INTRODUCTION
There is a tendency, in any analysis of violence, to look upon it in one of two ways: as a deviation from the past or as a continuation from it.
—Bill Buford, Among the Thugs
Violence and disorder constitute the primal problem of American history, the dark reverse of its coin of freedom and abundance. American society, or at any rate a conspicuous part of it, has been tumultuous from the very beginning of European colonization. Seventeenth-century Virginia was a disorderly place, though the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not. Violence in America has long manifested this uneven quality. Some regions, such as the South and the frontier and the urban ghettos, have experienced very high levels of violence and disorder, while others, such as rural New England or Mormon Utah, have been far more tranquil places.
In this book I examine three related questions about the historical pattern of American violence and disorder: Who has been responsible for it? Why, relative to other western nations, has there been so much of it? And why has it been so unevenly distributed?
Note that I ask these questions about violence and disorder, not about "crime." By violence I mean acts of direct physical aggression like beatings, shootings, stabbings, and lynchings, which, depending on the circumstances, may or may not be deemed criminal offenses. By disorder I mean acts of theft and destruction like looting or vandalism, as well as misconduct like drunkenness, drug abuse, and reckless driving—essentially, any irresponsible behavior that entails the unwarranted taking or destruction of property or causes preventable injury or premature death. While crime overlaps with disorder, and is often a useful index of it, the two are not synonymous. A drunk lost in a blizzard is as dead as one killed fighting a policeman, though the former may have broken no law or suffered no arrest. Much violent and disorderly behavior in American history has either been legal or ignored by authorities; in some cases, such as bounties for Indian scalps or election-day binges, it has been encouraged. To focus exclusively on crime and criminal justice is to surrender too much of what has actually made American history so bloody. Therefore I shall look broadly, and with an interdisciplinary spirit, at all types of violence and disorder.
Taking the last question first, why have violence and disorder in American history been so unevenly distributed, with some places relatively safe and peaceful and others the opposite? The disparities may seem, at first glance, to be a product of America's pluralism and diversity of social environments. Perhaps New England was less violent because the Pilgrims and Puritans, devoutly religious people, originally settled there. Perhaps southern and western communities were more violent because the presence of slaves and Indians aroused fear in white inhabitants and prompted them to carry guns. These sorts of explanations are plausible, and indeed go a long way toward accounting for the regional and ethnic peculiarities of American violence and disorder. They are not, however, the whole story.
Anyone who looks closely at the underside of American history will find mostly young and single men. They have accounted for far and away the largest share of homicides, riots, drug dealing, and the like. This pattern is common to all societies. But the American experience with young, single men has been unusually bad because, until recently, the country has had a higher proportion of them in its population than the European, African, and Asian nations from which its immigrants came. America's violent history was played out with a bad hand of cards dealt from a stacked demographic deck. As an immigrant society America experienced a more or less continuous influx of youthful male workers, resulting in a population with more men than women for every year prior to 1946. In a monogamous society, many of these surplus young men could not marry. Insofar as young, single men are any society's most troublesome and unruly citizens, America had a built-in tendency toward violence and disorder.
The demographic tendency was heightened by cultural and social influences. American men, especially southerners and frontiersmen, were contemptuous of other races and touchy about personal honor, which they were inclined to defend by violent means. American men drank a great deal of hard liquor and grew up in cultures that equated drunkenness with obstreperousness. American men, particularly those of the lower classes, resisted attempts at religious conversion and the feminized style of life associated with it. They often took their recreation with other men in bibulous places of commercialized vice, such as gambling halls and saloons, thereby multiplying the opportunities for violent conflict. The guns and knives they carried increased the likelihood that such conflicts would have fatal results. When killings did occur the police and courts were often unable or indisposed to deal effectively with them.
