Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century by Chad E. Pearson (review)

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• Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century by Chad E. Pearson
• Dennis Patrick Halpin

Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century. By Chad E. Pearson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. x, 314. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7173-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7172-7.)

In Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, historian Chad E. Pearson makes an important contribution to labor history, the history of capitalism, and ultimately the history of the long Reconstruction and Progressive eras. Over six chapters, Pearson brings [End Page 448] readers into the clandestine gatherings held by business owners, Law and Order Leagues, cattlemen’s associations, Citizens’ Alliances, and the Ku Klux Klan. These meetings happened throughout the United States, and Pearson hops around locations. In doing so, he spotlights events in smaller, lesser-explored cities, like Sedalia, Missouri, and profiles the actions and thoughts of lesser-known anti-union activists. Pearson’s cast is ostensibly a motley crew. They worked in different industries, at times held differing political views, and lived in different regions of the United States. Yet they were bound by the privileges stemming from their whiteness, class, and commitment to labor repression. The picture that emerges from this patchwork of smaller places and lesser-known figures is nothing short of a concerted campaign to repress efforts at working-class organization by any and all means.

For Pearson, the story of capital’s terrorists was not easy to uncover. Historians have long been aware of the limitations of the archives when examining the histories of the marginalized. Pearson discovered that the archives posed similar problems in recovering the thoughts of the elite men at the center of his story. It is not that these men were reticent—quite the contrary. As Pearson points out, these men created public narratives, but they were much more circumspect in these settings, usually folding their anti-union philosophies into a discourse of “upholding ‘law and order’” (p. 20). They left their most incendiary thoughts and ideas for the private planning sessions where they could let down their guard. Their secrecy was mostly effective. However, it was not airtight. A host of actors, including journalists, spies, and defectors, forced these gatherings into the archives when they publicized these secret proceedings.

Pearson’s examination of these men and their efforts has led him to a pointed conclusion: these men were terrorists. This categorization is central to Pearson’s argument. Readers’ individual reaction to the author’s deployment of this charged word—Pearson terms it “politically loaded and provocative”—may be a barrier of admission (p. 8). This issue is something that Pearson recognizes and confronts head-on. Pearson writes, “I suspect that most readers will find my choice of this word [terrorism] uncontroversial in some cases, but problematic, over-the-top, and even offensive, in other contexts” (p. 9). While Pearson is confident that using terrorism to describe the actions of the Ku Klux Klan will meet with little resistance, that same label might provoke pushback when applied to a group like “members of western-based stock growers associations, [and] Law and Order League vigilantes” (p. 9). “Yet,” he contends, “these organizations often employed the same types of primitive and ferocious actions used by Klansmen, including kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, and murder” (p. 9). Pearson is convincing. In case after case, he shows that the men he studies deployed violence, kidnapping, and harassment with little consequence or moral hesitation.

The word terrorism is important for Pearson in another respect: it binds together the actions of groups and individuals that are often discussed separately. Pearson instead encourages the reader to recognize these actions as part of an often decentralized but still concerted program. In this respect, Pearson offers a corrective in a similar vein as the recent work of Kidada E. Williams. Like the white supremacist terrorists in Williams’s I Saw Death Coming: A History of Survival and Terror in the War against Reconstruction (New York, 2023), [End Page 449] Pearson’s subjects did not always centrally plan their actions...