"American Homicide" by Randolph Roth

Another interesting book on violence in the United States mentioned in John Mack Faragher's excellent Eternity Street, published earlier this year and detailing Los Angeles violence in the 19th century, is Randolph Roth's American Homicide.

This hefty 2009 book from Ohio State University Press, clocking in at 475 pages of text and almost 200 additional pages dealing with methods, sources, notes, references, acknowledgments and the index, is an exhaustive chronicing of homicide throughout American history.  In fact, sometimes the individual instances of heinous murders committed can be overwhelming.

What makes Roth's book significant is that he advocates the position that, when there is a basic mistrust in government; when government is ineffective and weak; when citizens do not feel connected to one another, generally patriotically; when people's ideas about violence are set and pased on; and when young men are involved, violence is likely to rise, sometimes dramatically.  He also points to the lack of empathy people feel about others as being contributory to the conditions that lead to endemic violence.

There could be lots of discussion about whether this thesis is as well-founded as Roth presents it, but it does seem true that, in frontier Los Angeles from the 1850s to the 1870s, some of these conditions were most definitely present, though he discussed this region sparsely in this section.  How we can know by the evidence, rather than by the circumstances, that this is true is another matter, especially if there may be particular factors in locality, demographics and time that might not reflect the general terms of the thesis.

In any case, Roth core discussion of the region and time in his book is about twenty pages, under the sub-heading "Homicide in the Southwest."  Obviously, the Southwest is an enormously large region with a great deal of differentiation in its component parts, from Texas to New Mexico to California, and the latter with its large area having differences between, say, the gold fields relative to San Francisco, Los Angeles or the far northern part of the state.

So, almost by the nature of Roth's decisions to look at the Southwest very broadly, a great deal of generalizations will be employed, but there is still much of interest and value in his summary.  This includes the staggering violence being reflective of the chaotic conditions of the Mexican-American War followed immediately by the Gold Rush.

Roth also identified the proclivity for violence among men coming from such areas as the American South, New York, southeastern China and central Mexico, places known for their violence.  Clearly, migrants coming to places that were on the frontier with gambling, drinking, consorting with prostitutes and so forth meant that homicide would be a major problem.

There is not a great deal about Los Angeles in this book, but American Homicide provides interesting and useful context for violence in the City of Angels on national and sectional levels.

Many incidents were spontaneous, stemming from fights in bars, brothels and gambling halls, but others "stemmed from political, ethnic, racial, or religious conflict, from vigilante and predatory violence, or from personal quarrels or property disputes."  Copious amounts of alcohol and prodigious levels of testoterone, amplified among those who valued honor and self-defense as cardinal virtues were even more dangerous with the improvement in the technology of guns, such as the Colt revolver.

Roth wrote that, for most of the Southwest, "it was obvious that there was no stable, legitimate government or reliable legal system." Moreover, "there was a marked shortage of empathy, especially among people of different ethnic backgrounds, and earning status and respect was a struggle."  Economic inequality compounded by prejudice and discrimination towards ethnic minorities made matters worse and this, Roth posed, led to greater violence within ethnic groups as frustrations led to internal battles.  When people are at "the bottom of the social hierarchy," there are likely to lash out at people of their own ethnic group.

He also observed that the Mexican-American War "left the region in a state of near anarchy," then followed later with a discussion of the sudden shock that the Gold Rush brought to California with its massive migration, ethnic diversity, preponderance of young, single men, access to alcohol and guns, and so on.

Political divisions were strong in the postwar era with Latinos and Indians bitter about the American conquest and Anglos fighting over such issues as ethnicity, immigration "and the distribution of the spoils of conquest."  Here, Roth claimed that these probpems made it difficult for "any government to represent the values and interests of the majority of citizens or to win their trust" and "the rapid oinflux of so many alien cultures did little to help foster harmony."

This blogger has found that, in Los Angeles, there were certainly many instances of racial discord and battles over political positions and issues, but there were also many concerns about the ineffectiveness of government and the legal system to mitigate crime and adjudicate cases to convict those committing crime.

