Essay: VIOLENCE & HISTORY | TIME

“Your poor country,” sympathized a Japanese diplomat, speaking to a friend in Washington. “I had thought that after Dallas this could not happen again. There is enough misunderstanding about you abroad. This will make it even worse. How could this happen?”

The King assassination and the subsequent riots have reinforced a world image of America the Violent: a vast, driving, brutal land that napalms Vietnamese peasants and murders its visionaries along with its Presidents. It is an image that has been persistently built up not only by bloody fact but also by fiction—in books, films and television—all the way from the westerns through the gangster stories to the more recent outpouring of sadomasochism that seems to demand a new legal definition of obscenity as cruelty. When new events put exclamation points behind the impression, and Negro Militant H. Rap Brown says that “violence is as American as cherry pie,” heads nod in agreement around the world.

As ever, shocked foreigners seem to overlook conditions elsewhere. U.S. violence has never matched the Japanese rape of Nanking or the massacre of 400,000 Communists in Indonesia. Watts and Detroit were tea parties compared with assorted mass slaughters in India, Nigeria and Red China. What country has the world’s highest homicide rate? El Salvador, with 30.1 deaths per 100,000 people. In comparison, the U.S. rate stands at around 5.

And yet foreigners can and should expect the U.S. to rise far above its present status as the world’s most violent advanced country. Among industrialized countries, Canada’s homicide rate is 1.3 per 100,000; France’s is .8; England’s only .7. Within the U.S., the rate typically surges upward from .5 in Vermont to 11.4 in Alabama. In some Northern ghettos, it hits 90, just as it did some years ago in the King murder city of Memphis. Texas, home of the shoot-out and divorce-by-pistol, leads the U.S. with about 1,000 homicides a year, more than 14 other states combined. Houston is the U.S. murder capital: 244 last year, more than in England, which has 45 million more people. And murder statistics hardly measure the scope of U.S. violence.

Paradoxically, the first fact to be faced is a happy one: there is much evidence suggesting that violent crime in the U.S. has—at least until recently—not been increasing relative to the population. Although the FBI reports a 35% total increase during the 1960s, many experts argue that this figure overlooks population growth, improved police statistics and the new willingness of the poor to report crimes that used to go unrecorded. On the whole, Americans are now more apt to settle their arguments through legal redress, or at least nonviolent cunning, rather than with fists, knives and guns. Organized crime has shifted from blatant violence to financial infighting; today’s juvenile gangs are more talkers than fighters; very few labor-dispute slayings have occurred since the 1950s.

Whereas the South once accepted public lynchings as a community sport, the white racists who still kill Negroes are now increasingly prosecuted and punished. In three decades, the U.S. incidence of murder and robbery has decreased relative to the population by 30%. Says Sociologist Marvin Wolfgang, president of the American Society of Criminology: “Contrary to the rise in public fear, crimes of violence are not significantly increasing.”

The Power of Fear

Unfortunately, that very fear has a way of increasing violence. Fearful citizens ignore the victim’s cry for help; by shunning parks and other public places, they free muggers to attack isolated pedestrians. The U.S. mind is haunted by wanton multiple murder—16 people killed by a sniper in Austin, eight nurses slain by a demented drifter in Chicago. It is hard to convince the fearful that 80% of U.S. murders (half involve alcohol) are committed by antagonistic relatives or acquaintances, not strangers.

Now, above all, there is white fear of Negro attacks. While the Negro arrest rate for murder is ten times that among whites, most of the violent crimes committed by Negroes are against other Negroes. Of 172 Washington, D.C., murders in a recent two-year period, for example, only twelve were interracial. Yet fear that Negro riots are leading to some ghastly racial holocaust is fueling a vast, scandalously uncontrolled traffic in firearms that has equipped one-half of U.S. homes with 50 million guns, largely for “self-defense.” All this is rationalized by virtue of the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In fact, the right clearly applies to collective defense, as in a state militia. But Congress and most state legislatures refuse to regulate the gun craze, partly in fear of the political power of the 700,000-member National Rifle Association, which often seems to view America as still being Indian country. Only New York requires permits to own household pistols; only eight states require permits to buy them. Guns figure in about 60% of all U.S. murders; since 1900, they have killed 800,000 Americans (excluding wars).

