TWO
If, for biological reasons, young men are more inclined to violence and disorder, and if America had more than its share of young men, it follows that American life had a built-in tendency toward violence and disorder. It also follows that, the higher the ratio of men to women in a given community or region, the stronger this tendency would be. While these arguments make both intuitive and statistical sense, they are only the beginning of an explanation, not a complete one. American violence was not simply a gunfight at the XY corral. Indeed, nothing in human social life is simply the consequence of any genetic trait.
Consider height. The genetic trait for height (the genotype) is influenced by environmental factors such as health and diet, which partially determine the actual height obtained (the phenotype). Men have a genetic tendency toward greater average height than women, but phenotypical differences in stature also depend on who gets the most nourishing food or who does the stoop labor. Scientists and social scientists who are convinced, as I am, that heredity plays a role in human behavior are sometimes accused of biological determinism (or worse), but in fact the modern biological synthesis recognizes no dichotomy between nature and nurture. Biological systems are always and everywhere open systems in which innate and environmental influences continuously interact with one another.1
The environment also shapes culture, each society's rules for appropriate behavior. Cultures specify what is forbidden, tolerated, expected, admired. Cultures evolve and reproduce themselves, thanks to our ability to reason and learn. Their evolution leads to cultural differences, though biology enforces some common denominators, such as the incest taboo. The legacy of evolution—young men's neurochemical tendency toward and physical capacity for aggression—requires that all societies implement rules to constrain their behavior, as well as to devise means of channeling it in constructive, nurturing ways. The latter task is so universally important that Margaret Mead called it "the recurrent problem of civilization."2
The international homicide statistics in Figure 2.1 show that some societies are considerably more adept than others at civilizing young men. In the mid-1980s the homicide rate for American males aged fifteen through twenty-four was more than four times that of its nearest rival, Scotland, and seventy-three times that of Austria. Great differences could also be found within the United States. The rate of homicide for young white men in California was more than eleven times that of Minnesota. In every nation and state men more frequently committed murder than women—that is the biological constant—but the ratio of male-tofemale killers varied, as did the total number of killings. In societies with high murder rates the difference is generally accounted for by an unusually large number of young men killing other young men. Certainly this is true of the United States. The American homicide rate is high not because of psychopathic sprees or an epidemic of spousal jealousy but primarily because so many young men kill other, usually unrelated, young men.'
What, then, are the cultural and social factors that explain the variation in criminal or other socially disruptive behaviors, especially those involving young men? The literature on this question is vast. One can, however, extract from it six generalizations that are most relevant to explaining the historical pattern of American violence and disorder.
Honor
The first of these generalizations is that cultures or subcultures in which men are sensitive about honor have much higher levels of violence. Honor (or "primal honor," as it is sometimes called) has been succinctly defined as a system of beliefs in which a man has exactly as much worth as others confer upon him. Good opinion is won or lost by the way he handles himself in conflicts. To fail to respond to a challenge or insult is to lose face and therefore surrender self-esteem. In such circumstances insult is intolerable. The approved response is direct action, preferably action that displays physical courage, such as dueling. Aggressive displays outside the immediate community—bagging the most game, slaying the most enemies—are also useful means of achieving, maintaining, or repairing one's standing in the eyes of others. Cultures which stress honor stress male competitiveness.4
The violent defense of masculine honor was most common in the South and along the frontier, where it characterized the behavior of both aboriginal and immigrant inhabitants. Indian cultures, though diverse, typically stressed the imperatives of honor and vengeance. In this white frontiersmen were no different. Nor was the similarity accidental, for honor cultures typically flourish in remote rural areas where the state is weak or its rationalizing minions are held in contempt. "Never ... sue anybody for slander or assault or battery," Andrew Jackson's mother admonished her son. "Always settle them cases yourself." He did, and so did thousands of other like-minded southerners and frontiersmen who resolved their conflicts with pistols and Bowie knives and gouging fingernails. Their vengeful code was epitomized by a Colorado grave marker: "He called Bill Smith a liar." The same epitaph might well have served as a courtroom defense. The cultural preference for violent defense of personal honor was reinforced by a legal system that made it unusually easy to justify killing an opponent.5
