Who’d be plagued with a wife
That could set himself free
With a rope or a knife
Or a good stick, like me? 43
Even Mother Goose nursery rhymes, which mostly date from the 17th and 18th centuries, are jarring by the standards of what we let small children hear today. Cock Robin is murdered in cold blood. A single mother living in substandard housing has numerous illegitimate children and abuses them with whipping and starvation. Two unsupervised children are allowed to go on a dangerous errand; Jack sustains a head injury that could leave him with brain damage, while Jill’s condition is unknown. A drifter confesses that he threw an old man down the stairs. Georgie Porgie sexually harasses underage girls, leaving them with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Humpty Dumpty remains in critical condition after a crippling accident. A negligent mother leaves a baby unattended on a treetop, with disastrous results. A blackbird swoops down on a domestic employee hanging up laundry and maliciously wounds her nose. Three vision-impaired mice are mutilated with a carving knife. And here comes a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper to chop off your head! A recent article in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood measured the rates of violence in different genres of children’s entertainment. The television programs had 4.8 violent scenes per hour; the nursery rhymes had 52.2.44
HONOR IN EUROPE AND THE EARLY UNITED STATES
If you have an American ten-dollar bill handy, look at the man portrayed on it and give a moment’s thought to his life and death. Alexander Hamilton is one of American history’s most luminous figures. As a coauthor of the Federalist Papers, he helped to articulate the philosophical basis of democracy. As America’s first secretary of the treasury, he devised the institutions that support modern market economies. At other times in his life he led three battalions in the Revolutionary War, helped launch the Constitutional Convention, commanded a national army, established the Bank of New York, served in the New York legislature, and founded the New York Post.45
Yet in 1804 this brilliant man did something that by today’s standards was astonishingly stupid. Hamilton had long exchanged bitchy remarks with his rival Vice President Aaron Burr, and when Hamilton refused to disavow a criticism of Burr that had been attributed to him, Burr challenged him to a duel. Common sense was just one of many forces that could have pulled him away from a date with death.46 The custom of dueling was already on the wane, and Hamilton’s state of residence, New York, had outlawed it. Hamilton had lost a son to a duel, and in a letter explaining his response to Burr’s challenge, he enumerated five objections to the practice. But he agreed to the duel anyway, because, he wrote, “what men of the world denominate honor” left him no other choice. The following morning he was rowed across the Hudson to face Burr on the New Jersey Palisades. Burr would not be the last vice president to shoot a man, but he was a better shot than Dick Cheney, and Hamilton died the following day.
Nor was Hamilton the only American statesman to be drawn into a duel. Henry Clay fought in one, and James Monroe thought the better of challenging John Adams only because Adams was president at the time. Among the other faces on American currency, Andrew Jackson, immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill, carried bullets from so many duels that he claimed to “rattle like a bag of marbles” when he walked. Even the Great Emancipator on the five-dollar bill, Abraham Lincoln, accepted a challenge to fight a duel, though he set the conditions to ensure that it would not be consummated.
Formal dueling was not, of course, an American invention. It emerged during the Renaissance as a measure to curtail assassinations, vendettas, and street brawls among aristocrats and their retinues. When one man felt that his honor had been impugned, he could challenge the other to a duel and cap the violence at a single death, with no hard feelings among the defeated man’s clan or entourage. But as the essayist Arthur Krystal observes, “The gentry . . . took honor so seriously that just about every offense became an offense against honor. Two Englishmen dueled because their dogs had fought. Two Italian gentlemen fell out over the respective merits of Tasso and Ariosto, an argument that ended when one combatant, mortally wounded, admitted that he had not read the poet he was championing. And Byron’s great-uncle William, the fifth Baron Byron, killed a man after disagreeing about whose property furnished more game.”47
Dueling persisted in the 18th and 19th centuries, despite denunciations by the church and prohibitions by many governments. Samuel Johnson defended the custom, writing, “A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house.” Dueling sucked in such luminaries as Voltaire, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and the mathematician Évariste Galois, the last two fatally. The buildup, climax, and denouement of a duel were made to order for fiction writers, and the dramatic possibilities were put to use by Sir Walter Scott, Dumas père, de Maupassant, Conrad, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Thomas Mann.
The career of dueling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air. When gentlemen agreed to a duel, they were fighting not for money or land or even women but for honor, the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that everyone else believes that it exists. Honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humor.48 The institution of formal dueling petered out in the English-speaking world by the middle of the 19th century, and in the rest of Europe in the following decades. Historians have noted that the institution was buried not so much by legal bans or moral disapproval as by ridicule. When “solemn gentlemen went to the field of honor only to be laughed at by the younger generation, that was more than any custom, no matter how sanctified by tradition, could endure.” 49 Today the expression “Take ten paces, turn, and fire” is more likely to call to mind Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam than “men of honor.”