With a general lack of interethnic crime, at least compared to intraethnic violence, trust and harmony may have had less to do with the eruption of violence than personal matters like pride and status or the uncertainty of what young men might do when raging with testosterone and plied with copious alcohol.  Moreover, what Roth calls "kinship" that brought a more settled environment to the region might also be called "dominance" by one ethnic group (Anglos) over the others in the political and economic speheres.

Roth's analysis of the brutality of the Mexican-American War, which was largely, in his view, "to carry slavery, Protestantism, and white supremacy into the Mexican borderlands" is mostly written with an eye on Texas and the specific conditions there.  While California certainly had its share of slavery-sympathizing southerners, Protestants and white supremacists, conditions were different than those of Texas, even in "southern" California.  This is not to suggest that the situation was the opposite of Texas, but there were examples of relationships forged, more on social and economic class, between wealthier Californios and Anglos, at least until the latter had a significant majority in population and power after the 1870s.

The statement that Los Angeles had some 200 homicides per 100,000 adults through the mid-1860s can be questioned, based on sources, definitions of homicide and how homicides occurred, but there is no question it had a high rate compared to most places in America and that there was a significant drop by the 1870s as government was more stable, law enforcement improved, and the population included more women and children, to give some examples.

There is also discussion in the book about the ruthlessness of "Mexican guerrillas" and bandits, though, again, his focus is further east in New Mexico and northern Mexico or in northern California, which also experienced the brutality of the Bear Flag revolt of 1846 and the extraordinary violence of the gold mines in northern California in following years.

Roth does devote a small amount of space to the horrific Chinese Massacre of October 1871 in Los Angeles, correctly noting that Anglos and Latinos both pursued victims mostly indiscriminately.  This is followed by a statement about the perceived Chinese threat to Anglo labor through examples in Chico in the north of the state.  Yet, in Los Angeles, while labor might possibly have played some role, fundamental racism and hatred, including by Latinos who saw their historic neighborhood of the Calle de los Negros occupied by the Chinese, are almost certainly the major motivations.

As for Indians, Los Angeles is briefly mentioned with regard to alleged inter-Indian slaughter after a game of peon (mentioned previously in this blog), after which it was claimed 50 Indians were killed.  The systematic rooting out of Indians in the north was pervasive, but in Los Angeles there are little examples of Anglos or Latinos killing Indians, though the treatment by both of native peoples in terms of labor exploitation, targeted sales of liquor and other issues was, in in its own way, brutal by other standards.

Roth also analyzed Latino violence, stating that "it is likely that immigrants from Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Peru brought violent habits with them and contributed to the homicide problem" and that "murders across national lines was probably common."  He claimed that "murders among unrelated Hispanics were usually caused by spontaneous disputes" including fights in taverns, whorehouses and dances, though this was also, as Roth noted, true among Anglos, as well, particular among the working class.

Roth is certainly correct in stating that murder declined "as law enforcement improveed, the pace of immigration slowed, and more families and family-oriented businesses appeared" by the mid-1860s.  Still, rates afterward were generally much higher than elsewhere in the United States as frontier life continued to hold sway in much of the Southwest.  Yet, as he observed, California "remained one of the most homicidal places in the United States—and one of the most homicidal in all of American history." California's divisiveness, in Roth's opinion, mirrored that of the South after the Civil War and he linked the two regions together historically by claiming "that is why homicide rates among Anglos in California, like homicide rates among whites in the South, remain elevated to this day."

This latter statement is very interesting and is one that could be debated in terms of trying to link conditions of 150 years ago with those of modern life, even if the statistics seem to bear the statement out.  Weren't the conditions of the Gold Rush very specific to that place and time?  Aren't the conditions of early 21st century life, even if linked very broadly by some elements (economic dislocation, racial tension, acting out of frustration because of inequality, spontaneous violence), so different that they have their own interpretive storylines?

