TEN
The near disappearance of tramps in the first half of the twentieth century was part of a larger decline in the relative numbers and influence of single men. The gradual achievement of gender balance and rising affluence encouraged family formation, especially during the marriage boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The shift is illustrated in Figure 10.1, which shows the marital status of American men over fourteen. In 1890 nearly five American men in ten were single, widowed, or divorced. By 1955 it was three in ten. Most of these were simply men in their teens or twenties who had not yet married but would do so in the coming flush years.
The End of the Male Surplus
In a monogamous society marriage is a gigantic game of musical chairs. Because one woman can legally wed one man and vice versa, any marked adult gender imbalance will necessarily leave some unmarried persons, who may or may not be content with their single state. Conversely, the chances of marriage and family formation are most favorable when the numbers of women and men of appropriate ages are most nearly equal.
A rough numerical balance of just this sort was temporarily achieved in the mid-twentieth century when the overall male surplus finally disappeared. The disappearance was caused by two important changes. One was in immigration patterns, the other in the growing difference between male and female life expectancies.
From 1900 to 1914 overseas migration to the United States swelled to unprecedented levels. Over thirteen million immigrants entered the country, mostly young workers from southern or eastern Europe. At its peak in 1906-1907 the immigrant gender ratio was 262 men for every 100 women, the largest such disparity recorded since the early 1820s. More men immigrated in the early twentieth century for the same reason that there were more male tramps: industrialization and the need for manual laborers to build America's infrastructure. Slavs and Italians and Greeks toiled in mines and quarries, dug ditches and laid track, and undertook countless other jobs spawned by the urban-industrial transformation. Not all of them stayed, but enough did so that the U.S. gender ratio hit its high-water mark in 1910.1
A chain of events then diminished and reversed the male immigration surplus. When Europe went to war in August 1914 it suddenly became much harder for young men, who were wanted for military service, to leave for America. As many as 600,000 of those already in the United States repatriated. Some were conscripted, some rejoined their families for the duration, some left to take advantage of the demand for war workers in their native lands. In 1918 Josiah Rowe Jr., a young American pilot training in Foggia, Italy, estimated that a third of the Italian men he met had formerly worked in America. It was funny, he wrote, to walk along the street and hear someone call out, "Hello Keed." As soon as the war was over, he judged, these men and others would head back to the States on the first available ship. But for the duration the war caused net immigration (arrivals minus departures) to fall in magnitude and change in composition, becoming predominantly female for the first time in 1915-1919.2
Male immigration did make a comeback in the 1920s, though not to anything like prewar levels. It might have but for nativist sentiment, which had been gaining in intensity for two decades as immigration shifted away from northwestern Europe, and which crystallized in a campaign for restriction after the war. The campaign's legislative fruits, the 1921 and 1924 quotas, discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whence most of the male industrial workers came.3
The new immigration regime of the 1920s had one loophole, but it was a big one. The laws gave preferential status to the wives and children of male immigrants who were already U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Except in the case of Asian groups like the Chinese, who were singled out for virtually total exclusion, the laws cut the flow of male immigrants but not the follow-on migration of families and spouses. The latter included wives acquired through trips back home or arranged marriages, another option denied resident Chinese and, for that matter, the Japanese after exclusionists torpedoed the picture-bride system. In brief, European immigrants who elected to stay in the United States could legally form or reunite families in the 1920s and 1930s while Asian immigrants could not.
The preferential treatment of spouses continued to be an important factor during World War II and the Cold War, when millions of young American servicemen were stationed overseas. The foreign women they married were permitted to come to the United States and did so in large numbers. In 1946 through 1948 nearly 113,000 war brides entered America, or one quarter of all legal immigrants during that period. It is interesting (and, given the history of Asian exclusion, somewhat strange) that by 1983 fully 200,000 Asian wives of American servicemen were residing in the United States.4
The upshot was that mid-century immigration to the United States became and stayed mostly female. From 1929 to 1979 female immigrants made up a majority of the new arrivals, two-thirds of whom were women or children.5 Thus the force that had for so long contributed to the nation's male surplus had finally begun to work the other way. By the 1930s the net effect of immigration was to create or reunite families, rather than to supply more and more bachelor laborers.
The other important population change was the widening mortality gap between women and men. In 1920 the life expectancy at birth of white women was one year longer than that of men. By 1950 it had grown to nearly six years and by 1975, when white women could expect 77.2 years of life and men 69.4 years, it was nearly eight years. Among blacks the gap was even more pronounced, 72.3 years for women in 1975 compared to 63.6 for men.5
This widening gap was caused by safer births (over 100 times less risky for American women in 1980 than in 1915-1919), heavier male consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, greater male exposure to stress and likelihood of violent death, and the natural superiority of the female immune system. Its consequence was to accelerate the decline of the national gender ratio, which fell from 106.2 in 1910 to 100.8 in 1940 to 94.8 in 1970, a more than eleven-point swing in just sixty years. Although the ratio increased slightly in the 1980s and 1990s, it has remained low by historical standards, hovering in the 95-96 range.7
Most of the female surplus was among the elderly. If men survived the dangerous years of their late teens and early twenties, they typically married, aged, developed a fatal illness like heart disease or cancer, and then died. Their widows kept on aging, developed a string of chronic illnesses, lost their health and independence, and then died. This is, of course, a simplification, but as anyone who has ever visited a nursing home can attest, it is not far from the truth. By 1980 widowhood was more than four times as common among seventy-year-old women than among seventy-year-old men.8
While lingering widowhood has emerged as a serious domestic and fiscal problem, posing challenges to caretaker families, the solvency of the Social Security system, and health-care financing, it never has been a problem of social order. From the standpoint of violence and disorder, the marital status of aged women does not much matter, as they are unlikely to make trouble in any case. It is when young men cannot or do not marry that socially disruptive behavior is intensified.