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner is famous for the thesis that the frontier environment shaped the character of Americans who migrated there, making them tough, self-reliant individualists. More recently historians and cultural geographers have concluded that Turner had the right idea, that environment shapes culture, but that he was looking in the wrong place. He should have been looking at the cultures from which the settlers came. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the whites who settled along the middle and southern frontiers were often immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, from the hardscrabble periphery of Northern and Western Europe. Among them were Finns, Scots-Irish, Scottish Lowlanders, and various English border clans that had been warring since the time of Duncan and Macbeth. Gaelic-speaking Highlanders also poured into the Carolina backcountry, which one emigrant boasted would "soon be a new Scotland." Relative to other Europeans, people from these fringe lands were already individualistic, violent, honor-conscious, and impatient of the yoke of church and state. Preexisting cultural tendencies thus heightened the potential for disorder inherent in America's male population, or at any rate the part of it that settled along the southern and midlands frontier.6
So, in a roundabout way, did slavery. Southern slaveowners like Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen were hardened to violence, for violence was at the core of the slave system and was continuously employed to maintain it. Few adult southerners escaped seeing slaves cursed, whipped, hunted, or even killed. Slave executions and lynchings were public events witnessed by all ages. Brutalized slaves were an ever-present reminder that brute power counted in human affairs and that defeat entailed a terrible price.7
The intertwined strains of honor and violence in the white South influenced African-American culture, reinforcing tendencies that had deeper African roots. Blacks had originally come from West African tribal cultures which were both heroic and violent. The warrior was an admired figure; raiding and slavetaking were facts of life. Though the plantation system discouraged fighting in the quarters, southern blacks had ample opportunity to observe whites dispatching one another in affairs of honor. After emancipation they did likewise, killing one another over provocations as petty as those that embroiled white southerners. Postbellum black society, like white southern or frontier society, was contaminated by historical fallout from a culture of honor. The fallout seems to have had a long half-life, for the South, the West, and the black ghettos remain the country's most violent places in the late twentieth century. To this day most ghetto homicides are about disrespect, retaliation, and revenge, traditional honor-culture motives that nineteenthcentury southerners and frontiersmen would have understood.8
Racism
In addition to touchiness about honor, ghetto violence is clearly a product of racial discrimination, as is the ghetto itself. Throughout American history racism has exacerbated violence and disorder in three distinct ways: by inspiring and rationalizing interracial attacks; by blocking intermarriage and family formation; and by impoverishing, isolating, and socially marginalizing minority groups.
Racism is a subset of ethnocentrism, the tendency to favor genetically, socially, and culturally similar in-groups over alien out-groups. Edward O. Wilson has argued that selection favored those humans who were quickest to recognize, fear, hate, and drive away or kill strangers, thereby securing a margin of safety for themselves and their kin. It does appear that ethnocentrism, or at least xenophobia, is in some degree biologically programmed. Infants as young as three months will smile and coo at a parent or caretaker but abruptly cry when confronted by a stranger. Later in life people may learn to suppress their ethnocentric feelings by heeding the counsel of toleration, much the same way they learn to regulate other impulses. Or they may learn to intensify these feelings by internalizing discriminatory laws and customs, listening to demagogic tirades, fighting in bitter wars, or by any of a hundred other actions. That is, the intensity and lethality of ethnocentric behavior, including racism, are products of specific social, cultural, and historical circumstances.9
Ethnocentrism is not an either/or proposition. There are degrees of otherness which can be thought of as expanding circles surrounding each self. People are typically closest to those who are related by blood or marriage and/or those who share their ethnicity (national, racial, or tribal), language, religion, ideology, class, neighborhood, occupation, or workplace. They are furthest from those who share none of these things. Some out-groups may seem so utterly alien, so removed from the observer's self-identity, that they seem less than fully human. They may in fact be regarded as another species.10
The more alien the out-group, the easier it is to exploit or kill its members. That is, after all, what humans have long done to animals, rendering them beasts of burden or slaughtering them for flesh and sport. People regarded as beastlike have been treated accordingly, and have repaid their persecutors in kind when given the opportunity. The white depredations against Indians (and Indian depredations against whites) are the most notorious examples of this, although the pluralistic nature of American society has furnished many opportunities for and instances of interracial ferocity, especially on the frontier, the most ethnically diverse region and cockpit of racial conflict for the first three centuries of American history.
