To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

Violence in America is a subject that lends itself to cliches. "As American as apple pie." "Burn baby, burn!" "Make my day."

Many of the cliches that have helped to form the public image of violence in this country were coined thirty years ago, during a spasm of rioting, assassinations and public lawlessness unlike any period before or since. But cliches can obscure reality, and many of the images of violence inherited from the Sixties are no longer valid. In some ways, they exaggerate the extent of the problem and its impact on American life--we are not a nation racked with urban riots and campus uprisings any more. But in others, the old images deflect attention from the problems of today--the rate of violent street-crime offenses is actually higher now than it was then, and silent plagues of violence such as spousal abuse and brutality against children pass almost unnoticed by our official statistics. We are both less, and more violent than we used to be--and the solutions, to the extent there are any, are surely different than thirty years ago.

Yet some aspects of American violence are depressingly consistent, suggesting that little headway is being made in achieving solutions--much of the violence of thirty years ago was attributed to the corrosive influence of guns, race and the entertainment media, and those same three concerns confound our society today.

So with regard to this nation's unique scourge of violence, it would be well to have a periodic review of where we have been, where we are, and where we may be headed. In fact, such a review happens.

When President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (the Violence Commission) in the summer of 1968, the nation was in a state of shock. The year had begun, in late January, with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and the succeeding months brought sledge-hammer blows -- Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race, the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, the wave of urban rioting by African-Americans in Washington, Baltimore, and other cities, the rioting at Columbia University, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in California, and the chaos at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The decade of the 1960s, born in the hope of youthful idealism, equal rights reform, and a national drive to eliminate poverty, seemed to be spinning out of control.

Johnson appointed the Violence Commission in the wake of the King and Kennedy assassinations. He created a new commission partly because the Kerner Commission, appointed in 1967 following the riot in Detroit, had released a report early in 1968 that angered the president. The Kerner Report largely dismissed the achievements of the Great Society programs enacted under Johnson's leadership, and instead criticized the Vietnam war and emphasized the failures of national social policy in combating white racism and eliminating ghetto poverty. In its most famous passage, the Kerner Report described America as heading toward "two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." The Kerner Report had concentrated, not surprisingly, on the nation's racial crisis. The Violence Commission had a broader agenda of social pathology to address, and took a longer, historical view of their development. In addition to racial rioting in the cities, the Violence Commission agenda included political assassination, violent crime, and the role of the mass media in violence.

What has happened in the thirty years since? What have been the trends, and what lessons do they teach? The report that follows asks these questions, offers some answers and policy recommendations, and poses some questions of its own. As participants in the original Violence Commission study, we have watched with relief as many of the violent impulses of the 1960s faded, especially the group violence and political assassinations surrounding the issues of race and war. And, like most Americans, we have monitored the persistent pulse of violent crime with anxiety, mixing relief at falling crime rates in the 1990s with unease at its still murderous toll and our soaring rates of imprisonment. We address these trends since the 1960s in that order -- group and political violence first, then crime.

When we look back today on the work of the Violence Commission we are struck by how rapidly circumstances changed in the wake of the commission's 1969 final report. This occurred not because the commission's policy recommendations were acted upon and helped resolve the crisis. The Violence Commission, even more than the Kerner Commission, addressed complex and deeply rooted problems of social conflict -- race riots, campus unrest, political assassination, poverty, antiwar turmoil, rising crime. These were problems that federal government policy, even if responsive to the recommendations of blue-ribbon panels, was unlikely soon to meliorate. When commission chairman Milton Eisenhower submitted the final report in December 1969, Richard Nixon was in the White House. The Nixon administration, seeking to "lower our voices," trimmed rather than expanded the social programs of the Johnson administration, and pursued policies in Vietnam that prolonged the war for another half-dozen years.

Despite this familiar pattern -- polite inattention by government to blue-ribbon panel recommendations -- most of the major forms of violence that had characterized the 1960s and prompted the presidential commissions, quickly subsided. The race riots, annually torching the cities in the "long hot summers" of 1965 through 1968, abruptly ceased. The riots were spontaneous outbursts of accumulated resentment by African-Americans against police, slumlords, merchants, decayed schools and community services. But burning and looting one's neighborhood was self-destructive, and communities rarely rioted twice. Moreover, it is a mark of how rapid and effective was the civil rights revolution of the 1960s in toppling the Jim Crow South, that the long hot summers of urban violence torched few southern cities. Southern blacks were quick to exploit the payoff in jobs, education, and political power produced by the breakthrough civil rights reforms of 1964 and 1965, and were not inclined to riot.

