Rorotoko

In a nutshell

No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy.

From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States averaged 9 per 100,000 persons per year. It declined in the mid-to-late 1990s to 6 per 100,000 persons per year, but it remains comparatively high. The next most homicidal affluent democracy, Canada, has had only a quarter of the homicides per capita that the United States has had since World War II. The world’s other affluent democracies have had homicides per capita rates ranging from a fifth of that of the U.S. (Australia) to less than a tenth (Ireland).

The United States ranks first even when populations are compared by gender and ethnicity. Both women and men are far more likely to be murdered in the United States, and Americans of European descent, the least likely victims of homicide in recent decades, were murdered at a rate of 5.5 per 100,000 persons per year from 1965 to 1992. By itself that rate is high enough to make America two and a half to eight times more homicidal than any other affluent democracy.

Americans are exposed to that high annual homicide rate for their entire lives, an expected 78 years for children born today. The likelihood that a newborn American will be murdered if the homicide rate of the recent past persists—as it did for most of the twentieth century—is not 9 in 100,000, but 78 times that. In practical terms, that means one of every 142 children born today will be murdered—one of every 460 white girls, one of every 158 white boys, one of every 112 nonwhite girls, and one of every 27 nonwhite boys.

Why do homicide rates vary so drastically from one society to another, from one time to another, if murders are so alike in their motives and circumstances? Why, if humans have roughly the same capacity for violence, does murder claim one in 10,000 adults in some societies, and one in 20 in others?

To find out what circumstances ultimately foster high homicide rates we first have to go back through history, chart their course, and then make the connections between historical circumstances and the human beings who commit murders.

Doing so shows that homicide rates among adults are not determined by proximate causes, like poverty, drugs, unemployment, alcohol, race, or ethnicity. Instead, factors that seem on the face of it to be impossibly remote—like the feelings that people have toward their government, the degree to which they identify with members of their own communities, and the opportunities they have to earn respect without resorting to violence—determine homicide rates.

In other words, history holds the key to understanding why the United States is so homicidal today.

The wide angle

The theory of homicide I develop in the book first emerged because my initial hypothesis “died a horrible death” in the face of the evidence from Vermont and New Hampshire, where my study began.

I set out to understand why northern New Englanders were virtually non-homicidal. As I gathered data from beyond the time period I first studied, however, I discovered to my dismay that they were not. By the mid-nineteenth century American New Englanders had become more homicidal than their counterparts in England.

The book I had planned to write on northern New England’s “non-violent” culture was in ruins. However, when I separated by type the homicides I had found in New Hampshire and Vermont, I discovered that the patterns of homicide made sense in terms of New England’s history.

Murders of children by adult relatives or caregivers followed a long, smooth curve that was the inverse of the birth-rate: high fertility meant a low child murder rate and low fertility meant a high murder rate.

Marital homicides and romance homicides jumped suddenly in the 1830s and 1840s: decades in which jobs opened to women in education and industry and in which the ideal of companionate marriage took hold.

Homicides among unrelated adults peaked during periods of political turmoil and of loss of faith in government: the Revolution, the Embargo crisis, and the sectional crisis.

It appeared that state breakdowns and political crises of legitimacy produce surges in nondomestic homicides; the restoration of order and legitimacy produces declines in homicides.

The same pattern was evident on the national level in the twentieth century, a period for which comprehensive homicide statistics are available. The establishment of government legitimacy through the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War appeared to have reduced homicide rates through the 1950s; the crisis of government legitimacy in the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the eyes of African-Americans) may have contributed to soaring homicide rates.

I knew that it would take more to prove my theory than evidence drawn from the history of Vermont and New Hampshire, my area of expertise. So I extended my research to the colonial period, to early modern Europe, and outward to the South, the Midwest, the West, and the urban East.

Everywhere I looked, the domestic murder rate for children followed the inverse of the birth rate up to the end of the nineteenth century. Marital and romance homicides increased suddenly in the 1830s and 1840s across the northern United States—as well as in England and northern France. Everywhere I looked, homicides among unrelated adults correlated with political events.

I conducted “natural experiments” to prove that correlation. I hypothesized, for instance, that the homicide rate would soar during the American Revolution and remain high for decades afterwards in the Georgia-South Carolina backcountry, where the Revolution was a genuine civil war. I also hypothesized that the homicide rate would hold steady or fall in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, which enjoyed political stability under patriot control throughout the Revolution, and where support for the war effort and the new federal government was stronger than anywhere else in the South. My research in local archives confirmed these and other hypotheses. And every measure I could find of changes in people’s feelings and beliefs supported the theory.

one of every 142 children born today will be murdered—one of every 460 white girls, one of every 158 white boys, one of every 112 nonwhite girls, and one of every 27 nonwhite boys