The rest of the Northeast also saw a plunge from triple-digit and high-double-digit homicide rates to the single digits typical of the world’s countries today. The Dutch colony of New Netherland, with settlements from Connecticut to Delaware, saw a sharp decline in its early decades, from 68 to 15 per 100,000 (figure 3–13). But when the data resume in the 19th century, we start to see the United States diverging from the two mother countries. Though the more rural and ethnically homogeneous parts of New England (Vermont and New Hampshire) continue to hover in the peaceful basement beneath 1 in 100,000, the city of Boston became more violent in the middle of the 19th century, overlapping cities in former New Netherland such as New York and Philadelphia.
FIGURE 3–13. Homicide rates in the northeastern United States, 1636–1900
Sources: Data from Roth, 2009, whites only. New England: pp. 38, 62. New Netherland: pp. 38, 50. New York: p. 185. New Hampshire and Vermont: p. 184. Philadelphia: p. 185. Data representing a range of years are plotted at the midpoint of the range. Estimates have been multiplied by 0.65 to convert the rate from per-adults to per-people; see Roth, 2009, p. 495. Estimates for “unrelated adults” have been multiplied by 1.1 to make them approximately commensurable with estimates for all adults.
The zigzags for the northeastern cities show two twists in the American version of the Civilizing Process. The middling altitude of these lines along the homicide scale, down from the ceiling but hovering well above the floor, suggests that the consolidation of a frontier under government control can bring the annual homicide rate down by an order of magnitude or so, from around 100 per 100,000 to around 10. But unlike what happened in Europe, where the momentum continued all the way down to the neighborhood of 1, in America the rate usually got stuck in the 5-to-15 range, where we find it today. Roth suggests that once an effective government has pacified the populace from the 100 to the 10 range, additional reductions depend on the degree to which people accept the legitimacy of the government, its laws, and the social order. Eisner, recall, made a similar observation about the Civilizing Process in Europe.
The other twist on the American version of the Civilizing Process is that in many of Roth’s mini-datasets, violence increased in the middle decades of the 19th century.80 The buildup and aftermath of the Civil War disrupted the social balance in many parts of the country, and the northeastern cities saw a wave of immigration from Ireland, which (as we have seen) lagged behind England in its homicide decline. Irish Americans in the 19th century, like African Americans in the 20th, were more pugnacious than their neighbors, in large part because they and the police did not take each other seriously.81 But in the second half of the 19th century police forces in American cities expanded, became more professional, and began to serve the criminal justice system rather than administering their own justice on the streets with their nightsticks. In major northern cities well into the 20th century, homicide rates for white Americans declined.82
FIGURE 3–14. Homicide rates among blacks and whites in New York and Philadelphia, 1797–1952
Sources: New York 1797–1845: Roth, 2009, p. 195. New York 1856–85: Average of Roth, 2009, p. 195, and Gurr, 1989a, p. 39. New York 1905–53: Gurr, 1989a, p. 39. Philadelphia: 1842–94: Roth, 2009, p. 195. Philadelphia 1907–28: Lane, 1989, p. 72 (15-year averages). Philadelphia, 1950s: Gurr, 1989a, pp. 38–39. Roth’s estimates have been multiplied by 0.65 to convert the rate from per-adults to per-people; see Roth, 2009, p. 495. His estimates for Philadelphia were, in addition, multiplied by 1.1 and 1.5 to compensate, respectively, for unrelated versus all victims and indictments versus homicides (Roth, 2009, p. 492). Data representing a range of years are plotted at the midpoint of the range.
But the second half of the 19th century also saw a fateful change. The graphs I have shown so far plot the rates for American whites. Figure 3–14 shows the rates for two cities in which black-on-black and white-on-white homicides can be distinguished. The graph reveals that the racial disparity in American homicide has not always been with us. In the northeastern cities, in New England, in the Midwest, and in Virginia, blacks and whites killed at similar rates throughout the first half of the 19th century. Then a gap opened up, and it widened even further in the 20th century, when homicides among African Americans skyrocketed, going from three times the white rate in New York in the 1850s to almost thirteen times the white rate a century later.83 A probe into the causes, including economic and residential segregation, could fill another book. But one of them, as we have seen, is that communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called “the code of the streets”) to defend their interests rather calling in the law.84
The first successful English settlements in America were in New England and Virginia, and a comparison of figure 3–13 and figure 3–15 might make you think that in their first century the two colonies underwent similar civilizing processes. Until, that is, you read the numbers on the vertical axis. They show that the graph for the Northeast runs from 0.1 to 100, while the graph for the Southeast runs from 1 to 1,000, ten times higher. Unlike the black-white gap, the North-South gap has deep roots in American history. The Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia started out more violent than New England, and though they descended into the moderate range (between 1 and 10 homicides per 100,000 people per year) and stayed there for most of the 19th century, other parts of the settled South bounced around in the low 10-to-100 range, such as the Georgia plantation counties shown on the graph. Many remote and mountainous regions, such as the Georgia backcountry and Tennessee-Kentucky border, continued to float in the uncivilized 100s, some of them well into the 19th century.