The ambush that killed Martin Luther King in 1968 also brought to a close the contagion of political assassination that counted among its victims in the 1960s John and Robert Kennedy, King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. The campus violence at Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970, following Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, represented the last of the campus eruptions that began at Berkeley in 1964. The antiwar movement lost much of its driving force when Congress at the end of 1969 approved President Nixon's proposal to draft 19-year-old males by lottery. Drafting under this new system of low induction rates ended entirely in 1973, when the country shifted to an all-volunteer armed forces.

Radical political violence similarly faded during Nixon's first term. Some forms of radical violence, for example the revolutionary gestures of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman, faded in self-destructive anarchy. Other violent groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, were suppressed by police. All these groups, though small, were expert in manipulating the media and won attention far exceeding their numbers. By 1973, however, when American Indian Movement leaders staged a two-month confrontation with federal authorities at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the violent insurgencies of the 1960s had largely run their course.

Looking back at the 1960s from the end of the century, we can see three new lines of development, trends that were not clearly discernible at the time but that since have powerfully reshaped America. One was chiefly political, one economic, and the third, social. Together these post-1960s forces shaped a national environment that produced unmatched peace and prosperity for most Americans. Yet they also led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor. They failed to change the festering cores of the inner cities, and produced governments unwilling or unable to develop effective interventions beyond maintaining social control through the criminal justice system.

The first change, the political one, was a partisan realignment ushered in by the election of 1968. Nixon's victory brought a new era of divided partisan government to America, and accelerated a conservative movement that would send Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. The hallmarks of divided government would be polarized political parties, increasing conflict between the elected branches of the federal government (including impeachment), legislative gridlock, and budget brinkmanship. And, for a generation following Nixon's victory in 1968, split government brought Republican control of the presidency and appointments to the federal courts.

The hallmarks of the conservative trend in national politics was growing opposition to large, centralized programs of social intervention run by federal agencies and paid for by taxpayers. Even President Jimmy Carter, the one-term exception to the quarter-century era of Republican presidential dominance, worked for deregulation and fiscal restraint. Democrat Bill Clinton, first elected, like Nixon, in a three-way presidential contest, presided in 1992-94 over a White House-Congress switch in party control. But the dynamics of split government did not change; hostilities between the president and Congress continued (including, again, impeachment), as did opposition to Big Government programs in Washington. Such a political atmosphere was, and today remains, inhospitable to large programs of social intervention of the kind recommended by the Kerner and Violence commissions in the 1960s.

The second post-1960s change was economic, and came in two phases. The 1960s had capped the great, postwar boom that saw American industrial production and the U.S. dollar dominate the world. Then in the 1970s the economy deteriorated. It was plagued by inflation, stagnant production, soaring energy costs, and high unemployment. Modernized economies such as Germany and Japan and low-wage developing nations provided stiffening global competition for American manufacturing and trade. By 1983, however, the American economy rebounded, leaned down by deregulation, corporate down-sizing and out-sourcing, and lubricated by President Reagan's tax cuts and defense buildup. The surge of economic growth that followed in the 1980s and 1990s broke all the old records.

Helping drive the economic boom was the third change, the revival of mass immigration to America. The country's earlier era of mass immigration ended with World War I and the restriction laws of the 1920s, which kept numbers small for half a century. Then Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, a little-noticed reform that ended the national origins quota system of the 1920s. The 1965 law was passed on the strength of pledges by its sponsors that it would remove the racial and national origins quotas, but would not significantly change the number or origin of immigrants, then numbering around 300,000 a year. But the change brought unintended consequences. The family reunification preferences in the law, combined with population pressures and economic privation in the underdeveloped world, led to a tidal wave of immigration. Between 1970 and 1995 more than 25 million immigrants came to America, three-fourths of them from Latin America and Asia.

The post-1960s immigrants, like their pre-1920 counterparts, helped fuel the engines of the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Their abundance drove wages down, gratifying the employers and Wall Street investors who lobbied successfully to keep immigration levels high. Like immigrants before them, they worked hard, complained little, and provided stiff competition for native-born workers. Mass immigration thus produced conflicting outcomes, boosting the growth economy, yet at the same time displacing many native-born workers, especially unskilled blacks. Recent studies have documented this competition, where employers preferred Asian and Hispanic over African-American workers, and network recruiting in high-immigrant areas displaced black workers from jobs in hotel and office building cleaning, landscape service, restaurants, light manufacturing, and construction. "Immigrants tend to compete for jobs at the bottom of the wage ladder," writes Jeff Faux in Chapter 9, where they are "strongly motivated by hardship to elbow the native poor out of job opportunities."