The surfeit of elderly widows was of no marital help to young men, who in the United States as elsewhere preferred younger women to much older ones. But the feminization of immigration was clearly a boon, particularly to foreign-born men prevented by religious, ethnic, and class differences from marrying native-born women. And all American bachelors, immigrant or native, had their marital prospects enhanced by the gradual equalization of regional gender ratios, as shown in Figure 9.1. By the 1940s and 1950s gender imbalance had ceased to be a significant impediment to marriage in all but the remotest parts of the nation.
The Great Marriage Boom
Spousal availability is a necessary rather than sufficient condition for monogamous marriage and family formation. Political, cultural, and especially economic circumstances play critical roles in the extent and timing of marriage. Hard times make for fewer marriages and reduced fertility. In 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, the crude marriage rate hit a historic low of 7.9 per thousand. But it climbed back up in the later 1930s and then leapt to 12.7 in mid-1941.
The Selective Service Act, passed in September 1940, had much to do with this increase. J. R. Woods and Sons, a weddingring manufacturer, reported a 250 percent increase in sales after the draft law was passed. Young men and women adopted a now-or-never attitude toward the marital bed. "I've told him I don't love him," admitted one woman. "But he's an aviator and he says I should marry him anyhow and give him a little happiness. He says ... he hasn't any chance of living through the war." This last-chance mentality was especially pronounced after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when marriages jumped 60 percent over the previous December. An estimated 1,000 women a day married servicemen over the next five months.9
A quickie wartime marriage was not necessarily a lasting marriage, a problem dramatized by the breakup of the Derrys (Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo) in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. The crude divorce rate, which stood at 2.0 per thousand in 1940, shot up to 4.3 in 1946. But the crude marriage rate for 1946 was far higher, a record 16.4 per thousand. Moreover, the divorce rate dropped to a low plateau during the late 1940s and 1950s while the marriage rate remained very high. In round numbers there were 33 million marriages in those years compared to 8 million divorces, hence the pronounced increase in the percentage of men who were married.10
The great marriage boom was abetted by unprecedented national prosperity. The war and military spending ballooned the gross national product from $90 billion in 1939 to $212 billion in 1945, with the sharpest income and employment gains occurring among the poor. Pent-up consumer demand for housing, automobiles, and appliances kept the economy and family incomes growing after the war. In 1946 a worker with three dependents earned, after federal taxes, an average of about $43 a week. In 1959 the same worker's disposable wages were over $80 (both sums in 1960 dollars). Many of the jobs available in the late 1940s and 1950s were in the manufacturing and construction sectors, did not require much education, and were unionized and relatively well-paying. It was economically possible for couples to marry shortly after high school or even before. The median age of first marriage for men, 25.1 in 1910, dropped to 22.6 in 1955. Two-and-a-half years may seem a small change, but it had dramatic consequences. At the turn of the century only about one of every five men under twenty-five was married; at mid-century it was one of every two."
For women the median age of first marriage dipped even lower. In 1955 it was just 20.2 years, or about what it had been in Plymouth Colony in the early seventeenth century. Formal engagements at seventeen were common. A New York Times feature writer went so far as to warn that a "girl who hasn't a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married."12
Veterans who wished to pursue their education beyond high school could do so with the help of the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill. University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins pitched a public fit over the legislation, warning that the nation's "colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles." It was a risible prophecy. By 1947 nearly half of all college enrollees were veterans, and they had proved themselves hard-working students intent on professional careers. Some 450,000 became engineers, 360,000 schoolteachers, 240,000 accountants, 180,000 doctors or nurses, and 150,000 scientists. Their skills helped sustain the national economic expansion and their incomes provided a solid financial foundation for marriage and middle-class family life.13
Student-veterans did not have to postpone marriage until graduation. The GI Bill provided allowances for spouses and children along with college expenses. Half of the veterans who attended college were married and half of these already had one or more children. As in so many other aspects of social life, marriage proved an advantage. Despite cramped quarters, housing shortages, and squawking babies, the married vets, mostly mature and highly motivated men, consistently got higher grades than their bachelor peers.14
If demography, prosperity, and educational opportunity all favored marriage, so did the postwar Zeitgeist. The mass media bombarded Americans with images of romantic love and marital fulfillment in popular magazines and movies like William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives. The film's central figure, Captain Fred Derry, is haunted by the memory of combat, has trouble finding a good job, and is dumped by his two-timing wife. But in the moving final sequence it becomes clear that he will wed the banker's daughter Peggy Stephenson, even as the handless Navy veteran Homer Parrish prosthetically slips a wedding ring on the finger of Wilma, his loyal childhood sweetheart. Love conquers all, even traumatic stress and double amputation.