The strong ethnocentrism and racial antipathies of AngloAmericans have indirectly contributed to violence and disorder by discouraging intermarriage. Many population groups, including whites migrating toward the frontier, had unequal numbers of men and women, making intermarriage a seemingly natural expedient. But Anglo-American racism trumped demographic logic to a degree unusual in the western hemisphere, resulting in a complex of discriminatory laws and personal decisions that retarded marriage and family formation, delayed the balancing of the population, and, insofar as families restrained and disciplined their members' behavior, weakened the foundation of social control.
Finally, by blocking opportunities for employment and consigning minorities to impoverished and vice-ridden ghettos, racism has increased the amount of violence and disorder in those communities, particularly among their male inhabitants and above all among economically marginalized black men. Once valued and exploited as slaves, many freedmen and their sons and grandsons could not find regular employment after emancipation and drifted into a life of idleness and insobriety in the segregated quarters of cities and towns. The cultural sensitivity about honor they shared with other southerners was dangerous enough in itself, but when combined with unemployment, frustration, and drink it made for a truly explosive mix."
Alcohol
As this last observation suggests, violence and disorder are more likely if men drink alcohol, especially if they drink heavily and in circumstances or cultures that favor aggressive behavior when drinking. That alcohol is associated with mayhem is as well documented as any finding in the social sciences. One particularly compelling type of evidence comes from so-called natural experiments, in which events like annual fluctuations in wine production or a military ban on drinking (such as the one imposed on U.S. troops during the Gulf War) temporarily constrict the supply of alcohol. Crime invariably decreases.12
Less certain is how drinking triggers violence. Alcohol impairs judgment, and impaired judgment can lead to an accident or a clumsy offense or, more subtly, to misinterpretation of another person's behavior as insulting, threatening, or sexually inviting. A drunken misstep can be fatal, particularly in a packed bar or in an honor culture. Drunkenness can also invite attack if an intoxicated person is viewed as an easy mark or if a woman who drinks is perceived as a more suitable target for sexual assault. Drunkenness may even provide an excuse for violence, because the drinker knows in advance that his actions are more likely to be tolerated or excused because of intoxication. That is, a decision to engage in violence may "cause" drinking, rather than the other way around."
Some investigators think that alcohol produces hormonal or other neurochemical changes consistent with heightened aggressiveness, but these are not yet well understood or agreed upon, and there is other evidence that alcohol, despite its "Dutch courage" reputation, does not cause aggression in a direct fashion. Experiments have shown that subjects who believed they were drinking alcohol when in fact they were not behaved more aggressively than subjects who actually received alcohol but who had been led to believe otherwise. These curious effects occur because people learn to associate drinking with certain types of behaviors, among them obstreperousness. About half the world's cultures expect and approve of men's becoming loud, angry, abusive, argumentative, and physically belligerent when they drink. In one culture, that of the Mexican Tzeltal, drunken wife beating is so routine that it is mentioned in the wedding ceremony.14
Heavy and aggressive male drinking, like sensitivity about honor, has been concentrated in subcultures or regions. The wettest place was the frontier, which from the colonial period on had a high ratio of men to women and of taverns to population. American frontiersmen came, in the main, from cultures in which men drank a great deal of hard liquor and were expected to be boastful and rowdy as a consequence. "Everywhere on the frontier," comments the historian Robert Utley, "nearly all men drank nearly all the time, which made nearly all men more or less drunk most of the time. Drink enhanced self-importance, impaired judgment, generated heedless courage, and encouraged unreasoning resort to violence." This description is hyperbolic, but not by much. Frontier drunkenness was indeed widespread and, if newspaper accounts are accurate, involved in about half of all homicides and a good deal more than half of all assaults and brawls.15
These fights often took place in saloons, gender-segregated institutions of sociality and vice that flourished on the frontier and in nineteenth-century cities. Saloons brought drinking men together, and group drinking tends to be heavier than solitary drinking, the cliche about the dangers of the latter notwithstanding. Saloons multiplied occasions of conflict, both because of the imperative of guarding one's honor before other men and because of the presence of gambling, prostitution, prizefighting, and other activities which inspired drunken competition and arguments. The opportunity to extract patrons' wages drew gamblers, pimps, and their ilk to the saloons, usually with the knowledge and connivance of the proprietor. Vice added armed and hardened criminals to the already dangerous mix of inebriated men, ensuring that the saloon would be the historical epicenter of American violence and disorder.16
Religion
Devout Americans hated saloons. Appropriately so, for the more religious people are, the less likely they are to tolerate disorderly behavior in themselves or others. Self-discipline is at the heart of intense religious experience. Iron-willed puritans can be found among committed believers in all religions, but in the American case the most numerically and politically important group has been the Evangelical Protestants. The Evangelical outlook, instilled in children from infancy, is predicated on self-denial, on subordination of the individual will to that of God. Observing God's injunctions against anger, lust, fornication, and intemperance commits believers to an unending struggle against the temptations of the world and the deepest impulses of their animal nature. Observing the Gospel message of evangelization commits them to struggle against these same impulses in other people.17
