As American as Apple Pie
Is America more violent than any other nation? The fact is that the United States is a violent place. As a nation, it was brought into being by violence as much as by statecraft, suppressed an entire people through slavery, re-earned its nationhood through a terrible civil war, then celebrated that unification through the systematic, genocidal decimation of its Native American peoples. And it hasn’t stopped there. Consider the rampage of Howard Unruh in September 1949, in Camden, N.J., which resulted in the killing of 13 men, women and children; the nurses systematically butchered by Richard Speck in Chicago; Charles Whitman atop his Texas tower; John Oliver Huberty opening fire at the San Ysidro McDonald’s in 1984 or the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999.
Deliberate terrorism, in other words, is not a new American category, although Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski has given it a semi-crazed Luddite edge, and Timothy McVeigh, the worst terrorist in American history, who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City, is at either the end or the beginning of an epoch.
And now, the encyclopedia format has allowed USC English professor Ronald Gottesman and consulting editor Richard Maxwell Brown to organize the efforts of nearly 500 academics and other experts to tackle the infinitely complex issue of violence in the United States. The result of this enterprise, assiduously pursued across a decade, is a well-written, profusely illustrated and generously referenced three-volume encyclopedia that allows us, simultaneously, to access numerous aspects of the subject in alphabetical order and to approach, however tentatively, a systematic understanding of a field as unwieldy as violence.
Putting down these three volumes after days of fascinated reading, I found myself grateful to Gottesman, Brown and their colleagues for assembling signed entries that, cumulatively, bring us closer to the tantalizing--and always impossible--prospect of apprehending America through an understanding of one of its most persistent traits. To read “Violence in America” as I did--completely, page by page--is to encounter a labyrinth of traits running through both the consciousness and subconsciousness of American culture.
Are we as distinctively gun-goofy, for example, as some six entries--gun violence, gun control, militarism, the National Rifle Assn., the right to bear arms and weapons: handguns--would make us seem? It was a bourgeois American, after all, Richard Jordan Gatling, who in the mid-19th century perfected the art of killing with a gun by industrializing its manufacture, just as Henry Ford would later industrialize the manufacture of automobiles. Thanks to the Gatling gun and its successor, the machine gun, millions of humans have met untimely ends with increased efficiency. One cannot help but entertain the thought that there might be a special affinity, a special connection, a foundational relationship between violence in all its forms and the American experience.
Why, for example, are so many of our memories of major figures--Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.--so profoundly determined by the violence that destroyed them? Why are so many of our epochs defined by dominating instances of violence--the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (four related entries for this incident alone), the trials of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, the Scottsboro case, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the Lindbergh case, the My Lai massacre--or their aftermaths?
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Why have so many violent but otherwise marginal figures from the frontier--James Bowie and his knife, the Indian-killing Kit Carson, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Henry “Doc” Holliday, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--entered into American folklore and been celebrated in numerous films, even musical comedies, while the governors, the senators, the entrepreneurs, the founders of cities and towns from the same time lie in their graves forgotten? How can we make a heroine of Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Mass., who most likely gave her mother 40 whacks and walked, thanks to shaky evidence and a sympathetic jury? Why do we remember the 1920s and 1930s in terms of Al Capone, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Ma Barker, Dutch Schultz and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel when we would be hard-pressed to name a roster of brain trusters from the New Deal?
Why do some cities of America--New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Kansas City, Miami, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Seattle (yes, even Seattle!) and, of course, Los Angeles (with the Los Angeles Times bombing in 1910, the Zoot Suit riots, the Black Dahlia, the Watts uprising, the crushing of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the riots of 1992 and the O.J. Simpson case)--sustain such a culture of violence that they earn their own entries?
Violence pervades our leisure time as well. Witness the growing popularity of extreme sports, in which a violent outcome remains a constant possibility. And as far as more traditional sports are concerned, the entry on boxing, while tracing its origins to Greco-Roman times, convincingly argues that boxing has been most notably represented in modern times in the United States. The totally American game of football, meanwhile, especially in its professional dimension but at the high school and collegiate level as well, has mayhem at its core.
War is a major category in “Violence in America”: 15 pages in all, with 30 more pages devoted to militarism, the military and related entries and 19 pages devoted to a roll call of military weapons, including the nuclear bomb. The entry on World War II, however, is disappointingly brief, a mere five pages, especially because it constituted the most systematic employment of violence in American history and ended with the megaviolence (however justified at the time) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It took a film, “Saving Private Ryan,” to communicate, perhaps for the first time, to civilian American audiences what the American people were asking when they sent young men into battle. Of special interest are entries on Pearl Harbor, under the sub-category strategic violence; the Cuban Missile Crisis, the biggest violence that almost happened; and the Vietnam War, an excellent but again too brief entry on a war that may have served, for the foreseeable future at least, as a major form of avoidance therapy. Two biographical entries associated with the Indian genocide--Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull--together with a raft of citations of films (“Dances With Wolves,” “Black Robe,” “The Mission” and “Amistad,” most notably) perhaps reflect the fact that since the Vietnam War, we have shifted our collective allegiance almost entirely to indigenous peoples resisting extermination (Nat Turner, Geronimo, Cochise) while transforming such figures as George Armstrong Custer, so heroically portrayed by Errol Flynn in “They Died With Their Boots On,” into a perpetrator of state-supported violence who got what he deserved.
Government violence against citizens has a pertinent and lengthy category of its own. Related entries include Reconstruction and Waco. Reconstruction began as one thing, the enfranchising of African Americans, and it ended as another thing entirely, their suppression through local government and (another first-rate entry) the Ku Klux Klan. The entry on Waco is related, both as a matter of stated cross-reference and as imaginative association, with a variety of categories dealing with people and movements in opposition to government--something that Americans have a talent for doing but remain profoundly ambivalent about.