The nation agreed with Hollywood. Fewer than one postwar American in ten believed an unmarried person could be happy. Marriage was supposed to be a benign destiny, especially for women, who were regarded as mannish freaks if they chose a career over matrimony. In 1959 two out of three women who entered college dropped out, usually to go to the altar. "Education, work, whatever you did before marriage," recalled one young woman of the era, Bonnie Carr, "was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage." "I just wanted to get married," commented another, Cathy Lee Shipley, "and start my life."15
The marital efflorescence of the late 1940s and 1950s was in many respects historically unique. The social historian Stephanie Coontz has gone so far as to call it a qualitatively new phenomenon discontinuous with the marital trends of the previous hundred years. That which had been declining for a century, fertility and the disparity between married men's and women's education, suddenly began increasing. That which had been increasing, the divorce rate and female ages for marriage and motherhood, suddenly began decreasing. On top of everything else, the postwar family had a new locus, the suburb.16
Postwar Suburbs
Suburbs were not new but the scale of postwar suburban expansion was. Newlyweds were desperate for private housing, construction having been curtailed during the war. Families doubled up with relatives or squatted in Quonset huts, trolley cars, trailers, and grain bins. Wanted-to-rent ads in late 1945 newspapers are short essays in desperation, so many cents per word. Apartment seekers swore respectability of character, permanence of residence, Christian faith. They said they had no bad habits and no pets, or none that was not well trained. A few said they would live anywhere and that price was no object. Wouldbe landlords did not have much to offer in return. "Big Ice Box, 7X17 feet," ran an Omaha newspaper ad, "could be fixed up to live in."17
Bill Levitt had a better idea: affordable, mass-produced housing erected on inexpensive farmland within commuting distance of the central city. Levittown, his first and most famous development, went up on 4,000 acres of Long Island potato fields twenty-five miles east of New York City. Before they were through Levitt and his associates built 140,000 houses and helped to inspire the single most important postwar urban trend, suburban sprawl. By 1960 almost 60 million people, a third of the American population, resided in the ever-expanding suburbs. Most were families with young children living in Levitt-style Cape Cods, colonials, and ranch houses. The Levitt house, the historian Kenneth Jackson has written, was to postwar suburban development what the Model T was to the automobile.18
As important as Levitt and other private builders were, the suburban explosion would not have occurred on the scale it did without government assistance. The policy of allowing income tax deductions for mortgage interest payments and local property taxes amounted to a massive subsidy for new home ownership. So did loan guarantees by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, both of which made low-cost mortgages available to millions of postwar Americans. "The majority of guys . . . did not use the GI Bill for school," the journalist Mike Royko recalled of his workingclass Chicago neighborhood. "They used it for a loan for a home. That's when the younger couples started moving out. Guys got married and went lookin' to live somewhere else. The neighborhood got older and never really recovered. The guys went out to Park Forest, Rolling Meadows. They were the new suburban pioneers."19
The pioneers, if that is the right word, depended on government-subsidized roads for transportation. In the 1940s and early 1950s most jobs and major stores were still in the central cities, and commuting, via narrow and crowded roads, was a necessity. The solution to the growing traffic problem, foreshadowed by the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, was a system of superhighways that could carry thousands of cars at high speeds between built-up areas. The superhighways and ancillary roads were built through the efforts of the most broadly based and powerful lobby in American history, a combination of oil, car, and truck companies, banks, labor unions, road contractors, realtors, and land developers, all of whom stood to gain from the rapid growth of suburbs knit together with new roads and geared to automobiles. In 1951 even the atomic scientists got into the act, arguing that larger, decentralized cities with depopulated urban cores would be less susceptible to nuclear attack. When the legislation authorizing the interstate highway system was enacted in 1956, with 90 percent of the cost paid by the federal government, one of the official rationales was the quick evacuation of urban targets in the event of atomic bombardment.20
What the new roads and highways actually permitted was quick white evacuation from increasingly black parts of town. Levitt's own family had promptly left Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood when the first black family moved in. For two decades blacks were legally barred from buying into his proliferating Levittowns and similar developments. "Everybody wanted to have a house away from the niggers," admitted Paul Pisicano, a New York Italian who used the GI Bill to become an architect after the war. "Now guys were talking about niggers: I gotta move out or my kids ... I think American suburbs are bound by their antiblack sentiments. That's the common denominator."21
Not everyone agrees. Kenneth Jackson, for one, thinks that economic factors, the pent-up demand for and relative cheapness of subsidized suburban housing, were more decisive than race. Be that as it may, there was unquestionably a racial impetus to suburbanization, an anti-black push as well as an economic pull. The larger the postwar migration of southern blacks to inner cities—at one point in the 1950s 2,200 black men and women were moving to Chicago's South and West Sides every week—the stronger the impetus and the more pronounced racial polarization became. By 1970 blacks made up 22.5 percent of central-city dwellers but only 5.7 percent of suburbanites. Suburban blacks, including those of the middle class, were usually confined to older, closer-in, less desirable neighborhoods, while affluent white families kept moving farther out to newer, more expensive suburban (ultimately, exurban) housing and better schools protected from black incursion by municipal and district lines.22
Pax Domestica
The 1940s and 1950s marriage, baby, and suburban booms had important consequences for the amount and pattern of American violence and disorder. Two stand out. The first was that the decline in the number of single men and the efflorescence of family life contributed to the substantially lower overall rates of violence and disorder in American society after World War II until about 1960. The second was that the pattern of urban violence and disorder became increasingly centripetal, with crime and delinquency occurring much more often in the inner cities than the new, family-oriented suburban neighborhoods.