Evangelicals have not always succeeded in reining in the self, nor have they necessarily been pacific. In some contexts, as when disciplining their children, they have shown themselves quite capable of violence.18 They have sometimes persecuted those of different beliefs, though sectarian strife is one form of violence that has been mercifully rare in American history, in part due to constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. Because of this absence of holy wars, and because of the circumspection born of conscience, the net effect of Evangelical Protestantism and of religious belief generally has been to enhance the American social order and to diminish criminal violence.
Evangelical Protestants and other deeply religious people have been, and still are, less likely to be found in circumstances— gambling halls, saloons, other people's beds—that lead to trouble involving the police. They have been less likely to do away with themselves, owing to the religious injunction against suicide and to their close involvement with family, church, and community life. When dealing with strangers, they have been more likely to be helpful, cooperative, and friendly. Religious people, sums up the sociologist Christopher Ellison, are nice people."
The religious revivals of the nineteenth century transformed America into one of the most churchgoing nations in the world. Between 1780 and 1860 the number of Christian congregations increased from about 2,500 to 52,000, a rate of growth nearly three times that of the general population.20 Millions of bornagain Americans found Jesus, renounced Satan, took the pledge. This poses an interesting question. If Americans were becoming so religious, and if religious belief militates against crime and vice, why did America remain such a violent and disorderly society?
The short answer is that spiritual enthusiasm was unevenly distributed throughout the population. Historians of American religion have consistently found that married women were the most faithful churchgoers, young single men the least faithful. Religion was to disorder as money was to poverty: those who needed it most had the least to draw upon. Religious indifference was especially widespread on the frontier, the region with the most bachelors and the fewest churches. "Veritable heathens," summed up Olaus Duus, a Norwegian pastor writing from Minnesota in 1857, describing what he considered to be the largest American frontier denomination. "A man among them never hears much practical discussions about religion," a diarist observed of the Rocky Mountain miners, adding that their lives were "wild" and "restless." "Ninety per cent of them [cowpunchers] was infidels," remarked another memoirist, innocent of both grammar and theology.21
Itinerant preachers tried to rectify the situation, traveling thousands of miles to spread the Gospel message along the backwoods frontier and beyond. They sometimes encountered open hostility, everything from dogs in church to ugly threats. Peter Cartwright, a Methodist circuit rider, recalled several camp meetings interrupted by cursing, jeering rowdies. Most of the interlopers were drunken riffraff, but on one occasion they were led by haughty young men sporting whips and fine clothes.22
This is not surprising. Conceptions of appropriate masculine behavior were class- as well as culture-specific. The model of the Christian gentleman was most acceptable to middle-class American men, who were on the whole more inclined to join religious worship than to scoff at it. It was least acceptable to young men from the lower and upper reaches of society, who thought religion suspect and unmanly. A recurring theme in American religious history was the conflict between a feminized and middle-class Evangelical Protestantism and the masculinized culture of excess found most often among the genteel and rough manual laborers. The tippling, dueling gentleman was as much a sinner to the Evangelicals as the saloon brawler. If the brawler in question happened to be a foreigner or a Catholic, so much the worse. The rambunctious, drunken behavior of Irish workingmen was a continuing scandal to middle-class Protestants, an important source of both nativism and the prohibitionist impulse. By the late nineteenth century traditional Evangelical efforts at temperance and conversion were being superseded by campaigns to suppress saloon-going, intoxication, and other lower-class and immigrant vices thought to be ruinous of the social order and destructive of individual souls.23
Anti-vice campaigns were unnecessary in communities that were already religiously disciplined and homogeneous. Puritans, Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, Dunkards, Hutterites, and other devout Protestant groups periodically hived off to establish agrarian communities of exceptional order and stability, places where people loved God and neighbor, tended their fields and orchards, and left the latch string out.24
Mormon Utah, though predicated on a different theology, was an equally untroubled place. One Utopian village in the southeastern portion of the territory was actually called Orderville. It prospered until 1885, when the federal government, which had better things to do, prosecuted and imprisoned its leaders for plural marriages. In Salt Lake City, the principal Mormon settlement, the only observable vice was associated with the army and its non-Mormon followers at a nearby camp. Travelers, including those hostile to Mormon beliefs, uniformly described the city as prosperous and well planned and its citizens as hard working and virtuous.25 Collectively, the religious colonies were the most dramatic example of the power of religious conviction to squelch disorderly behavior. Perhaps that is why, collectively, young single men wanted nothing to do with them.
