September 11

A date can accumulate a theme by accident. September 11 accumulates one with something closer to insistence. Strip away the noise of centuries and the question that rises from this particular square on the calendar is always the same: who is entitled to use force, against whom, and in whose name?

Begin at the founding. On September 11, 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury — not a martial appointment, on the face of it, but the act of placing a man with Hamilton’s convictions inside the machinery of state was itself a claim about power. The treasury is where a government declares what it will do, and Hamilton meant it to do a great deal. The appointment announced that the new republic’s organized force — its credit, its customs revenue, its capacity to act — would be consolidated and directed from the center. Order, established by instrument.

Sixty-two years later, on September 11, 1851, that order ran into its own contradiction. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, a group of escaped slaves led by William Parker met a slave owner and a federal marshal who had come, under the Fugitive Slave Act, to seize three men as property. They fought back. The slave owner was killed. The Christiana Resistance became, as the record puts it, a cause célèbre between slavery proponents and abolitionists — shorthand for the moment when the legal structure Hamilton had helped build was exposed as a machine that could be turned against the people it was supposed to protect. The escaped men had no standing under that law. They used the only argument available.

The date carries that tension forward. On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh stood in Des Moines and accused the British, American Jews, and the Roosevelt administration of conspiring to push the United States into war with Germany. The speech deployed the language of the people — who is manipulating whom, who actually wants this fight — in the service of a politics that history has not been kind to. It is worth placing alongside Christiana not as an equivalent but as a reminder that the question of legitimate force is never politically neutral; it can be asked in bad faith as easily as good.

The gravity of this date does not permit any of that to dominate for long. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with the involvement of the United States government, overthrew Salvador Allende, the elected president, who died in the coup. Allende had come to power through an election; he was removed by organized violence. The question Christiana posed in miniature — whether state force and legitimate force are the same thing — arrived again at national scale, this time with the answer handed down from outside the country’s borders.

Then came the morning that made this square on the calendar unlike any other. September 11, 2001: four aircraft hijacked by nineteen members of al-Qaeda. Two into the World Trade Center in New York. One into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. One into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people killed. The attack was conceived as a blow against American power — against the same consolidated, outward-facing force whose foundations Hamilton had helped lay. It landed instead on office workers, firefighters, passengers, people who had never made a decision about foreign policy in their lives.

There is nothing to observe about 2001 that is not already known, and this essay will not pretend otherwise. What the date offers, set in the longer sequence, is only this: every entry on September 11 is a story about what authority looks like when it meets the limits of its own claim. Hamilton’s treasury, the Christiana marshals, Allende’s government, the towers — all of them represent some version of organized order, and all of them were, on this date, either established or challenged or shattered. The calendar does not adjudicate. It simply keeps posing the question, year after year, in a different register, waiting for an answer that has not yet arrived.