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Michael Casiano, "Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stout, and today I'm here with Michael Cassiano to talk about his new book, Let Us Alone the Origins of Baltimore's Police State, which is out now from the University of Illinois Press. Michael Cassiano is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore county, and a core faculty member in UMBC's public humanities minor. As we'll discuss, his book, Let Us Alone examines the relationship between policing, municipal governance and race in post Civil War Baltimore. Now that his book has arrived, Mike is working on his next project, a social history of early 20th century port cities in the Mid Atlantic that examines the relationship between policing, labor and race. Mike has been involved in grassroots housing justice efforts in Baltimore for the past several years as part of Charm City Land Trust, a community land trust located in East Baltimore where he also lives. He is an affiliate faculty member in the Language, Literacy and Culture doctoral program and an associate member of UMBC's graduate faculty. Mike, welcome to the show.
- [02:15]
C
Thanks for having me.
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B
Now, before we get into the book, we have to talk about the COVID which features one of the absolute most chilling images of policing I've ever encountered. And I say that as a police historian who has come across a lot of this kind of material. Could you describe that image for our listeners and talk a bit about what it depicts?
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C
Yeah, so. So the image itself depicts a room in the. The Detective Bureau's offices in Baltimore around 1908, 1910, around thereabouts. And it's dated that way because it coincides with the tenure of a police commissioner named Sherlock Swan. And Sherlock Swan was the grandson of Thomas Swan, who was the governor who founded the Baltimore Police Department in his sort of like, you know, modern form in 1857. And what swan was, was. Was doing, and this is contextualizing that chapter, is he was really putting a. A very, very strong but anonymized police force onto the streets. He was relying a lot on plainclothes officers to do these sorts of street level investigations. The chapter deals in details with officers, you know, staking out brothels, assessing whether or not women's dresses are too loose, tracking drug dealers in sort of the early 20th century Drug enforcement campaigns that the chapter deals sort of primarily with. And also sort of developing these sort of novel police technologies and strategies, including, like, expanding the Bureau of Identification, which was this sort of precursor to, you know, forensic labs and things like that. And so what the picture depicts is part of this process of trying to create technologies to further surveil people, particularly African Americans in Baltimore, sort of like calcifying black neighborhoods. And so the image has, you know, about 30 or so detectives, and they're wearing these white muslin masks that are totally obscuring their face and anonymizing them. And in a. In the sort of foreground of the image, there's a race platform and there is a. A unidentified and unidentifiable to me. I couldn't find out who this was exactly. Black man who's in profile facing the other way, and the detectives are just sort of looking at him. And it's just very haunting, haunting image. And the idea behind it was that there was within and on the streets of Baltimore, there was a sort of preponderance of. Of, you know, criminals, non criminals, just as citizens, who were understanding that they could identify police officers and sort of like blow their cover if they were doing any kind of plainclothes work. And so the police commissioner went up to New York, learned from Theodore Bigham, who was heavily xenophobic in his own sort of way, and had developed the strategy to do the morning lineup with masks to anonymize the detectives in the New York Police Department. And Swan brought that to Baltimore, implemented it. And it was this sort of ritual that happened Every morning called Facing the Masks. And it is haunting in its sort of like heavily racialized connotations. And the way that it's depicted in other images that, you know, aren't in the book were like deeply and profoundly racialized. This was a sort of like ritualistic, kind of like humiliation ritual coupled with this sort of like intensive and sort of show of force, power dynamic.
- [06:33]
B
Right, right. And it. Yeah, that's okay. So thank you for that. Now one other question that I had real quick before, before we move on is did you know right away that you would use that as the COVID image? Or how did you, what did that process look like?
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C
Yeah, I mean, when, when you're working on a book like this, I think that there's a way that presses try to, they try to create the most intriguing cover. I had some misgivings about it because I'm, I'm very, you know, wary about the sensationalism. But on the other end, it really does capture what the book is about. The sort of like increasing racialization of policing in Baltimore city during this period. And you know, as, as, as you're reading the book and I hope this comes through, there's like this increased sort of terrorization that's happening in black communities as they are calcifying and as policing becomes like almost singularly or towards, you know, shoring up the color line by the 1920s. And that image really captures a moment and, you know, this kind of ephemeral moment, almost totally unidentifiable moment in the archive that is broadly systemic across policing. And so I, I, you know, I suspected given how striking that image was, that it would be used for the COVID And yeah, I think for the press it was sort of a no brainer. There are, there are lot of striking images in the book, but that one is like in, in exceptionally striking image.
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B
Yeah. And it does really important work, as you say, advancing the argument of your work. So I want to, with that in mind, now we just jumped right into, you know, chapter four and what you're talking about there. But before we go any further, I'd like to more clearly establish the intellectual framework for, for the book. So in particular, I'm interested in your use of the term police state in the title as well as the term police power throughout the book. So could you walk us through what those terms mean and how they position your book in relation to other scholarship on policing?