Men and Families
Most young men, however, were interested in the prospect of marriage, which leads to the fifth generalization, that families constrain violent and disorderly male behavior. This is true both of families of origin, in which men are born and socialized, and of families of procreation, which they form to raise their own children. "All government originates in families," Noah Webster once observed, and he was right.26 Parents set and enforce limits, but their most important role is modeling pro-social 'margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-indent:12.0pt;line-height: normal'>Historically, these tasks of discipline and socialization were shared by surrogate parents who supervised apprentices, servants, and farm workers. In exchange for their labor, master and mistress provided food, shelter, correction, instruction, and sometimes wages that would prepare their youthful charges to establish themselves and begin their own families. However, the decay of the apprenticeship system in the years from the Revolution to the Civil War and the gradual disappearance of live-in workers eliminated this traditional method of controlling and educating the young. The responsibility thereupon reverted to the nuclear family, augmented by schools, churches, the YMCA, and other ancillary social institutions.27
Parents, natural or surrogate, can ruin children by cruelty, neglect, incompetence, and bad example. Not all parents are responsible, nor do they all inculcate responsible behavior. Even so, it is better on average to grow up in an intact, two-parent family than in a single-parent family or with no parents at all. Children who are abandoned or illegitimate, or who lack a parent for reasons of death, separation, or divorce, are statistically more prone to delinquency, truancy, dropping out, unemployment, illness, injury, drug abuse, theft, and violent crime. Negative effects are most apparent in adolescent boys who, lacking fatherly control and guidance, are socialized by default in hypermasculine, countervalue families like gangs.28
Children who experience family disruption are less likely to become or to stay married as adults. This fact has important implications for the social order, because families of procreation, like families of origin, constrain behavior. Married men, as Emile Durkheim pointed out, are subject to salutary discipline.29 Monogamy controls and focuses their sexual energy; children make them mindful of the example they set; the material needs of their families encourage regular work habits and self-sacrifice. Above all, married men lack the sense of expendability that plagues bachelor communities, in which the prospective loss of life, whether one's own or another's, is often regarded lightly.
A story told by Rebecca Burlend, a Yorkshire immigrant who settled with her husband and five young children in Illinois in the early 1830s, illustrates this principle. One day Burlend's husband discovered that a tall stranger was letting his horses feed in their corn:
My husband remonstrated with him on the injustice of such behaviour, and persevered in his attempt to drive [the horses] out; at which the person, whose name was Brevet . . . struck him a blow on the forehead with his fist, and threatened further violence if he did not allow them to remain. Seeing that physical force was the only available argument, my husband began to prepare for resistance; but calling to mind the situation of his family, and not knowing what perfidy might be resorted to, he wisely concluded to leave the man and his horses where they were. I mention this circumstance principally to shew how much we were indebted to an over-ruling Providence for the preservation of my husband's life on this occasion. We afterwards learned that Brevet . . . declared he would have stabbed my partner with a large dirk which he always carried with him, if he had resisted. In a short time afterwards he left the neighborhood, dreaded and detested by all who knew him.
