Al Sandine, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees.

Moore, Jay

Al Sandine, The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees (New York: Monthly Review Press 2009)

GEORGE RUDE and E.P. Thompson first brought to our profession's attention the enormous importance of crowd actions in defending customary moral practices and shaming those in positions of power to do the right thing for the hoi polloi. Jesse Lemisch, Alfred Young, Gary B. Nash and others have shown that the same phenomena were equally present on this side of the Atlantic in colonial times and during the early US Republic. But whatever happened to the crowds such as those studied by these prestigious scholars? Today, with a few exceptions, purposeful crowds of that sort seem largely to have become a matter of history. Crowds are largely reduced to mere aggregations of people--to the passivity and conformism of shoppers in malls and of sports fans in stadiums and arenas. It is the question of what happened to the more radical activist crowds that is taken up here by scholar/activist A1 Sandine. Sandine provides a set of historical vignettes illustrating crowds in their once spontaneous, rowdier variety--such as the ones that shut down the Stamp Act in 1765, those that freed slaves awaiting return to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act, those that joined with striking railroad workers in 1877 and striking textile and rubber workers during the 1930s, and finally those of the rebellions that broke out in Harlem in 1935 and 1964 and then elsewhere during the later 1960s. Sandine is fully aware that "mobs" have not always acted in ways that progressives of the political left could ever get behind--that even "killer crowds," such as racist lynch mobs, must also have a space somewhere on display in what he refers to as the "crowd museum"--and he devotes a chapter to describing them, too. Nor were all crowds "self-owned," as Sandine puts it. Many have been bought and manipulated like the high-pitched partisan political crowds during the Jacksonian period.

Sandine remains convinced, however, that much of democratic value has been lost in this transformation. Our ancestors were much more capable of taking useful collective actions, from barn-raising to hell-raising. That spirit needs to be revived. He reminds us that crowds, invariably derogated as "mobs" by the ancient and modern upper classes and their intellectual apologists, once ruled effectively in the Greek polls and the Roman republic. He argues that crowd and other collective actions are needed today, above all, to drive a wedge between politicians and the big business interests that hold them so much in their sway. Sandine hopes the present economic crisis, as it intensifies, will see a revival of them, and perhaps it will. (The book came out before the mass labour takeover of the State Capitol in Madison and similar struggles to defend worker bargaining rights in other states.) He holds out the mass anti-IMF and anti-governmental actions by workers and members of the squeezed middle class during the Argentinian debt crisis in the early years of the current century as examples of what can be possible.

So what happened? Sandine argues that during the 19th century the ruling powers moved to tame the streets and public squares that had long been contested class terrain. Longstanding popular festivals that involved role reversals and the mocking of clerical and civil authorities were suppressed by refusing to issue permits and by unleashing the newly created urban police forces and vigilantes. Festivals and marches affirming patriotism and capitalism, with most people relegated to the role of spectators on the sidelines, were promoted instead. The "ginger" was removed from the once tumultuous July 4th celebrations, and Labor Day was substituted for workers' May Day. Today, the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade, with its "family-friendly" commercialism, is much more the norm. Those who attend these events today have generally internalized respectable behaviour patterns and do not need much policing. Others simply watch at home on their individual TV sets. Also contributing to the transformation of crowds was the emergence during the 20th century of consumerism turning people into social atoms--no longer mobilizing en masse to storm the barricades but trampling each other in order to be the first in line at a Walmart Black Friday sale. We hear the voice of a seasoned political activist when Sandine writes about the difficulty of anti-war or other protesters being heard, locked out of malls and tuned out by those few left in the streets.

Sandine has done his homework, and is familiar with theorists like Debord, Baudrillard, Lefebvre, Harvey and Castells. Lively, well written and quite enjoyable to read, the book is more like a rambling set of mini-essays roughly grouped together into topical chapters than a systematic historical monograph. Thus, in the chapter entitled "Safe Crowds" we find two or three page sections on suburbs, auto commuters, malls, the New Urbanism and mega-churches. There is no effort to bring each chapter's sections into something greater than the sum of the parts. Valuable insights pop up throughout the book, including the notion that the rioters of past generations are in the prison population of today. However, there is insufficient follow up to these insights.

Most surprisingly, Sandine never once engages with E. P. "Ihompson's famous hypothesis that a good many of the early modern crowds in food riots and otherwise were defending the principles of a commonly understood "moral economy," an hypothesis that since Thompson's 1971 essay has stimulated much productive scholarly discussion and debate. By applying Thompson's insights, we might be able to make better sense out of the obsolescence of crowd actions, especially in terms of one political economy with its particular set of structural rules being supplanted by another.

Sandine mentions the neighbourhood assemblies as popular discussion and decision-making bodies that emerged for a time out of the Argentinian crisis. But he does not offer any observations on the relationship of crowd actions and more permanent revolutionary political change. We would surely like to hear something more about how crowds can become institutionalized as organs of dual or alternative power in historical situations and why these things lose their momentum. Still, regardless of its lacunae, this is a book that is deserving of attention--by scholars and activists alike--for opening up for a popular audience four major questions: What were crowd actions? How did they impact American society? What happened to them? And why we are still so much in need of them?

Jay Moore

Marshfield, Vermont