The statistical basis of the first proposition begins with Figure 10.2, which displays three common measures of violent death, the rates of mortality from homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle accidents, plus an aggregate of these three statistics, for the years 1933-1973.23 Figure 10.3 displays four demographic and social statistics correlated with the rise and fall of the violent death rates: the percentage of American men fourteen and older who were single, divorced, or widowed; the percentage of Americans who told pollsters they did not attend a church or synagogue on a weekly basis; the unemployment rate; and the percentage of the total population aged fifteen through twenty-four.
The years 1933-1973 were chosen for reasons of comparability. Suicide and especially homicide data recorded before 1933 are less consistent and reliable, in part because deaths from motor-vehicle accidents were often recorded as murders. In 1906 Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, declared reckless drivers the worst menace facing the nation. "I am a Southerner and know how to shoot," he reminded his New York City audience, adding that he sympathized with those who blazed away at hit-and-run drivers. The animus against Mr. Toad-like motorists and careless teamsters, once quite common, likely contributed to the overcharging which contaminates earlytwentieth-century homicide data.
After 1973 auto death rates fell because of the oil crisis and highway speed-limit reductions ("55 Saves Lives"). Moreover, the rapid, Vietnam-inspired improvement in emergency medical services in big cities after the early 1970s prevented the deaths of many trauma, stabbing, and gunshot victims, "bleeders" in police parlance. Better odds for the bleeders, not to mention mandatory seat-belt laws, air bags, and other auto-safety measures make it anachronistic to compare late-twentieth-century rates of violent death to those of the mid-twentieth century. As strange as it may seem, the violent death rates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, popularly and with some justice believed to be appallingly high, were, in historical and medical terms, artificially low.24
A number of researchers believe that homicide, suicide, and motor-vehicle death rates move in unison and that the three categories are socially and psychologically related. A person who is reckless, self-destructive, or intoxicated or has little to lose may easily end up with any one of the three on his death certificate. Conversely those who avoid undue risk, act soberly and responsibly, and have something to lose are far less likely to meet a violent end, unless they simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.25
Figure 10.2 supports the idea that violent death rates moved together in roughly U-shaped curves that were high in the 1930s, lower in the 1940s and 1950s, and then rose again in the early 1960s. There were a few anomalies, but these are easily explained. The dip in motor-vehicle death rates during World War II was due to gas and tire rationing and hence fewer miles driven. It was probably also due to the fact that so many young men were in boot camp rather than behind the wheel. Likewise the homicide downturn during the war, followed by an upturn in 1946, was the usual sponge effect of the armed forces absorbing, isolating, and then releasing men back into civilian society.26
In the years 1942-1945 American men did most of their killing overseas. In the racial cockpit of the Pacific theater violence took on a ferocious, mutilatory quality reminiscent of the Indian wars. Dead Japanese soldiers were field-stripped of teeth, ears, noses, hands, skulls, and other souvenirs; returning soldiers clearing customs in Hawaii were routinely asked if they had any bones. One cocky, bearded young minesweeper skipper hanged the mangled body of a kamikaze pilot from the top yardarm of his mast. But none of this latter-day barbarity showed up in domestic violence statistics.27
What did show up are post-1946 declines in all four death curves, declines that corresponded to the diminishing percentage of single, divorced, or widowed men. (Figure 10.4 lists the correlations for this and other variables.) The postwar marriage, economic, educational, and suburban booms combined to give a record number of American men a huge emotional and financial stake in the system: wives, kids, jobs, respectability, homes, and mortgages. It was the middle-class experience mass-produced, and it exerted the same restraining influence that it had in the nineteenth century except that the number of affected men was proportionately larger.
