Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition

Abstract

To describe a work on torture as a pleasure to read risks an accusation of perversity. Yet W. Fitzhugh Brundage has crafted a book at once accessible to the nonacademic reader and satisfying to the scholar of American history and culture. The title economically expresses the central argument: Americans have repeatedly managed to square claims of exceptional civility with the practice of torture. Brundage could have simply stamped this move as hypocrisy; instead, he reassembles and reviews the changing contexts in which torture and its justifications have been challenged and upheld, from the sixteenth century, when British and European conquerors transposed torture from a widely accepted practice to extract truth among their own to a marker of incivility among indigenous peoples. This myth was twofold: natives were cruel and barbaric; using torture was a necessary means to impose the values of civilization. In the late eighteenth century, the Constitution's democratic and humanitarian principles, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, laid new ground for opposition to torture, but humanitarian and liberal rhetoric failed to stem its infliction. Indeed, as earlier historians, including David J. Rothman and Rebecca M. McLennan, have observed, nineteenth-century penitentiary advocates "wrapped" the mental and physical torture of prisoners "in the language of humanitarian sentiment" (p. 113).