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C
Yeah, so when I was working on the, when I was working on the book, I, you know, I came across the term police power. And the police power with a definite article which has it a slightly, I think, different legal distinction, and one deals almost singularly with police. And I think this was a lot of what the New police History, which is a phrase, I think, that Simon Balto coined to discuss histories of policing since 2010 and the publication, I think, of Khalil Muhammad's book, the Condemnation of Blackness and really sort of probing these aspirant urban armies that are occupying cities that are structured in sort of racialized dispossession and rooted in the sort of legacy of. Of slave catching in the American South. And the way that police have become sort of like a central organizing principle in daily life and particularly the sort of criminalization of poverty, racialized and gender criminalization as well. And so there's that sort of orientation of police power. And then there's a significant literature in sort of critical legal studies, critical theory that. And also, like municipal governance in the history therein that discusses, like, the police power, which is how, you know, it usually happens in the United States, state legislatures enable localities to deploy the police power, which is, you know, measures that uphold the general welfare, sort of broadly construed. And this, you know, term is so capacious on purpose in a lot of ways to provide, you know, local government with the type of discretion that it needs to, you know, police within its environs. And that policing, you know, stretches well beyond the, you know, the boys in blue and the, you know, patrolmen and the, you know, sort of boots on the ground. And it, you know, is a way that cities have made the case in Baltimore in particular, in. In this study, it made the case that, you know, the police power allows us to use force to uphold the general welfare. And what the general welfare is understood like in 1910, is to be that, like, racial disharmony will destroy the city and will destroy urbanism and will destroy this political formation. And therefore, the police power enables us to separate real estate and prohibit people from buying. And the enforcers of that are going to be the cops. And so it's this way of really trying to understand not necessarily a. The police as being localized within station houses, but thinking about, like, how are other administrations of a deprivation, like falling under this banner of, like, the police power, how are they the engines of urbanization? And so that takes me to look at, yes, for sure, the police department, which is central to the study, but also other institutions, asylums, the city jail, private citizens who wielded a ton of power, especially during the Progressive Era in the Gilded Age and the you know, private charity reformers, social workers who, you know, created the architectures of criminalization in public schools and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that was the, the, the theoretical intervention, but also the kind of like theoretical synthesis I was trying to make to examine the city. And that was really me working backwards from the contemporary where it does seem like, and you know, this is something that in my organizing work happens and also in teaching, it does seem like any and every conflict is mediated by dialing 91 1. And I don't think that that's an accident. I think that's rooted in the sort of like historical legacies of this policing structuring the way that cities are organized such that it is the sort of catch all solution to every and every problem. And this book sort of charts how that absorption happens after the Civil War, right?
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B
Yeah. And you try, you track this police power through all these different sites in the book, which I think is a really great way to think about the organization. So I wanted to talk a little bit more. The book has this thoughtful organization of its chapters moving through these, these sites of policing while also advancing chronologically, which I thought was a clever way to frame it so you can talk a little bit about how you arrived at that approach to the books organization.
- [13:54]
C
Yeah, so there are a couple of things. One of it, one of them was, was theoretical. So I wanted to, I mean, there's such a robust literature on like the new police history and also like carceral history that is really contemporary. And that was informing my book as I was reading and sort of revising the dissertation and also teaching at the same time. And so I was interested in, you know, building upon, you know, the work that my peers were doing in all of these different sections. Like the, the literature on the criminalization of children that has, has emerged recently was really formative for looking at public schools. And the literature obviously on incarceration was very important in sort of like contextualizing the city and all of the literature on the sort of like gendered and racialized terror that adhered in the American south in the late 19th and early 20th century. And I wanted to really draw on all of this and not do sort of like a singular study. And it also sort of coincided with what my broader aspirations were, mapping this sort of growth of and consolidation of an elementary police state by the 19th 30s. And then the other piece of it was, was readability. I've been teaching a course called Policing in prisons in US society since 2020. And I have, you know, assigned so many texts, so many books. And I'll give a shout out to Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the City of Inmates, because it is a perennial book on that syllabus that students are always so effusive about. And her book proceeds chronologically and touches upon different population groups in Los Angeles. And students are obsessed with that book. And they. I mean, for one, she's an amazing writer. It's an amazing book, and it is so engaging. And also, it does have these, like, varied case studies that are sort of tied together by the idea of settler colonialism. So I, as I was, you know, assigning these books, and students would always come back to that as being like, it doesn't stick. Stay in one place. It shifts focus. It allows us to shift focus. And so there's a variety there. And so when I was thinking about it, I was like, I mean, the theoretical basis of this allows me to do this so I don't have to, like, stay on one subject for 200 pages and really kind of, you know, beat a dead horse. And that was also in conversation with my students. And, you know, we always do a very gener read of every book that we do. And then at the end we go like, did you like this book? And oftentimes the. And, you know, this is a product of just, like, academic writing. Oftentimes the negative feedback students will give was. It was super repetitive. Like, I felt like I was. I was learning the same thing over and over and over again. And, you know, that's good argument building, right? Because that, that, that, that reassertion of your argument, reassertion of your claims is important to carry a through line through over the course of an entire book, which we all know is very difficult to do. And, but at the same time, that, like, shift in perspective, shift of focus, change over time does then allow, I think, students to be more engaged. And I wrote this kind of with and for them.
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B
Yeah. Well, it's really great to hear about that relationship that developed in the writing through the act of teaching and how those two things were related. That's. That's really interesting. One more big picture question before getting into the details of the book. This is an urban history as much as it is a history of policing. And as you say on page six, while many carceral histories are police histories set in cities, this book is an urban history of policing. So with that in mind, I wanted to ask, why is Baltimore the site for this book? What makes it a good place to examine the questions that your book is engaged with.