Today’s fear of violence is rightly aimed at the terrifying anonymity of the big cities—of which 26, containing less than one-fifth of the U.S. population, account for more than half of all violent crimes. But this fear can be localized: violence is overwhelmingly a ghetto phenomenon; it is the slum dweller who suffers most and cries out for better police protection. In Atlanta, for example, the violent-crime rate in neighborhoods with incomes below $3,000 is eight times that among $9,000-income families.

Who are the violent? Primarily youth: the fatherless Negro boy aching to prove his manliness, the school dropout taunted by TV commercials offering what he cannot have and often incited by what he has learned about the Mickey Spillane brand of violence. Adding to the slum kid’s anger is all the middle-class hypocrisy about violence. “Good” people utterly delegate society’s dirty work to overworked white cops, few of whom are inclined to be Boy Scouts. The middle class denounces violence but wants the police to use it, and is then shocked when hordes of young hooligans respond in kind—vividly teaching irresponsible elders (most sharply disapprove) that looting is a handy way to grab the possessions they lack.

Of Men & Rats

The fearful middle class, Negro as well as white, can no longer afford to ignore violence, a phenomenon from which no human being is exempt. Freud held that man has a death instinct that must be satisfied in either suicide or aggression against others. Many modern psychiatrists disagree. Dr. Fredric Wertham, famed crusader against violence, argues that violence is learned behavior, a product of cultural influences such as violent comic books. The violent man, he says, is the socially alienated man.

Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian-born naturalist, believes that human aggressiveness is the instinct that powers not only self-preservation against enemies but also love and friendship for those who share the struggle. Overcoming obstacles provides selfesteem; lacking such fulfillment, man turns against handy targets—his wife, even himself. Polar explorers, deprived of quarrels with strangers, often start to hate one another; the antidote is smashing some inanimate object, like crockery. Accident-prone drivers may be victims of “displaced aggression.” The once ferocious Ute Indians, now shorn of war outlets, have the worst auto-accident rate on record.

Lorenz points out that men and rats share the dubious distinction of being the only carnivores with no innate inhibitions against attacking members of their own species. Early man was too weak to do so. But as he developed weapons, he learned to cherish the “warrior virtues” of truculent masculinity and pleasure in dominating others. Though he also developed moral restraints against killing, these are not natural and tend to collapse under stress. Seeking a really nonviolent community, anthropologists point with hope to the peace-loving pygmies of the Ituri rain forest in the Congo. Unlike other men, those “primitives” have no male-warrior hangup; they retreat from power-seeking neighbors—and hugely enjoy the sensual pleasures of eating, drinking, sex and laughter.

Modern man is often at his noblest in small-unit war, a caveman hangover. But peacetime culture bars such outlets, and when men fail to achieve the virility substitute of money, power or meaningful work, they can explode in violence. Not that man has a killer instinct; he simply does not fully realize the effect of pulling a trigger and blowing off another man’s head. Modern long-range weapons further blunt his sensibilities. Mussolini’s son extolled the bombing of the Ethiopians: “I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center of a cluster of tribesmen, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.”

In a moral sense, violence is not power but an act of despair, an admission of failure to find any other way to gain a goal. By definition, every society is committed to nonviolence; the violent are suicidal, for society must repress acts against law and order. Yet realistically, one cannot gloss over the fact that violence often pays off. In the violent subculture of a juvenile gang, the nonviolent are considered cowards, and violence produces not guilt but status.

As a Force for Reform

It is undeniable that all through history, violence has been the chief means of social reform. Even primitive Christians, proclaiming love, destroyed pagan temples to dramatize their cause. The Boston Tea Party had the same purpose. The 13th century King John’s Magna Carta illustrated the oldest inducement for social reform: fear of “revolution or worse.” To his credit, Marx argued against violence until societies were really ripe for change; most Western European labor terrorism disappeared as a result. But in romantic countries, including the U.S., revolutionary violence often became a mystique for purging feelings of inferiority. Explains Brandeis University Sociologist Lewis Coser: “The act of violence commits a man symbolically to the revolutionary movement and breaks his ties with his previous life. He is, so to speak, reborn.”

