I’m reading Ian Toll’s Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. In truth, the book is more like U.S. history than nautical history in that it uses the legislation, contracting, construction, and missions of the the first U.S. warships as a clever hook to illustrate the political atmosphere of the time. Anyway, after seeing the jeering of Bush on his exit (and the newscasters declaring, “bad form!” which to me is like a rapist complaining about someone who didn’t hold the door for his victim when being discharged from the hospital), I was struck by this passage about Jeffersonian Republicans when they were on the outs when everyone else wanted to stick it to France:
Republicans were threatened with mob violence. On May 7 [1798], after the city’s assembled militia companies had passed the president’s house in review, groups of young men spread out through the streets, fired with patriotic emotion and fueled by liquor. Some knocked down lamposts and smeared mud on the statue of Benjamin Franklin on the steps of the Philadelphia Library. After dark, a mob gathered outside the home of Benjamin Franklin Bache, where Peggy Bache, five months pregnant, was alone with their three young children. A few proposed to set the house on fire, but they confined themselves to battering on the door and breaking some of the windows. Drunken gangs were out all night, carousing in the streets and singing patriotic songs beneath the windows of imagined traitors.
So while the recent event was embarrasing and childish and should be condemned as such, it’s not particularly new.
