The “vicarious play” of lynching melodramas: Cinema and mob violence in the United States, 1895-1905

Abstract

In 1917, the notoriously caustic journalist H. L. Mencken condemned lynching as a “sport” that was “popular in the South because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations." Lynching, he wrote, in an oft-repeated quote, took “the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra, and other diversions common to large communities." 1 On the one hand, Mencken was speaking to the ways in which lynching in the Jim Crow era, with the cheering crowds and casual onlookers it attracted, appeared to be a form of gruesome entertainment for white southerners. But he was also making the larger point that the spectacle surrounding lynching derived from the South’s relative cultural isolation. In Mencken’s view and that of many other intellectuals and activists in this period, mob violence was a backwoods remnant of an archaic and barbaric impulse toward vengeance, a sign that the South, as well as other regions that still lynched, were disconnected from modern civilization. 2 Lynching would wane, it was assumed, only when southerners became less rural and insulated, when they developed not only a more enlightened respect for legal institutions and state power, but more modern forms of amusement. This view reflected a broader liberal faith in this period that modernization, as it brought social and economic improvement, acted as a progressive force, one which would sway rural Americans to abandon their local prejudices and conflicts, especially racial prejudices and conflicts, in favor of democratic and egalitarian ideals.