The apparent immunity and impunity of the rioters in the national Capitol on January 6 has sparked numerous questions about why the military, and indeed any competent force to prevent entry into the Capitol, remained missing for so long. The National Guard eventually did show up, but it was some three hours after the building was already breached, and damage to people and property had long since been perpetrated. Five people lost their lives, including one Capitol policeman who was apparently struck on the head with a fire extinguisher. Members of Congress, fearing for their own lives (and, apparently, some of them were targeted), had to be rushed out of their offices and chambers and into a secure room. And several members of the Capitol police force were seen not only giving the rioters free entry, but taking selfies with the rioters and helpfully escorting them on their way when they were done. The pleas for National Guard help, both by Capitol police and by Governor Hogan of Maryland (who wanted to activate his State Guard) were refused by the Pentagon until the crisis was basically over.
This raises the fundamental question: in a situation this threatening, why were military forces—who are trained and equipped to handle events like this—not called in? Why was the reduced Capitol force left to control this situation alone? What is the precedent for calling out the real troops in situations similar, but in many ways less daangerous, than this one? History does, in fact, provide us with many examples of Presidents calling out the military to control precisely this kind of defiance. Looking at some of them may give us a better idea of how this one might have been controlled, and why it was not.
I was a late teenager when the first of these situations took place in September of 1957, a few years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v Board of Education, outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The school board of Topeka, Kansas, and all other schools in all other states, were informed that racially segregating schools, even if the schools designated for blacks were supposedly equal, was unconstitutional. The ruling was understood to apply not only to “separate but equal” schools, but also to many other supposedly ‘separate but equal’ public services as well. These racially segregated public services and schools had been sanctioned in 1896 by the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, thus making the South’s “Jim Crow” laws legal. Brown v Board overturned Plessy and all other laws that pretended that equality under the law was satisfied by “separate but equal” facilities. Brown v Board ruled that they did not, and were not equal at all. As part of the decision, courts and school boards were directed to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.”
In 1957, however, even though the Little Rock, Arkansas school board had voted to desegregate its public schools, Governor Orval Faubus refused to implement the order in Little Rock, and especially at Central High School. In refusing the order, he used the ploy of calling out his state National Guard to allegedly protect black students, when in reality the Guard prevented black students from attending Central High School. Tensions rapidly flared, pitting jeering segregationist mobs against the black students who were determined to get their constitutionally-mandated education at Central High School. After several days of a standoff between students trying to enter and the taunting, racist mobs that gathered to oppose them, then-President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which did two things. First, it federalized the Arkansas National Guard, placing it under federal authority. Second, it deployed federal troops—the 101st Airborne—to Little Rock to enforce the desegregation order. In the face of screaming, spitting crowds of white supremacists, the students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” were escorted to and from school by armed soldiers.
In short, in the face of what he considered an insurrection defying a Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to put down the insurrection and enforce the order. Though he withdrew the federal troops fairly quickly, leaving the National Guard to maintain order, the show of force by the ex-Supreme Allied Commander made it clear that the federal government was not about to tolerate resistance to the integration of public schools that had been mandated by the highest court in the land.
This same determination was exhibited by President Kennedy about five years later, although he made numerous attempts to limit the use of the military until the situation became lethal. The controversy started when James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Even with more than 120 federal marshals to accompany him, as well as troops from the Border Patrol ordered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a violent crowd opposed Meredith’s entry. Adding fuel to the flames, Governor Ross Barnett expressed his and Mississippi’s undying resistance to integration:
We will not drink from the cup of genocide... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!
When mobs of segregationists swelled into the thousands, President Kennedy ordered in Military Police from the from the 503rd, 716th, and 720th Military Police Battalions, the already- federalized Mississippi National Guard, and elements of the 101st Airborne Division. By September 30, Meredith, still under federal protection, was allowed to register under escort, and in 1963 became the first black graduate of the University. But not before a third of the federal agents, 166 men, were injured in the melee, and forty federal soldiers and Mississippi National Guardsmen were wounded. In addition, two civilians, one a French journalist, and one a jukebox repairman curious about what was going on, were murdered in execution-style killings (Wikipedia.com).
One other case, also concerning integration, deserves mention. Taking its cue from what had happened in Mississippi, the University of Alabama in June 1963, refused, in defiance of a Federal Court order, to admit two black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood. The segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, flanked by Alabama state troopers, sought to publicize his defiance by literally standing in the door of the auditorium where registration had to be completed, blocking it to the two black students. President Kennedy, again, acted decisively: he issued Executive Order 11111, which federalized the Alabama National Guard. After having previously ignored the Deputy Attorney General’s order to step aside, Wallace yielded to the National Guard General’s command to obey the court, and in short order, the two students were allowed to complete their registration.
Wallace, of course, was not done. In September 1963, he again attempted to block school desegregation (his famous motto being “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) at Tuskegee High School in Macon County. The whole county had been ordered, as the result of a lawsuit, to integrate its schools, and thirteen black students were selected to try to integrate Tuskegee High School on September 2. To prevent this, Governor Wallace, by executive order, had state troopers surround the school, thus preventing the black students from entering the school.
Once again, President Kennedy refused to treat this lightly, and federalized National Guard troops to enforce desegregation of the school. Governor Wallace was once again forced to yield to the federalized troops, and Tuskegee High School was integrated. Even though throngs of white students withdrew to attend private schools which the Governor himself helped finance, neither they nor the governor could maintain segregated public schools in Alabama.
We see, then, that where Presidents are determined to enforce the law (one of the prime duties of the Executive branch), insurrectionists, regardless of the support they receive from public opinion, cannot defy the considerable power of the federal government. The federal government, that is, always has the option to call on the military—either the federalized National Guard, or the armed troops of a no-nonsense unit like the 101st Airborne—to back up its rulings with force. Whether or not they understand and respect legal court rulings, or statutes, or the Constitution, rebellious citizens, armed and organized into so-called ‘militias’ or not, understand the power of the U.S Military, and are rarely willing to defy it.
This military might, and the willingness to use it, is what must be demonstrated (first in the upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden) to the right-wing crazies that Donald Trump has encouraged over the past four years. From his remarks after the Unite-the-Right rally in Charlottesville VA (in which one person was killed and the President saluted the “very fine people” there), to his urging of the heavily-armed Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in September of this year, to encouraging his minions at the January 6 rally, not just once but several times, to march to the Capitol and fight—the word is repeated several times, as in “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and, “You have to show strength and you have to be strong”—Donald Trump has given the most radical of his supporters license to be his personal shock troops. And on January 6, this culminated in the President issuing a call to arms to a large crowd, many of whom had already committed themselves, prior to the rally, to violence. That is, the President of the United States was inciting his most rabid supporters, many of them armed, to ‘stop the steal;’ by which he clearly meant for them to stop the United States Congress and its members from doing their constitutionally-mandated job to certify the 2020 electors from all fifty states. And to do so not by simply demonstrating, but to do so with strength, to fight what he repeatedly called an illegal election, to not allow Congress to “take the presidency away from him,” but rather to use force to overturn the most fundamental act in American democracy—the vote in an election that had been validated and certified dozens of times by states and by the courts.
Thus, rather than use the military to control an unruly mob acting illegally, Donald Trump attempted to use the mob to literally overturn the law. It is a breach, a violation of the most basic kind in a democracy, and as has been said over and over, it cannot, must not be allowed to go unaddressed. It must be aired fully for all to see and understand, and demand, as a consequence, that all those involved be held accountable—beginning with the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
Lawrence DiStasi
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