The confederacy of militants descending on Charlottesville in August 2017 came armed and itching for a fight. Some brandished assault rifles and others were prepared to their wield flagpoles as clubs. The city’s mayor at the time, Michael Singer, was unable to prevent the assault by banning the rally because of an elastic First Amendment ruling by a federal judge. He was attacked—before and after the violence—from all sides.
Signer gives his account of the 2017 events in Cry Havoc but the riot is portal to a larger exploration of freedom and responsibility and the increasingly blurry line between democracy and demagoguery, maybe even democracy and nihilism. Even before Unite the Right laid its plans, Signer was having a hard time with what should have been an easy, part-time job. Charlottesville was well regarded as a friendly city for tourism and business, but the political process was under stress. He describes city council meetings as circuses disrupted by unruly single-issue citizens. When he introduced Roberts Rules of Order, he was denounced as an authoritarian for insisting that civility is the basis for deliberation in a democracy. When everybody shouts, no one is heard.
Charlottesville is a college town with all the expected amenities, but the big school, the University of Virginia, embodied the city’s—and America’s—unresolved history. It was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence. Charlottesville is home to an African American population that ill-served by social engineering schemes after Jim Crow. And then there was Lee Park, crowed by a statue of Robert E. Lee. Renaming the park and discussions over removing the statue drew anger from absolutists on both sides. Compromise isn’t in the vocabulary of zealots.
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Signer may have been a novice politician but came to the table with applicable experience. A practicing attorney, he has contributed essays to the New York Times and Washington Post and wrote a biography of James Madison, the principal author of the U.S. Constitution. He has no more patience with the left extremists who routinely turned city meetings into bad political theater than he does with those from the right. As he argues, both extremes are sawing away at such pillars of the American republic as the rule of law and the state’s monopoly of force. Private armies and “militias” have no place.
Signer pins his hope on law, especially an evolving understanding that the First Amendment shouldn’t grant blanket protection to advocates of violence or proscribe local authorities from always refusing to assume expensive police protection for hate rallies. He shows how the violence at Charlottesville helped propel jurists in that direction.
Cry Havoc is a thoughtful book—and yes, its author devotes several pages to defending himself. The report issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia blamed Signer and his city council for being ill-prepared for Unite the Right. A federal investigation distributed the blame more widely. State and local police (over which Singer had no control) failed to coordinate their response or fully anticipate the rally’s repercussions. The result was one death and a deepening sense of national turmoil.
