In the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions: 50 per 100,000 in Abilene, Kansas, 100 in Dodge City, 229 in Fort Griffin, Texas, and 1,500 in Wichita.96 The causes were right out of Hobbes. The criminal justice system was underfunded, inept, and often corrupt. “In 1877,” notes Courtwright, “some five thousand men were on the wanted list in Texas alone, not a very encouraging sign of efficiency in law enforcement.”97 Self-help justice was the only way to deter horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other brigands. The guarantor of its deterrent threat was a reputation for resolve that had to be defended at all costs, epitomized by the epitaph on a Colorado grave marker: “He Called Bill Smith a Liar.”98 One eyewitness described the casus belli of a fight that broke out during a card game in the caboose of a cattle train. One man remarked, “I don’t like to play cards with a dirty deck.” A cowboy from a rival company thought he said “dirty neck,” and when the gunsmoke cleared, one man was dead and three wounded.99
It wasn’t just cowboy country that developed in Hobbesian anarchy; so did parts of the West settled by miners, railroad workers, loggers, and itinerant laborers. Here is an assertion of property rights found attached to a post during the California Gold Rush of 1849:All and everybody, this is my claim, fifty feet on the gulch, cordin to Clear Creek District Law, backed up by shotgun amendments.... Any person found trespassing on this claim will be persecuted to the full extent of the law. This is no monkey tale butt I will assert my rites at the pint of the sicks shirter if leagally necessary so taik head and good warning.100
Courtwright cites an average annual homicide rate at the time of 83 per 100,000 and points to “an abundance of other evidence that Gold Rush California was a brutal and unforgiving place. Camp Names were mimetic: Gouge Eye, Murderers Bar, Cut-Throat Gulch, Graveyard Flat. There was a Hangtown, a Helltown, a Whiskeytown, and a Gomorrah, though, interestingly, no Sodom.”101 Mining boom towns elsewhere in the West also had annual homicide rates in the upper gallery: 87 per 100,000 in Aurora, Nevada; 105 in Leadville, Colorado; 116 in Bodie, California; and a whopping 24,000 (almost one in four) in Benton, Wyoming.
In figure 3–16 I’ve plotted the trajectory of western violence, using snapshots of annual homicide rates that Roth provides for a given region at two or more times. The curve for California shows a rise around the 1849 Gold Rush, but then, together with that of the southwestern states, it shows the signature of the Civilizing Process: a greater-than-tenfold decline in homicide rates, from the range of 100 to 200 per 100,000 people to the range of 5 to 15 (though, as in the South, the rates did not continue to fall into the 1s and 2s of Europe and New England). I’ve included the decline for the California ranching counties, like those studied by Ellickson, to show how their current norm-governed coexistence came only after a long period of lawless violence.
FIGURE 3–16. Homicide rates in the southwestern United States and California, 1830–1914
Sources: Data from Roth, 2009, whites only. California (estimates): pp. 183, 360, 404. California ranching counties: p. 355. Southwest, 1850 (estimate): p. 354. Southwest, 1914 (Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico): p. 404. Estimates have been multiplied by 0.65 to convert the rate from per-adults to per-people; see Roth, 2009, p. 495.
So at least five of the major regions of the United States—the Northeast, the middle Atlantic states, the coastal South, California, and the Southwest—underwent civilizing processes, but at different times and to different extents. The decline of violence in the American West lagged that in the East by two centuries and spanned the famous 1890 announcement of the closing of the American frontier, which symbolically marked the end of anarchy in the United States.
Anarchy was not the only cause of the mayhem in the Wild West and other violent zones in expanding America such as laborers’ camps, hobo villages, and Chinatowns (as in, “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown”). Courtwright shows that the wildness was exacerbated by a combination of demography and evolutionary psychology. These regions were peopled by young, single men who had fled impoverished farms and urban ghettos to seek their fortune in the harsh frontier. The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.102 Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.
The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call “cads versus dads.”103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the “cad” end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women. Also favoring cads is a milieu in which women are more plentiful but some of the men can monopolize them. In these settings it can pay to gamble with one’s life because, as Daly and Wilson have noted, “any creature that is recognizably on track toward complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory.”104 The ecosystem that selects for the “dad” setting is one with an equal number of men and women and monogamous matchups between them. In those circumstances, violent competition offers the men no reproductive advantages, but it does threaten them with a big disadvantage: a man cannot support his children if he is dead.