In all, for those interested in America's peculiar homicidal history, Roth's book should be read and considered as essential.  The anecdotal catalog of violence can be mind-numbing and some of his conclusions might be reasonably debated, but he makes many good points about rising violence in times of poor government and criminal justice administration, as well as racial and ethnic tension.  Los Angeles is rarely discussed and in generalized terms, but there is still a lot of context to absorb and appreciate in this very interesting study.

Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

This book was purchased at the local library's bookstore for $1 in early February and has proven to be a real eye-opener on the subject of this blog, in terms of the broad context of violence.

Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Pyschology at Harvard University, has been named one the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, as well as one the top 100 global thinkers by the journal Foreign Policy (his The Stuff of Thought is now in reading mix right now).

The Better Angels of Our Nature, which appeared in 2011, is massive, at a weighty 700 pages of text, but it takes on a large context of violence towards gays, ethnic minorities women, and animals and looks at the deep psychological aspects of violent behavior, including predatory, dominant, vengeful, sadistic and ideological motivations.

 
It looks how empathy, self-control, morality and reason are measured in comparison and contrast to what is referred to as the "civilizing process," as adapted from the work of Norbert Elias.  The thrust of the book is that, despite the millions of deaths caused by the two World Wars, genocidal actions by Turkey, the Nazis, and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, and other atrocities, violence has actually declined significantly over time and, in recent decades, has lead to what Pinker calls "the Long Peace."

Pinker is careful to say that he is not suggesting that the trends in the decline of violence will continue as they have been or that there won't be large-scale atrocities in our future, but is compelling in working with an array of studies that show just how much violent behavior has been mitigated of late.

In his third chapter, Pinker discusses violence in the American South and its "culture of honor," in which violent actions were part of a masculine code of "self-help justice" and a denial of allowing government "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force."  He quotes Eric Monkonnen, whose work has been alluded to in this blog relating to homicide statistics, and his statement that "the South had a deliberately weak state, eschewing things such as pentitentiaries in favor of local, personal violence."

For Southerners, "self-help justice depends on the credibility of one's prowess and resolve" and "an obsession with credible deterrence, otherwise known as a culture of honor."  That is, men in the South codified the idea that violence was legitimate "after an insult or other mistreatment."  Northerners were more likely to commit murder during robberies, but Southerners "in those sparked by quarrels" and "to protect home and family."

Notably, Pinker alludes to the fact that the Southern colonies were populated by large numbers of Scots-Irish "who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central government" and that many came from a sheepherding economy, which may have facilitated the development of the "code of honor."  He notes that "herders all over the world cultivate a hairtrigger for violent retaliation."

Even if later Southerners were no longer heders, he continues, "cultural mores can persist long after the ecological circumstances that gave rise to them are gone."  He does note, though, that "the immediate trigger for self-help justice, then, is anarchy" in the absence of effective legal institutions or the acceptance of them.  Moreover, "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 discussion then turns to the American West and the fact that, even more than the South, it "was a zone of anarchy until well into the 20th century." Here the sheepherder is manifested as the cowboy with the culture of honor transplanted to the wide-open spaces of the western states and territories.  The self-help attitude based on honor also involved "drinking, gambling, whoring, and brawling."

Pinker writes that "in the American Wild West, annual homicide rates were fifty to several hundred times higher than those of eastern cities and midwestern farming regions."  More germane to the subject of this blog, "the criminal justice system was underfunded, inept, and often corrupt."

In this context, "self-help justice was the only way to deter horse thieves, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other brigands" and "the guarantor of its deterrent threat was a reputation for resolve that had to be defended at all costs."

Gold Rush California, Pinker continues, citing David Courtright's Violent Land, had "an average annual homicide rate at the time of 83 per 100,000."  An accompanying figure built on statistics from Randolph Roth's American Homicide showed that rates peaked in California at over 100 per 100,000 and then began a long decline that can be attributed largely to the "civilizing process."

