Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 - Hardcover

Pfeifer, Michael J.

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9780252029172: Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252029178 ISBN 13: 9780252029172

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2004

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Rough Justice is the first national cross-regional study of the history of lynching and criminal justice in the United States. Working from extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions. It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal execution.
Eventually the rural and working-class rough justice enthusiasts who endorsed mob murder in the Midwest, West, and South compromised with the bourgeois advocates of due process law. In the early twentieth century, states in those regions, aping the punitive innovations of northeastern states, revamped the death penalty into a comparatively efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice, and lynchings ceased. Yet today's death penalty, which is powerfully influenced by racial and gender prerogatives and which often fails to offer defendants meaningful due process, bears the legacy of the history of lunching and of the compromise that ended it.

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Book Description:

The history of lynching’s transformation from collective, popular violence to state_sanctioned, sanitized execution

In this first national, cross-regional study of lynching and criminal justice, now in paperback, Michael J. Pfeifer investigates the pervasive and persistent commitment to "rough justice" that characterized rural and working class areas of most of the United States in the late nineteenth century.

Defining rough justice as the harsh, informal, and often communal punishment of perceived criminal behavior, Pfeifer examines the influence of race, gender, and class on understandings of criminal justice and shows how they varied across regions. He argues that lynching only ended when "rough justice" enthusiasts compromised with middle-class advocates of due process by revamping the death penalty into an efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice.

About the Author:

Michael J. Pfeifer is a professor of American history at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington.

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