This mixture of demographic, cultural, and social characteristics guaranteed that American society would experience unusually high levels of violence and disorder, but not that American society would be uniformly violent and disorderly. These troublesome elements—the surplus of young men, widespread bachelorhood, sensitivity about honor, racial hostility, heavy drinking, religious indifference, group indulgence in vice, ubiquitous armament, and inadequate law enforcement—were concentrated on the frontier. An expanding subnation of immigrants within a larger nation of immigrants, the frontier was, at least as far as white Americans were concerned, the most youthful and masculine region of the country and, consequently, the one most prone to violence and disorder.1
The frontier was the principal arena of single male brutality in American history. Tens of thousands of drunken and disorderly white frontiersmen perished prematurely, as did countless native and animal inhabitants whose territory they despoiled. Nor is the carnage entirely in the past. Insofar as the frontier experience has become a foundation of the national self-image—that is, insofar as Americans continue to think a manly man is someone with a gun and an attitude—it continues to influence the amount and type of violence in the United States, as well as our collective response to it.
Frontier violence was, however, a transient and self-limiting phenomenon. The single men who sought their fortunes along the frontier either died off or returned home or drifted elsewhere or eventually married, usually to young brides who had numerous children of both genders, thereby evening out the population and eliminating its statistical tendency toward higher levels of violence and disorder. This process of demographic adjustment also occurred within immigrant groups, which initially tended to have more men than women. The passage of time balanced the numbers of men and women both regionally and ethnically, unless, as in the special case of Chinese immigrant laborers, the government enacted laws that made family formation difficult.
To be sure, not all of America's surplus men were to be found in frontier or western districts. From the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression a floating army of itinerant workers, variously known as tramps, hobos, navvies, shanty boys, and bindle stiffs, moved about the country seeking work in construction sites, lumber camps, canneries, threshing crews, and other places where temporary or seasonal jobs were available. Migratory work, while often dangerous, provided men with experiences and wages they would not have otherwise had. The problem was the purposes to which these wages were often put. Money that might have gone into savings and family formation was dissipated in saloons, poker games, and brothels. Bachelor workers led a life of alternating work and spree until they finally either got out, burned out, landed in jail, or ended beneath the dissecting knife on the coroner's slab.
Such a life was not simply the result of individual weakness. It was fostered by vice purveyors and unscrupulous employers who understood the usefulness of a mobile, self-enslaved male work force. But it was anathema to Evangelical Protestants and Progressives, who counterattacked with reforms like prohibition, designed to break the cycle of male vice and the personal and social ills that stemmed from it.
It was ultimately economic and technological change that cut most deeply into the ranks of the floating army. Agricultural mechanization, the growth of jobs in cities, and the automobile, which permitted family-based commuting, reduced the number of itinerant single male workers. At the same time the overall male surplus was disappearing, due to shifts in immigration patterns and the fact that women's life expectancy was improving more rapidly than men's.
With a balanced population and a prosperous industrial economy, post-World War II America experienced a sustained marriage boom. The two popular images of the 1950s—that it was the decade when Americans settled down to raise their children in safety and plenty and that it was a decade of conformity— were both rooted in the postwar marital efflorescence. Families were about procreation and social control, control of the parents as much as the children. Postwar American parents worked hard, paid off their mortgages, sacrificed for their children. Church attendance went up, violent crime went down. It looked as if America's built-in tendency toward violence and disorder, the excesses of excess men, had finally run its troubled course.
Then came the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of the youthful baby boomers, the sexual revolution, and a sustained rise in violent crime and drug abuse. It was not simply that there were more young and therefore trouble-prone men in the population, though that was true enough. It was that more of these men were avoiding, delaying, or terminating marriages. Overall, the number of American men living alone roughly doubled between 1960 and 1983, an unprecedented change for prosperous times and one that undoubtedly contributed to the upsurge of violence and disorder.
Though marriage and conventional family life were becoming less common among young men, sexual intercourse was not. The result, despite widespread contraception, abortion, and a decline in fertility, was a huge increase in the percentage of children who were illegitimate and raised in fatherless families. Another feature of the post-1960 social terrain, the much higher frequency of divorce, also increased the number of poorly supervised, poorly socialized, and just plain poor children. Though these problems were national in scope, they were most severe in black America, particularly in the urban ghettos. By the early 1990s there were black neighborhoods, which sociologists began calling hyperghettos, in which two-thirds or more of the families were headed by single mothers and three-quarters of all births were illegitimate.
