One of the stranger things I might choose to boast about is that the grave of a Signer of the Declaration of Independence is virtually in my back yard. William Hooper’s tombstone in the Old Town Cemetery of Hillsborough, North Carolina, lies just 10 feet from my property line. Hooper (1742-1790), a member of the Continental Congress and one of three North Carolinians who signed the Declaration, was a Harvard-educated attorney who once cut a great figure in North Carolina, before and after the Revolution. His personal history is a colorful one that encompasses much of the drama, risk and uncertainty of his time.
Here was a Founding Father, a man who must have known Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton, maybe even Thomas Paine. Born and educated in Boston, he certainly knew the Adamses. His grave is not frequently visited, not even by schoolchildren in this history-saturated town, but as his closest neighbor I’ve long been in the habit of paying my respects. And even, in times of great civic peril, of consulting Hooper symbolically. It’s not easy to astonish a man my age who has spent more than a half-century in the news business. But after the mind-bending horrors of Jan. 6 in Washington, where a lunatic president incited neo-Nazi thugs to trash the Capitol building and rout Congress, I took my astonishment and sorrow to that quiet corner of the Old Town Cemetery where Mr. Hooper was laid to rest.
“Well, where do we go from here, sir?” I asked, half out loud. It’s necessarily a one-sided conversation with a gentleman who has been a ghost, at best, since 1790. And how could he understand that riots and insurrections, in 2021, are the evil offspring of social media? A concept like “Twitter mobs’ would bewilder an 18th-century lawyer even more than it bewilders me. But that ancient weathered tombstone sent back more comprehension and sympathy than I could ever expect from Lindsey Graham or Mike Pompeo. And without a doubt more useful legal advice than anyone could expect from Rudy Giuliani.
“What’s next?” I pressed Hooper, a prosecutor who had served as deputy Attorney General. “Trump’s maniacs were screaming ‘Hang Mike Pence!’” And I swear I heard a spectral voice answer “Impeach! And convict.”
The sad irony is that William Hooper knew all about mobs—and riots, and the personal disasters and humiliations that may befall patriots in times of upheaval. When he lived here, quiet, quaint Hillsborough was a focal point for the War of the Regulation (1765-1771), the pre-Revolutionary insurrection that some historians cite as the beginning of the end of British rule in America. As an officer of the Crown, Hooper was on what many would regard as the “wrong” side of that controversial affair. When the Regulators rioted in Hillsborough in 1770, he and several other lawyers and officers of the court were seized physically and dragged through the streets.
Hooper was with the colonial militia, commanded by Gov. William Tryon, when it dealt the Regulators their final defeat at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. Presumably he was present when Tryon, known during the approaching Revolution as an exceptionally brutal British general, hanged six of the Regulator leaders on a hill near the Hillsborough courthouse. Ten years later, when Hooper was pursued as a fugitive for his role in the Continental Congress, British troops came to Hillsborough and burned his home. I can see that rebuilt colonial structure, now occupied by a retired cardiologist, from the window where I’m sitting.
Several other Signers were tortured to death by the British, atrocities that are not common knowledge. After the riot at the Capitol last week, some of the congressional idiots who encouraged it referred to Jan. 6 as “a 1776 moment,” implying that the savage rabble stalking Trump’s “enemies” were patriots who will be remembered like the Boston Tea Party or Paul Revere. That’s laughable from a dozen angles. But only people like Hooper, who lived through it, could explain how complicated the actual 1776 moment must have been.
The descent from George Washington to Donald Trump is so precipitous that it’s hard to imagine without vertigo, without nosebleeds. Without tears. But one thing that never changes is the nature — the deplorable human nature — of mobs. They’ve been with us always, congregations of cowards who feed off each other’s ignorance and rage. More than a century after the death of William Hooper, H.L. Mencken surveyed American democracy and was not charmed. He’s rarely more eloquent than when he’s sneering at what he calls “the eternal mob-man.”
“Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race. … In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party,” Mencken wrote, in “Notes on Democracy.” And in the same vein, “Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.”