Fortunately, full employment during most of the 1980s and 1990s eased pressures between the competing minorities. But two outbreaks of collective violence during those otherwise riot-free decades revealed deep-seated problems that prosperity and full employment tended to mask. One was the Liberty City-Miami riot of 1980, in which 14 persons were killed and more than 300 were arrested. The riot broke out when African-Americans in the Liberty City slum protested a "not guilty" verdict in the trial of four Miami police officers accused of beating a black businessman to death. The 1985 update of the Violence Commission report observed that the riot was an exception but carried a warning. Set against a background of post-Castro Cuban immigration and economic success in Miami, and of black resentment in depressed Liberty City worsened by the nationwide inflation and high unemployment of 1980, the riot was the precursor of another telltale exception: the 1992 riot in Los Angeles.

The Liberty City-Miami and Los Angeles riots were separated by a decade of rising prosperity. Then recession returned in 1991-92. This worsened the downturn in California's economy caused by defense industry layoffs following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and heightened tension between racial and ethnic groups. The 1992 riot in South Central Los Angeles was sparked on April 29 by the acquittal by an all-white jury of charges against four white Los Angles policemen charged with beating a black suspect, Rodney King. A video segment showing the officers beating King was widely seen on national television. The black-versus-white theme reinforced the initial interpretation of the riot by civil rights groups as Watts II. The label partly fit -- Los Angeles blacks violently protesting decayed neighborhoods and police violence, just as they had in 1965.

But the 1992 riot had a larger, more contemporary meaning. It was far more destructive than the 1965 riot, leaving more than 50 dead, 2,300 injured, and causing more than $1 billion in property damage. Most merchants victimized by looting and arson were Asian and Latino -- black attacks on Korean merchants was a persistent pattern. More than half of those arrested were Hispanics, 40 percent of them with criminal records. Black-Latino tensions in Los Angeles had been rising, with disputes centering on claims by Hispanic political leaders that blacks, benefitting from affirmative action programs in the 1970s and 1980s, were overrepresented in government jobs. The Los Angeles riot in 1992 was, then, also an immigration riot, featuring cultural and economic competition between racial and ethnic groups.

Like the Liberty City-Miami riot of 1980, the Los Angeles riot of 1992 was a cathartic outburst, but one soon eased into the recesses of public memory by the return of good times. But both riots sent a message, like a firebell in the night, an alarm signifying a deep abscess in the tissues of an expansive, prosperous nation. The Liberty City riot, warned the Violence Commission update of 1985, signified "the transformation of the Miami black community into an underclass . . . a large proportion of the city's blacks had been relegated to an underclass of unemployables with little hope of escaping the dependency wrought by their structural irrelevance." Today, even conservative social critics concede that the underclass -- chiefly urban, black, and low-income -- has been largely untouched by the rising tide of economic prosperity or the ameliorative efforts of government programs. Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, concluded in a recent study that despite the prosperity that followed Ronald Reagan's elevation to the White House, the underclass remains cut off from mainstream America, "living a life in which . . . productive work, family, [and] community . . . exist in fragmented and corrupted forms."

Sociologists disagree on the size and structure of the underclass and the appropriateness of the term. But few economists disagree that the rising tide of economic prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s has been accompanied by a growing class gap in income and wealth. As Paul Jargowsky observes in his chapter in this book, the Violence Commission report of 1969 was "stunningly accurate" in predicting the fragmentation of the American city, but underestimated the extent to which the fault lines in society would shift from racial issues in the direction of social class conflict. Class divisions widened in the African-American community, as the black middle class tripled after 1960 while the black underclass stagnated. The income gap separating the top and bottom fifths of the American population, a gap modestly narrowed during 1930-1970 by the redistributionist spending and tax policies of the Roosevelt administration and its successors, widened again thereafter, especially following the "supply side" tax and fiscal policies of the Reagan presidency. By the 1990s, the top fifth of the population typically received half of the annual income while the bottom fifth received less than 5 percent.

As Eisenhower Foundation president Lynn Curtis points out in his introduction to this report, the average corporate CEO in 1980 earned 42 times as much as the average factory worker. In 1998, the average CEO earned 419 times as much as the average worker. Prosperity and full employment ease the sting of class resentment caused by such startling disparities, much as good times ease the tension between racial and ethnic groups competing for jobs and advancement in our cities. But when the economy falters, as it had when the Liberty City and Los Angeles riots erupted, will we have learned and benefitted from any lessons of the past? And even while the good-time economy continues to roll, are we content with the record of crime and our response in the criminal justice system since the crime wave of the 1960s alarmed the American people?

