Dark Trophies by Harrison Simon

Author:Harrison, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The era of the racial spectacle lynching has often been viewed as a tragic aberration in the history of poor and backward regions of the South. My argument is that it needs to be understood as part of a much broader continuum of practices relating to crime and its punishment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, practices which were largely metropolitan in origin, even cosmopolitan. These included procedures of criminal law, forms of public entertainment, and medical and scientific research practice. What all of these had as their central unifying theme was the collection, preservation and exhibition of the body parts of criminals - for the punishment and deterrence of crime; for scientific study; and for popular entertainment.

To the male population of small town and rural communities, these must have seemed to resonate powerfully with one particularly important aspect of their own lives: the stalking and killing of game animals, and the victorious display of their remains. To many of these men, hunting was more than simply a pastime. It must have seemed an allegory of the fight of good against evil, and of order against disorder. For all these practices appeared to share a common moral purpose, and to speak a single narrative of consummated justice: first, the hunt for the perpetrator – usually male – of a shocking crime; then his capture, death and dismemberment; and, finally, the commemoration of his life and well deserved death through the retention and display of parts of his body.

Evidence of these links between lynching and the medical museology of crime is that both came to an end as significant social phenomena at the same time. The popular anatomical museums disappeared in the 1930s (Sappol 2004). By the middle of the same decade, lynching had become repellent to the vast majority of U.S. public opinion, and was in rapid decline (McGovern 1982: 140).

The dismemberment of the victim, and the keeping of body parts, usually viewed as among the most backward and regressive aspects of lynching, may actually have been understood by the perpetrators themselves in quite the opposite light: as giving their actions an aura of propriety, even legal formality. In certain respects the racial spectacle lynching developed its particular forms and rituals as an attempt by the largely rural and working-class supporters of what Pfeifer (2004) calls ‘rough justice’ to imitate or appropriate what probably seemed to them elements of modernity, in an attempt to give legitimacy to their informal, home-grown methods of social control.

Lynching was at the bottom of a pyramid at the top of which stood law, medicine and science. These epitomes of modernity had their joint material embodiment in the museum, an institution whose fundamental role was to amass and display evidence of human mastery of nature. Lower down, somewhere around the middle of the pyramid, were the salacious museums of crime and bodily pathology that purveyed what would now probably be described as edutainment to urban working men. Still further below these in respectability were the

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