Capital’s Terrorists in the Long Nineteenth Century

With author Chad E. Pearson

In his new book Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century, Chad E. Pearson details how US employers at the turn of the twentieth century deployed a variety of tactics to secure their power in and out of workplaces. Through the Ku Klux Klan, Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers’ organizations, and Citizens’ Alliances, they applied extralegal repressive techniques – including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings – as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. Driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests, the birth of law-and-order politics as we know it can be found in 19th-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines.
Book available from online sellers and from the publisher, University of North Carolina Press

Chad E. Pearson is a labor historian at the University of North Texas and author of Capital’s Terrorists and Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement. He has published essays in Jacobin, Counterpunch, Monthly Review, and other journals.