We may not know the role of Providence in this encounter, but the role of family seems clear. Brevet, a drifter with little to lose, behaved aggressively. Burlend, who had no wish to leave a widow with five children, backed down. It is a drama that has been repeated many times. "I took things that I wouldn't have took before that from any man on earth," recalled the Montana cowboy "Teddy Blue" Abbott, explaining why he gave up fighting after becoming engaged. "Simply because of the fear of losing her. I was afraid ... I might kill a man and have to go to jail or leave the country, and I wouldn't run the risk." Abbott also gave up drinking and chewing tobacco, settled down, raised a family, and went from $40-a-month cowpuncher to owner of a 2,000-acre ranch.30
Married men are also likelier to be cleaner, better nourished, and healthier because they have wives, and often daughters, who customarily attend to laundry, cooking, nursing, and other hygienic tasks. In societies with a systematic division of labor, where marriage is the accepted way by which adult men gain the fruits of women's work, the bachelor is at a serious disadvantage. He is, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out, "really only half a human being" and frequently observed in an unclean and disheveled state. "He that hath not got a Wife," declared Ben Franklin's Poor Richard, "is not yet a Compleat Man.""
Here is the prejudice against single men distilled into a single sentence. We usually think of discrimination in American history as centering on race, ethnicity, and gender, but in fact many of the deepest and most unthinking prejudices have involved marital status, to the point of incivility to the unmarried dead. Single men have at times been forced to live in segregated neighborhoods and dormitories. Like blacks, they have had their own restaurants and railroad cars. They have been assigned lower priority for scarce medical resources and have been operated on without benefit of anesthesia.32 They have consistently earned less and have paid for their singleness through double poll taxes, higher land prices, steeper insurance rates, less generous credit, longer prison terms, and less compensation for job-related disabilities. In hard times they have been laid off before married men and in dangerous ones they have been placed in the front lines." On occasion the exposure to danger has been voluntary, as when a Montana cowboy offered to break the meanest broncs to spare his married employer the risk. As with all prejudices, roles and expectations have a way of becoming internalized. Social marginality reinforces single men's sense of superfluity and contributes to the risk-taking and psychology of expendability found in bachelor groups.34
Social scientists and statisticians have been investigating the fortunes of single and married men for over a century and a half. They have found consistently—to my knowledge without exception—that single men have been more likely than married ones to be homeless, unemployed, poor, in trouble with the law, or in prison. In 1890, when national statistics on the marital status of convicts first became available, 29 percent of all prisoners were married, compared to 52 percent of the male population over the age of fourteen. By 1974 the gap had widened in both directions: only 21 percent of male jail inmates were married, compared to about 64 percent of the over-fourteen population.35
This pattern is consistent with the high arrest rates for men in their teens and early twenties. Though physical and hormonal changes are partly responsible, this is also the age range in which men are typically between households. Leaving or having already left their families of origin, they have not yet entered the self-disciplinary regimes of their own families of procreation.
Men who have become stuck in or who have reverted to this single state have been much more prone to violent and disorderly behavior. They have more often killed themselves and others; more often suffered venereal disease, insanity, alcoholism, and drug dependency; and more often succumbed to illnesses, like tuberculosis, associated with malnutrition and squalor. Consequently their lives have been shorter. In New York State in the early twentieth century, unmarried men who had survived to age 20 could expect to live a total of only 43.6 years compared to 60 for those who were married.36 Although life expectancies for both groups have since increased, there is still a significant mortality gap between married and unmarried men.
This gap is partly due to the selective nature of courtship. Men who are undisciplined, unattractive, obnoxious, impoverished, inebriated, or otherwise socially or physically impaired find it harder to acquire spouses. These same traits may result in shorter lives or trouble with the law. Several studies have shown, however, that marriage has a protective effect independent of the selection factor.37 Marriage imparts a sense of identity, self-worth, and mastery that translates into greater resistance to mental and physical illness. The behavior of married men is more circumspect and healthful, especially if children are also present.
In short, though the purpose of marriage is family formation, one of its chief effects is male social control. The controlling effect works on two generations, fathers and sons, present and future. That is why society-wide family decline always has longterm consequences. Unmarried men may be more erratic and vulnerable than married ones, but they are not necessarily more continent. If they conceive male children out of wedlock the chances are good that their biological sons will be poor and undersocialized and will have trouble establishing families of their own.
