Marching Proud Boys wearing black Fred Perry polos and getting into fisticuffs with Antifa. Anonymous hacktivists wearing creepy, plastic Guy Fawkes masks and messing with the computers of law enforcement and other organizations they think corrupt or cruel. Oath Keepers proclaiming to be "Guardians of the Republic" and traveling to the U.S. Capitol with paramilitary equipment to "Stop the Steal" in January 2021. Woke "Free Gaza" protesters clad in keffiyehs and N-95 masks storming university buildings and building squatter camps.
The American taking all this in would be forgiven for feeling the country's politics have gotten weird and extreme over the past 20 years. Certainly, many in the media have treated all these instances as novelties that may portend the death of American democracy.
In truth, crazy politics is a recurring feature of our nation. Groups sprout up either adjacent or in antagonism to the major political parties, and it can be difficult to discern whether their confrontational style and tactics mask nefarious and violent designs.
Consider the 1960s and early '70s, which were not all that long ago. Black Americans and white liberals rose up against Jim Crow. Long-haired hippies and Yippies seized control of campuses and protested the Vietnam war, government, capitalism, and the square, bourgeois American lifestyle. Feminists denounced patriarchy and matrimony: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," declared Gloria Steinem. Black Panthers donned military fatigues and started food banks to feed the hungry but also bought guns and used them. The Weathermen planted bombs and the Symbionese Liberation Army engaged in kidnapping and bank robbery—for a higher cause, they insisted.
But wild, disruptive politics go back further still, as Jon Grinspan depicts in Wide Awake, his third historical tome on the latter half of the 19th century.
The story begins in Hartford, Conn., in 1860. The town ostensibly was in a good way, with a growing population, healthy economy, and a moralistic population with "the highest literacy rate in the country, at 99.7 percent." But beneath the placidity strife was building. Anti-immigrant passions had flared as had eruptions over slavery, a moral issue that could not be settled by legislators' bargaining. Four years earlier, Democrats had shot fireworks into a crowd who had assembled to hear presidential contender John C. Frémont speak.
Abolitionist Cassius Clay of Kentucky was coming to Hartford in late February, and Eddie Yergason, a 19-year-old tailor, decided to see the spectacle. Like many other young men in the gentler trades, he often spent his downtime reading polemical newspapers and debating politics. To prepare, Yergason got a torch, which was commonplace at evening rallies, and sewed himself a black cape. A few of his friends did the same, and off they went.
Clay denounced slavery and the minority that forced it upon the nation, and condemned the assaults on free speech by pro-slavery yobs. Yergason and friends helped lead Clay's parade back to his hotel. Along the way, some Democrats heaped insults on the crowd and picked fights.
Thus were born the Wide Awakes, a group that was less for particular policies than alert and unabashedly clear-eyed about the loathsome mob politics of Democrats and their pernicious minority rule. A mere 393,975 of America's 31 million inhabitants were slave owners, Grinspan notes. Yet, the pro-slavery Democratic Party had won six of the previous eight elections, and five of the nine Supreme Court justices were slave owners.
Yergason and three dozen young Hartfordian men gathered the next week and committed themselves to taking a stand. They drew up rules for membership, which required each to wear the same costume. When Abraham Lincoln came to town in early spring, Yergason and his growing corps marched with him to keep him safe and to thwart any who would try to cancel his speech.
The Wide Awakes upped their protective skills by learning military drills from a leader in a local militia. Another local taught them a cheer: "Hurrah! Huzzah!" Unlike the unruly, dirty-playing Democratic mobs, the Wide Awakes prided themselves on crisp costume, disciplined march formations, and stoic countenances.
Come summer, the Wide Awakes were the hottest movement in the country. Chapters sprung up throughout the North and even in the border states. Their numbers were in the hundreds of thousands, and may have reached a half million. Their rallies were massive, drawing tens of thousands. Some chapters also included brass bands that would blast out buoyant tunes at all hours of the night.
The Republican Party did not know what to do with them, but were happy they supported Lincoln for president. The Democrats and their sympathizers hated the Wide Awakes, and imagined they were a paramilitary force preparing to invade the South. A backlash spawned anti-Wide Awake groups.
A year after they were founded, Yergason's Wide Awakes were at Lincoln's inauguration. The newly sworn-in president kept them at arm's length and the Grand Old Party asked them to stay home or at least dress like regular folks. Which they did.
Lincoln's victory came with an existential question for the Wide Awakes: What now for this nonparty, campaign-adjacent organization? The Civil War soon started and answered the question. Wide Awakes, Yergason included, signed up to fight the war. Afterwards, the chapters mostly disbanded and the group faded into an alumni club by the fin de siècle.
In concluding the book, Grinspan tells us one lesson of the Wide Awakes is that weird politics should not be waved away. "People often dismiss performative politics as empty, a collection of stock gesture going nowhere. … But our era reminds us of the power of spectacle and bluff, costume and prop. … Take the show seriously."
Another lesson from the Wide Awakes is that crazy politics is inevitably episodic. Groups that begin outside the major political parties often get absorbed within it, and become tamed in the process. Many of the Wide Awakes ended up as Republicans, who played a dominant role in post-bellum politics and policymaking—just like the 1960s leftists who reached the apex of Democratic Party politics in the 1990s. The fragmentation of the federal government's power between three branches, and between federal, state, county, and local governments, makes it hard for any faction—no matter how wide-eyed—to gain power and hold it for long.
Take consolation, then: This too shall pass.
Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War
by Jon Grinspan
Atlantic Monthly Press, 352 pp., $32
Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of UnderstandingCongress.org.