THE 20th CENTURY
As our tour of the history of forgotten violence comes within sight of the present, the landmarks start to look more familiar. But even the zone of cultural memory from the last century has relics that feel like they belong to a foreign country.
Take the decline of martial culture.50 The older cities in Europe and the United States are dotted with public works that flaunt the nation’s military might. Pedestrians can behold statues of commanders on horseback, beefcake sculptures of well-hung Greek warriors, victory arches crowned by chariots, and iron fencing wrought into the shape of swords and spears. Subway stops are named for triumphant battles: the Paris Métro has an Austerlitz station; the London Underground has a Waterloo station. Photos from a century ago show men in gaudy military dress uniforms parading on national holidays and hobnobbing with aristocrats at fancy dinners. The visual branding of long-established states is heavy on aggressive iconography, such as projectiles, edged weapons, birds of prey, and predatory cats. Even famously pacifistic Massachusetts has a seal that features an amputated arm brandishing a sword and a Native American holding a bow and arrow above the state motto, “With the sword we seek peace, but under liberty.” Not to be outdone, neighboring New Hampshire adorns its license plates with the motto “Live Free or Die.”
But in the West today public places are no longer named after military victories. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead. Military men are inconspicuous in public life, with drab uniforms and little prestige among the hoi polloi. In London’s Trafalgar Square, the plinth across from the big lions and Nelson’s column was recently topped with a sculpture that is about as far from military iconography as one can imagine: a nude, pregnant artist who had been born without arms and legs. The World War I battlefield in Ypres, Belgium, inspiration for the poem “In Flanders Fields” and the poppies worn in Commonwealth countries on Novembe
r 11, has just sprouted a memorial to the thousand soldiers who were shot in that war for desertion—men who at the time were despised as contemptible cowards. And the two most recent American state mottoes are Alaska’s “North to the Future” and Hawaii’s “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness” (though when Wisconsin solicited a replacement for “America’s Dairyland,” one of the entries was “Eat Cheese or Die”).
Conspicuous pacifism is especially striking in Germany, a nation that was once so connected to martial values that the words Teutonic and Prussian became synonyms for rigid militarism. As recently as 1964 the satirist Tom Lehrer expressed a common fear at the prospect of West Germany participating in a multilateral nuclear coalition. In a sarcastic lullaby, the singer reassures a baby:Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn’t happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.
The fear of a revanchist Germany was revived in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys made plans to reunite. Yet today German culture remains racked with soul-searching over its role in the world wars and permeated with revulsion against anything that smacks of military force. Violence is taboo even in video games, and when Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were “liberating” rather than conquering their opponents’ territories.)51 German pacifism is not just symbolic: in 2003 half a million Germans marched to oppose the American-led invasion of Iraq. The American secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously wrote the country off as part of “Old Europe.” Given the history of ceaseless war on that continent, the remark may have been the most flagrant display of historical amnesia since the student who complained about the clichés in Shakespeare.
Many of us have lived through another change in Western sensibilities toward military symbolism. When the ultimate military weapons, nuclear bombs, were unveiled in the 1940s and 1950s, people were not repelled, even though the weapons had recently snuffed out a quarter of a million lives and were threatening to annihilate hundreds of millions more. No, the world found them charming! A sexy bathing suit, the bikini, was named after a Micronesian atoll that had been vaporized by nuclear tests, because the designer compared the onlookers’ reaction to an atomic blast. Ludicrous “civil defense” measures like backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover classroom drills encouraged the delusion that a nuclear attack would be no big deal. To this day triple-triangle fallout shelter signs rust above the basement entrances of many American apartment buildings and schools. Many commercial logos from the 1950s featured mushroom clouds, including Atomic Fireball Jawbreaker candies, the Atomic Market (a mom-and-pop grocery store not far from MIT), and the Atomic Café, which lent its name to a 1982 documentary on the bizarre nonchalance with which the world treated nuclear weapons through the early 1960s, when horror finally began to sink in.
Another major change we have lived through is an intolerance of displays of force in everyday life. In earlier decades a man’s willingness to use his fists in response to an insult was the sign of respectability.52 Today it is the sign of a boor, a symptom of impulse control disorder, a ticket to anger management therapy.