Armed Men in Groups
Men who, for whatever reason, are not married generally find themselves in the company of other unmarried men, brought together by the collective nature of their work or recreation. This gives rise to one last generalization: men in groups make for trouble, especially if they are armed and loosely disciplined. People think and act differently in groups than when they are alone; they also think and act differently as a group's age, social class, and gender mix changes. Men who congregate with other men tend to be more sensitive about status and reputation. Even if they are not intoxicated with drink or enraged by insult, they instinctively test one another, probing for signs of weakness. Declining peer challenges can lead to ostracism; accepting them often leads to fighting.
Male jostling goes on in any society. What is peculiar to America is the frequent addition of firearms to the equation. Between 1899 and 1993 no fewer than 223 million civilian firearms were available for sale in the United States, including 77 million handguns. This understates the number of guns actually available, because federal records do not include military weapons, firearms made before 1899, or illegally manufactured or smuggled weapons. Add in the zip guns, the military surplus, and the attic pieces and there may well have been one firearm for every person living in the country in 1993.38
Widespread gun ownership does not automatically mean widespread violent crime. Most Swiss households have guns, because most Swiss men serve in the militia. Yet the Swiss male homicide rate is quite low (Figure 2.1). There is also some evidence that gun ownership deters burglars and robbers, who fear getting shot by an irate victim more than they fear the long arm of the law.39
The real problem is that when men carry firearms, above all concealed handguns, fights can quickly turn into homicides. A good many murders are simply "successful" aggravated assaults, the result not necessarily expected or planned. Guns that are more forgiving of bad marksmanship—revolvers, repeaters, and automatics—have compounded the problem and increased the prospect of bystander injury. Revolvers first made their appearance in the 1830s and became commonplace after the Civil War, when the country was awash with military pistols. Men, especially southerners, carried pistols as part of their daily apparel. Concealed guns were so common in Kentucky after the Civil War that when a gentleman ordered a pair of pants the tailor automatically inserted a pistol pocket. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mail-order suppliers got into the act, furnishing weapons, from cheap revolvers to twenty-shot automatics, to anyone who could fill out a form and pay a few dollars. The real merchants of death, it turned out, were reputable American firms. Sears was doing a $3 million annual business in revolvers before the company finally ended its sales.40
By the 1920s, if not before, it was apparent that the unusually high American homicide rate was connected with the easy availability and lax control of guns. England, which strictly regulated guns through the Firearms Acts, had few shooting deaths and a homicide rate a tenth that of the United States. Moreover, individual states with the highest percentages of firearms slayings in the period 1924-1926 also had the highest overall rates of homicide, the correlation being +.61. Whatever its deterrent effect on theft may have been, the American habit of gun-toting was significant because it often turned ordinary disputes, usually flare-ups between men, into extraordinary and fatal crimes.41
That is, if the crimes were recognized and treated as such. On the frontier murderous brawls were often unprosecuted and served to enhance the reputation of the victor. Someone who had "killed his man" acquired instant standing. The more he killed, the bigger his reputation. Reputations could also be lost. The fastest way to do so, apart from cowardice, was to fail to partake of the masculine vices in the presence of other men. To refuse a drink was to insult the man who offered it. The incorrigibly abstemious were sometimes forced to learn better manners at the point of a gun.42 Disreputable, lower-class males, men of no account in the middle-class world of family and church, exercised much greater influence in bachelor communities like bunkhouses and mining camps. They both tempted and punished, for to fail to emulate their vices was to fail, in their own terms, to be a man.