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C
Yeah, so with reference to the part about Baltimore, I, you know, there were several rounds of peer review that asked me to kind of make a case for Baltimore. And I think this happens a lot with urban histories that are, like, super hyper local. And the. That feedback was always like, what makes the city stand out? What is exceptional about the city? Stuff like that that I don't necessarily believe as a concept. And, you know, I write in the introduction that policing is systemic. And if we are to imagine or to believe that policing is systemic, then there's not, like, one city that can be the carceral city. All cities are the carceral city. And so, you know, part of it was making sure that I was articulating that the approach was a little bit different, but not that Baltimore was providing me with, like, an exceptional lens through which everybody should be engaging the city in the same way, if that makes sense. And at the same time, I was sort of taking a different approach. I wanted to know how, especially given the historiography of Baltimore, you know, what was going on in the city between 1865 and 1929, this period that encompasses, like, several, you know, different junctures in American history. So like, that sort of post Civil War boom period that began in 1863 and ended in 1873, the Gilded Age, sort of like rise of industrial capitalism in, like, a very serious way, and Baltimore commercial capitalism as well, into the late 19th century, the progressive Era at the turn of the century type, sort of a moment of periodization and the Roaring Twenties. And these are not periods that have been written about substantively in Baltimore's history. I will shout out Dennis Halpin's book. And Dennis Halpin was nice enough to write the endorsement quote for this book is a book that came out in 2019 that touches upon this relatively understudied part of Baltimore's history. And then before that, James Crook, Politics and Progress, which came out in 1967 and is the only, like, singularly focused progressive history of Baltimore. And so this period was. It was very fascinating to me in that way. And I was really interested in understanding how as all of these things are happening, as the city is growing and exploding in population density, in land mass, in bureaucratic capacity and in its private sector, as all of this stuff is happening, how are the police part of this broader urbanization? Rather than thinking about, like, what in particular about the Baltimore police is, you know, interesting or unique, and it tells us something about, like, the police as an institution or as a department. I was much More interested in understanding how policing as a concept was constitutive of the structure of the city as it was articulated in Baltimore. And the other interesting thing about Baltimore is that it is, you know, this weird interstitial space. It's in the borderlands of the eastern seaboard. It is a state that was, you know, technically loyal to the Union, caused during the Civil War, but had among its, you know, population several tens of thousands of Confederates. The first casualties of the Civil War after the Declaration happened in Baltimore, Baltimore City with a processionist mob attacking Union soldiers on their way to Washington D.C. and after war's end, all of these Confederates come back and are immediately re. Enfranchised. The city doesn't have to go through the kinds of onerous reconstruction that cities and states in the Deep south have to go through and are exempted from that. And so, you know, this democratic political machine takes control in the city and it becomes a place wherein there is a lot of pioneering legislation on the basis of that. And so it is an interesting space to, to, to consider how these dynamics that may have adhered in the south if it had not been burned to the ground, would have adhered in, you know, a kind of southern city, quote, unquote.
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B
Right. Well, you've convinced me. So let's, let's meet some of the people that, that do appear in your book. Chapter one introduces us to the so called bummers and takes us inside Baltimore's notorious city jail as well as the Bayview Asylum. So who are these bummers and what lessons do we learn from their confinement in jails and asylums?
- [23:21]
C
Yeah, so the bummers are, they're elsewhere. It's sort of called tramps. These are transient workers, the reserve army of labor in the city who, you know, either, you know, don't aspire to work or, you know, do aspire to work, but don't have an opportunity to work because of industrial capitalism. And they, you know, they become this sort of national problem. This, this, this, this problem of sort of popularization and the sort of degradation of, you know, whatever value it is. Christian values, bourgeois values, however they're articulated, this idea that there are, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of primarily men in American cities who are not working, who are, you know, occupying public space, who are indulging in drink or indulging in alcohol, and who are, you know, this sort of lumpen, you know, proletariat class, you know, however, however, however much mileage that sort of terminology gets us with understanding these, these men. What was Interesting to me about bummers is how in Baltimore City, their utility, let's say, or as far as sort of local government is concerned, has nothing to do with their ability and capacity to labor, but rather it is their mere existence that is the use case for articulating what the post Civil War carceral landscape is going to look like. The question is, what do we do with these people? And the answer in a lot of cases is incarcerate use. Vagrancy statutes have them do public works, have them build the roads, have them work in productive industry. Bombers in Baltimore City are pretty resistant to that. The city itself doesn't have a ton of carceral capacity by the time they emerge as a quote, unquote problem, has a pretty modest jail. And this is before the Civil War, in the antebellum period, where peace cases become sort of the issue. And these peace cases are rooted in disturbing the peace. And that piece is largely sort of like, well to do and middle class sensibilities, abilities of like, these are, you know, people who are literally in the streets and. And look at all this sort of urban poverty, which really does sort of smack of a contemporary moral panic around unhoused people contemporarily as well. And so the bummers become this issue, this problem, this conundrum. And part of it is top down and part of it is bottom up. And so from the bottom up perspective, bummers are very, I would say, what's a good word? I think that they are very kind of annoyed by the sort of like, bourgeois moralism and these clampdowns, and are very well aware of what their presence entails, but also, you know, what the. Their rights are. And so the beginning of that chapter starts with an anecdote from a bummer named George Boston, who's charged with public intoxication. And he's arrested by a police officer and taken to the city jail, which is a very sort of common experience during this period where, you know, thousands of men are. Are arrested and confined to the city jail for public intoxication. And he petitions a lower court in the city and says, hey, listen, I was drunk for sure, but I was just standing around, I wasn't bothering anybody. I wasn't doing anything wrong. And the court sides with him, lets him go. Completely reasonable argument. But then the state legislature comes back and provides police broader discretion to arrest people for being drunk and orderly. And so it is, you know, it sparks a sort of like. Like legal reform, which then really does flood the city jail. And what is happening with Bummers is they become a use case. And the sort of like political football where the police department is invested in arresting as many bummers as possible because the fines accrued from their arrest come back to the station houses and fund the department. And the police are nothing if not incessant self advocates. During this period and went into the present. City jail is over taxed. And the city jail, Wharton is trying to figure out the best way to attract convict labor to make the jail self sustaining, because that is a municipal aspiration and that's sort of a penological convention. At the same time, there are asylums in the city that are dealing with and are tasked with providing shelter to and aid to poor people. And so they're also feeling the pressure of having bummers within their institutions. And so all of this is sort of being mediated. And what I found and studying bummers is that they are this sort of use case that creates the justification for the city to expand its carceral capacity and for the states to expand its carceral capacity. And a house of Correction is built 16 miles away from the city in Anne Arundel county, which is an adjacent county. As a result of this increase, a new asylum is built that comes under the stewardship of Johns Hopkins Hospital, which continues to be under the stewardship of Johns Hopkins Hospital called Bayview Asylum, where bummers are confined. And so it becomes this sort of complex bureaucratic negotiation of human sorting that is rooted in how do we get the most productive value out of bummers. And simultaneously what is the duties? What are the duties and the obligations of the city to mediate and sort of solve the problem that they present.
