Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947

The history of lynching's transformation from collective, popular violence to state_sanctioned, sanitized execution

In this first national, cross-regional study of lynching and criminal justice, now in paperback, Michael J. Pfeifer investigates the pervasive and persistent commitment to "rough justice" that characterized rural and working class areas of most of the United States in the late nineteenth century.

Defining rough justice as the harsh, informal, and often communal punishment of perceived criminal behavior, Pfeifer examines the influence of race, gender, and class on understandings of criminal justice and shows how they varied across regions. He argues that lynching only ended when "rough justice" enthusiasts compromised with middle-class advocates of due process by revamping the death penalty into an efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice.