B ook E nd - Research - University of Kentucky

Book End
Terrorism on American Soil
through the Lens of Literature
America’s Culture of Terrorism:
Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word
by Jeffory A. Clymer
University of North Carolina Press
A
s a scholar of literature, Jeffory Clymer,
an associate professor of English at
UK, is obsessed with words and how individuals struggle to define the events of
their day. An Illinois native with a
longstanding interest in the history of labor
issues and class struggle, Clymer’s dissertation topic—terrorism in American literature and culture—began to come into focus
after he read accounts of an 1886 bombing
at a workers’ rally in Chicago’s Haymarket
Square.
The workers were on strike for an eighthour workday. A few days into the strike,
anarchists and labor radicals organized a
rally to draw the city’s attention to the
conflict. At the protest, someone—who
was never identified—threw a bomb that
40
Odyssey
killed eight policemen. “Newspapers reported Haymarket as the first
incident of terrorism on U.S. soil,” says Clymer, who came to the University
of Kentucky last fall from Saint Louis University.
His continued reading about violence on American soil during this
historical period led him to the 1920 bombing of J.P. Morgan’s Wall
Street office in New York, in which a still-unknown bomber killed 38
and injured hundreds. The multimillionaire Morgan was a major
financier and banker.
Clymer happened to be reading these accounts at around the
time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and was struck by the fact
that the targets of all three bombings were symbols of capitalism
and governmental authority. Other similarities between historic
and contemporary acts of terrorism—the attendant media frenzy
and violence without a claim of responsibility—deepened his
interest in the subject of terrorism on American soil.
Clymer began examining how 19th-century writers used
language to name, explain and make sense of these acts of
violence. Clymer focused his research on the period of
American history between Haymarket and the J.P. Morgan
Wall Street bombing, and was particularly interested in
the ways in which acts of violence are connected to the
growth of industry and capitalism.
His resulting book, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence,
Capitalism, and the Written Word, examines works by Henry James, William
Dean Howells, Jack London, and Ida B. Wells, as well as trial transcripts and
media reports to show how emerging ideas about terrorism were, in part,
shaped by how these writers and transcripts portrayed various terrorist acts
on U.S. soil.
Clymer becomes animated when discussing the social value of literature
and says it’s his prerogative as a professor of English to delve into territory
that is more commonly reserved for historians and social scientists.
“I’m a literature professor, but I see literature as being deeply enmeshed
in the culture,” he explains. “Imaginative literature is a genre where real and
intractable social problems are articulated, described and processed. We
comprehend events through language, and literature is one of culture’s
important sites where we establish—and fight over—our terms, ideas, and
ways of talking about or understanding life.”
Clymer had completed the manuscript for America’s Culture of Terrorism
before September 11, 2001. However, the magnitude of the events of that
day led him to add an epilogue that reflects the difficulty in making sense
of such a catastrophic occurrence. He found that as with previous examples of terrorism in our history, 9/11 compelled Americans “to attempt
to regain our mental balance by groping toward” a collective understanding of terrible events. —Laura Sutton