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B
Right, yeah, that's helpful because the bummers are this, this really crucial part of the story. And you're able to trace them through both jails and asylum, speaking of these sites of police power. But another set that. That plays a crucial role in here that I was really fascinated about as I was reading through it, is the reformers. So your book has a lot to say about the progressive reform movement and its influence on police reform. So can you talk about Baltimore's progressives, their reform movement, the sites that they use to. To. To. To do what they do. And also, you know, maybe in a general sense, what your research contributes to historians understanding of that movement.
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C
Yeah, so the, yeah, Baltimore city was. Was an interesting city in that it had a very, very strong charities movement. Sort of the. The mother of modern social work is a woman named Mary Richmond, who was the secretary of the Baltimore branch of the charity organization Society for almost a decade before she moved to Philadelphia. And so it really is a city with a long history of progressive era, particularly like, you know, poverty based groups. And a lot of it had to do with, I think, this, this, this very deeply embedded sense of moral duty and obligation on behalf of a particular set of reformers. Because as progressive historians have pointed out, the progressive movement was not a cohesive, coherent movement of people who are all on the same page. It was all a bunch of different folks who had kind of singular causes in a lot of cases, whether it was temperance or protecting and saving fallen women or any number of progressive causes, eradicating child labor, et cetera. And in, in Baltimore City was very similar. And what, you know, I really unified the search for me was the biography of one person, Charles Bonaparte. And Charles Bonaparte was a pretty singular figure because if his last name sounds familiar, he is the grand nephew of Napoleon. His father is Jerome Bonaparte, who was the son of Elizabeth Patterson, who was the heir to William Patterson's fortune in Baltimore City, and also Jerome Bonaparte who was briefly married to her. And then Napoleon had the marriage annulled and then he became the King of Westphalia. And so Charles, you know, emerges out of this, out of this legacy. And he is a very sharp, smart dude who is like very, very extremely wedded to his Catholicism, is zealot in, in terms of his sort of like religious convictions and is, you know, smart or you know, rich. And so goes to Harvard University and comes back to Baltimore City and uses it as the sort of, of place to sort of develop his reputation, his name and has just a lot of money and a lot of free time by virtue of not having to be like a working, you know, lawyer taking on clients all of the time. And so he is the, you know, either the president or the vice president or on the executive committee or like funding so many of the progressive reform organizations in the city during that period. He, he founds the reform league in 1885 to take on the democratic machine. He is part of the executive level administration of the charity organization society of the civil service reform Agency. Like all of these agencies, Charles Bonaparte has his, his hands in and what the reformers are trying to do, these reformers. So him, John Rose, who eventually becomes a U.S. district Court judge, Roger Call, who is another sort of like very virulent critic of the way that the city's operating, the spoil system and all this stuff. What they're really interested in doing is they're interested in reforming the police and having the police function as a Army against morals violations. And what they kind of realize is that with the democratic machines, control, which has sort of prevailed since the end of the civil war in Baltimore City, there's nothing really that they can do. Their hands are tied. They can't really reform the police because the police are controlled by whatever, whoever's sitting in the governor's mansion. And that is the one agency that they are the most interested in reforming, because it is the one agency, given what their responsibilities and obligations are, and also given the amount of resources expended. Police are by far more well funded and financed than the, you know, school system, than the, you know, poverty relief organizations. They're second only to municipal debt, taken to, you know, finance, you know, private, the private sector, which is then protected by the police department. So it's all sort of part of the same kind of continuum. And so what Bonaparte and the reformers, you know, note is that the police is the agency that is the one that is the ripest for eradicating all the social evils that are the civilizational threat posed by drink and prostitution and gambling and all this stuff. And at the same time, they know that the police department is also constituted by a bunch of working class immigrants or, you know, second generation immigrants, and they have their own sort of anti immigrant prejudices as well. And basically they need to get in there and change everything. And so what they do is they stage this challenge against the democratic machine. And on the heels of the. The Panic of 1893 or the Depression of 1893 and several cities swinging to Republican administrations, they able to remove the democratic bosses from the government and from their control for a bit and institute a ton of reforms, including police reforms. And so they get in there, they, you know, stage a sort of like kangaroo court, they fire the police marshal, they install a new police marshal, and they are effective enough in the four years that they have in power to really alter the nature of the police at that period. And then, broadly speaking, what it speaks to is how citizens and private actors and private reformers are central to articulating our understanding of what police power constitutes. Because these are not cops, These are, these are lawyers, these are professionals, these are, you know, well to do citizens. And their sort of pet projects encompass altering society and changing it to adhere to their worldview. And so they do a great job of that. And then, you know, would be remiss not to mention that Charles Bonaparte then ascends to the ranks his good friend Teddy Roosevelt, who, you know, makes an appearance in chapter two because they have they correspond constantly, especially after Teddy becomes the police commissioner in 1894 to administer Lexow in New York. Teddy makes Charles Bonaparte the Attorney General of his administration when he's president, and together they find the Bureau of Investigation, which becomes the FBI. And a lot of what Bonaparte is drawing from is his experiences in Baltimore City working with private detectives, staging these. All these sorts of like, you know, a political theater as a way of swaying public opinion. Like all of that is really formed and. And informative during his time working as a reformer in Baltimore City.
- [38:34]
B
Yeah, it's an unexpected turn. I was really fascinated by that when I came across that. Now, chapter three introduces us to a couple of disciplinary mechanisms that reformers subjected black and immigrant Baltimore residents to, including this thing called the friendly visit, as well as attendance officers responsible for policing truancy in the public schools. So we have here home and school as sites of police power. So could you describe those things, friendly visiting and attendance officers for us? And how are they related to progressive reform?