Growing up without a father, and growing into anomic lives with no regular family life of their own, young men in these circumstances were in a sense twice single, and a good deal more than twice as likely to become involved in shoot-outs or run afoul of the law. Their family instability was compounded by, and in many ways originated in, the everyday realities of ghetto life: social isolation, skewed demography, and the ubiquity of guns, alcohol, drugs, and vice. These problems made the white frontier boom towns of the nineteenth century into violent hot spots, and they did the same for late-twentieth-century black ghettos. In fact, except for the apparent paradox that the ratio of men to women is low in the inner city while it was high on the nonagricultural frontier, there is an important sense in which ghettos are the raw frontiers of modern American life, the primary arenas in which the recurrent problem of youthful male violence continues to be played out.
Like any historian I bring a set of convictions to my work. The most basic of these, that peace and order are good and violence and disorder are bad, is, in the Burkean sense of the term, conservative. I understand—more to the point, I feel—that the events described in this book constitute a vast tragedy of spoiled and severed lives.
My explanation for this collective tragedy is not, however, conservative in a conventional political sense, and is certainly not emotional. It instead emphasizes the interplay of large biological, demographic, cultural, social, and economic forces. Explaining mass historical phenomena without drawing upon empirical research from other fields is an impossible task, rather like exploring a cave without a light. Social historians cannot find explanatory "laws" in history—that is the fallacy of historicism—but we can borrow laws in the form of empirically tested generalizations to better understand how and why things happened in the past. Conversely, social science generalizations based on current data must be tested against, and seen in the context of, events occurring over a longer span of time. A grant, a computer, and six variables spanning the last decade are not enough to comprehend American violence and disorder. Like so many problems in so many disciplines, this one requires historical knowledge and perspective for a full understanding.
Among the disciplines whose findings I have used to illuminate the dark side of American life are anthropology, biology, criminology, demography, epidemiology, psychology, sociobiology, and sociology. Borrowing from two of these, biology and sociobiology, is apt to be controversial. The idea that human behavior is shaped by an underlying animal nature determined by millions of years of evolution is roughly as popular among contemporary historians as it is among Baptists. For political and ideological reasons, large and important elements of the profession have ignored or declared anathema the Darwinian renaissance taking place in the rest of the social scientific world.
That is unfortunate, for an evolutionary perspective can yield new insights into the history of American violence and disorder, especially into the behavior of young men, where the problem has always been centered. To borrow an image from the anthropologist Adam Kuper, human history is like a clock with three hands. The sweep hand tracks what the French call the history of events, the passing wars, coups, booms and busts that make headlines and fill the pages of most narratives. The minute hand corresponds to the long-term changes, the gradual, less-noticed but profoundly important cultural adaptations that take many generations to effect. The hour hand, which historians largely ignore, is the evolution of human beings as a species. But anyone who wants to know exactly what time it is needs to know the position of all three hands.
The same criticism can be turned against the Darwinophiles. Evolution cannot explain everything any more than the hour hand of the clock can alone tell the exact time. This book is not—and no study of violence should be—a reductive exercise in historical sociobiology. Rather, it is an attempt to show that biological and sociocultural explanations, usually regarded as so much oil and water, can be blended together to provide a more comprehensive explanation of social and historical events. Though my primary concern is explaining the historical pattern of American violence and disorder, I write with a sense that the methodological stakes are high. If a combined approach centered on gender works in the American case, then perhaps those who seek to explain the destructive behavior of our species elsewhere will elaborate the culture-learning model with some biological borrowing of their own.
Finally, I write with the conviction that historians who make use of empirical generalizations ought to do so in plain English in a narrative salted with the experiences of real people. Although I have drawn on statistical literature and bolstered my argument at key points with statistics, I have tried to avoid what William Cronon has called the twin evils of quantitative analysis—boredom and mystification. This has meant, among other things, using letters, diaries, memoirs, biographies, literature, interviews, movies, photographs, cartoons, and sketches to provide stories, insights, and illustrative material. Except for the first two chapters, in which I review the scientific and social scientific literature, the book is a straightforward social historical narrative. It proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, looks at a variety of ethnic and racial groups, and has a thematic beginning, middle, and end. The beginning focuses on violence and disorder among youthful, unattached men as a migratory and demographic anomaly most commonly found in nonagricultural frontier regions; the middle on the near-eclipse of this phenomenon during the first half of the twentieth century; the end on its troubling reappearance as an intractable feature of ghetto life in the late twentieth century.