The Bagdad Motel Incident
by our literary editor, St. Clair Carr
[A reader has questioned the accuracy of some of the assertions, reported below, made by John Hersey in The Algiers Motel Incident, in particular the claim that Detroit's leaders thought the 1967 riots were the work of revolutionaries. We're looking into the claims, and will discuss what we find when we've finished. Until then we'd like to think that the analogy which is the point of the following article is, if not necessarily valid, at least worth considering.]We like old books here. Well, you know that because we keep telling you we do and we keep reviewing them. So you won't be surprised to find that this past week I've been reading The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. This book was a nonfiction bestseller in 1968. In it the distinguished Mr. Hersey, author of Hiroshima and a Pulitzer Prize winner for A Bell for Adano, investigated the killing of three young men at the Algiers Motel during the Detroit riots of 1967.Early on the morning of July 26, 1967, a large section of Detroit was rioting and being patrolled by heavily armed city policemen, state troopers, and National Guardsmen. A National Guard unit heard some shots and thought they were sniper fire from the Algiers Motel. Guardsmen, state troopers, and city policemen rushed the building. Inside they found no guns, but they did find ten black men of varying ages and two young white women. Soon three of the black men were dead and the other occupants badly beaten. One of the dead men had his face beaten off, one eye beaten out of his head, and one arm nearly severed by buckshot.
Well, what does that sound like, eh? Does that sound just a bit like Iraq? At the time the authorities in Detroit believed that the riots were part of a nationwide conspiracy to overthrow the government, and that the shooting in the riot areas was being carried out by specially trained and heavily armed teams of snipers. In the end, though, no one ever found any revolutionaries. They had the same status in reality as the fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction. At the Algiers they didn't even find any guns. But, just to be sure, the representatives of law and order at the Algiers did a little laying waste with shotgun and the billyclub.
It was all to protect Detroit, eh? And what a job it's done. When the authorities at all levels of government refused to take action to deal with the causes of the rioting, Detroit went into a sharp decline from which it's never recovered. No one was ever convicted of the murders. Two policemen got off because they weren't warned of their rights when filing their police reports. Pretty good, eh? Their job is to inform people of their rights, but they were presumed not to have known their own.
The result was the usual maelstrom of speculation and delusion, much like the current maelstrom in the States of speculation about why George W. Bush "really" wanted to invade Iraq. I call it a maelstrom because maelstroms suck things under. The maelstrom in Detroit sucked Detroit under, for sure. Instead of trying to find the truth, people just latched on to the paranoid delusion that they were most comfortable with and watched as the city deteriorated.
And after Hersey's book sold lots of copies, people quickly lost interest in the Algiers Motel. Just as they lost interest in how they got into Vietnam. And so is history made.
Well, Hersey warned 'em. The book sometimes overwhelms with detail, but Hersey was just playing fair. His own conclusions are clear, but the large amount of documented evidence in the book makes it clear he wanted you to draw your own. But in the 1960s, as today, drawing your own conclusions wasn't all that popular among the voting public. It's so much easier to hate Negro agitators/Islamofascists. And so is history made.
The Bagdad Motel incident © John FitzGerald, 2005
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