Only a generation earlier, they would not have been considered gentlemen no matter how rich they were.
Physical Fighting was something done by the quote unquote lower orders. Or by younger emotionally immature males.
In the UK there has been a similar decline in drunken brawling. Back in the 1980s it was commonplace. City centre pubs and clubs sometimes seetheed with testosterone and some saw it as part of an evenings entertainment.
I can think of a few reasons for this. It was an industrial economy. Lots of physically demanding jobs where a macho temperement was an asset. The post war boom also happened a good ten or more years after the US, in the 1960s, so there were a lot of youngsters and the economy was in a bad shape with lots of youth unemployment. If you were young and single, you still went out on a Friday and Saturday even if you had limited funds. There was also the alcohol licensing laws that called last orders on drinks at 10:30pm which led to several hastily drunk pints before you spill out onto the streets either heading for a club or a fast food takeaway supper. The scenes of public drunkeness on the streets was routine. Altercations in fast food takeaways and outside pubs, then the line to get into a club, then later when the clubs closed at 1:30am and the line for a taxi cab. Each town would have just enough large cops to quieten down the fights. It was always fisticuffs, knives were rare. Firearms were unheard of.
That world has gone. The economy is now service based with people skills being rewarded rather than bashing metal in a factory. There is now a far wider range of recreational drugs available besides alcohol that lead to much less aggressive behaviour. There are less young people. The licensing hours have liberalised, still not 24 hour, but consumption a concentrated binge. Knife crime is a problem, but that is usually between gangs of drug dealers. We also now live in an audio visual wonderland and the Internet channels conflict online. Gamers spend their time duelling and killing zombies in their bedrooms. Violent crime has reduced dramatically… But maybe it has just now manifest as trolling and fraud.
Is it a better world? Win some, lose some, I guess.
As with drink driving, this is a legal thing. Owners of bars have legal liability for damage done by their customers if it’s found they served people who were drunk.
Perhaps the traditional casus bellis no longer apply.
Hit on someone’s girlfriend? Today she’s been raised with more agency and will parry unwanted advances herself, or tell her boyfriend to stand down while she chooses her own conversation partners.
Call another man’s heterosexuality into question? That’s not an insult anymore, just confusing a random straight guy with his gay friends and coworkers.
Jocks vs nerds vs greasers? Social classes spend less and less of their scarcer and scarcer free time around different classes of people, for a host of reasons.
I don’t think there’s substantial disagreement with the conclusion that Prohibition markedly lowered alcohol consumption.
By the way, noting that access to/popularity of weaponry likely has contributed to lower incidence of fistfights does not equate to endorsing the strange idea that a “politer” culture has resulted. It just means that disputes wind up in lethal exchanges more often. The evolution of gang fights from 1950s “rumbles” provides an example.
Does the ubiquity of video surveillance have an effect?
Most bars, pubs, restaurants, even most businesses have video cameras all over the place that will record fights. And so many people have cellphones with cameras that they pull out & start filming immediately (just look at how many of such incidents are on the internet).
With so much video evidence likely available to police, they are less likely to just pass it off as ‘a couple of drunks fighting’ but instead arrest and charge the instigator. Even if they don’t, it’s increasingly common to end up in a civil lawsuit for damages.
And both Judges in criminal court and juries in civil court are more likely to treat this seriously, with heavier sentences or damages. That probably deters some people from starting fights.
One of the ways to note this phenomenon is to watch movies from the 30s and 40s. In one Jimmy Stewart pic I saw not-so-recently (so I forget which one) he plays a good-natured, non-violent guy who goes off on another fellow on very little provocation, just straight from “mild insult” to “fists flying,” and I remember thinking, “Huh, that would be unthinkable today.”
I don’t know that women ever liked the fighting, although Alan Jay Lerner thought some did.
I don’t think sober people engaged in fist fights as often as portrayed in fiction, or the retelling of fact based stories. Alcohol makes will definitely make a difference. Most potential fights go nowhere, then and now, because usually at least one of the participants doesn’t want to fight for some reason. If the triggering event doesn’t lead to a fight right away it’s not likely to happen. There’s even less chance of it when bystanders can intervene. When the fights do happen they’re almost always over quickly or turn into a wrestling match. The number of potential fist fights per capita probably hasn’t changed that greatly but percentage of actual fights resulting from potentials has surely gone down. And the percentage of potential fights involving alcohol is higher than people think.
How much does getting lead out of the environment have to do with this.
