Tarring and feathering
[13] Ditson was tarred and feathered before having a placard reading "American Liberty: A Speciment of Democracy" hung around his neck whilst regimental musicians played "Yankee Doodle".
[15] Also in 1851, a Know-Nothing mob in Ellsworth, Maine, tarred and feathered Swiss-born Jesuit priest, Father John Bapst, in the midst of a local controversy over religious education in grammar schools.
The November 27, 1906, edition of the Evening News of Ada, Oklahoma, reports that a vigilance committee consisting of four young married women from East Sandy, Pennsylvania, corrected the alleged evil conduct of their neighbor, Mrs. Hattie Lowry, in whitecap style.
For example, in August 1918 a German-American farmer, John Meints of Luverne, Minnesota, was captured by a group of men, taken to the nearby South Dakota border and tarred and feathered—for allegedly not supporting war bonds.
[22] In March 1922, a German-born Catholic priest in Slaton, Texas, Joseph M. Keller, who had been harassed by local residents during World War I due to his ethnicity, was accused of breaking the seal of confession and tarred and feathered.
[24] A week before the 1919 Australian federal election, former Labor MP John McDougall was kidnapped by a group of about 20 ex-soldiers in Ararat, Victoria, and subsequently tarred and feathered before being dumped in the town's streets.
[25] A group of black-robed Knights of Liberty (a faction of the KKK) tarred and feathered seventeen members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Oklahoma in 1917, during an incident known as the Tulsa Outrage.
[34] The punitive social ritual of tarring and feathering has appeared in numerous American works of both "canonical literature and dime novels", even as the actual practice became less frequent, "dramatizing debates between summary punishment on the one hand, and individual rights on the other".
[35]: 2, 4 [36] This outward blackening by tar was generally equated with blackness of character, which again was linked to racist notions of the inferiority of black-skinned slaves, while the feathers were sometines regarded as "nodding to [American-]Indian headdresses".
"John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, among numerous others, draw on tarring and feathering to portray anxieties about the "experiment" of democracy in which egalitarian alignment of society yielded a racialized social opprobrium.
"[35]: 3–7, 47, 159 The earliest representations in literature were in the context of the American Revolution, in a poem by Philip Freneau and in John Trumbull's M'Fingal from 1776, which in its literary form of "the mockepic genre [...] resonated with the euphemistic, tongue-in-cheek language used in newspapers".
[38] James Fenimore Cooper's Redskins from 1846 presented the act of tarring and feathering in the context of the Anti-Rent War as the "unwarranted, imbalanced threat of violence from misguided, irrational, and selfinterested crowds".
[35]: 55, 59–65, 70 In the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, tarring and feathering appeared as problematic side-effect of democracy and nationalism in the United States of America of his time,[35]: 114–126 progressing from a symbolic regicide in the American Revolution to fratricide.
Here Hawthorne examined the effect this punishment has on the "community after engaging in such a brutal act",[35]: 114–126 [39] while he used it as "as a metaphor of persecution and victimization" in "Old News: The Old Tory" (1837) and "The Custom-House", the introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850).
[35]: 146–149 In the stories "The Liberty Tree" and "Tory's Farewell" from the collection Grandfather's Chair (1842), Hawthorne shows tarring and feathering as a sign of "mob mentality that dismisses common sense" and is unwarranted as a means of political and social dispute.
"[36] Edgar Allan Poe's humorous short story, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" (1845), featured the staff of an insane asylum being tarred and feathered as a means of torture.
[40][35]: 92–93 In his short story "Hop-Frog; Or Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs" (1849) appeared the "image of the tarred and feathered body as ape", which "for Poe, is the embodiment of white terror associated with the chaos of rioting and insurrection.
"[36] Both stories are written against the background of the abolitionism debate, and the tarring and feathering is also seen as the outward sign of a "power inversion", which can be related for Poe's society both to the relationship of slave and master, as well as abolitionists and anti-abolitionists.
[41][42] A more racialized context, where tar is used to blacken the skin against abolitionists and sympathizers "to correspond to the purported color of the slaves they were trying to free" is prevalent in the atmosphere preceding the American Civil War.
[35]: 151–154 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain "perhaps more than any other literary work, immortalized the punishment": the King and the Duke are tarred, feathered, and ridden on a rail after performing the Royal Nonesuch to a crowd that Jim had warned about the rapscallions.
[35]: 24, 36–37 Charles Dickens satirized this tone of the latter in Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–1844) in the figure of Mr. Chollop: This American was an "advocate of Lynch law, and slavery; and invariably recommended, both in print and speech, the "tarring and feathering" of any unpopular person who differed from himself" and "was much esteemed for his devotion to rational Liberty".
[49] A graphic depiction of the practice occurs in Robert McLiam Wilson's 1989 novel Ripley Bogle, where in West Belfast a woman made pregnant by a corporal of the Royal Engineers is punished.
[53] In Eoin McNamee's novel Resurrection Man (1994), both sides of the Northern Ireland conflict are shown employing these "ritual punishments for consorting with the enemy", emphasizing the Troubles "as a period of the destabilization of ethical norms".
[47] Marina Trininc remarked that English prints emphasized the feathers, as e.g. geese symbolized "weak intellects and moral unnaturalness", while the "racialized dimensions of this punishment", the association of the tar with black skin, "were lost in translation across the shores".
[63][64] In American Horror Story: Freak Show episode 8 "Blood Bath" (2014), The Lizard Girl's father is tarred and feathered in retaliation for his role in his daughter's intentional disfigurement.
[69][70] Despite the overall funny tone of the movie, the scene connects to "a public form of humiliation used throughout history", "a sort of lynch mob mentality" directed against the minority, here the eponymous nerds.
[69] In the episode "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell" (2008) of the television series It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Mac and Dennis, while dressed as British fops, are tarred and feathered by colonial Americans in light-hearted "hilarious scenes".
The cruel procedure is used as a tragicomic element illustrating this "revisionist retelling of the Wild West saga", as the leader of the perpetrating mob turns out to be Jack's long lost sister.
[78][77][79] In an episode of the Deadwood TV series, African-American character Samuel Fields is tarred and feathered in a racist "eruption of mob violence that acts to express and purge the anger of the town's whites" in scenes clearly depicting the horror of the procedure.
[101] The image of the tarred-and-feathered outlaw remains a metaphor for public humiliation many years after the practice had become uncommon,[1][2][40] such as in this example from Dark Summer by Iris Johansen: "But you'd tar and feather me if I made the wrong decision for these guys.
