Watching the local news–with its unending series of abductions, rapes, and murders–one gets the impression that America s now a much more violent place than it was, say, a hundred and a hundred and fifty years ago.
Well, it may be.
Or it may just seem to be because there is so much more media coverage.
On an absolute scale there are, of course, many more such crimes because the population grows constantly grows.
But, taking changing population into account, is the rate of violence really greater now than in those days?
We need a definition of “violence”, particularly with reference to the behavioral threshold above which an even it classified as violence.
It is possible that white Americans commuted more violence against black Americans in any year in the 1800s, than the total amount of social violence in a current year.
I think the way pop culture portrays those eras as being very violent is a gross exaggeration. The wild west wasn’t that wild, the prohibition era no more a warzone as any gang violence we see now. So it really may be more violent now than then.
*I have no stats to back this up
Probably not. Crime stats are back to rates recorded in the 1960s. The thing is, whatever crime rate they recorded in the 1800s wouldn’t have been the same metric as today. No doubt it was much easier to get away with murder, a lot of acts we consider crimes weren’t considered crimes then, and so on.
Plus, how do you count slavery and the Civil War? From a certain perspective, every time an overseer whipped a slave, that was an unpunished act of assault and battery. The Civil War was an act of treason and sedition committed by tens of millions of people as well as several hundred thousand counts of murder. Every slave kept was unjust imprisonment and kidnapping.
I’m just saying, if we included slavery in the crime stats this would really distort those numbers.
The reason you feel this way is that previously, if a police officer shot a suspect, it might be some fairly neutral headline in a local paper. Today, the news has found that only stories that really seem outrageous get any clicks, so the headlines are designed to be inflammatory, and you’re hearing about the most shocking crimes cherry picked from 370 million people.
+1 on the slavery thing, but also you had things like “rough and tumble” fighting (oh such a jolly name for it):
So yeah, while things like Wild West shootouts were less grand, and usually had fewer participants than we see in the movies, it wasn’t exactly downton abbey.
It could be that things like duelling were standout violent events in an otherwise peaceful society, but personally I strongly doubt it.
In the relatively short term–the last few decades–all measures show both property crime and violent crime down, sharply. For example, see 5 facts about crime in the U.S. from Pew Research, from early this year. (The murder rate has increased in the last two or three years, but murder, violent crime, and crime are all still down sharply from the 1960s-1990s.) Those graphs in the Pew article are based on two completely different sources, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report of reported crimes (based on police data) and an annual survey of households conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Both sources nonetheless show the same trend.
This blog post is rather older (from 2010), but goes a lot farther back in history. On a century-long scale, and just looking at murder, we as a society are back where we were in the 1950s; during the decades-long crime wave from the 1960s through the 1990s, we were more-or-less back to where we had been in the 1920s to 1930s. A longer-term graph (where the data are admittedly more incomplete) shows a long-term very large decline in homicide among Americans. Over the course of several centuries, the homicide rate has not fallen uniformly, and there have been temporary reversals in that trend, but (assuming this graph is in fact accurate), the long-term trend is quite striking. Compared to a few centuries ago, the America of even the Roaring Twenties or the Thirties (with Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde) or the Seventies (the era of “Dirty Harry” and Charles Bronson) looks peaceful and civilized by comparison.
Most cowboys did not even own a revolver. They were far too inaccurate and expensive for general use. the whole Hollywood western idea of the clean-cut, hard-living but honourable cowboy was a very long way away from the truth.
You may be interested in Pinker’s book “The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, briefly discussed here.
He documents pretty exhaustively that violence has in fact been in a long term decline. “Follow trendlines not headlines” as they say.
We should probably use murder as a proxy for ‘violence’ over long periods. Otherwise it’s a lot harder to find comparable stats over time or even define what ‘violence’ encompasses. Not that other violence isn’t important or doesn’t vary by time and place, it’s just a lot harder to compare over time if you haven’t even defined ‘rate of violence’ more exactly.
A great reference for US murder rates by time and place is “American Homicide” by Randolph Roth. That book actually concentrates on the period from colonial times up to early 20th century, not so much on more recent rates. It’s an amazing piece of research.
‘Wild West’ murder rates were in fact astronomical. That’s no myth. Roth quotes by state/territory for 1869-70, NV 70 per 100k, AZ 171 per 100k (577 if including murders by Natives), 137 in CO, 268 in west TX. Vs. 5-ish per 100k in the US a whole now. Those areas just weren’t a big % of the total US population.
How Hollywood portrays the West is really a different issue. Plenty of characters get killed in classic 1950’s-60’s Westerns just like they do in ‘Deadwood’ or ‘Unforgiven’. And besides stuff like cleaning up language, sex, mud, blood from wounds etc. where 1950-60’s Westerns were obviously less realistic than more recent ones, who says the basic picture of good and evil in Deadwood is more ‘realistic’ than ‘Bonanza’? In Bonanza good and evil might be too sharply separated, in Deadwood they might be too mixed together, depending on the audience’s view of what ‘real life’ is like. Nowadays society has a more morally ambiguous view than in the 1950’s. That doesn’t mean recent Westerns are more ‘realistic’ in that sense, though again they are in spending more time/money replicating the right clothes and weapons, and showing sex and bad language that obviously did exist but old TV shows had to ignore.