A figure from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, adapted from American Homicide by Randolph Ross shows the peaking astronomical rate of homicide in California during the Gold Rush years of the 1850s and the dramatic decline since.

Meantime, as Courtwright noted, the staggering violence of the Gold Rush era "was exacerbated by a combination of demography and evolutionary psychology."  Significantly,

these regions were peopled by young, single men who had fled impoverished farms and urban ghettoes 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.

There is also the matter of having some mitigation by the presence of women, be they mothers, sisters, aunts, or wives and the latter become especially important as Pinker highlights the concept of "cads versus dads."  That is, as young men marry and have families, they distance themselves from the competition from other males that leads to so much violent confrontation.

Then comes neurobiology through the pervasive influence of liquor on the weakening of self-control and Pinker observes that "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."

One element Pinker did not discuss was the technological advances in weaponry, specifically the introduction, just in time for the Gold Rush, of the Colt revolver in 1849.  Elsewhere in the book, though, he suggested that the weapon was not so much a factor in increase or decline of violence as the human characteristics that led to the decision to engage in or step back from violent activity.  It is true that among Spanish-speaking Californians, the weapon of choice was often more likely to be a knife or a sword, but the growing inventory of guns is certainly a factor in the prevasivenes of violence.

Pinker, despite the opportunity to play off the title of his book, did not mention Los Angeles in his book, but, clearly, many of the conditions that he discussed applied to this brawling little village as well as to other frontier communities he referenced including Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Leadville, Bodie and others.

Los Angeles from the 1850s to the 1870s had plenty of the saloons and grog shops, gambling dens, brothels and other institutions that fomented so much of the staggering levels of violence that wracked the town for so long.

It also, which would have played well to his other point about the "code of honor," as the region had a large proportion of Southerners in its populace.  As will be discussed in this blog in future posts, there was no shortage of incidents involving Southern men defending their honor through duels, brawls and gunfights.

El Monte, settled mainly by families from southern states who migrated over in the early 1850s and onward, was ground zero for much of this, whether it meant family feuds that happened in that community or elsewhere.  These included the King-Johnson feud of 1855 and the King-Carlisle gunbattle in Los Angeles a decade later.

However, it is worth noting that there was a change by the 1870s.  For example, the township of Los Nietos, straddling the San Gabriel River where today's cities of Downey, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier and Pico Rivera are located, saw a significant influx of Southerners by 1870--to the extent that the English-surnamed population leapt from two dozen in 1860 to over 1,100 a decade later, most of them from southern states.

Yet, there is little indication that violence there was anywhere close to what was experienced in El Monte or among its population, twenty or so years before.  Perhaps the anarchic conditions of the Gold Rush era had been replaced enough by the "civilizing process" so that its results could already be witnessed in Los Nietos.  Schools, churches, a greater proportion of women--these could be among a range of factors that were involved.

In any case, Pinker's book was a revelation when it came to thinking about the big picture dynamics of how violence has declined over the centuries.  For anyone who wants to know more about the role of violent behavior over time, though it will take a while, The Better Angels of Our Nature is definitely worth checking out.

William Lewis Manly and Early Los Angeles Crime

The Death Valley '49ers were among the best-known migrants to California of the masses of gold seekers and others who came to the Pacific coast in the early stages of Gold Rush.  Among their number was William Lewis Manly, whose memoir, Death Valley in '49, first appeared in print in 1894.

The horrors of the trip across Death Valley are the focus of the work, but, for the purposes of this blog, the interest is more related to Manly's arrival in Los Angeles in early 1850, after surviving the ordeal in the desert and then a return visit a little more than two years later.

It was March 1850, when he straggled into town, noting that

the houses were only one story high and seemed built of mud of a gray color, the roofs flat, and the streets almost deserted . . . we could not see any way to make a living here.  There was no land cultivated and not a fence, nothing to require labor of any kind . . . in our walk about this city of mud we saw many things that seemed strange to us.  There were more women than men, and more children than grown-up people, while the dogs were plenty.

