GLC@Lunch: "Gold, Coal, and Oysters: The Politics of Police Origins"

Note: In-person seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Stephanie Saxton (GLC Research Affiliate; Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College)

Gold, Coal, and Oysters: The Politics of Police Origins

While today's network of police and bipartisan support for them seem fixed, this talk returns to the early debates over police legislation to show the competing visions of policing in the mid-19th century United States. Police bills were fraught battles, shaped by trans-continental flows of people and capital that touched down in municipal spaces (like the oyster industry, gold rush, and railroad expansion). Nationally, Democrats sought to preserve the plantation economy and argued that private violence, not a professionalized public police force, was what the country needed. Instead, I argue police departments were the product of a haphazard coalition of aspiring imperialists, nativists, and Republicans that coalesced into a party politics and, eventually, sutured elite divisions post-Civil War.