For other areas and times I recommend that book, it varied remarkably by time and place. Of course it varies a fair amount now by place but usually on a more finely grained basis (one part of a metro area v another). But for example in NY the murder rate since 1900 was mainly similar to what it is now, except for the big rise in 1960’s-1990’s. See second graph in this link. The first graph shows absolute number of murders further back. Obviously the population was smaller (and NY only consisted of Manhattan and the Bronx before 1898) but this is in line with Roth in indicating the murder rate wasn’t high in Gilded Age NY, though in Hollywood 19th century NY is often shown as extremely violent (‘Gangs of NY’, ‘Copper’ etc).
This is disputed:
http://cowboytocowboy.com/wordpress/2012/04/25/600/
From what I have read the United States became an immensely more violent place towards the middle of the 19th century, and a variety of reasons were to blame:
-
The Civil War and the attendant social conflict in that. Obviously if we count the war itself the homicide rate is astronomical, but I don’t mean that. The culture was made much more violent and angry by the angry lead up to the war, and the violence it let loose afterwards.
-
Guns. Guns started becoming much cheaper, effective, and available in the 1830s, quite dramatically so. If you wanted to shoot someone in 1805 you used a flintlock that looked like it might as well have been from 1710. “Good” firearms were expensive and of limited effectiveness. In 1855, if you wanted to shoot someone, you had your choice of many affordable, reliable revolvers.
-
Transit. If you wanted to get away with a crime in the 19th century, in many respects it was ludicrously easier than today; there weren’t many photographs around, nothing in the way of formal identification, limited communications, no fingerprints, not much in the way of paper trails. If you shot upo a bank and stole a few hundred bucks in St. Louis and could make your way to San Francisco, you could call yourself by a different name and no one in your new home town would bat an eye. The barrier would-be criminals had in the early part of the century was that travelling long distances was very, very hard and very, very expensive. However, as the century went on, trains, canals, riverine transportation and the opening of the West made it easier and cheaper.
-
Law enforcement in the West. Law enforcement in the 19th century in general was VERY poor and unprofessional as compared to today. The idea of the police as professional cops, servants of the public trust, was simply not a thing; cops were generally a political arm of the rulers of the day, and there was little professionalism to speak of. A lot of cops were erstwhile criminals themselves. While this was always true, the ability of law enforcement to function in the expanding West was understandably stretched beyond any sort of reasonable limit; you just can’t effectively police people, who are spread thinly all over the place unless you hire a crazy number of cops.
I’m skeptical of these types of claims. Sometimes debunkers seize on to a kernel of truth and then overdo it.
Mark Twain lived that life and wrote about it, and his descriptions match the contemporary “myth” more than the revisionist versions.
I’m not sure that a noted fiction writer is who I would choose as a source. Even if what he was writing was labeled as nonfiction, he might still have exaggerated for entertainment value. I never knew anyone but what told a stretcher now and then, after all.
No. There is this issue of medical treatment: a significant proportion of the people who didn’t die immediately in previous eras would now be saved by modern medical treatment.
And on the other hand, it used to be more common for men to fight (almost always nonlethally) over trivial matters.
I think if you look at the male population between 16 and 35* as compared to the total population for any two given time periods, that will probably tell you a lot about how much they differed in the level of violence. Extra credit if you look at the unmarried ones, too.
*Or 30. Not sure what “sweet spot” is for boys/men causing the most violence in society.
the worst period with regards to violence and crime in American history is 1840 to 1890 although most of the data concerns big cities like nyc …even though the movie was fiction gangs of new York was originally a non fiction book
Also even though the alienist by c.carr was also fiction guilded age historians said the background was based off of real examples
That’s true, especially in recent decades. But OTOH if you tried to track shootings you’d just have a lot more trouble getting comparable figures. Even for murders the stats aren’t likely to be 100% comparable. They are I think though the best way to answer whether there was a much more or less violence in a given place and time. So again Roth gives murder rates in Old West states/territories in the range of 70-577 per 100,000 per year. Medical treatment is obviously not a big factor in the difference between that and current overall US rate something like 5 per 100k/yr.
I assume he probably did exaggerate. What I assume he did not do is make up the entire image out of the whole cloth.
The book ‘Gangs of New York’ was of the ‘true crime’ genre written by a journalist, and doesn’t actually have that similar a subject matter to the the movie. It’s about various criminal gangs in the city over a much longer period (the movie anachronistically compresses some of that into a short period, for example showing a Chinese immigrant community in 1863 when there were almost none in NY prior to the 1880’s). I genuinely recommend the book for entertainment, and I like the movie too, but neither are reliable sources on violence rates in NY.
Here’s another link with murder rate in NY back to 1800 (previous link had only absolute number of murders prior to 1900). Go to page 8 of 30.
It doesn’t include recent data so ends with a rate actually above that generally prevailing in mid-late 19th century, but in 2017 the murder rate in NY reached 3.4 per 100k (now below the US national avg including suburbs and rural). However that’s not particularly lower than it was in the time ‘The Alienist’ is set, 1896, per this graph, and not dramatically lower than in the 1860’s except for the spike during the Draft Riots of 1863.
As mentioned above one can quibble with exact comparisons over long periods based on things like medical care, or speculating that many more murders used to go unreported (though it’s inherently difficult to prove that was a major factor). But there isn’t evidence, as opposed to fictional portrayals, even if based on subjective contemporary accounts, that NY was a lot more violent in the 19th century than it is now. The time when NY was clearly much more violent, in terms of murder, than it is now was from the 1960’s till the murder rate recently declined to to the range which seems to have prevailed for most of NY’s history.