Hal David’s lyrics for Sherman Edward’s tune “Johnny Be Angry” went down the same road in 1962. Credit to Joannie Sommers for vocals.
This thread is about men, but, make no mistake, women drink too.
Also in pubs and other establishments.
There wasn’t as much lead in the environment 100 years ago. There may have been more exposure to lead oxides in paint but Tetraethyllead was just beginning to be added to gasoline a century ago and it would take some time to contaminate the environment the way it had at it’s peak. The fist fight meme goes back further than 100 years though.
I read a book a few years ago (can’t remember name) in which he analyzed the ‘violence’ level in USA society. His conclusion is that the level of violence has decreased dramatically in 50 years. The level of violence was always much higher in Southern states (old Confederacy) than rest but the level of violence in 2010 for the South had decreased substantially to the level the rest of the country had during 1970…and the North decreased dramatically to lower levels unseen in our history.
My gut ‘feel’ of this rings true…it does seem that when I was younger fights were quicker to happen.
In addition and to what provoked my response to you was that he analyzed the level of ‘politeness’ in society and found a very strong correlation between violence level and politeness. When a society is violent, you need ways to try to avoid the violence and large amounts of politeness become the norm.
Weirdly, as society has become dramatically less violent, the level of politeness has also dramatically decreased…because it CAN.
Therefore, the lowering of politeness might actually be a GOOD thing or at least a symptom of it.
Going back from the 70s to the 20s/30s he noticed a similar decline. In short, society (and men) are VERY DRAMATICALLY less violent then they were even 100 years ago.
I think it was Malcolm Gladwell (?) who had the probably misguided (like much MG) analysis that southern “gentlemen” are more excitable, more likely to be belligerent over perceived insults because the south was populated from herding populations rather than agricultural populations, and so a culture where if you did not stand up for your rights immediately your possession (your herd) is easily stolen - whereas farmers are less likely to resort to fisticuffs because nobody steals a few acres of wheat in the night or when you are busy for a few minutes.
It seemed like a strained idea at the time… more so now. (And doesn’t explain potato farmers…)
Violent Land by David T. Courtwright. Too many single men, not enough women to stabilize the community.
Alcohol is definitely a big part of the explanataion for the decline but it only applies in certain environments. Adults who got into fights easily mostly didn’t start the habit only once they were old enough to drink - schoolyard fights were once very common and have (I think!) all but disappeared and I’m assuming alcohol wasn’t a factor then.
When I was at primary school (so only the 80s, and in Scotland not the US) fights were reasonably common. There was an informal league table of who was the best fighter; participants would be disciplined of course but the habit was no more beyond the pale than any other regular rules infraction. I don’t think any boy got through his whole school career without being in one fight and there was a view that being able to hold your own in a fight was a good thing. In secondary school, fights were rarer but pretty much the same still applied. They happened, it was regrettable, detention would follow but just part and parcel of school life.
Any kids’ literature from 100 years ago will likely involve at least discussion of fighting and probably an actual fight. Usually framed as the noble hero against the bully, but again, fighting was just something boys did and could in fact be quietly proud of if they acquitted themselves well.
I asked my son about this once and he looked at me like I was mad.
But the point is that all these quick-fisted brawlers got their start early.
For various reasons, I recently read some of the original “Rover Boys” books, which did often involve our young heroes ending up physically fighting some miscreant or other. One thing I found particularly amusing was that in the very first book, circa 1899, the author, Arthur M. Winfield (i.e., Edward Stratemeyer) devotes a couple of paragraphs to assuring the readers that he, personally, deplores violence as a means of settling disputes, and hopes that his young audience will never resort to such things.
He then describes, in loving detail, how Dick Rover proceeds to thoroughly demolish the school bully, putting the ne’er-do-well firmly in his place and earning the admiration of all of his fellow students.
Yeah, exactly. Being able to handle yourself in a fight, and stand up to wrong’ uns, was presented as a valuable life skill. And while actual school fights were likely not always as clear cut as “noble hero vs terrible bully” the chances of finding yourself in one were reasonably high.
Similarly, people used to teach boys boxing. In school. It was considered a useful life skill. Possibly rightly! But if you’re taught how to do something, you’re going to want to do it. And you’re going to go through the rest of your life thinking that you can do it, and sometimes should do it.
Various martial arts are fun for children as well as adults and are a valuable life skill, but that does not directly translate into wanting to get into street fights and bar fights.