- [39:04]
C
Yeah, so in the sort of contemporary literature on particularly like abolitionism, there's this concept called, like, soft policing, which is a policing that isn't administered by cops, but functions along similar axes. You know, sort of the. The ability to sort of pass judgment, the ability to institutionalize, to detain. And oftentimes soft police have a kind of benign connotation to them. And this is really sort of embodied in the idea of the social worker. And so chapter three is really. It is a history of, or sort of a. A snapshot of a history of the sort of development and the emergence of social work as this sort of like, disciplinary, soft police arm of this burgeoning police state that I'm sort of charting throughout the book. And so, you know, what is, you know, interesting about this is how the. The use of urban sociology and the. These sort of for sports prescriptive ways that, like heredity and culture are inscribed into the sort of urban sociological frameworks that then guide these charity workers. Charity workers come social workers and their approach to friendly visiting. And so they are very, very, very deeply embedded in the sort of, like, eugenics academic production of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And they are texts, and they're encouraging their agents to read these texts and, you know, describing the ways that, you know, black cases, cases in sort of, like, clientelist orientation, are different or distinct from those of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe versus, like, people who are acculturated or Native Americans, quote, unquote, Native Americans, Americans from the United States States, white Americans from the United States and how all of these present different challenges. And this really does guide friendly visiting in a lot of ways. In some ways, friendly visiting becomes a. A. A mode of institutionalization. A lot of friendly visitors will make referrals to police to confine folks who they deemed to be vicious beggars or paupers to Bayview Asylum. And so it's this different pipeline that's created between agents, police, and an institution of confinement. And so there's that element of how they sort of, like, contribute to the sort of burgeoning police power. And then the other element is I analyze the emergence of the attendance officer as a way of sort of historicizing like. Like, you know, how, like the criminalization of schooling and the criminalization of public schools. And during this period, there's this movement towards eradicating child labor. And in the chapter I make this, you know, I'm trying to make this as clear as possible. The intentions of reformers are great. Their execution relies so much on the structure of feeling during this period of urbanization, wherein everything is sort of being consumed by this use of force as a way of trying to realize ends that these means don't necessarily coincide with that seem misaligned or that proved to be misaligned. And so in their effort to eradicate child labor, one of the things that they institute is a compulsory education law. Compulsory education laws are still in the books, and they dictate that you have to go to school up to a certain age. Baltimore in 1902, they pass this law. You have to go to school until you're 12. And that is, if you get a job, then you're able to drop out at 12. But if you don't, then you have to stay in school until you're 16 and you have to go. It's compulsory. And so if you miss too much school, then you're subject to investigation. And so the enforcement mechanism that's put into the legislation is the creation of attendance officers and parental schools schools. And these parental schools are functionally reformatories, Although the superintendent, who is in charge of administering this program is very clear that's not a reformatory and a, you know, doth protest too much type of situation where it's obvious that these are reformatories. Children can be taken away from their parents, they can be put into these schools. They are not allowed to see their parents. They're not allowed to go home for holidays and things like that. That. And so what. How you get these students into these parental schools is through a cadre of attendance officers. And these attendance officers, at the beginning of the program start, there are 12 of them. They have subdivided the school into districts that roughly coincide with the police districts. They wear badges. They have the legislation of the compulsory attendance law, and they start investigating cases. They go to workplaces, they go to schools, they talk to principals, they talk to teachers, and they start investigating kids instead of investigating children and their parents. And they, you know, sort of grow in size and influence to the point where the superintendent in charge of administering the program says very, you know, you know, proudly that these people come to folks's houses, their private domiciles, accompanied with the full power of the law. Law in this, you know, way of, yes, people are now sort of terrified that their children can be taken away from them. And simultaneously, what emerges through their investigations is that there is this idea that truancy and crime are sort of causative and that truancy creates crime. And when they start investigating, what they find is not a bunch of. Of. Of criminals, you know, who would, like, be on the streets with ragged dick, you know, in, like, the late 19th century, they find is a bunch of kids who are, like, suffering from illnesses, who are unable to get to school because they don't have shoes, who are. Who are immobilized by the realities of urban poverty that this organization, the charity organization society and their sort of colleagues and peers are trying to eradicate but do not seem to understand the scale of and are not interested in ameliorating in any significant sort of way. Their philosophy is make it. Make it impossible for poor people not to live honestly by denying them. And the critics of these initiatives look at the public schools and go, these public schools are horrible. They're not conducive to learning. And this really hit me as an educator because, you know, I've taught in classrooms where they were totally not conducive to learning as well. And also, you know, students are not being assessed well enough to understand whether or not they have. And this isn't the language they used at the time, but essentially what they were saying is like, you know, whether students have learning disabilities, whether students are, you know, suffering from difficulty seeing they're not being. They don't have glasses. Like, the school environment is not a place that they can thrive in. And so not going is the same as going. And so the root causes of all of these things, you know, namely fixing the education system and creating the conditions under which students can actually, like, learn in an environment. That's not what the charity organization society and the attendance officers are trying to fix. Rather what they're trying to do is criminalize truancy and force students to go to schools. And that is sort of broadly the ethos of this movement during this period.
- [47:50]
B
Right, right.
- [47:52]
C
Okay.
- [47:52]
B
So I want to move on. Another side of police power is the court. Chapter five takes us into the courtroom and is in my opinion a master class of archival research. Can you tell us the story of Henry Albert Brown? His arrest, his trial, his eventual execution for a crime he didn't commit. And talk about how you trace that story through the archives.