Marriage, fatherhood, and homeownership were not the only causes of the decline of violent death rates after 1946, nor can they be disentangled from several other important factors. One is religion. George Gallup's pollsters estimated weekly church or synagogue attendance in 1939, 1940, 1950, and yearly from 1954 on (Figure 10.3). Their findings point to a substantial religious revival in the late 1940s and 1950s. The fraction of Americans who did not attend weekly religious services, 63 percent in 1940, dropped to a twentieth-century low of 51 percent in 1958. In 1950 just under 87 million Americans belonged to churches; in 1960 over 114 million were members. Church buildings sprouted in pastures; seminaries and college religion courses were full. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible and other religious books were runaway bestsellers. Young revivalists like Billy Graham and Oral Roberts launched spectacular careers. Evangelical denominations gained in confidence and numbers. The Catholic Church's increasingly prosperous and still-loyal congregants packed Masses and sent their children to crowded parish schools. The Church's postwar success was so manifest that anti-Catholic writers like Paul Blanshard resurrected the hoary nativist plaint that "superior Catholic fertility" and the institutional clout of the hierarchy threatened the American nation.28
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The busy bishops and parish priests, the no-nonsense nuns—and the Pentecostal revivalists, the refugee rabbis, the Nation of Islam's ministers, clergy of every type and color—were a force for order in postwar American society. From a social perspective it is not denomination that matters as much as depth of conviction and active involvement in religious life. Regular churchgoers do not have rap sheets, or at least not long ones.
True, the postwar revival faltered in the 1960s and 1970s, undermined by the triumph of consumer culture. The mainline congregations in particular went into a spiritual and numerical decline that has not yet been reversed. But the revival was real enough in the 1950s and likely had a restraining effect on violent and reckless behavior, judging by the correlations in Figure 10.4. Notice that nonattendance at religious services in those years was also correlated with the percentage of unmarried men and the portion of the population aged fifteen to twenty-four. In the 1950s as in earlier periods of American history young, single, lower-class men were the most religiously indifferent element of the population. Married, middle-aged, middle-class men with children more readily joined churches. That is, the postwar religious revival was itself partly caused by the marriage boom and the upward mobility of a large segment of the population. Both of these were in turn made possible by the rapid expansion of the economy and the creation of millions of jobs. When unemployment went down, so did all measures of violent death.29
Unemployment was a particularly good predictor of suicide, the rate of which was very high during the Depression and much lower subsequently. This was an old story. Serious industrial downturns and widespread layoffs have always increased suicides among workers despairing of employment.io Joblessness, however, was less strongly correlated to homicidal and motorvehicle deaths. An odd thing happened during the 1960s. Unemployment was low—during the Vietnam build-up extremely low, around 3 or 4 percent—but the accident and homicide rates were shooting up anyway.
One explanation for this anomaly is demographic. The marriage boom gave rise to the baby boom, and by the 1960s and early 1970s the 49 million babies born between 1941 and 1954 were becoming adolescents and young adults. The portion of the population aged fifteen to twenty-four jumped from 13 percent in 1960 to nearly 18 percent in 1973. For men and women alike fifteen to twenty-four are years during which the chances of drunken driving accidents, violent quarrels, drug experimentation, and suicide are much higher than in childhood or mature adulthood. Hence the higher violent death rates, full employment or no."
The violent tendency inherent in the youthful bulge was magnified by interrelated economic, technological, legal, and moral changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Women's increasing entry into the workforce delayed or, in some cases, indefinitely postponed marriages. Medical innovations—birth control pills and lUDs, plus continued antibiotic progress against venereal diseases—made sex without marriage easier and safer, though in doing so they removed traditional reasons to get and stay married.32 As a result of the new marital disincentives and of the growing affluence and emphasis on expressive individualism and erotic gratification, more young men began delaying or forgoing formal marriage. More middle-aged ones took advantage of liberalized divorce laws and "traded in" their aging wives for younger ones by way of remarriage.
The net effect of these portentous changes, collectively known as the sexual revolution, was to increase the numbers of single adults and fatherless children. In 1960 Americans spent an average of 62 percent of their adult lives with spouses and children, an all-time high; in 1980 they spent 43 percent, an all-time low. "This trend alone," comments the sociologist David Popenoe, "may help to account for the high and rising crime rates." Violent crimes were largely committed by unattached males, he reasons, and when their number rose, so did the crime rate."
The 1960s and 1970s were also characterized by growing tolerance and use of psychoactive drugs, of which the most publicized were marijuana, LSD, and heroin. Their increased use caused more overdoses and accidents and generated turf and robbery homicides in illicit drug markets. At the same time alcohol consumption, which had been low and stable from 1947 to 1959, shot up from around 2.02 gallons of absolute alcohol per person in 1960 to 2.69 in 1973, an increase of 33 percent in just fourteen years. This increase undoubtedly contributed to the higher violent death rates, as did the beginning of the cocaine revival. Practically nonexistent at midcentury, cocaine began a comeback in 1969-1973 and continued to grow in popularity for the next fifteen years.34
It was as if, in the late 1940s and 1950s, all the irenic planets in the American solar system had finally come into alignment. Gender balance, predominantly female immigration, widespread and stable marriages, educational and employment opportunities, religious revivals, and low levels of alcohol and drug abuse all worked to diminish the number or constrain the behavior of America's young men. From the standpoint of preventing violence and disorder, just about everything that could have gone right did go right, as in the mining camps and cattle towns nearly everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.