Another biological contribution to frontier violence was neurobiological rather than sociobiological, namely the ubiquity of liquor. Alcohol interferes with synaptic transmission throughout the cerebrum, especially in the prefrontal cortex (see figure 8–3), the region responsible for self-control. An inebriated brain is less inhibited sexually, verbally, and physically, giving us idioms like beer goggles, roaring drunk, and Dutch courage. Many studies have shown that people with a tendency toward violence are more likely to act on it when they are under the influence of alcohol.105
The West was eventually tamed not just by flinty-eyed marshals and hanging judges but by an influx of women.106 The Hollywood westerns’ “prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch” captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient. Widows, spinsters, and young single women sought their fortunes in the marriage market, encouraged by the lonely men themselves and by municipal and commercial officials who became increasingly exasperated by the degeneracy of their western hellholes. As the women arrived, they used their bargaining position to transform the West into an environment better suited to their interests. They insisted that the men abandon their brawling and boozing for marriage and family life, encouraged the building of schools and churches, and shut down saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and other rivals for the men’s attention. Churches, with their coed membership, Sunday morning discipline, and glorification of norms on temperance, added institutional muscle to the women’s civilizing offensive. Today we guffaw at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (with its ax-wielding tavern terrorist Carrie Nation) and at the Salvation Army, whose anthem, according to the satire, includes the lines “We never eat cookies ‘cause cookies have yeast / And one little bite turns a man to a beast.” But the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in maledominated enclaves.
The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman
he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause. When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter.107 The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you’re mine, I walk the line.
An appreciation of the Civilizing Process in the American West and rural South helps to make sense of the American political landscape today. Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelical Christianity, “family values,” and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue staters’ timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.
DECIVILIZATION IN THE 1960s
But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out . . . in.
—John Lennon, “Revolution 1”
For all the lags and mismatches between the historical trajectories of the United States and Europe, they did undergo one trend in synchrony: their rates of violence did a U-turn in the 1960s.108 Figures 3–1 through 3–4 show that European countries underwent a bounce in homicide rates that brought them back to levels they had said goodbye to a century before. And figure 3–10 shows that in the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof. After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980.109 The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.110
The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture, the political scene, and everyday life. Mugger jokes became a staple of comedians, with mentions of Central Park getting an instant laugh as a well-known death trap. New Yorkers imprisoned themselves in their apartments with batteries of latches and deadbolts, including the popular “police lock,” a steel bar with one end anchored in the floor and the other propped up against the door. The section of downtown Boston not far from where I now live was called the Combat Zone because of its endemic muggings and stabbings. Urbanites quit other American cities in droves, leaving burned-out cores surrounded by rings of suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities. Books, movies, and television series used intractable urban violence as their backdrop, including Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelinman-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car. A fear of crime helped elect decades of conservative politicians, including Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Law and Order” platform (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue), George H. W. Bush in 1988 with his insinuation that Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had approved a prison furlough program that had released a rapist, and many senators and congressmen who promised to “get tough on crime.” Though the popular reaction was overblown—far more people are killed every year in car accidents than in homicides, especially among those who don’t get into arguments with young men in bars—the sense that violent crime had multiplied was not a figment of their imaginations.
The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed. Social theorists in 1962 would have happily bet that these fortunate conditions would lead to a continuing era of low crime. And they would have lost their shirts.
Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.
An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs.111 One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.112 Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent too.
Many criminologists have concluded that the 1960s crime surge cannot be explained by the usual socioeconomic variables but was caused in large part by a change in cultural norms. Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change. The political scientist James Q. Wilson has argued that demographics were an important trigger after all, not because of the absolute numbers of young people but because of their relative numbers. He makes the point by commenting on a quotation from the demographer Norman Ryder:“There is a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized and turned into contributors to fulfillment of the various functions requisite to societal survival.” That “invasion” is the coming of age of a new generation of young people. Every society copes with this enormous socialization process more or less successfully, but occasionally that process is literally swamped by a quantitative discontinuity in the number of persons involved.... In 1950 and still in 1960 the “invading army” (those aged fourteen to twenty-four) were outnumbered three to one by the size of the “defending army” (those aged twenty-five to sixty-four). By 1970 the ranks of the former had grown so fast that they were only outnumbered two to one by the latter, a state of affairs that had not existed since 1910.113
Subsequent analyses showed that this explanation is not, by itself, satisfactory. Age cohorts that are larger than their predecessors do not, in general, commit more crimes.114 But I think Wilson was on to something when he
linked the 1960s crime boom to a kind of intergenerational decivilizing process. In many ways the new generation tried to push back against the eightcentury movement described by Norbert Elias.
The baby boomers were unusual (I know, we baby boomers are always saying we’re unusual) in sharing an emboldening sense of solidarity, as if their generation were an ethnic group or a nation. (A decade later it was pretentiously referred to as “Woodstock Nation.”) Not only did they outnumber the older generation, but thanks to new electronic media, they felt the strength of their numbers. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up with television. And television, especially in the three-network era, allowed them to know that other baby boomers were sharing their experiences, and to know that the others knew that they knew. This common knowledge, as economists and logicians call it, gave rise to a horizontal web of solidarity that cut across the vertical ties to parents and authorities that had formerly isolated young people from one another and forced them to kowtow to their elders.115 Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.
The baby boomers were bonded by another new technology of solidarity, first marketed by an obscure Japanese company called Sony: the transistor radio. The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios. I can still remember the thrill of tuning in to signals from New York radio stations bouncing off the late-night ionosphere into my bedroom in Montreal, listening to Motown and Dylan and the British invasion and psychedelia and feeling that something was happening here, but Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was.
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