Why has the South had such a long history of violence? The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe. The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms—which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.
FIGURE 3–15. Homicide rates in the southeastern United States, 1620–1900
Sources: Data from Roth, 2009, whites only. Virginia (Chesapeake): pp. 39, 84. Virginia (Chesapeake and Shenandoah): p. 201. Georgia: p. 162. Tennessee-Kentucky: pp. 336–37. Zero value for Virginia, 1838, plotted as 1 since the log of 0 is undefined. Estimates have been multiplied by 0.65 to convert the rate from per-adults to per-people; see Roth, 2009, p. 495.
This power sharing, historians have noted, has always been sacred in the South. As Eric Monkkonen puts it, in the 19th century “the South had a deliberately weak state, eschewing things such as penitentiaries in favor of local, personal violence.”86 Homicides were treated lightly if the killing was deemed “reasonable,” and “most killings . . . in the rural South were reasonable, in the sense that the victim had not done everything possible to escape from the killer, that the killing resulted from a personal dispute, or because the killer and victim were the kinds of people who kill each other.”87
The South’s reliance on self-help justice has long been a part of its mythology. It was instilled early in life, such as in the maternal advice given to the young Andrew Jackson (the dueling president who claimed to rattle with bullets when he walked): “Never . . . sue anyone for slander or assault or battery; always settle those cases yourself.”88 It was flaunted by pugnaciou
s icons of the mountainous South like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, the “King of the Wild Frontier.” It fueled the war between the prototypical feuding families, the Hatfields and McCoys of the Kentucky–West Virginia backcountry. And it not only swelled the homicide statistics for as long as they have been recorded, but has left its mark on the southern psyche today.89
Self-help justice depends on the credibility of one’s prowess and resolve, and to this day the American South is marked by an obsession with credible deterrence, otherwise known as a culture of honor. The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment. The psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen have shown that this mindset continues to pervade southern laws, politics, and attitudes.90 Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels. In surveys, southerners do not endorse the use of violence in the abstract, but only to protect home and family. The laws of the southern states sanction this morality. They give a person wide latitude to kill in defense of self or property, put fewer restrictions on gun purchases, allow corporal punishment (“paddling”) in schools, and specify the death penalty for murder, which their judicial systems are happy to carry out. Southern men and women are more likely to serve in the military, to study at military academies, and to take hawkish positions on foreign policy.
In a series of ingenious experiments, Nisbett and Cohen also showed that honor looms large in the behavior of individual southerners. In one study, they sent fake letters inquiring about jobs to companies all over the country. Half of them contained the following confession:There is one thing I must explain, because I feel I must be honest and I want no misunderstandings. I have been convicted of a felony, namely manslaughter. You will probably want an explanation for this before you send me an application, so I will provide it. I got into a fight with someone who was having an affair with my fiancée. I lived in a small town, and one night this person confronted me in front of my friends at the bar. He told everyone that he and my fiancée were sleeping together. He laughed at me to my face and asked me to step outside if I was man enough. I was young and didn’t want to back down from a challenge in front of everyone. As we went into the alley, he started to attack me. He knocked me down, and he picked up a bottle. I could have run away and the judge said I should have, but my pride wouldn’t let me. Instead I picked up a pipe that was laying in the alley and hit him with it. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he died a few hours later at the hospital. I realize that what I did was wrong.
The other half contained a similar paragraph in which the applicant confessed to a felony conviction for grand theft auto, which, he said, he had foolishly committed to help support his wife and young children. In response to the letter confessing to the honor killing, companies based in the South and West were more likely than those in the North to send the letter-writer a job application, and their replies were warmer in tone. For example, the owner of one southern store apologized that she had no jobs available at the time and added:As for your problem of the past, anyone could probably be in the situation you were in. It was just an unfortunate incident that shouldn’t be held against you. Your honesty shows that you are sincere.... I wish you the best of luck for your future. You have a positive attitude and a willingness to work. Those are the qualities that businesses look for in an employee. Once you get settled, if you are near here, please stop in and see us.91
No such warmth came from companies based in the North, nor from any company when the letter confessed to auto theft. Indeed, northern companies were more forgiving of the auto theft than the honor killing; the southern and western companies were more forgiving of the honor killing than the auto theft.