It is a measure of the corrosive impact of violence in the United States that one of the buoyant events of the 1990s was that violent crime rates went down.

Things weren't expected to happen that way. Crime rates as reported by the FBI had shot up in the turbulent 1960s, had zig-zagged around until an alarming rise in teen-age homicides in the mid-1980s triggered another rise in violent crime rates, and many experts predicted that the situation would get worse in the century's final decade. They warned that a bulge of young people in the population would began to reach their most crime-prone ages in the early 1990s, touching off a further disturbing spurt in violence and crime.

Instead, crime rates declined. Beginning early in the 1990s, crime rates began to drift downward--across the nation, and across all categories of offenses. Violent crimes--the assaults, rapes, robberies and killings that concern people most--generally declined the most. The trend has continued.

There has been a scramble to take credit, and to discover why. Some cited the crack cocaine epidemic that had ravaged the inner cities in the 1980s, but seemed to have run its course by the last decade of the millennium. Others credited the strong economy, on the plausible theory that people with jobs don't need to steal. Judges and courts, from the Supreme Court down, had generally become tougher on criminal defendants, and some said that had discouraged crime. Meanwhile, many big-city police forces were concentrating on seizing guns from young men, and lower murder rates followed. Easily the most thought-provoking theory was one produced by two university professors who theorized that the advent of legalized abortions in the 1970's prevented the births of a large number of unwanted children who would have been high-risk to become criminals, but were not around to commit crimes in the 1990's.

But the two measures that seemed to have the best claim for credit for the crime decline are the huge build-up in imprisonment and aggressive new tactics by the police. Law enforcement officials say a relatively few criminals commit a vast number of crimes--so it is no coincidence, they argue, that crime rates have gone down as more and more convicted criminals have been shut away in prison. Likewise, the cities--most notably, New York--that have used "zero tolerance" police methods to seize weapons and squelch even minor disorderly behavior, have achieved some of the steepest declines in crime.

But the very fact that these two anti-crime methods appear to work seems to carry the seeds of political and social conflict. Both methods generate friction with blacks, because both touch upon the unhappy relation between crime and race in America.

When the first Violence Commission report was issued, the subject of race was considered so touchy that the report handled it with cautious indirection. "Violent crime in the cities" it noted, "stems disproportionately from the ghetto slum where most Negroes live." Fifteen years later, the updated report did not flinch to say that "Black Americans, as a group, are more violent than white Americans." In this book, the chapter on "The Extent and Character of Violent Crime in America" notes matter-of-factly that "although blacks have constituted a modest percentage of the overall population, they have accumulated a disproportionately large share of the arrests for violent index crimes."

What this means in practice is that the anti-crime devices that produce results also tend to create tensions with the black population. Jerome Skolnick, in his chapter in this book on police policy, deals adroitly with both sides of this unfortunate conflict. The police, using Willie Sutton-like logic, go where crime is most likely to be found--in minority ghetto neighborhoods. The many law-abiding citizens there feel hassled, and resentment and lawsuits result.

This complicates things, because these contentious anti-crime devices are politically very popular. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rode the popularity of his aggressive crime campaign to a landslide re-election, telling minority voters that but for the steep cutback in the murder rate, several thousand of them would be dead and unable to vote for anyone. Other mayors are copying Giuliani, and many governors are building prisons--where a high percentage of the prisoners are always black.

And so it goes. Political pressures call for measures that effectively reduce violent crime. These measures often fall heaviest on blacks. So, what works causes racial problems. Regrettably, the solution to this is not found in this book, or, to our knowledge, anywhere else.

These problems are compounded by the failure of the government's prohibitionist strategy against drug use. It is no coincidence that the last time the nation's murder rate was as high as it reached in recent years was in the 1930s, when the government tried prohibitiion against alcohol. By almost any measure, the "War on Drugs" has been a vastly expensive failure that has promoted violence between those in the illegal drug trade. A new approach is needed, one that will benefit from the lessons of the blessedly-departed Prohibition Era.

A final irony is that despite recent successes in combating violence, this nation is still an extremely violent place. As Elliott Currie puts it in a chapter in this book on comparative violence, "American rates of serious violent crime are not only higher than they were thirty years ago, but far higher than those in comparable industrial nations around the world." What has happened is that crime had soared so high by the end of the 1980's that the recent declines, while a pleasant relief, only obscured the reality that this is a very violent land.

