and the public bureaucracy were squarely, unapologetically, and unironically on the side of the lynch mobs. In St. Joseph, Lloyd Warner, in jail for an unspecified reason, was dragged out of his cell and to a street where he was flooded with seven gallons of gasoline and lit on fire. As the victim was "burned alive," the "crowd cheered and laughed and made jokes" ("Crowd" 592). The straight reporting of the laughter and jeers of the lynch mobs does make a self-evident moral statement of a kind, but the hard truth is that only a culture without law and order and without humanity could permit such atrocities against its fellow citizens.
Nearly seven decades after the Emancipation Proclamation such atrocities occurred with regularity in American society, particularly in the South. The political, economic and social justification of slavery and the mind-set of race superiority still pervaded American culture. No government or law enforcement intervention was powerful or even motivated enough to overcome them.
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