The attempted lynching of Paxton Hibben

The attempted lynching of Paxton Hibben is presented as the violent culmination of a campaign to isolate him for his radical politics. A photograph of Hibben laying a wreath on Jack Reed’s grave had already provoked an effort to expel him from the O.R.C.; at his twentieth college reunion, the hostility became physical, as classmates put a noose around his neck.

The photograph and its consequences

Back in America, somebody obtained the photograph of Hibben at Jack Reed’s grave. The image was enough to prompt an attempt to throw Hibben out of the O.R.C., placing institutional exclusion alongside the later threat of mob violence. The passage does not say that the expulsion succeeded, but it makes clear that the photograph marked him as a target.

The reunion attack

At Princeton, during the twentieth reunion of his college class, Hibben’s classmates were drunk. The narration allows that the assault may have been a college-boy prank, but immediately undercuts that possibility with its physical detail: they had a noose around his neck. The language of the crowd’s threat, “lynch the goddam red,” makes the political animus explicit. Whatever the assailants’ claimed intent, the noose and the word lynch give the episode the force of an attempted lynching, not merely a hostile joke.

Political meaning

The attack is set against a broader rejection of change. The passage declares that there is no longer a place in America for social justice, progressivism, revolt against oppression, or democracy, and follows that declaration with the stark consequences: no money and no jobs for radicals. Hibben’s reunion ordeal gives this exclusion a bodily form. The photograph first marks him for institutional rejection; the noose shows how quickly that rejection can become a threat to his life.