- [48:14]
C
Yeah. So Henry Brown is a 19 year old black naval meth attendant in 1921 from Texas originally, who is a deserter who leaves the Naval Academy in Annapolis and begins living in Baltimore City. He's in Baltimore City when a woman named Harriet Kavanaugh is murdered mysteriously on the Naval Academy grounds. She's murdered and the Navy creates a court of inquiry to investigate the case. The Department of Justice sends federal agents to investigate the case and local police get involved at eventually. So Brown is seized for desertion by the Baltimore police and then taken by the Master at Arms who's sort of like the. The cop on, on a naval ship back to Annapolis where he's held at the Cumberland. And reporting during this period there's a ton of. Obviously because this is a massive story and the reporting during this period is, is pretty lukewarm on why Brown is, is, is involved or even implicated in, in the news in any way, noting that like all of his ties are purely circumstantial. And then surprisingly, a couple of days later he confesses to the murder and is taken to Baltimore City where he's arraigned before a US Commissioner who.
- [49:51]
B
In.
- [49:51]
C
That hearing Brown takes the opportunity finally as he's, you know, sort of able to speak without police and other law enforcers around him to say that he was beaten into confessing for the murder. This chapter is a real product of the archive and several archives that I was working with during this period. I first encountered this story in Lee Sartain's book, which is a history of the Baltimore branch of the naacp, which is a very, very influential branch in the United States. Not so much in the 1920s, but very much so in the 1930s and definitely in the post war period and is a couple of paragraphs about it. And as I'm looking to do, you know, work on what is chapter six, but was then chapter five and looking at, you know, Baltimore Afro American coverage of what's going on in the city, particularly with regard to police and trying to sort of demystify some of the a, the police's, you know, justifications for being so active in black neighborhoods. But also the quantitative data that I have, I started looking at, you know, what is the Afro reporting on? And one of the things they're reporting on a lot is the third degree, which we know because of the Wickersham Commission reports in 1929 are a serious and endemic use of police violence against people to try to combat the sort of like interwar levels of violent crime that are happening largely as a result of like. Well, there are several reasons why it's happening. And so I have, you know, a couple of news stories. I have, you know, this, this account in this book. And so I position this as, you know, one among many things that are being reported by the Afro at this time. I read that, I write that chapter and the COVID lockdown happens. And so then I am like kind of, as every historian probably is trying to figure out, like what do I, what do I do? What do I, what can I do? So I'm reaching out to archivists that I know, archivists that I don't know, archives that I've been to, archives that I haven't been to. And I'm trying to find stuff for anything. I reach out to the US District Court here because Henry Brown's case was, was, was held in the federal court because it was committed allegedly on national or federal property on, in the US Naval Academy. And so it was administered in US District Court. Find that the US District Court archives are kept at the National Archives of Philadelphia. Send an email to like an info address, you know, up to there. Do you have any information on this case? Henry Brown, blah, blah, archivist, emails me back and says we have quite a lot, lot on that case. We have a 275 page stenographic transcript. We have dockets, we have all of this stuff. We have about 400 pages and you can get them, I'll scan them for you for you know, 10 cents a page or whatever. And I was sort of gobsmacked, said absolutely. He sent that to me graciously. And again, you know, shout out to every archivist on earth. They are so important for us to do and to write these books. And so when I received this, I started reading through the stenographic transcript. And it's long and it is so eye opening because what the press reports is you know, basically kind of, they don't report what's going on in the, in the proceedings at the trial, they report, you know, he's been sentenced to death by the judge. The execution data is this, this, this, this. And then I'm reading the transcript and, and the judge is very sort of ambivalent on his, you know, take on the case. So much so that he basically instructs the jury, don't listen to the eyewitness testimony. It's too inconsistent to listen to. If this stuff is, is true, if we align some of these stories, then there's no way that he could have actually been at the Naval Academy to commit this murder in the first place, which is telling in and of itself. He, he kicks the confession that's given to the Baltimore Police Department says that is inadmissible. You aren't allowed to read that, you're not allowed to consider it during the trial. But he keeps another confession that was given by Henry Brown to the court of inquiry on the basis of the fact that he has legal counsel during the time in which he gives that confession, which is, you know, with context. Brown gives that confession, you know, not long after he gives the confession to the Baltimore police detectives. And he gives that confession fully having been beaten and compelled to give the first confession. And he has received a promise from the Baltimore police detectives that they'll take him back to Baltimore, get him out of Southern Maryland, where he's afraid that he will be lynched. And his fears are totally well founded. It. This is, this is a teenager who is from Texas, a black teenager from Texas who then moved to Southern Maryland. So he's very duly aware of the sort of racial landscape of what this accusation could possibly do to him. And he wants to get back to Baltimore City where he, he's. He seems to believe there's embodicum of a chance for survival there to paint an accurately and deservedly grim picture of the, the state at this period. And so that then leads me down the sort of like, you know, archival rabbit hole. The next thing that happens is that a citizens committee takes up the case, the local branch of the naacp, a woman named Laura Wheatley. And I find all this correspondence between her and the executive secretary, James Walton Johnson, and the notes that she takes from a meeting that she has with Warren Harding, the notes that she takes from a meeting has with the Attorney General, just like a stack of, of. Of material that really gets into the sort of the, the respectability politic that's at play here, where there are several more moderate, if not conservative, members of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP that do not want to take this case on and that likely believe in the sort of, like, spirit of conservatism and racial uplift, that, you know, helping or siding with this, you know, poor young black teenager who has been, you know, accused of committing the most heinous crime possible during this period for a black teenager that, that could reflect poorly on the district. Branch. Branch. And so she says, fine, I'll do it myself. She gets some folks together, including Emma Truxin, who's a black social worker, Boston Allen, who is a reverend, and J. Stewart Davis, who is a lawyer, and they, you know, make this case to the U.S. pardon attorney. The U.S. pardon attorney's records, which I found at the National Archives in College park, are also extensive. And I'm able to find, you know, affidavits that they have from people, sworn affidavits that testify to Henry Brown's alibi, which he said that he was in Baltimore City. And, you know, the fact that he was at a brothel makes things a little complicated because a lot of the, you know, women who work there are loathe to testify in court. There's also, from J. Stewart Davis, very credible evidence that the Baltimore police is shaking down people who are, you know, know, considering testifying on Henry Brown's behalf. And, you know, most notably, I get the pardon attorney's report to the Attorney General. The pardon attorney is this man named James Finch, who is in constant contact with Laura Wheatley and to whom they have a bunch of mutual reverence. And the report is this 40 page report that's like exhaustively researched, that at the end of it, based on, you know, his investigation and the fact that the Department of Justice abandons their investigations into two other people who have suspicion on them, he recommends a commutation, which I've been working on this case or on this chapter for three years or something, and the Finch report is one of the last things that I read. And, and I was, as I was researching this, was pretty sure that before I even knew what the end was, pretty sure that Henry Brown was going to be executed. And I had already confirmed it by the time I read Finch's report. And I didn't realize how close the citizens committee actually came to getting him. Well, not. Not his freedom, but to saving his life. And when I read the recommendation of commutation, I was gobsmacked because I knew what happened. And basically he kicks that up to Harry Doherty, who's the Attorney General at the time and is very much, you know, you know, in Warring's and. And and, and Harding's. Sorry, Warren G. Harding's presidential administration, which is a very, very. A bad administration, but also an administration that, you know, placates the black electorate rather than actually providing material support. And that's, you know, the, the criticism that black organizations like the NAACP have against him. Dougherty reads Finch's report, largely agrees in the report. You know, even continues to maintain his position that a lot of the evidence, if not all of the evidence, is completely circumstantial, should not be listened to. But his rationale for what he eventually recommends, which is murder by hanging, is that despite the fact that Henry Brown's confession was certainly compelled, he could have told the truth anyway, which is just like monumentally callous assessment. And the, the.
