This thesis examines the intersection of class, gender, and racial violence in the early twentieth century. Through a discussion of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and the first United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, this work demonstrates how both white and black intellectuals used the concepts of Victorian manhood, racial uplift, and civilization to understand these historical events. Bourgeois intellectuals of both races clung to the middle- and upper-class cultural assumptions inherent in each concept, even if they would eventually reach different understandings of what had happened in each historical event. Conversely, lower-class participants and those who adhered to ideologies like Socialism rejected the bourgeois cultural norms that establishment intellectuals utilized and blazed new cultural trails.