It is true that in the postwar era homicide remained high in the United States in comparison to European nations like Britain. Guns were still widely available, notions of honor and justifiable killing lingered in the South and West, and motion pictures and television glorified the violent frontier action hero. Moreover, the homicide death rate of nonwhite men, though declining from 51.5 in 1947 to a low of 33.6 in 1961, remained very high relative to the rate for white men and inflated the national total.35 In relation to other developed countries postwar America was still a violent land, though by its own historical standards (if not those of peacetime Europe) it had become relatively tranquil. It would remain so until its irenic planets drifted out of alignment during the 1960s and 1970s.
The Collapse of the Inner Cities
The other major and, as it turned out, more lasting effect of the postwar marriage and suburban boom was to reinforce the tendency for urban violence and disorder to be concentrated in or near city centers. From their inception in the railroad boom of the nineteenth century, American suburbs had been essentially middle- or upper-class enclaves populated by propertied families with stable incomes. As such they had much lower rates of crime and delinquency than crowded inner-city tenement districts, where people were poorer, life was more precarious, vice operators were more abundant, and the children of immigrants often ran in gangs and afoul of the law.
Pre-World War II American cities were nevertheless fairly compact. Even in the biggest cities the distance between the lowest and highest crime zones—in Chicago, say, between suburban Oak Park and the downtown Loop—might be as little as five miles. But by the 1970s the distance between the safest, most affluent suburbs and the most crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods could easily be five or ten times that distance. The reasons were cars, highway construction, and the suburban explosion.'6
Let me illustrate, if I may, with a story. In the summer of 1974 a friend and I were visited by a young German Marxist we had met while studying in Europe. Our German acquaintance arrived at Kansas City International Airport and was driven by interstate beltway to my friend's commodious suburban home. On the principle of when in Rome, he agreed to go with us to a football exhibition game. We drove along the interstate to Arrowhead Stadium, watched the game, and returned home. "I enjoyed very much the match," the German said politely, "and you have a fine Autobahn. But I have a question. Where are your factories? Where are your ghettos?"
I looked him straight in the eye and said, "It's all communist propaganda. They don't exist."
His expression was one of complete bafflement. His mind told him I was pulling his leg but his experience told him something quite different. In two days he had not seen a shred of industry or poverty, so well were these things concealed by the city's sprawl.
Who could not tell a similar tale? The isolation and segregation of the poor have not only confused foreign visitors and eased the consciences of the affluent, they have disastrously increased the economic, familial, and social problems of inner cities in a way that has made the affluent more determined than ever to keep their distance. The automobile has become middle America's instrument of applied sociology. Postwar suburbanites, including those who were not openly or consciously racist, took advantage of cars and the existence of distant, often municipally separate communities to practice geographical and statistical discrimination. They knew where the bad neighborhoods were and used their automobility to avoid them, thereby reducing their chances of being mugged or burglarized or having their children educated in inferior schools.
The neighborhoods they abandoned or shunned were increasingly occupied by poor immigrants, often though not always black, for whom moving to the city was a step up. As the journalist Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, an extraordinary thing occurred in the rural South after the war. Hundreds of thousands of poor blacks, sharecroppers and small farmers displaced by agricultural mechanization, could quadruple their incomes by merely relocating to a city a long day's train journey away. They streamed to the North, as did thousands of poor southern whites. They were joined by a wave of Puerto Rican immigrants, the so-called Marine Tigers, named for a Liberty ship that shuttled back and forth between New York and San Juan after the war.37
They might as well have booked passage on the Titanic. Rural-to-urban migration worked well enough in the 1940s and early 1950s when unskilled and industrial jobs were abundant in the center cities. But as more and more people and employers left for the suburbs and as the industrial base of the economy began shrinking, the legitimate economic prospects of inner-city dwellers diminished. Many of the entrepreneurs who did stay were in some way connected to vice: loan sharks and pawn brokers, liquor-store and tavern owners, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and numbers runners. This not only increased the amount of violence—vice institutions and transactions, as always, were flash points—it drained away money and sharply increased alcoholism and addiction among the newcomers and their children.38
Drug and alcohol abuse were among the most tragic consequences of the great black migration. Southern racial mythology to the contrary, blacks did not have serious problems with alcohol or narcotics at the turn of the century. Most of them were poor and lived in remote and often legally dry rural areas. Despite occasional Saturday night and holiday sprees, chronic alcoholism among country blacks was practically unknown. It is not going too far to suggest that in 1900 rural blacks were the soberest people in the nation, apart from totally abstemious groups like the Mormons.
