String Up Old and Innocent Victim"
One hundred seventeen rioters were indicted. One was fined $25 for petty larceny; another, a teenager, was sent to a reformatory. Mrs. Hallam later admitted that she invented the attack to explain to her husband some bruises inflicted by her boyfriend.
Now, fast forward to 10 years ago, when Americans were intoxicated by fumes from myriad triumphs. The Cold War had been won, the Gulf War had been a cakewalk, Russia was democratizing, China was locked in the logic of the Starbucks Postulate (give people a choice of coffees and a choice of political parties will soon follow) and everyone was becoming rich with technology stocks. The exhaustion of various fighting faiths -- fascism, communism, socialism -- meant there was no remaining ideological rival to the American model for organizing a modern society. Few Americans anticipated aggression from people who despise modernity.
Today, Russia's government is despotism leavened by assassination, China will achieve universal emphysema before meaningful universal suffrage, and Americans, in a slough of despond about economic difficulties that have not yet even reached a recession, gloomily embrace an inversion of the Whig Theory of History, which holds, or once did, that progress -- steadily enlarged and ennobled liberty -- is the essence of the human story.
So, remember Springfield. The siege of the jail, the rioting, the lynching and mutilating all occurred within walking distance of where, in 2007, Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Whatever you think of his apotheosis, it illustrates history's essential promise, which is not serenity -- that progress is inevitable -- but possibility, which is enough: Things have not always been as they are.