Book Review

One day, while I was sitting in my office, the chair of the history department came down the hall with a package for me that had just arrived in the mail. She watched as I ripped the wrapping off to reveal my latest book: Michael Fedo, The Lynchings in Duluth (St. Paul, 2000). My chair was used to my taste for books about violent subjects but this one left her saddened and a bit taken aback. "Not Duluth too," she softly moaned.	1
Yes, and Marion, Indiana, as well. In A Lynching in the Heartland, James H. Madison describes how in 1930, Marion whites lynched Tom Shipp and Abe Smith, two black men accused of rape. His story reminds us that mob violence occurred in every region, not only in "the most godforsaken places in the South" (16) but in "an ordinary place" like Marion (27-43, 115). Any American could turn to racial violence.	2
Madison's A Lynching in the Heartland takes its place within a strong genre in American history: the lynching case study. Such local histories can show distinctiveness, arguing that local variables really operate independent of any larger framework. Stephen J. Whitfield's A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York, 1988) promises to be precise rather than profound, to tell a local story rather than a general history of lynching. The once-popular psychological approach required a close look at the local personalities. Howard Smead presents the 1959 Mack Charles Parker killing as the work of a particularly isolated, backward community (Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker [New York, 1986]). In Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge, 1982), James T. McGovern, impressed by Stanley Elkins' comparison of slaves with concentration camp inmates, found that Jackson County, Florida, whites lynched blacks because black passivity unleashed whites from their inhibitions (Anatomy of a Lynching, 151-157).	3
Or, local studies illustrate a larger context, arguing that the locality typifies some larger circumstance. Scholars looking at particular lynchings sometimes find that local places resisted modernization. In The Leo Frank Case (1966; Athens, 1987), Leonard Dinnerstein writes that white Atlantans resented the factory as an alien intrusion. More recently, Nancy Maclean has reformulated this view, arguing that the lynchers of Leo Frank feared that modernization might liberate women ("The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism," Journal of American History 77.3 [1991]: 917-48). Even Stephen Whitfield found that the murder of Emmett Till reflected southerners' general "need to lash out at the alien forces that so persistently imperil the grace of the Southern Way of Life" (Whitfield, A Death in the Delta, 132). Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser explain the 1911 Coatesville, Pennsylvania lynching in similar terms: the lynchers acted in the face of modernization so dramatic as to "challenge the very meaning of community" (No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania and the Lynching of Zacharia Walker [Urbana, 1991], 7). Dominic Capeci calls the lynchers of Cleo Wright "tradition bound killers" terrified by modernizing forces. (The Lynching of Cleo Wright [Lexington, 1998]). Local variables do not really matter in these stories: rural America generally resisted the forces of change.	4
While Madison looks at whether Marion or the Midwest might have been distinctively prone to vigilantism, he seems more interested in showing that after 1930, Marion experienced fundamental change. But change does not really explain the lynching of Smith and Shipp. "No one," Madison admits, "can satisfactorily explain why the mob became so incensed, why the sheriff and other community lead-ers did not stop the beast"(153). Marion may not have had a commitment to racism more extraordinary than other places.	5
After narrating the 1930 lynching, and another, failed 1885 lynching attempt, Madison turns his focus to the creation of public memory. That he recognizes that lynching towns have painful memories is no great innovation. Most case study authors recognize that communities associated with lynchings have disturbing memories that residents try to avoid. Madison finds the same thing in Marion and puts it at the center of his book. In Madison's telling, rival storytellers contend for audiences with competing narratives. According to Madison, James Cameron triumphs in this struggle. Cameron had stood accused alongside Smith and Shipp but the mob released him. (One witness later claimed it was a "fair mob"[87].) Cameron self-published his story. The New York Times toured his Milwaukee museum. National Public Radio interviewed Cameron as did ABC, CBS, and NBC. The Village Voice featured him on its cover. His story, with its inaccuracies, became the dominant version of the Marion lynching.	6
Public memory and storytelling represent Madison's most original contribution to the case study genre. Yet it is not clear if Madison thinks the storytelling really matters all that much. Madison carefully documents great racial change in Marion. The fall of segregation, symbolized by the election of a black sheriff, makes it possible for Cameron to come home. The changing story about what happened in 1930 did not shift race relations; rather, as race relations evolved, the story followed suit.	7
James H. Madison has written an account of a single lynching that recognizes that perceptions and the words used to describe those perceptions matter. He ties this insight into a subtle argument that the lynching spirit was more universal than regional. Lynching was ordinary and the rhetoric or storytelling that justified it pervaded all regions. This is an important contribution in a crowded field.	8
Christopher Waldrep San Francisco State University

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