The mob with its violent potential is always there, like a crater lake of gasoline where only the most desperate, unhinged demagogue would dare to throw a match. On Jan. 6 we saw what happens when one dares. The North Carolina Regulators had a great deal more to rage about than the Trumpist Neanderthals who invaded the Capitol, but we see disturbing similarities in their behavior. In the Hillsborough riots of 1768 a Regulator mob vandalized the provincial courthouse, leaving excrement on the judge’s chair and the decomposing corpse of a long-dead slave on the lawyers’ bench. Regulators dragged officials through the streets and threatened to lynch them, beat one so lawyer so badly that he lost an eye, and burned the house of the presiding judge and dozens of other buildings. They literally left Hillsborough in ruins and in flames.
It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t genteel. The only thing that made me laugh — bitterly — about the events of Jan. 6 was an eyewitness report that Trump, the lowest low-life (as a grown man with children, he was the favorite guest on Howard Stern’s infantile sex-talk show) who ever occupied the White House, watched the riot on TV and enjoyed everything except the fact that his murderous vandals were so obviously “low-class.” He had intuited that the bearded thugs in horned helmets and “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts weren’t Ivy Leaguers or investment bankers.
Mobs are always the same. But what has changed, lethally, in the age of technology and new media is the way they’re organized, mobilized and sustained. In Hooper’s day the mob-men, in order to meet and reinforce each other’s worst prejudices and wildest impulses, were obliged to walk, ride or steer horse-drawn vehicles over miles of muddy roads. In the age of Trump the Twitter troll, they scheme and foment and concoct wild conspiracy theories on social media (a headline in today’s New York Times: “How Facebook Incubated the Insurrection”). The Internet has become such a separate dimension and such a fecund breeding ground for racist nostalgia and malignant political fantasy that its wired mobs can escape reality altogether. They’ve become the foot soldiers every demagogue and dictator most covets, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt explained in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951): “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
This erosion of the actual, this contemptuous dismissal of the very idea of “truth,” may prove to be the most toxic legacy of the serial liar Donald Trump. Twisted and inflated in the spookiest corners of the Internet, his shameless lies will spur mobs and smother common sense long after the last rude scratch on our Capitol building has been repaired. There are many things I could never explain to a Founding Father like Mr. Hooper, who predated the Industrial Revolution. But as a well-educated man at a time when they were uncommon, he would have been well acquainted with feral stupidity. Would he have encountered enough of it to comprehend the 21st-century blood-guilt cult called QAnon, which seems to have seduced enough cognitively impaired Americans to merit front-page coverage in the national media? Millions, they claim?
QAnon is a comic-book Otherworld where the superhero Donald Trump is the nation’s last defense against a secret order of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and child-killers — suspiciously including many prominent Democrats and Jews — who actually rule the world. This bouillabaisse of psychedelic paranoia is an infallible litmus test for morons. If you respond to QAnon fantasies with anything short of hysterical disbelief, you are such a cognitive shipwreck of a human being that no amount of training could prepare you to compete with the average chimpanzee. At least two new Republican congresswomen have tested positive for QAnon.
Would the American experiment end as it began 250 years ago in Orange County, N.C., with bloodthirsty mobs rampaging through public buildings? Can we move forward with COVID-19 devastating the nation’s lungs and QAnon attacking its brains? But in desperate times, Mr. Hooper might have tried to reassure me, remarkable people step forward. The Founders had Washington to lead, they had Paine and Jefferson to frame their thinking, and they prevailed. As I took my graveside leave of Mr. Hooper, with the Inauguration looming and threats of more armed riots, I was not confident at all. God bless President Biden. But I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
(Historical footnote: Even a Signer isn’t guaranteed a final resting place. A century after his death, what remained of William Hooper was disinterred and reburied at the Guilford Courthouse National Historical Park near Greensboro, where he has a statue. But I’m certain that his spirit remains here where he lay for 100 years, 40 yards from the house where he lived.)
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2021
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