This least-common-denominator effect has been a more widespread and important force in American society than generally recognized, particularly in times of mobilization and conscription. "The army is the worst place in the world to learn bad habbits of all kinds," a Michigan private confided to his brother in 1863; "there is several men in this Regt when they enlisted they were nice respectable men and belonged to the Church of God, but now where are they? they are ruined men." The twentieth-century inversion of Victorian standards and values— the increasing popularity of cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, swearing, promiscuous sex, and other vices previously confined to the underworld—was due in no small measure to the military experience of millions of American men. Lower-class men set the social tone in the boot camps and barracks, leading respectable recruits and draftees to acquire vices (and sometimes diseases) they took back to civilian life.43
The classic example of the barracks effect was the late Richard Nixon. A devout Quaker when he went into the Navy, Nixon proceeded to learn to drink, smoke cigars, play poker, and swear, well, like a sailor. The famous expletives deleted of the Watergate tapes—mainly "damn," "hell," "Christ," "Goddam," and "crap," with an occasional "shit" or "asshole"—were vestiges of Navy bull-session talk, grafted by the accident of military service onto what had originally been a very different vocabulary.44
The armed forces offer important clues to the behavior and disorderly potential of armed, unmarried men in groups. Historically the American military has brought together young men and prepared them, technically and psychologically, to kill their enemies. "On the last day of training before leaving for Vietnam," recalled one marine,
We were ushered into a clearing where a staff sergeant stood holding a rabbit. He stroked and petted it. As soon as we were all seated, with no word of explanation, he crushed its head with a rock and proceeded to actually skin and disembowel the animal with his bare hands and teeth while showering the entrails on us. As we left the clearing he stood there with fur all around his mouth and blood running down his throat. The intended message was that one was going into a war and civilization and all its emotional vestiges must be left behind.45
Intended messages can have unintended consequences. Armed forces foment male violence to serve the ends of state violence, but in doing so they create a social monster, a large group of aggressive youth in a supermasculine environment dominated by unmarried, lower-class men. To control the monster in peacetime, as well as to maintain discipline during battle, armed forces require elaborate rules and strict punishments— the system of rank and command, drill instructors, courts-martial, and so forth. George Armstrong Custer, who was more anxious to keep his men from drink than from massed Indian warriors, went so far as to impound their pay until they were away from the whiskey-peddling sutlers. Unspent greenbacks were found blowing among the corpses at the Little Big Horn.46
At best, disciplinary and preventive measures keep soldiers' behavior within manageable limits. Armed forces partially isolate and contain the disorderly potential of their recruits, but they do not eliminate it, as the long history of military vice and criminality attests. When wars wind down and troops become inactive, demoralized or dispersed, trouble always follows. General George Washington complained, with odd exactitude, that seven-elevenths of his troops were close to mutiny at the end of the Revolutionary War. He had to post extra guards to keep them from rioting and insulting their officers. Violent, disorderly, and drunken soldiers were a constant problem during Florida's Seminole Wars, especially during lulls in the fighting or at the end of campaigns. Similar excesses occurred in the last stages of the Mexican War, prompting a disgusted quartermaster's wife to declare "an inactive army ... a perfect hotbed of evil." Frontier garrison duty—lonely, boring, dispiriting work that drove men to drink, vandalism, desertion, and suicide—was no better. "My experience has taught me," cautioned an officer stationed in Texas in 1856, "to recommend no young man to enter the service." The officer's name was Robert E. Lee.47
The end of the Civil War gave rise to an especially large crime wave. Violent offenses rose by nearly 60 percent in New York City in 1865, an increase attributed to "the rough material turned loose upon society by the close of the war and the breaking up of armies." Two-thirds of all those committed to northern state prisons in 1866 were veterans. Crime was sufficiently brisk in Massachusetts to require construction of a new state penitentiary. It was even worse in the South, where emancipation cheapened black life and bitterness inspired racial depredations. A thousand freedmen were killed in Texas between 1865 and 1868, many by angry veterans and for reasons no better than spite.48
The armed forces, in other words, have acted throughout American history as a giant sponge. In times of mobilization and combat they have absorbed the most dangerous elements of society; in times of demobilization and peace they have discharged them and their acquired vices, lethal skills, and war-surplus guns back into society. If, as after World War II, most of the young veterans returned to families or formed new ones, the effects of mass discharge were mitigated. If, however, a sizable number of veterans either did not marry or divorced their spouses, as after the Vietnam War, the negative effects of military service could be of a more serious and long-lasting character.
Violence and disorder occur most often in groups of armed, touchy, bigoted, intoxicated, undisciplined, unparented, unmarried, and irreligious young men. For the first three centuries of American history, groups of such men were found primarily along the frontier, a shifting region that, apart from its farming and religious communities, had a deserved reputation for violence and disorder. It also had more than its share of single young men who migrated there in sufficient numbers to produce an abnormal population structure. How and why this abnormality occurred, and with what exceptions, is the subject to which we now turn.