When I heard last week that Time magazine had named The Protester as its Person of the Year, my thoughts immediately turned to Rutherford B. Hayes.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
I just happened to be reading Michael A. Bellesiles’s book “1877: America’s Year of Living Violently,” and I just happened to be on Chapter 5, “The Great Insurrection,” when Time’s selection of The Protester was announced. I agree. This has been an amazing year for protest, from regime change across the Middle East to the Occupy movements across the United States, as everyday citizens have stood up against economic, political and religious oppression.
Global changes aside, if you were to hold a mirror up to current events in the United States, you would see more than a faint reflection of 1877, when we were in a prolonged recession and lending crisis; when we were waging a frustrating war against insurgents (the Plains Indians); and when widening class division resulted the spread of railroad strikes and workingman revolt from city to city.
Global changes aside, if you were to hold a mirror up to current events in the United States, you would see more than a faint reflection of 1877, when we were in a prolonged recession and lending crisis; when we were waging a frustrating war against insurgents (the Plains Indians); and when widening class division resulted the spread of railroad strikes and workingman revolt from city to city.
Of course, there were some important differences between then and now. Most notably, consider the Pepper Spray Cop of 2011, a sort of random, rogue villain amid what generally were nonviolent Occupy protests. Now consider President Hayes’s whole army of pepper-spray cops in 1877, when state militias and federal troops were at the beck and call of railroad magnates and the elected officials in their back pockets — including Hayes, who owed his presidency in part to the deep pockets of the railroad baron Tom Scott. And when federal troops marched on protesting workingmen, it wasn’t with pepper spray; it was with loaded carbines and fixed bayonets. If there had been cellphone cameras and YouTube in 1877, you would've seen some crazy shit, man.
Some things, on the other hand, never change. Consider how the 1 percent feels about the 99 percent. Here’s what the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher said in 1877, according to Bellesiles’s book: “The general truth will stand that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault — unless it be his sin.”
And here’s Newt Gingrich this November: "The Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. … That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath.'"
The Republican Prarty. They always want to claim Lincoln and Jefferson, but they never say a word about Hayes. I wonder what he and Allan Pinkerton would think about The Protester as hero. Probably that he should take a bath and get a job.
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