The History of Insurrections: Are We Aware of The Implications?

On January 6th 2021, just an hour after President Trump gave a rallying speech condemning the US’s electoral system, and cajoling the crowd to take immediate action, hundreds of supporters forcibly made their way into the US Capitol complex. 

It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. From the moment the insurgents entered the Capitol building, the media struggled to find a way to capture the events accurately; the events were reported as everything from a storming of the Capitol to an eruption of chaos. Was it a storming, an insurrection, an attack, an expression of democratic failure? In politics, the choice of word can be the difference between a coup and a revolution, between an illegitimate gathering and an ideological movement.  Think for example of the IRA -- for some they are freedom fighters, for others they are terrorists. The legacy of entire movements can be transformed by the language we use to remember them with. 

Now that the dust has settled and media coverage seems to have died down, January 6th is described as an insurrection. It is the grounds on which President Trump’s impeachment was filed, and the premise upon which upwards of 285 individuals have been implicated in the attack. 

In “America on Fire, Elizabeth Hinton observes how “most instances” insurrections have been “perpetrated by white vigilantes hostile to integration and who joined together into roving mobs that took ‘justice’ in their own hands.” January 6th was undeniably an insurrection, and it fits right into the definitive structure it has been afforded. This is one of the first instances where our recognition of an insurrection has been correct. 

The original Insurrection Act was signed by Thomas Jefferson in 1807; the act grants the President sweeping authority to deploy US military and federalized National Guard troops under particular circumstances (including suppressing civil disorder, insurrections, or rebellions) into an active law-enforcement role. The Act has since been revised. In 2001, after the September 11th bombings, to expand Presidential power. There are three main ways the act can be invoked: on a state level, a state legislature or governor can request assistance from the president to “suppress [an] insurrection,” and at the executive level, the President can invoke the act to suppress “an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy,” and to invoke the use of armed forced when there is an interference with federal or state law.  

However, in the 213 years since the Act was signed into law, the act has been applied liberally -- often used to racialize problems, and later to undermine and threaten ideological movements. In 1957, President Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to enforce desegregation of Little Rock, to escort nine black students back to Little Rock Central High School. Yet, just a few years later, President John F. Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act once in 1962 in Mississippi, and twice in Alabama in 1963 -- in both instances, against the State’s will -- to enforce civil rights laws.  President Lyndon B. Johnson followed suit by deploying federal troops in 1967 to first quell the “Detroit Uprising” and once again in 1968 to suppress protests in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Later that same year, Nixon would fold insurrectionist phrasing into his law-and-order Republican rhetoric to undermine the continued civil rights protests: “we have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and bomb and destroy,” Richard Nixon later said in 1968. “In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark,” Nixon continued, “we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.”

The last, formal invocation of the act was by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 to suppress the Los Angeles Riots after the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King. 

Since then, a number of Presidents have threatened to invoke it. In 2005, just four days after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, President George Bush suggested that the then Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco was not in a position to lead the post-disaster relief. After suggesting that Gov. Blanco step-down, he threatened to override her position by federalizing the National Troops himself. Most recently President Donald Trump, at the end of May 2020, threatened to “send in the National Guard and get the  job done right” in an attack on Minneapolis’s Mayor Jacob Frey in the handling of BLM protests. 

The liberal application of the Insurrection Act over such an extended period of time has grave implications. There is little acknowledgment that we are seamlessly equating the “insurrection” of the civil rights movements to that of the white-supremacist attack on the Capitol in January, 2021. And secondly, it is clear that the Insurrection Act may not function effectively within our legal system as well as it once did. In the case of Jan 6, it’s clearly not working. Of the 285 individual cases of violence identified from the day, only around 30 cases are currently active. 

It is no longer acceptable to use the same act to undermine a civil rights movement and suppress white vigilantes, and it is no longer acceptable to threaten an act that should be used as a last resort as a kind of underhanded political political threat. If we take journalism as the first draft of history, it is clear that we need to interrogate the ways in which we describe political movements going forward.

Isobel McCrum is a double history and behavioral decision sciences major interested in how people have thought about things in the past and what that means for us, and the decisions we make today. Isobel is a blog staff writer at the BULR, and is interested in legal personhood, and the interpretation and development of legal literature and language.