There was an explanation, of course, for the demographic oddities that Manly discerned, as "the majority of the male inhabitants of this town had gone to the mines, and this accounted for the unusual proportion of women."  Then, before winter set in, he continued, "we learned that they would return in November, and then the gambling houses would start up in full blast . . ."

Evidently Manly did not stay around long enough on his first visit to Los Angeles to find out what "full blast" in the gambling dens of town could often lead to, but on his return to the City of Angeles in summer 1852, he did.

First, though, he discovered that one of the members of his expedition had arrived in Los Angeles a couple of months ahead of him.  In January 1850, Lewis Granger came to the town and quickly disavowed any idea of heading for the mines.  Instead, he became part-owner of a boarding house, before deciding to follow the occupation he had before coming to California—being an attorney.

In fact, when Manly returned to Los Angeles, he stated: "[Jonathan R.] Scott and Granger were lawyers.  Granger was the same man who read the preamble and resolutions that were to govern our big train as we were about to start from Utah Lake [Salt Lake City].  Scott was quite a noted member of the bar . . ."

What attracted Manly's attention more, though, was the fact that

the country was overstocked with desperate and lawless renegades in Los Angeles, and from one to four dead men was about the number picked uyp in the streets each morning.  They were low class, and there was no investigation, simply a burial at public expense.

As discussed in this blog previously, the statement that there was about a murder a day in Los Angeles during the time Manly was talking about, or slightly afterward, was expressed in print by other memorists, including merchant Harris Newmark and Horace Bell, whose colorful and embellished recollections have been recounted here at some length.

Other sources indicate that, while the homicide rate was astronomically high by modern or even contemporary standards, there was nowhere near the level of violence recorded by these writers, who may have inflated their figures to further dramatize their recollections.

This 1843 drawing purports to show what "Mexican Gentlemen" looked like.  William Lewis Manly, in his 1894 memoir, lauded the honesty, benevolence, and charity of Californios.

In any case, it is interesting to read how Manly saw the ethnic mixture in Los Angeles, writing, "the permanent Spanish [that is, Californio] population seemed honest and benevolent, but there were many bad ones from Chile, Sonora, Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Europe, who seemed always on an errand of mischief, a murder, thieving, or robbery."

Manly also had kind words to say about the Californios because of the assistance he was given by them after his travails during his trip to the region, stating

I became well acquainted with many of these old California natives, and found them honest in their dealings, good to the needy, and in all my travels never found more willing hands to bestow upon relatives, friends, or strangers ready relief than I saw among these simple natives.

Many American and European writers of the era expressed outright hostility and racism towards Spanish-speakers in California, so it is notable to see Manly's views, even if "simple" could be construed as paternalistic, or merely as "salt of the earth".

Several months before the murder of Joshua Bean, a former Indian-fighting militia general turned saloon owner, in the mission town of San Gabriel, Manly related a different event related to popular justice in that community.

Evidently, there were four men observed near the mission and acting suspiciously, so based 

on this information the Vigilance Committee arrested the man [the other three apparently having escaped] in camp and brought him to a private room, where he was tried by twelve men, who found him guilty of horse stealing and sentenced [him] to be hung at once, for horse stealing was a capital offense in those days

It was true that, for a time, grand larceny could be punishable by death after a trial, but there was no such example found in Los Angeles County during the brief time the statute was in effect.  More likely, the Vigilance Committee [where a standing or an ad hoc one] was applying its own stautory standards.

Manly continued,

To carry out the sentence they procured a car, put a box on it for a seat, and with a rope around his neck and seated on the box, the condemned man was dragged off by hand to an oak tree not far away, whither he was followed by all the men, women, and children of the place, who were nearly all natives [Californios, probably].

