“The spirit ot lawlessness grows with what it feeds on and when mobs with impunity lynch criminals for one crime, they are certain to begin to lynch real or alleged criminals for other causes. In the recent cases of lynching over three-fourths were not for rape at all, but for murder, attempted murder and even less heinous offenses. Moreover, the history of these recent cases shows the awful fact that when the minds of men are habituated to the use of torture by lawless bodies to avenge crimes of a peculiarly revolting description, other lawless bodies will use torture in order to punish crimes of an ordinary type.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

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Theodore Roosevelt 445

American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858–1919

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“This matter of lynching would be a terrible thing even if it stopped with the lynching of men guilty of the inhuman and hideous crime of rape; but, as a matter of fact, lawlessness of this type never does stop and never can stop in such fashion. Every violent man in the community is encouraged by every case of lynching, in which the lynchers go unpunished, to himself take the law into his own hands whenever it suits his own convenience. In the same way the use of torture by the mob in certain cases is sure to spread until it is applied more or less indiscriminately in other cases.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

“All thoughtful men must feel that gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country and especially over the peculiarly hideous form so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims, on which occasion the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime, but on the color of the criminal.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

“In a certain proportion of these cases the man lynched has been guilty of a crime horrible beyond description; a crime so horrible that as far as he himself is concerned he has forfeited the right to any kind of sympathy whatsoever. The feeling of all good citizens that such a hideous crime shall not be hideously punished by mob violence is due not in the least to sympathy for the criminal, but to a very lively sense of the train of dreadful consequences which follows the course taken by the mob in exacting inhuman vengeance for an inhuman wrong.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

“Libertarians say: what about individual rights? The question boils down to this: how many robbers must there be before robbery is no longer a crime? How many rapists must there be before it is no longer rape? We all know logic. A crime is a crime, no matter how many people are involved. If the majority of a town goes out and lynches someone, it is still murder. Majority rule often leads to mob rule, which tramples on individual rights and self–ownership.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Facets of Liberty: A Libertarian Primer, (1985), p. 196 (Chapter 23, “The Libertarian Philosophy and Taxation")

“But the fullest recognition of the horror of the crime and the most complete lack of sympathy with the criminal cannot in the least diminish our horror at the way in which it has become customary to avenge these crimes and at the consequences that are already proceeding therefrom. It is, of course, inevitable that where vengeance is taken by a mob it should frequently light on innocent people, and the wrong done in such a case to the individual is one for which there is no remedy. But even where the real criminal is reached the wrong done by the mob to the community itself is well-nigh as great.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

“The reality is that racial lynchings were a frequent and normal feature of life in the South. This unique method of murder was a devastating form of terrorism that imposed a constant threat to all black people. The white authority structure did not only tolerate or encourage these killings but used the fear of lynchings to control and oppress black people.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

“Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

Source: Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974), p. 121
Context: When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. (Not that the group is always on the right side of the issue. Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.)

“There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Parliament of Whores

Source: Parliament of Whores (1991), p. 194

“This new generation, for example, is not content with preachings against that vile form of collective murder — lynch law-which has broken out in our midst anew. We know that it is murder, and a deliberate and definite disobedience of the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." We do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Address before the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. December 6, 1933 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14574
1930s

“America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

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Theodore Roosevelt 445

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