Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [112]
In any event, in the eighteenth century, “disorder,” as Maier puts it, “was seldom anarchic,” and rioters often “acted to defend law and justice rather than to oppose them.” Attitudes changed in the nineteenth century. The tolerance for mass action declined. There was a long, slow retreat from legitimate public participation in law enforcement. This was true symbolically as well as literally. Hangings, we recall, took place in open air, before crowds, in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Then they retreated, first to the courtyards of prisons, then to smaller, more secret rooms. Why did all of this happen? For many reasons: but surely one of them was the sense that society did not dare let loose the uncontrolled passions of the many. The “monopoly of violence” was the only way to keep violence scarce.
Or relatively scarce. Violence, like vice, never went away. American violence is still a historical puzzle. Other societies, as they modernized, lost much of their violent edge. There is some evidence that the police actually succeeded in taming, more or less, the slums of great cities like London. Economic growth, no doubt, helped. People who voted and had a bit of money and security were less prone to violent crime. This may have been the case in the United States as well. There is some evidence that serious crime did decline in the nineteenth century.2 But the level of crime remained higher than in other countries. Perhaps (some people think) this was because the society was more mobile, more open; less bound to traditional ties of family, church, and town; or because of the frontier, or the “fatal liberty” of American society.
What makes the problem so intractable is the scarcity of facts. They were, of course, even scarcer in the nineteenth century itself. Still, it was commonplace, among conservatives of the time, that the radical democracy of America must, and did, lead to “anarchy and mass murder.” In the 1830s, “thoughtful men were disturbed by a spirit of violence and brutality which seemed to be spreading across the nation.”3 The riots and disorders in the big cities were certainly an alarming fact of life in the first half of the century, as was labor unrest in the second. The New York City draft riots of July 1863, in the middle of the the Civil War, were perhaps the bloodiest riots ever experienced in the history of the country.4 In 1850, a man who signed his name as “Veritas” wrote a letter to a newspaper, calling Philadelphia “The Murder City”; the homicide rates then were nothing compared to what they are now; but they were large enough to disturb respectable citizens.5
Violence and the Frontier Tradition
When people talk about the roots of American violence, they almost always invoke the frontier, or the frontier tradition.
There are, of course, frontiers and frontiers. After all, the Puritans in Boston, in 1650, were pioneers, and they lived on a frontier. Similarly, the Mormons in the “State of Deseret,” beyond the reach of mainstream American law, were pioneers, living on the rim of society, or beyond it; but they ran a tight ship, and a nonviolent one, all things considered. John Philip Reid, in a remarkable study of behavior on the wagon trains of the overland trail in the middle of the nineteenth century—in absolute wilderness, in a place far outside the grasp of the long arm of the law—found very little violence and an enormous amount of respect for law and order.6
All this, however, does not do away completely with the image of a raw and lawless “frontier,” or the romantic Wild West. The