Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation (practice paper, September 2014)

APPLIED PRACTICE PAPER#1

Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation

“Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic”

GQ, July 2014

 Stepan Serdiukov

AMST 501: Theory and Methods

September 23, 2014

In March 2014, the United States Bureau of Land Management sent its representatives, along with the law enforcement rangers, to round up and impound the trespassing cattle on the federal land in Clark County, Nevada. Thus, the government moved to resolve its 20-year dispute with the cattle's owner, local rancher Cliven Bundy, who had been refusing to pay his grazing fees since 1993, claiming that federal powers have no authority over any of Nevada's lands.

However, the story was still far from its conclusion. On April 12, a group of Bundy's supporters, many of them heavily armed, confronted the BLM agents guarding the impounded cattle. Fearing especially fatal consequences, the Bureau director Neil Kornze ordered the agency's employees to release the cattle and leave. So, the unruly rancher emerged victorious—at least, for the time being. Bundy's supporters, in some number, remained on his land until June.

Their exploits are described in the article 'Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,' published in GQ magazine in July 2014 —the text that is going to be the subject of the current paper. It is built around reporter's conversations with Cliven Bundy himself, the militiamen, and his own observations about the situation in the vigilante camp.

For several reasons, this article is especially well-suited for analysis applying the American Studies theoretical framework. First of all, its principal characters are members of a self-styled 'citizen militia,' yet another modern facet of a fringe paramilitary movement, that gained momentum in the early 1990s, and which, in turn, was part of a long and controversial American tradition of vigilantism. Second of all, vigilantism in the US is inextricably connected with racial and social conflicts that in no small part defined the relationship between different class and race groups in this country. Additionally, the magazine story is rich with author's personal assumptions and opinions, expressed quite openly; this gives our inquiry yet another subject, also inseparable from American tradition (of letters.)

Therefore, it appears appropriate to study this text as a cultural manifestation of public attitudes towards militia and vigilante movements and their relationship with the federal authority, and race.

From the start, the article explicitly evokes the imagery of the American War of Independence: “Did you know there was a revolutionary war fought on American soil earlier this spring? It's true! Back in April, a small band of militiamen led by a rabble-rousing Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy defeated the United States of America without firing a single shot. And so a brand-new country—sand-choked, heatstroked, and very heavily armed—was formed inside this one [emphasis added]”. The author keeps the association alive, repeatedly referring to Bundy's supporters' camp as the “Republic” throughout the text. Moreover, the camp itself was known among its inhabitants under two names: Camp Tripwire and Camp Liberty, with American flags, as the author notes, almost ubiquitous.

The men and women defending the camp, the “Liberty” from supposed imminent encroachment or attack by the government forces, unmistakably see themselves as vigilantes, protectors of freedom. Essentially, in the American history, vigilantism meant direct democracy, the collective of people standing guard of their community's laws, and, inevitably, values. However, vigilantism is mostly a local phenomenon, whereas Bundy's supporters came from all over the United States. Take “Bam Bam”, one of the men being interviewed by Baron: he claims to have traveled all the way from New Jersey. Texas, California and New Hampshire also were among the places where Bundy's supporters came from. This makes their classification quite a curious task, because the locality they claimed to protect seemed to exist only in their minds, as they projected the ideal America they held dear onto the situation with Bundy's ranch, land, and cattle. Are they vigilantes, militiamen, or both? 