- [60:31]
B
What.
- [60:31]
C
What will kind of come to light in the Wickersham Commission report of these. Like the, the. The permissiveness of law enforcement on the basis of like, trying to. Yeah. Cowtow to a virulent public that wants justice by any means. He kicks that up to Harding. Harding, you know, orders the execution and Henry Brown is hanged. And I will say, you know, from an. From an archival perspective, I don't. This is the most dense chapter in the book. It's also this, like, micro history that I. I contextualize was a. And with broader trends and things like that, particularly rates of murder as they're increasing arrest for murder as they're increasing conviction rates, which are skewed heavily towards black people execution trends which almost totally flip after the Civil War to be almost exclusively black Baltimoreans are being executed in the city. And so it is part of an emblematic of this sort of broader trend in law enforcement towards this sort of like, operation with impunity towards black life. And also it is a thing, as a historian, when you have all of this material that I did feel kind of duty bound to tell this story and to tell it particularly in the way that honored Henry Brown and Laura Wheatley and Emma Truxen and Boston Allen and J. Stewart Davis, these folks. And it was. Yeah, I don't know. There aren't many times that I have this. But I remember reading the commutation that James Finch recommended at the National Archives in College park and just crying. It is like a devastating case. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [62:27]
B
Well, it's a real service that you ultimately pursued it and were able to include it in the book in the way that you did. I'm glad that you were able to tell that story even though it presented so many obstacles, archival through the pandemic and all that kind of stuff. Now, while you were describing that, you mentioned the Baltimore Afro American in reference to Henry Rollins story. And in the last chapter, you kind of turn your attention more fully to that newspaper as a source in order to describe several famous incidents, infamous incidents of police brutality in Baltimore, including policing interracial relationships and the case of a person named Charles Edward Williams who's killed by an off duty police officer. So could you talk a little bit about the black press as a source and its importance in telling the history of policing?
- [63:14]
C
Yeah. So I started from having collected a lot of quantitative data to track the sort of trends in arrests that were being, you know, done in the city over the course of, I think it's 1895, the Baltimore Police starts to kind of like categorize arrests based on race. And, you know, I collect all of that data using annual reports and things like that up until 1929. And what I notice is that the arrest rate is always disproportionate, and it becomes increasingly disproportionate in 1929. Racially disproportionate. So black people are being arrested at higher rates than white people. And that the category of arrest that is the most disproportionate is disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. And these are two, you know, discretionary statutes that really empower the police officer in an intimate encounter to arrest somebody for, you know, whatever definition of public disturbance or disorderly conduct they see. And magistrates usually uphold this. And even if somebody isn't confined to the city jail, like, the fact of, of. Of being arrested is a trauma that is, you know, broadly systematized in, you know, these, at this point, calcifying black neighborhoods, particularly in Northwest Baltimore, which becomes a sort of like cultural hub and where there are wards that have 80, 90% African American residents. And so it's not this sort of like salt and pepper of like the immediate post of war period. These are now like almost exclusively black neighborhoods that police are targeting, coordinating off from the growing suburbs in the north and the sort of downtown district. And so I, you know, I, I had this information, I knew that this was happening. And, you know, I'm not averse to quantitative data, but I think it tells a very limited story. And so while I was including the, that I, I was genuinely interested in, like, what is, what are people being arrested for? What is, what is the actual reason why folks are being arrested? And you look at the dockets, the dockets, you know, at the Maryland State Archives are, are. Are as vague as the charge itself. It's this disorderly conduct person's name, how the fine that they paid, the, you know, the term they spent at the city jail. And that's basically it. And so, yeah, I turned to the. To the Afro American to see, like, what's going on here. And, you know, I have some names from the archive. And so I look up some names from the archive. I. I look up some stories that have disorderly conduct or public disturbance. Then I take those to the archive to see, like. And it's just, you know, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And over the course of, like, doing this and trying to corroborate what's going on, you know, I start to see these patterns emerge of, you know, what. What is constituting public disturbance? What is constituting disorderly conduct? And I'm not able to, like, humanize or really contextualize what that means without the black press. And so in a lot of cases, like you mentioned, a lot of people are being arrested for interracial sociality. They're being arrested, they're being antagonized, they're being harassed or being chased into their private. Into their homes. They're being violated in their homes. There are several stories in the Afro of, you know, police officers trailing interracial couples, especially when it's a black man and a white woman. You know, this is in the wake of sort of the man act and the. The sort of sexual regulation that is. That is a foundation of, you know, growing the police state, as, you know, Anne Gray Fisher argues in her book, which is incredible. And so there is a way that these charges of disorderly conduct and public disturbance are used to police interracial sociality. And the police commissioner at the time notes that the reason that folks are being arrested for this is because that type of behavior, in his words, disgusts the public. And so it does constitute a public disturbance. And again, you know, circling back to the sort of capaciousness of, like, what does the police power mean? All this discretion is. Is. Is so fundamental to the articulation of what the cops do. And it becomes this real core and foundational attitude that structures the police demand for deference, particularly from black people in the city, and which is emboldened by the police