Recalling another time when anger ruled the nation

Jamie Stiehm

is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington

This summer's dialogue of democracy over health-care reform is bringing out the worst in the body politic. In orchestrated scenes of rage and threats in town-hall meetings, public discourse is now public "discoarse."

When a man brings a gun to a New Hampshire meeting, when a Missouri woman tears up a poster of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, and when long-serving Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) and Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.) are shouted down by hostile home crowds, then we've got trouble. History tells us these un-American incidents undermine civil society.

Philadelphia has seen a rising tide of mob violence before, in Jacksonian America during the 1830s. The culmination came when a grand new temple of free speech was burned down by a mob while the police, firefighters, and the mayor did nothing to stop them.

Quaker antislavery leaders had raised $40,000 to build a central space for a cause catching on like - well, wildfire. But Pennsylvania Hall did not last a week.

Briefly, a sprig of spring sweetened the air in 1838. The neoclassical hall stood high on Sixth Street between Arch and Race, close to Independence Hall. Men and women, blacks and whites attended the opening ceremonies. Pennsylvania Hall was a proud paragon of American democracy.

John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet and newspaper editor, read a poem for the occasion. The first lectures heard in the hall were on abolition and temperance, with "overflowing" numbers in attendance. William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston abolitionist, charted the journey ahead to emancipation.

Race was at the heart of the hostile crowd outdoors. They protested the social mixing - or "amalgamation." The presence of a few black women seemed to be the problem, Mayor Isaac Roach told those inside. He suggested asking them to leave. Lucretia Mott, a Quaker antislavery leader, tartly rejected that proposal.

Soon the mob began to sound like a sea outside. Rocks landed on the windows. On the third night, the mass outside reached a crest of thousands.

When Roach arrived, he asked for the hall key. Then he shouted out there would be no meetings that night - and told the mob to disperse. Locking the door, he took a blow as he left the scene.

After the mayor and the abolitionists left, the mob broke its banks. Every last book, desk, and blue damask sofa was extinguished in a blaze that shocked the nation. Garrison escaped by the skin of his teeth. The mob looked for the house of Lucretia and James Mott on North Ninth, but missed it.

Philadelphia, the beloved city, suffered a kick in the head and injured its psyche in the rough and tumble. Anguished residents asked how it could have happened in a nation where human rights were written into the law. Philadelphia liked to think of itself as a cut above other cities. Pennsylvania was often the staging ground for national triumphs and tragedies, from the Revolution of 1776 to the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

The economic Panic of 1837 probably accounted for some of the Philadelphia crowd's violence. Racism was certainly there in droves. The lack of municipal authority and failure of leadership fanned the flames.

What the burning of Pennsylvania Hall tells us, though, is that an ugly hatred lived and festered in the country itself. For if something so drastic could happen in dear old Philadelphia, the state of the union was in danger in 1838. The writing was on the hall.

And so it is today, with violence in the air. If it could happen there and then, it could happen here and now.