Nisbett and Cohen also captured the southern culture of honor in the lab. Their subjects were not bubbas from the bayous but affluent students at the University of Michigan who had lived in the South for at least six years. Students were recruited for a psychology experiment on “limited response time conditions on certain facets of human judgment” (a bit of gobbledygook to hide the real purpose of the study). In the hallway on their way to the lab, the students had to pass by an accomplice of the experimenter who was filing papers in a cabinet. In half of the cases, when the student brushed past the accomplice, he slammed the drawer shut and muttered, “Asshole.” Then the experimenter (who was kept in the dark as to whether the student had been insulted) welcomed the student into the lab, observed his demeanor, gave him a questionnaire, and drew a blood sample. The students from the northern states, they found, laughed off the insult and behaved no differently from the control group who had entered without incident. But the insulted students from the southern states walked in fuming. They reported lower self-esteem in a questionnaire, and their blood samples showed elevated levels of testosterone and of cortisol, a stress hormone. They behaved more dominantly toward the experimenter and shook his hand more firmly, and when approaching another accomplice in the narrow hallway on their way out, they refused to step aside to let him pass.92
Is there an exogenous cause that might explain why the South rather than the North developed a culture of honor? Certainly the brutality needed to maintain a slave economy might have been a factor, but the most violent parts of the South were backcountry regions that never depended on plantation slavery (see figure 3–15). Nisbett and Cohen were influenced by David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed, a history of the British colonization of the United States, and zeroed in on the origins of the first colonists from different parts of Europe. The northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker, Dutch, and German farmers, but the interior South was largely settled by Scots-Irish, many of them sheepherders, who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central government. Herding, Nisbett and Cohen suggest, may have been an exogenous cause of the culture of honor. Not only does a herder’s wealth lie in stealable physical assets, but those assets have feet and can be led away in an eyeblink, far more easily than land can be stolen out from under a farmer. Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation. Nisbett and Cohen suggest that the Scots-Irish brought their culture of honor with them and kept it alive when they took up herding in the South’s mountainous frontier. Though contemporary southerners are no longer shepherds, cultural mores can persist long after the ecological circumstances that gave rise to them are gone, and to this day southerners behave as if they have to be tough enough to deter livestock rustlers.
The herding hypothesis requires that people cling to an occupational strategy for centuries after it has become dysfunctional, but the more general theory of a culture of honor does not depend on that assumption. People often take up herding in mountainous areas because it’s hard to grow crops on mountains, and mountainous areas are often anarchic because they are the hardest regions for a state to conquer, pacify, and administer. The immediate trigger for self-help justice, then, is anarchy, not herding itself. Recall that the ranchers of Shasta County have herded cattle for more than a century, yet when one of them suffers a minor loss of cattle or property, he is expected to “lump it,” not lash out with violence to defend his honor. Also, a recent study that compared southern counties in their rates of violence and their suitability for herding found no correlation when other variables were controlled.93
So it’s sufficient to assume that settlers from the remote parts of Britain ended up in the remote parts of the South, and that both regions were lawless for a long time, fostering a culture of honor. We still have to explain why their culture of honor is so self-sustaining. After all, a functioning criminal justice system has been in place in southern states for some time now. Perhaps honor has staying power because the first man who dares to abjure it would be heaped with contempt for cowardice and treated as an easy mark.
The American West, even more than the American South, was a zone of anarchy until well into
the 20th century. The cliché of Hollywood westerns that “the nearest sheriff is ninety miles away” was the reality in millions of square miles of territory, and the result was the other cliché of Hollywood westerns, ever-present violence. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, drinking in American popular culture during his cross-country escape with Lolita, savors the “ox-stunning fisticuffs” of the cowboy movies:There was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced, blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules, nothing to show but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero embracing his gorgeous frontier bride.94
In Violent Land, the historian David Courtwright shows that the Hollywood horse operas were accurate in the levels of violence they depicted, if not in their romanticized image of cowboys. The life of a cowboy alternated between dangerous, backbreaking work and payday binges of drinking, gambling, whoring, and brawling. “For the cowboy to become a symbol of the American experience required an act of moral surgery. The cowboy as mounted protector and risk-taker was remembered. The cowboy as dismounted drunk sleeping it off on the manure pile behind the saloon was forgotten.”95
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 16