"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.