One of the most important motives in historical vigilantism was race. White lynch mobs dispatched their quick and brutal “justice” to the people outside the circle of whiteness, as whiteness, as Nikhil Pal Singh puts it, has always been a prerequisite for an ideal American national subject. Racist motives behind Bundy's supporters' actions can be found throughout the text. For example, “Bam Bam,” a New Jersey militiaman, in a conversation with the author first talks about the Fourteenth Amendment, that effectively included African Americans in the circle of citizenship. He claims that the language of the amendment suggests that people are considered corporations. (The present writer fails to find that language in the amendment.) Though “Bam Bam” does not outright deny the legality of the document, he still claims that something was not quite right with it. However, in the next paragraph, he is quoted as calling Abraham Lincoln “a tyrant-ass son of a bitch,” giving quite an impression of the aforementioned denial. Note that “Bam Bam” (as most of the camp's inhabitants) does not divulge his real name. Such propensity for remaining anonymous is quite conspicuous, especially considering the racist undertones in his speech: Ku Klux Klan lynchers (exemplary vigilantes) made quite an effort to hide their faces and names.

Baron does make a connection between the racial composition of Bundy's supporters and their motives to come all the way to the Nevadan desert: “After talking to people like Marky awhile, I thought maybe I understood it—back home they were carpenters, contractors, mechanics, repairmen, at loose ends. They were white men, mostly, who felt like this country had once been theirs and now was not [emphasis added]”. Another interesting racial image is found in an exchange between the author and a vigilante dubbed “a slightly feral Seann William Scott”:

"I've been here for days," I stammered out. I said I was a member of the press.

"What outlet you with, did you say?"

"GQ magazine."

"GQ?!" Seann William Scott sneered. "We're a bunch of G.I. Joes, not Ken dolls."

The initial line-up of the G.I. Joe action figures (depicting four of the US armed forces branches) was all-white, and to this day these Hasbro toys are mostly associated with white masculinity. Some even argue that the subsequent line-ups of G.I. Joes, where African-American toys were added, still recreated the white supremacy system while attempting to convey diversity.

Another important trait of American vigilantes throughout history was, of course, the self-righteousness with which they operated. They usually appealed to popular sovereignty and the right to revolution. The latter is prominently mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, which gives the modern militia movements a cause to invoke the Framers' ideas as defence for their activity. Vigilantes frequently see themselves as fixing the troubles with the established law and order, and Cliven Bundy is not an exception. He is portrayed to be a firm believer in his cause. “Twenty years ago, Cliven Bundy says, he “fired” the Bureau of Land Management, who'd been responsible for stewarding the land and who had failed at its job, at least according to Cliven Bundy.” This precisely reflects Bundy's philosophy of government: he does not recognize the representative government's authority over the land that belongs to it, because the land actually belongs to 'the people'. A government is seen here as an employee, subject to dismissal. So when the employee violently disobeyed, Bundy confronted the government with his own army—the vigilantes from all over America.

Self-righteousness of a vigilante also sometimes implies doing the God's work, and the text presents us with more than one example of such behavior. Bundy says: “I felt like, you know, I had God on my side.” The other camp inhabitant, a man going by the name “Marky,” confesses to Baron: “As a Christian man, I feel like the Lord has his hands right over me. I am not afraid.” Some of the armed men remembered the Waco siege as a battle of people who were in the right and died for it. They felt that the religious, sectarian zeal of the Branch Davidians had something in common with their cause.

The frontier myth is also at play here. Vigilantism, as Linda Gordon notes in her book “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction,” was strongly identified with the imagined West, the open land and the 'spice of danger' promised by it. “People kept talking about dying in the republic,” Baron notes. Here is his description of the standoff that ended in BLM agents withdrawing: “The people knelt before the government's corral and paused to pray. Many had seen this exact moment in their dreams. They prayed for their own safety, but they also prayed in thanks: Finally.”

So, the Bundy standoff as depicted in the GQ article can be perceived as a threeway performance: as reenactment of the Revolutionary era, white supremacy era and the frontier period, all consistent with the ideal national subject notion, and the American vigilante culture.

References

Zach Baron. “Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,” GQ, July 2014, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201407/cliven-bundy

Nikhil Pal Singh. "Rethinking Race and Nation." American Studies: An Anthology (2009): 9-16.

Karen J. Hall. "A soldier's body: Gi Joe, Hasbro's Great American Hero, and the symptoms of Empire." The Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2004): 34-54.