In early January, America watched as thousands of pro-Trump protestors stormed the Capitol building. Former President Donald Trump, who had recently lost to now-President Joe Biden, allegedly provoked the rioters during his planned rally, which was held earlier that day in D.C.
The date of the rally-turned-insurrection, Jan. 6, was the same day that Congress confirmed Biden’s election victory. Rioters took to arms and stormed the Capitol building in hopes to stall or stop this very process.
The events of Jan. 6 were unlike any ever seen before in American history. Our nation had never before seen an attack on the Capitol building started by its very citizens.
Tom Jones, dean of the school of arts, biblical studies and humanities, spoke on the historical weight of this very incident.
“This is not the type of national tension we saw in the 1960s or 70s,” Jones said. “It’s more comparable to the political divide we saw in the 1840s and 50s.”
The timeframe of the 1840s and 50s saw a peak in political polarization as many lost confidence in a series of one-term presidents, a deadlocked Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, Jones continued.
This national unease led to all sorts of protests and riots but none that ever led to an attack on the Capitol building.
According to Jones, the most comparable incident in American history is perhaps the “Bonus Army” of the late 1920s, when World War One veterans built cardboard and plywood shacks outside of Washington government buildings in hopes of persuading President Herbert Hoover to grant them early access to their “bonus” checks earned through their service in war. Hoover refused, and ultimately resorted to removing the veterans by force.
Unlike those war veterans of the 1920s, the pro-Trump rioters of 2021 did not utilize peaceful protest.
“The storming of the Capitol building, with protestors looting the building and sitting in Senate seats, looked nothing like anything we’d ever seen in America,” Jones said. “It looked more like something we might have seen in Eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet empire.”
In other words, it was utter chaos and anarchy.
The insurrection of Jan. 6 was a blatant contrast to the historic “American tradition,” as Jones put it. The way to change is through peaceable assembly, and it always has been. Violence is never a part of that equation.
“I think the riot we saw was a reflection of the naivety of the leaders involved who failed to anticipate the likelihood that their demonstration would attract participants from fringe groups intent on using their protest as a way to engage in anarchy and mayhem,” Jones said.
This riot immediately followed a planned Trump rally. To think that no violent action would come of a rally held by a recently defeated candidate, in the middle of D.C., at the height of national political tension, is — as Jones said — naive. And that’s putting it mildly.
At the end of the day, there is a right way to share your opinions and beliefs. Peaceable assembly and the right to vote — these things are “the American tradition.” Violence, looting, rioting and destruction should have no place in the activism of American citizens. And yet, that core of American ideals was blatantly ignored and disregarded on Jan. 6, 2021.