But when blacks began moving to the cities and settled in or near vice districts the situation changed. Unemployed black men were particularly prone to get into trouble with liquor or drugs, both commonplace in the ghetto environment. Narcotics arrests and hospital commitments among blacks went up sharply in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s as the tempo of the southern black exodus increased. In 1974 Washington, D.C., by then a largely black city, had far and away the highest rate of alcohol abuse in the country, with nearly one in four adult residents an alcoholic. By contrast Mississippi and Alabama, two states with large rural black populations, then had the lowest alcoholism rates in the nation.39
Heavy drinking and drug abuse aggravated inner-city violence, not least among young, turf-conscious black and Latino gang members. A notorious instance was the 30 July 1957 killing of Michael Farmer, a fifteen-year-old polio victim who lived with his parents in New York City. He was jumped by members of the Egyptian Kings and Dragons gang, who had been drinking cheap wine and whiskey and were out looking for their enemies when Farmer and a companion happened along. "You know, I was drunk," admitted one assailant, "so I just stabbed him. [Laughs] He was screamin' like a dog." When Farmer's mother identified his body in the hospital morgue she said his expression looked as if he were calling for help.40
The trial, then the longest in New York City's history, created a sensation and focused attention on the growing problem of gang violence. (So did the musical West Side Story, which opened with a cast of more sympathetic characters two months after the Farmer slaying.) One of the New Yorkers who decided to get involved in the problem was a young priest named William O'Brien. Following the Farmer murder, he recalled, "hundreds of kids were referred to me, and ninety percent of them were using drugs." The solution O'Brien ultimately hit upon was a therapeutic community called Daytop Village in which addicted, alcoholic, and violent youth were resocialized in an artificial authoritarian family.41
Daytop was a noble effort. It was also a drop in the proverbial bucket. By the late 1960s and 1970s widespread alcoholism and drug abuse were established facts of ghetto life. They led to violence directly through intoxication, bad judgment, drug ripoffs, and other disputes; indirectly by compounding problems of marital and family stability, which were also being worsened by job loss and the steady growth of a self-contained, increasingly isolated, and deeply troubled urban "underclass."
I shall have more to say about the problems of ghetto families in the next two chapters. The point I want to emphasize here is simply that migration patterns in the postwar decades exaggerated the centripetal character of urban violence and disorder as suburbs filled up with people who were affluent, family-oriented, sober, and well educated, leaving behind people who were less and less likely to share these traits. In the end the exodus turned out to be a matter of class as well as race. The black middle class, greatly expanded by the Civil Rights movement and growing access to public-sector jobs, got out or made plans to do so. "I still live in the black community," a black parole officer complained to a black sociologist. "I want to get away from all riff-raff, but I'm just not able to afford one of those big mortgages yet, ha-ha." He was, he admitted, "afraid of some of these younger guys, what they'll do to people like me and you. They don't care, don't worry about jail. They'll take you out of here." Looked at honestly, such fears of violence and predatory crime and their proposed remedy, flight from the inner city, were identical to those of middle-class whites. Identical too were the consequences: concentration in the ghetto of those with the poorest economic prospects and the fewest pro-social role models.42
A black man interviewed in 1981 under the alias "Teddy" had an unusual perspective on the ghetto implosion. In 1965 he was sent to prison on charges of attempted robbery and attempted murder, his fourth felony conviction. He did not get out until 1977. When he returned to Harlem late one evening he experienced a time-machine effect, so drastically had the area changed. "Harlem wasn't Harlem no more," he remembered:
I saw the trains were all marked up with graffiti, and that the platforms were dirty. I said to myself, "What the fuck has happened?" I got off the subway at 135th Street. I looked at the neighborhood and there weren't any more houses, just bricks and garbage and shit piled up. I said, "Goddam!" I walked down another block, and I saw that all the stores that weren't closed up were barred up. You couldn't see anything in the windows no more. There weren't any people in the street, and this was summertime. When I left there were people all over the streets. You could hear music, and kids laughing. Now it was almost like a ghost town.
When Teddy reached his mother's house, a once-grand edifice on Seventh Avenue that had been chopped up into apartments, he saw that it had fallen into complete disrepair. "The lights were hanging down, the walls were marked, the halls smelled like piss ... I went into the apartment and said, 'Mom, what's going on?' That apartment used to be spotless, but now the plaster and shit were falling down." When he woke up the next morning he looked out the window: "It was just completely turned around. Across the street the houses were boarded up, nailed up. And the first thing I see is a guy out there selling dope."43
What happened in Harlem happened all over the country in the 1960s and 1970s with the same bloody results. In Cleveland the homicide rate jumped 320 percent between 1958 and 1974; most of the slayings were black-on-black ghetto shootings. In Michigan so many black men were deliberately or accidentally killed during the 1960s that the life expectancy of that group fell by three years. In the nation as a whole, more blacks were killed by other blacks in a single year, 1977, than were killed in combat in Vietnam from 1963 to 1972.44
By 1980, when the American homicide rate hit a new high, the urban environment had become so polarized and the situation in the slum neighborhoods so bad that the life expectancy of male ghetto dwellers was approaching that of people living in the world's least developed countries. In Central Harlem, where 40 percent of the excess mortality in 1979-1981 was due to cirrhosis, homicide, or drug addiction, the chances of a man reaching his sixty-fifth birthday were worse than they were in Bangladesh.45
Night as Frontier
