[.ca] America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, ... (ISBN 0807854603)

The Brutal Truth About Terrorism:
Disgruntled workers acting out in acts of violence and assassination. A greedy author looking to make a quick buck by exploiuting terrorism. Tensions between groups of people including the repeated persecution of one by the other. Sound familiar? Sound new? Not hardly. This all took place during the turn of the twentieth century. Clymer explains that terrorism is not new in America. Workers revolting against their bosses and the system that held them down blew up railway cars and buildings. Supporters of prosecuted miners assassinated the Governor of Idaho. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 caused widespread panic. Beause the culprit and the motive were never determined, the uncertainty fueld even more speculation and tension. Jack London capitalized on the voracious appetite for terrorism-related literature in The Assassination Bureau and The Iron Heel, which he specifically mentioned to Macmillan Publishing was ripe for the consumer public. Thomas Dixon and Ida B. Wells wrote about the conditions in the reconstruction South . Dixon glorified the Ku Klux Klan and was concerned about mulattoes and skin bleaching tonic; Wells set out an explanation that the vacuum left by the end of slavery was filled by the phenomenon of rape as a way to control black men. The difficulty with this work is that Clymer does not tie in the past witht he present terrorism situation at any part after the introduction. Clymer's background in English is extremely evident here as this is a beautifully crafted work of rhetoric. However, as a student of history and politics, this work is relegated to a supplementary role as it deals primarily with how terrorism was portrayed in works of fiction. No matter how realistic Henry James, Jack London, and Thomas Dixon's novels may be, they remain works of fiction ans thus unusable to serious students of history. However, this work remains useful for its philosophical discussion of terrorism overall.