32. "Mob"

It's hard to use the word "mob," and especially hard if you're a citizen of a country in debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for its form of government. "Mob" suggests that the people you see throwing off society's control cannot be trusted to control themselves. Rousseau (in our standard reading of him) says that they can. You can trust man's basic nature, which is good.

If you don't trust it how can you justify giving common people the vote, and letting them serve in legislatures, and sit on the bench? Distrust takes you to the wrong side of the revolution, American or French, that gave you your government.

What made that side — king, nobles, clergy — so wrong? Their centuries-old view, encouraged by the church, that man's good nature had been corrupted by his disobedience in the Garden. That's so unenlightened. Who wants to be on their side?

We're sure that we don't, then we see a lot of young people go way out of control on a foreign city's streets and want to call them a "mob." But, alas, the society that would control them is very much like the kings, nobles, and clergy that in times past have tried to control our own young people. We've long ago, most of us, given up calling them a "mob." They took down the Bastille, for God's sake.

Our history textbooks have made us so conscious of the gains made by people throwing off society's control that we think Rousseau must surely be right. No, we don't think. We just assume, so deeply in America that some people, like college students, are shocked when other people, like the police, show that they don't take them to be basically good, and might need controlling. In the sixties, before the riots that closed Ohio University, police were stationed on rooftops, looking to spot lawbreakers. Students, as the editorial page of their newspaper showed, were outraged at the insult to them.

It has probably never been harder to express doubt about young people than it was on American university campuses than it was in the sixties. These were the leaders in the battle for civil rights and the end of the Viet Nam War. These were the highest scorers yet on our college entrance tests. And if they didn't know it Commencement speakers would tell them, "You are the best." But of course they did know it. "You have broken the best heads in the country," a Harvard student told the police from his Commencement lectern.

It was not a time to go back over history and count the losses suffered when people throw off society's control — the Reformation slowed by mobs pillaging in its name, Puritans discredited by their zealots, socialists ruined by anarchist allies. Nor were the parents of these people the ones to do it. It would reverse everything that made them happy as they listened to the adulation ("American youth-worship," said Europeans) in those Commencement speeches.

Even now it's hard to call those children in their later group actions a "mob," or class what they lost the nation with the losses of earlier mob actions. I want to say that young people failing to control themselves (yippies, crazies, druggies) delayed the changes the nation needed to make (they gave Richard Nixon, I think, what he needed to be elected), but I know that even at their worst they were doing a good thing: refusing to be complicit in the second-stupidest war in our history.

And the police on those rooftops were doing a good thing, trying to control a mob. I'm glad they were there, and I wish they had arrived at the ROTC building in time to keep the students from burning it down. I'm grateful for the troops the governor sent to Athens to restore order. A lot of the faculty, those who had stood watch all night to save the other buildings, are grateful to them.

It has occurred to me that we are a lot like the citizens of New York City after the troops that President Lincoln sent in had beat down those rioting over the draft in 1863 (they had killed hundreds, many of them blacks), as Herman Melville sees them:

and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And more — is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.