Twentieth-century urban violence and disorder have been unevenly distributed in ways other than geographical. The criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, in a well-known study of homicides in Philadelphia in 1948-1952, found not only that the killings were concentrated in the inner city but that nearly half took place on just two days, Friday and Saturday, and nearly half occurred within the span of just six evening hours, 8:00 P.m. to 1:59 A.m. Studies of homicide patterns in other cities have confirmed that a disproportionate number of murders and assaults take place after dark. "Our day begins when your day ends," homicide detectives are fond of saying. The same is true of emergency room personnel, who become very busy with bleeders in the early morning hours.46
The best way to understand this phenomenon is to think of the night as a frontier. If one considers a frontier to be partly a collection of human characteristics ("a form of society," as Turner put it), then it is reasonable to ask whether those characteristics exhibit a temporal as well as spatial pattern. They do. Electric lighting, automobiles, and other technological innovations have made it possible for twentieth-century Americans to carry on more and more of their activities after dark. It was, in the words of the sociologist Murray Melbin, "as if the flow across the continent swerved into the nighttime rather than spilling into the sea."47
But the colonization of the night, like that of the western frontier, has been a selective demographic process. Melbin analyzed a large sample of passersby at various sites in central Boston in 1974. He found that men were more numerous than women at any given time but that their majority was only 52-61 percent during daylight hours versus 67-89 percent at night. The ages of the passersby were just as skewed. No one over the age of fifty-nine was observed on the streets after midnight and no one over forty from 2:00 to 5:00 A.m. Not coincidentally there was more violence after dark. The largest number of fights, for example, was reported around midnight despite the fact that most Bostonians were asleep.48
This has been and remains the pattern in all American cities. In Boston and elsewhere the urban motor-vehicle death rate quadruples after dark. Nor is this simply a matter of poor visibility. Nighttime drivers are more likely to be under twenty-five, intoxicated, or both. Murder and rape are everywhere crimes of the night. In Jacksonville, Florida, a woman is four times as likely to be raped at midnight as she is at noon, although the Jacksonvilleans active at midday far outnumber those up and about late at night. Nighttime provides cover and, in a statistical and moral sense, an abnormal population. Avoiding that population by avoiding the late-night hours is a form of precautionary temporal segregation, just as moving to a suburb is a form of precautionary residential segregation.49
What people shun in reality they often seek out in fiction. The nighttime has provided writers and filmmakers with many of their most successful settings, plots, and characters. Beginning in the 1920s the hard-boiled school of American detective fiction became temporally fixated on the floating night world of speakeasies, roadhouses, gambling joints, and cheap hotels. The dark urban settings of Dashiell Hammett, Erie Stanley Gardner, and Raymond Chandler in turn influenced and lent themselves to the dominant visual style of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, the stark, black-and-white cinematography of film noir. Just as pulp fiction and western films had mythologized the ranching frontier, preserving the humble cowboy in the magnifying amber of popular culture, noir movies glamorized the tough-guy gumshoes, the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes whose personal sense of honor and willingness to resort to violence to uphold it resembled the frontier code.50 Thus the fictionalized version of the colonization of the night injected into the collective American consciousness something it did not especially need, another set of larger-than-life and homicidally violent male action figures.
The colonization of the night by youthful crime- or accidentprone men has had legal and political consequences. Municipal curfews on teenagers, spot checks for drunken drivers, feminist "Take Back the Night" campaigns, and paramilitary vigilante operations like the Guardian Angels, who patrolled New York City's subways, are all instances of organized responses to the dangers posed by the abnormal demography of the nighttime frontier. In a way they are updated versions of the anti-vice and law-and-order campaigns of the maturing mining and cattle towns. History, sociology, epidemiology, literature, myth, and politics all point to the same basic lesson. Whenever and wherever young males congregate, violent trouble is likely to follow.
At mid-century, however, most middle-class men were not active in the dangerous late-night hours. They were instead daylight creatures of regular habits who worked in small businesses or, increasingly, in large organizations from which they commuted home in the evening. Whatever experience they had of frontier violence was vicarious. They watched their share of shoot-'em-ups but also Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, and Ed Sullivan, America's strait-laced impresario. They took their kids to picnics and ball games and Scout meetings. They cut the grass and played golf on Saturday, went to church on Sunday morning, watched football, tucked their kids in bed, retired to their rooms, made love to their wives, rolled over, drifted into snoring sleep, got up, shaved and showered, climbed into the car, and drove back to work on Monday morning.
This lifestyle has been subjected to endless intellectual and artistic ridicule. It has been mocked as bland, conformist, soulless, sexist, speechless. "My generation, coming into its own," complained John Updike, "was called Silent, as if, after all the vain and murderous noise of recent history, this was a bad thing."51
The jibe hits home. All social history consists of trade-offs, and all politics is about which trade-offs should be made. While the postwar marriage and suburban booms undoubtedly narrowed the options of married women and bled center cities, it seems equally undeniable that they were, at least in the short run, a potent force for social order, welcome in a country that had been through a lot. The marriage boom gave purpose to, restrained the behavior of, and added years to the lives of a generation of young men. To fairly evaluate the 1950s or any other decade it is important to remember what did not happen as well as what did. Judging from the violent death curves, what did not happen during the marriage-boom era was the premature, senseless, and traumatic deaths of tens of thousands of American men.