An incident from 1950 illustrates the change. President Harry Truman had seen an unkind review in the Washington Post of a performance by his daughter, Margaret, an aspiring singer. Truman wrote to the critic on White House stationery: “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.” Though every writer can sympathize with the impulse, today a public threat to commit aggravated assault against a critic would seem buffoonish, indeed sinister, if it came from a person in power. But at the time Truman was widely admired for his paternal chivalry.
And if you recognize the expressions “ninety-seven-pound weakling” and “get sand kicked in your face,” you are probably familiar with the iconic ads for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding program, which ran in magazines and comic books starting in the 1940s. In the typical storyline, an ectomorph is assaulted on the beach in front of his girlfriend. He skulks home, kicks a chair, gambles a ten-cent stamp, receives instructions for an exercise program, and returns to the beach to wreak revenge on his assailant, restoring his standing with the beaming young woman (figure 1–1).
When it came to the product, Atlas was ahead of his time: the popularity of bodybuilding soared in the 1980s. But when it came to marketing, he belonged to a different era. Today the ads for gyms and exercise paraphernalia don’t feature the use of fisticuffs to restore manly honor. The imagery is narcissistic, almost homoerotic. Bulging pectorals and rippling abdominals are shown in arty close-up for both sexes to admire. The advantage they promise is in beauty, not might.
FIGURE 1–1. Everyday violence in a bodybuilding ad, 1940s
Even more revolutionary than the scorn for violence between men is the scorn for violence against women. Many baby boomers are nostalgic for The Honeymooners, a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Gleason as a burly bus driver whose get-rich-quick schemes are ridiculed by his sensible wife, Alice. In one of the show’s recurring laugh lines, an enraged Ralph shakes his fist at her and bellows, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . . POW, right in the kisser!” (Or sometimes “Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!”) Alice always laughs it off, not because she has contempt for a wife-beater but because she knows that Ralph is not man enough to do it. Nowadays our sensitivity to violence against women makes this kind of comedy in a mainstream television program unthinkable. Or consider the Life magazine ad from 1952 in figure 1–2.
Today this ad’s playful, eroticized treatment of domestic violence would put it beyond the pale of the printable. It was by no means unique. A wife is also spanked in a 1950s ad for Van Heusen shirts, and a 1953 ad for Pitney-Bowes postage meters shows an exasperated boss screaming at a stubborn secretary with the caption “Is it always illegal to kill a woman?” 53
FIGURE 1–2. Domestic violence in a coffee ad, 1952
And then there’s the longest-running musical, The Fantasticks, with its Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like ditty “It Depends on What You Pay” (whose lyrics were based on a 1905 translation of Edmond Rostand’s play Les Romanesques). Two men plot a kidnapping in which the son of one will rescue the daughter of the other:You can get the rape emphatic.
You can get the rape polite.
You can get the rape with Indians:
A very charming sight.
You can get the rape on horseback;
They’ll all say it’s new and gay.
So you see the sort of rape
Depends on what you pay.
Though the word rape referred to abduction rather than sexual assault, between the opening of the play in 1960 and the end of its run in 2002 sensibilities about rape changed. As the librettist Tom Jones (no relation to the Welsh singer) explained to me:As time went on, I began to feel anxious about the word. Slowly, ever so slowly, things began to register on me. Headlines in the papers. Accounts of brutal gang rapes. And of “date rapes” too. I began to think: “this isn’t funny.” True, we weren’t talking about “real rape,” but there is no doubt that part of the laughter came from the shock value of using the word in this comic manner.
In the early 1970s, the producer of the play refused Jones’s request to rewrite the lyrics but allowed him to add an introduction to the song explaining the intended meaning of the word and to reduce the number of repetitions of it. After the play closed in 2002 Jones rewrote the lyrics from scratch for a 2006 restaging, and he has legally ensured that only the new version may be performed in any production of The Fantasticks anywhere in the world.54
Until recently, children too were legitimate targets of violence. Parents not only spanked their children—a punishment that today has bee
n outlawed in many countries—but commonly used a weapon like a hairbrush or paddle, or exposed the child’s buttocks to increase the pain and humiliation. In a sequence that was common in children’s stories through the 1950s, a mother warned a naughty child, “Wait till your father gets home,” whereupon the stronger parent would remove his belt and use it to flog the child. Other commonly depicted ways of punishing children with physical pain included sending them to bed without dinner and washing their mouths out with soap. Children who were left to the mercy of unrelated adults were treated even more brutally. Within recent memory, many schoolchildren were disciplined in ways that today would be classified as “torture” and that would put their teachers in jail.55
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 6