At first glance, group violence may not seem to be the U.S. paradigm. Individualists claw their way through the unrelieved shootings, stabbings, rapes and lynchings of American fiction; lone duelers against fate people the works of writers as various as Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Saul Bellow. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking and his numerous uptight descendants—the Western marshal, the private eye—are solitary scouts strewing the wilderness with dead Indians and renegades. Still, the singular misfits who tamed the frontier with bile, brawn and bowies were also members of often hostile groups—cattlemen v. sheepherders, for example. Indeed, U.S. history roils with political violence, much of it self-defense by countless groups against what they considered majority injustice.

The Revolution, a prime example, was followed by farmer uprisings over debts and taxes—the Shay and Whisky rebellions. In the mid-1800s, the nativist Know-Nothings fought rising Irish political power by killing Roman Catholics, burning churches and ultimately controlling 48% of the House of Representatives. In 1863, the Irish, fearing that Negroes would take their jobs while they were drafted into the Civil War, conducted a frightful race riot in New York City that killed an estimated 2,000 people and injured 8,000. The Civil War killed 500,000 soldiers—the equivalent of 3,000,000 in today’s U.S. Afterward, the supposedly defeated white South defeated Reconstruction with a guerrilla war in which the Ku Klux Klan and other whites killed thousands of would-be Negro voters, imposed segregation, and infected the North with the very racism that the Civil War supposedly ended. Over the years, a dozen or more major Northern race riots followed the same pattern: whites invading black neighborhoods and killing scores of Negroes.

Some experts see a possible direction for Negro protest in the history of the once brutally violent American labor movement. In the late 19th century, depressions triggered virtual revolutions when employers cut wages, imported scabs, tried to break unions. Strikes were then bitterly repressed by company cops or state militia; federal troops were called in often. The bloody railroad strikes of 1877 killed 150 people; the Rocky Mountain mining wars at the turn of the century killed 198, including a Governor. In Pennsylvania, a secret band of Irish miners called the Molly Maguires assassinated bosses in a Viet Cong-style attempt to win better working conditions. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) lauded and used terror tactics and in many areas were in turn murdered and mutilated. All in all, several thousand people died in labor disputes before the movement finally won its point in 1935, when federal law forced employers to recognize unions and engage in collective bargaining—dramatic proof that the U.S. can create a legal system for resolving even the most desperate have-not grievances.

Unfortunately, Negroes lack the organization and specific grievances that make labor disputes negotiable within a framework of rational group conflict. The basic Negro grievance is emotional: the white attitude toward Negroes. King tried to shame whites by nonviolence, by Negro suffering. The tragedy is that his remarkable success also produced white backlash, black militancy and a kind of moral vacuum in which hapless white police are left to cope with mindless ghetto explosions.

One ground for optimism is the remarkable effect of the President’s riot commission report, which, ironically if necessarily, taught many police to be nonviolent and hence more effective in handling the post-King riots. Yet this advance also has the very disquieting effect of seeming to condone looters; and violence rewarded would seem to promise more of it, especially among the guilt-free kids who take it as a lark. Even grimmer is the psychological import of the King assassination: his killer, however twisted his mind, clearly felt that he had a mandate for murder. The appalling result suggests that all too many unstable Americans unconsciously identify with a kind of avenging Western hero, and believe that one man with one bullet can and should change history.

Help the Other Fellow Survive

The U.S. must utterly reject this grammar of violence—just as it must urgently enact effective laws against the dangerous, absurdly outdated sale of firearms to all comers. If Americans seriously hope to pacify their own country, they must also do nothing less than abolish ghettos and what they breed: the hopelessness that incites violence. Above all, the U.S. must provide the jobless with the most elemental source of self-respect—meaningful work.

Beyond the ghetto, though, there will probably always be violence—out of anger, greed, insanity—until people are taught as children how to master the art of diverting pent-up aggressions into constructive action. At this stage of human knowledge, every school in the land ought to be teaching psychology as one of its most crucial subjects. Today, every parent who cares about peace ought to be guiding his children to militant enthusiasm for some humane cause, the most beneficent outlet for aggressions.

And every American who abhors violence should start talking to the very people he fears and hates. Attitude is the important factor. When people grow up with one another, work together, learn to know one another, one group will be less likely to fear and hate the other. If there is any way to curb violence, it is for man to study man and start fighting for the other fellow’s survival.

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