After some of the unnamed man's friends were alerted to the situation, they arrived

to try to save his life.  They talked and inquired around a little and then proposed the question whether to hang him or to turn him over to the lawful authorities for regular trial.  This was put to a vote and it was decided to spare him now.  So the rope was taken off his neck, and he was turned over to Mr. [J.S.] Mallard, the mission justice of the peace, much to the relief of the fellow who saw death staring him in the face.

Manly's description of this narrowly-averted lynching is not found elsewhere and, obviously, cannot be corroborated.  If true, however, it is a rare example of a popular tribunal electing to rescind its own verdict and death sentence.

Also rare is to find first-person sources of life in early American-era Los Angeles and particularly that dealing with crime, violence and the administration of justice.  Manly's memoir is an interesting one on many grounds and well-worth including and considering in any accounting of these issues.

Eternity Street Lecture on Frontier Los Angeles Violence and Justice

This afternoon at the Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, Yale professor emeritus John Mack Faragher gave a stimulating presentation based on his new book Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, published by W.W. Norton and Company.

With accompaniment from PowerPoint slides, Faragher began by noting that, whereas in Europe over the centuries homicide has dropped precipitously, there was a major spike in American homicide in more recent generations, though a noticeable decline has taken place since 1990.  He then moved to the local scene, stating that, after considerable research, he was able to document 468 homicides in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1875.

Courtesy of W. W. Norton and Company.

While this is a far cry from the claims of Horace Bell and Harris Newmark that there was a murder a day at a certain point in the early 1850s, Faragher reminded the audience that, per 100,000 residents, it was still extraordinary to have an average of, say, 20 homicides a year in a frontier town as small as Los Angeles.  This rate dwarfed most homicide rates in major areas of the United States and within California at the time and today.

Faragher then talked about something that has not received nearly as much attention (and that goes for this blogger's work, as well) when it comes to examining violence in society generally, much less that of Los Angeles during the 1850s through 1870s.

Much has been said about the preponderance of young men, free from tethers of home, imbued with copious amounts of alcohol, supplied with advance weapons of destruction (like the new Colt revolver, introduced in the late 1840s), surrounded with people of many other ethnicites and races, and unrestrained by a dysfunctional and poorly-supported government and criminal justice system.

However, what Faragher did in his book and explained in his talk was that the little-known effects of domestic violence have a connection to individual and larger-scale violence.  He reviewed some of the many cases in Los Angeles's civil court records that document spousal abuse from the Mexican era through the early American years.  While in some cases, judges granted divorce and other petitions from women abused by their husbands, a good many did not.

In one notable incident cited by Faragher, Phillip Rheim, a German known as Felipe Reim by Angelenos and who owned the Los Dos Amigos saloon, was particularly abusive to his wife, who finally secured a divorce by default when Rheim failed to appear in court.  Rheim then committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum, an opiod, with the suggestion being that the divorce pushed him over the edge.

Faragher proceeded to cover some of the more notorious incidents of vigilante activity in Los Angeles, from the first lynching to take place in the town in 1836 when Maria Rosario Villa de Feliz and her lover Gervasio Alipas killed her husband and then were hung by a committee of citizens, up through the horrific Chinese Massacre of 1871.  Faragher talked about a number of incidents, detailing the operations of vigilantes, and the responses by those in support of and opposed to mob law.

The one-hour talk held the rapt attention of about fifty audience members.

The presentation concluded after about an hour and there were plenty of questions from an audience that clearly was impressed by what they heard.  A reception was held on a warm winter afternoon and copies of Eternity Street were sold and signed.  This blogger picked up a copy and is raring to get reading tonight.  More on the book will be posted on this blog soon.

For those who did not get to see this talk at either the Huntington Library on Friday or the Homestead today, Faragher is giving his talk tomorrow at the Autry Museum at 11 a.m., so there'll still be time, for those interested, in watching the Super Bowl later.  He'll also be interviewed on Larry Mantle's Air Talk on KPCC 89.3 on Monday around 12:30 or so--check listings for that.  Finally, he'll be doing a talk and book signing at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Tuesday at 7 p.m.