As the entry on riots suggests, Americans loathe public disorder and are ambivalent even about peaceful demonstrations; yet once they do start rioting and/or demonstrating--the New York draft riots of 1863, the Haymarket Square riot of May 1886, the Watts uprising of 1965, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the 1969 People’s Park uprising in Berkeley, campus violence in general and the 1970 killings at Kent State and Jackson State colleges specifically are telling entries--they do so with a vengeance as both demonstrators and repressers; witness the more recent demonstrations in Seattle and at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
The civil disobedience entry encourages us to consider just how much resistance to authority, including violent resistance, is part of our national heritage. Even such thoroughly compromised figures as Huey Newton of the Black Panthers; Claude Dallas, the Idaho Minuteman who killed federal officers; and David Koresh, the messianic minister of Waco fame, hover on the edges of respectability, at least as far as the folklore-making engine is concerned, because they embody that innate antinomianism that forever seethes within the American breast, if only as a matter of getting ticked off by an unfair parking ticket.
On the other hand, Americans are also given to outbursts of inquisition (the Salem witch trials, the House Un-American Activities Committee in its various phases, the Tenney Committee of the California State Senate, the Loyalty Oath controversy at UC, the charges leveled by Sen. Joseph McCarthy) and vigilantism. Though some of this vigilantism has made it into American folk lore and respectability (the San Francisco Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856; the Molly Maguires; the novels of Mickey Spillane, whose detective Mike Hammer is a one-man vengeance machine; and Bernhard Goetz of New York City subway fame), vigilantism, together with its most vivid exercise, lynching, expresses what is perhaps the deepest, darkest corner of the American psyche: a proclivity for retributive extra-judicial violence based on race.
No one reading such entries in “Violence in America” as those about slavery, race and ethnicity, Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans and the entry on lynching can come away with anything less than a feeling of deep disturbance and a recognition that perhaps the Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal was right when he told us in 1940 that race was the enduring problem in American life. Even so prosperous, non-offending, totally loyal segment of the population as the Japanese Americans would experience the sting of this curse in the internment and stigmatization following Pearl Harbor.
Interestingly enough, however, assassins never become folkloric. Bonnie and Clyde and Ma Barker are one thing; but killers such as John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, though they warrant separate entries, remain cold and repellent figures in “Violence in America.” (Jack Ruby, by contrast, a schlemiel in search of significance, engenders a tinge of sympathy.) The same netherworld is reserved for serial killers--Albert Fish, executed in 1936, a little-known but rather terrible monster; Juan Corona, disturbingly normal in his outward demeanor; John Wayne Gacy with his clown suit and sub-basement of buried boys; Ted Bundy with his Luciferian smirk; Aileen Wuornos, an unusual example of a female serial killer, providing her johns with more than a little-death experience; Mark Hofmann, faking Mormon documents and blowing people up; and the unknown Zodiac, who remains free and who killed my friend Paul Stine, with whom I roomed when working one summer in Yosemite National Park and who was driving a cab, putting himself through San Francisco State, when he picked up Zodiac as a fare one foggy and fateful night in San Francisco. And yet, at least three serial killers--Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler; Ed Gein, the prototype for Norman Bates in “Psycho,” and David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam”--have been accorded movies of their own, which at the least institutionalizes their demonism.
Charles Manson, by contrast, remains an unassimilable monster, our worst nightmare come true, growing into senior citizenship, strumming his battered guitar in some deeply sequestered California cell, like a bad dream that won’t go away. In Manson is found a living avatar of that evil, leprous and demonic, edging itself into the culture of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll that was supposed to bring about such a brave new world with such beauteous people in it. Drugs and violence and alcohol and violence have their own entries, with booze coming out the winner as far as engendering acts of personal (read domestic) violence but drugs spawning a trafficking culture in systematic mayhem, which is to say the putting of violence at the core of drug-trafficking and distribution.
New categories, meanwhile, come to the fore. Mass murder, for instance, has its own entry, including the genocide of Native Americans, the lynching of African Americans and the mass bombings of civilians at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
An uneasiness about both the past and the future remains with anyone energetic enough to move through the entire three volumes of “Violence in America.” Over the last few years, we have had to invent a whole new series of categories or revive categories previously reserved for Greek or early Shakespearean tragedy to maintain a workable inventory of violence in these United States. Entries such as gay-bashing, thrill crime, spousal and partner abuse, verbal violence, hate crimes, together with violence against animals and the environment, simultaneously show Americans as behaving badly in new ways and, as a matter of courage and hope, being willing to face, cope with, punish and sometimes treat various aspects of human misbehavior. The entries on children--both violence to and violence by--is especially disturbing, particularly the one on incest, which proves to be a problem as ancient as the human race but, in part because of a growing number of women in the criminal justice system, one we are paying more and more attention to. Equally disturbing is the fact that schools, teenagers, juvenile delinquency and gang violence require an impressive amount of discussion.
One puts down “Violence in America,” finally, grateful for the proliferating entries--poverty, racism, endocrinology, hormones, testosterone, sociobiology, genetics--together with a 30-page entry on theories of violence that give us some hope that violence ultimately can be understood, contained and transcended through a rational inventory of those forces which bring violence about.
And yet some categories are so resistant of rationalization--violence born of religious differences, for example--that our optimism is tempered. The philosophy and practice of nonviolence receives a good six-page entry, but one wishes for more. I missed as well an entry on Evil with a capital E and Original Sin, likewise capitalized. For when all is said and done, when all the causes are inventoried and cataloged, when all the force of rationalism is brought to bear on solving the problem, there still remains an element of mystery as to exactly why human beings so frequently turn from the light and embrace the darkness. For the answer to this question, I now turn to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Religion.