The most depressing consistency in the thirty years since the Violence Commission report has been the culpability of guns in facilitating violence, and the failure of the political system to deal with it. The Violence Commission approached this gingerly, declaring that "firearms generally facilitate, rather than cause, violence." But it did observe that there were then an estimated ninety million firearms in the United States, which it described as a "domestic arms buildup." It recommended the "restrictive licensing of the handgun," designed to greatly reduce the number of handguns in the United States.

Comparing the innocence of these recommendations to the chapter on "Firearms and Violence" in this book is to read and weep. There are now almost 200 million firearms in this country. They are no longer mostly designed for hunting and target-shooting. Today, most are high-powered, rapid-firing, easily-concealed weapons that have no other logical function than to kill humans.

The impact of a flood of such weapons into an urban society is bizarre. Any confused teenager feeling disparaged by fellow students can blow a number of them away. A worker who has problems on the job can put an end to it with a massacre at the office. A litigant who feels wronged by the justice system can set it right by shooting up the courthouse. Most people resolve things in a more reasonable way--but in a nation of 230 million people and 200 million firearms, the law of averages is producing a growing number of massacres.

If ever there was a metaphor for a failure of democracy, this has to be it. Whether it is due to the political muscle of the gun lobby, or the fear of the average citizen of the intruder in the night, or the apathy of everybody else, the political system has spectacularly failed to produce a solution. A symptom of that failure is the intervention of the trial lawyers--who, with millions in potential legal fees as an incentive, have sued to force the gun manufacturers to do their business in less socially-destructive ways. Perhaps the best that can be said is that, when the political system finally rouses itself to achieve a reasonable control of weapons, it will be both a victory against violence and for democracy.

Even during the relative innocence of television thirty years ago, the Violence Commission had reason to believe that the violence of those days may have been aggravated by the omnipresent violence on TV. More so than other topics looked into by the Commission, this inquiry was driven by widespread public complaints; many Americans suspected that pervasive TV violence was desensitizing children to the destructive effects of violent behavior, and the public called upon the Commission to come up with answers.

This equivocal response was driven by two realities of the "television issue:" First, there was no conclusive proof that TV violence causes people to commit crimes, and second, the only certain way to reduce violence in the media was government censorship, and very few people had a stomach for that.

Now, thirty years later, the TV issue persists, and so do the two stumbling blocks in the path of a resolution. In the chapter on "Television Violence" in this book, George Gerbner declares that "the debate has remained at a virtual standstill." There is still no conclusive empirical evidence that television is guilty (and now, movies, video games, music videos and the Internet have been added to the list of suspects), and efforts to curb media violence have been blunted by the public's aversion to government censorship, and the constitutional strictures against it.

"Solutions cause problems," Eric Sevareid used to say, and American society seems to have been sensitive to this in confronting media violence. People sense that there is a connection between the increase in the violence their children see in the media and the violence some of them inflict on others--but people also understand that the entertainment industry gives them violence and sex because that's what they like to watch, and they are reluctant to give government the power to control that. The result has been a series of measures that give a soothing appearance of action, but with little unsettling bite. The Television Violence Act (encouraging television to clean up its own act), the V-chip, voluntary industry TV ratings and special programming for children have nudged the media to exercise restraint, and the public seems comfortable with the process. In fact, the amount of raw violence in the media seems to have declined. Considering the alternatives, muddling through appears to have been the best policy.

Looking back, it is clear that the Violence Commission's mandate to determine the "Causes and Prevention" of violence was a tall order. It may be more than this nation will ever accomplish. But in the process of trying, it is helpful that the Eisenhower Foundation has conducted these reviews of the status of violence in America every fifteen years. Let the process continue.

1. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969), 1. The commission and its report were referred to as the Kerner Commission and the Kerner Report after its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois.

2. Fred Graham covered the activities of the Violence Commission for the New York Times, and wrote "A Contemporary History of American Crime," Chapter 13 of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 371-86. Hugh Graham was co-director of the Commission's Task Force on Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Fred Graham and Hugh Graham are brothers.

3. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Vintage, 1996); Roger D. Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

4. Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and James F. short, Jr., "Collective Violence: The Redress of Grievance and Public Policy," in Lynn A. Curtis, ed., American Violence and Public Policy (New York: Yale University Press, 1985), 168-71.

5. Jack Miles, "Blacks versus Browns: The Struggle for the Bottom," Atlantic Monthly (October 1992): 41-68; Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (New York: Times Books, 1997). See also the chapter on Hispanics by Dora Nuevares-Muniz in this volume.

6. American Violence and Public Policy, 171.

7. Charles Murray, "The Underclass Revisited," American Enterprise Institute research report, 1999.

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