Wrath by Peter W. Wood

Author:Peter W. Wood [Wood, Peter W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legendary

Through wars, strikes, riots, and political unrest, anger in the past was either an occasional thing – an eruption of a specific group with a powerful grievance, such as the Pullman Strike of 1894 or the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 – or a malady limited to specific people, such as the notorious feud between the Appalachian Hatfield and McCoy families from 1878 to 1890. Sometimes this anger intensified to rage, or even wrath, but it never settled into being a national ideal. We were not a nation known for being full of angry, bitter people or a nation that was always on the verge of blowing its stack.

Even though we created approving legends of vigilantes seeking frontier justice, these sorts of intervention were, on the whole, seen as regrettable and sometimes tragic violations of the standards of civilized life. It is telling that the angriest factions in American society, from Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan to Weathermen and the militia movement, almost always organized themselves as secret societies. In the past, those who decided that they would act on anger hid their faces. The echo of that today is the Antifa movement, but Antifa rioters are far from ashamed of their anger. They are just aware that cameras are now everywhere and that masking is a good way to forestall arrest.

One genre of vigilante tales depicts “Indian haters,” who, having lost family members to an Indian massacre, devote themselves to a solitary career of vengeance. Herman Melville, in The Confidence Man, captured the genre well when he put the story of the (real-life) Colonel John Moredock in the mouth of an inept hustler. Moredock, an Illinois pioneer in the early nineteenth century, tracked a band of Indians who had killed his mother and siblings. Eventually, having killed all twenty members of the band, Moredock supposedly made a practice of hunting down and killing any Indians he could find.11

Moredock-like figures continue to inhabit some dark place in the American soul. Ethan Edwards, in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers (1956), reminds some of Moredock, but he is present in any number of revenge movies that have nothing to do with Native Americans. The angry antihero of Paparazzi (2004), who dispatches annoying photographers, is a modern Moredock, as are the numerous triggermen of “first-person shooter” video games. The figure has been with us at least since Thomas Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1594), the first Renaissance revenge play.

All this is to say that new anger has one of its roots in an old form of virulent anger in which some Americans imagined an enemy so vile that nothing short of serial or collective murder was warranted. But Moredock was never an American hero. He and his imitators have existed in the American imagination primarily as a type to be repudiated, although the repudiation has recently taken a new direction. A view currently popular within the field of (anti-) American studies is that America has long been a hateful place filled with incitements to genocidal violence.

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