commissioner, who the Afro American is very, very critical of, Charles Gaither, who is a former brigadier general from the National Guard, who comes in and reconstitutes the police department into a series of platoons. And that really, he takes his sort of experience in the National Guard and His experience in Colonial occup and applies it to the Baltimore Police Department and is armed with these like broadly discretionary statutes and is very intentional in the installation of terror into these, this occupied population. And that was extremely illuminating in how often the Afro was reporting. People's private domiciles are being being infringed upon. Cops are knocking indoors, cops are shining flashlights and sleeping people's faces. Cops are breaking into houses where a black and a white person went into to investigate what they're doing. None of this is illegal unless, you know, you have these like broadly discretionary statutes. And all of it's being directed in this way that is very intentional upon you about seizing upon the law law to enact specifically this kind of terror. And then that chapter in the book ends and culminates with Charles Williams's murder by an off duty cop who you know is off duty, knocks on his door. Charles Williams is in his house, slams the door in this dude's face who is just a guy, you know, he's not wearing his, his patrolman's uniform, he's just a guy. And Charles Williams, Williams, the only place on earth that he has a, even the slightest bit of security in knowing that he's safe is his home. You know, you would think, slams the door in the stranger's face, stranger knocks open the door and murders him. And the police commissioner backs the patrolman.
- [70:29]
B
And.
- [70:29]
C
And it is a story that is very contemporarily resonant. And you know, the book ends on this sort of, you know, dour note as a way of sort of forecasting and foreshadowing. You know, this is what policing sort of has become. This is what it was, a sort of vigilantism that adhered in the antebellum period among cops who were, you know, demanding of deference from a significant black population in the city, but then is also, now they're armed, now they're dangerous, now they are occupying, now they're instilling fear, now they're terrorizing. And the protections that should adhere to citizens in their own homes don't protect black Americans in their own homes. And it continues to worsen, particularly in the post war period with regard to these types of abuses.
- [71:29]
B
Right, yeah. Well, on that note, I wanted to just follow up a little bit about, in some ways about lessons that the book has, but also about audience. And it's helpful that you mentioned teaching as an inspiration for the book structure and other things. So who do you hope reads this book? And who's the Ideal audience. What lessons do you hope they draw from it?
- [71:50]
C
Yeah, the primary audience I think, think is this is a very, very local, local history. I, I, I approach this book, as many of us do who are in the academy, as an opportunity to write a book that I would like to read. An opportunity to write a book that I would like to, you know, for a subject that I would like to understand more. And the, the history of policing in Baltimore is, I think, you know, with Adam Malka's book and with Dennis Halpin's book and with this book now is more sort of fleshed out. And that's great, but I think it's still very ripe for analysis, particularly about policing in the 1960s and 70s. Comprehensive full length studies of that sort of post war policing haven't really been completed. And so, you know, I am a, somebody who has, has a very, I think, distinct privilege among academics. I live in the city that I study and also the city that I'm from. And so I have access to the archive and I have access to the people who live here and you know, my experiences growing up and, and I, from all these conversations, I know that people are interested in this history and wanted to read a book like this. And so in a lot of ways the audience is, is those folks, people who I talk to, people who've had these experiences. And when I did a couple of events in Baltimore when the book came out, and there are people who are genuinely curious and were very thoughtful and had all these questions about what was going on during this period and questions about stuff that aren't in the book and that are right for future study. So I think, you know, from it coming from me wanting to read this book and then also, but being informed by the fact that, you know, this is a part of Baltimore's historiography that's lacking, comes with the residents of the city and then also undergraduate students. You know, it's, it's tough. You, you have to write these books in a way that, you know, passes enough with peer review. And so sometimes they get more complicated than you want them to be. But I tried to write as accessibly as possible for like advanced undergraduate students to be able to engage with a narrative, to engage with stories from the past that highlight sort of things that illuminate understudied elements of that region and period, but also might be able to shed light on the contemporary. And so those are the main audiences and the lessons are, are, you know, that there's so much that has to be sort of disentangled I think, in the structures of government, particularly local government, to realize a sense of justice or reform or abolition or what have you of policing in the United States because they're so embedded in the sort of legal architectures that form, you know, our city charter and all the case law has been passed that sort of like reinforces the police's ability to do all of these types of activities and the police's incessant self advocacy that has now created the conditions under which 911 becomes the catch all to any social conflict. I think in taking this institution and, and trying to ameliorate all of the harm that it causes, there are very elemental structures of government that need to be changed in order to realize that happening. And I think that there are several people who are working on that, several organizations and activists who are working on that at the grassroots level. And I hope that this book can illuminate some of those historic patterns for that sort of broader freedom struggle as well.
- [76:01]
B
Well, Mike, thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure doing history with you for our listeners. Michael Casiano's book, Let Us Alone the Origins of Baltimore's Police State is available now from the University of Illinois Press, and you can find it wherever the finest books are sold. Mike, I thank you again for being on the show.
- [76:17]
C
Congratulations on the book. Thanks so much. And thanks for having me. Sam.