To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

In June, 1968, a few days after the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and 2 months after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order authorizing the establishment of a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence -- with Johns Hopkins President Emeritus Milton S. Eisenhower as chairman and Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. as vice-chairman. On December 10, 1969, the Commission issued its final report, preceded by many volumes of staff task force reports.

The Commission was bipartisan. In terms of philosophy, the views of Commission members ran the gamut from Judge Higginbotham, Michigan Senator Philip Hart, Ambassador Patricia Roberts Harris and longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer to Terrence Cardinal Cooke, Ohio Representative William McCulloch, Arizona Judge William McFarland and Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska. Appendix 1 has biographical summaries of the original Commissioners.

As President Emeritus of a great university, Milton Eisenhower believed in the power of knowledge and the logic of scientific evidence. When comprehensive findings were presented to him in a rigorous, systematic way, he was capable of changing previously held beliefs. That is how he came to accept and advocate for recommendations on licensing and reducing the availability of handguns in America. Milton Eisenhower received a great amount of hate mail because of that recommendation. A man of courage, he stood by his principles.

Assisted by a large professional staff, hundreds of leading experts and months of testimony, the Commission chose to look for fundamental, underlying issues. It searched for causes, not symptoms. "Violence is like a fever in the body politic: it is but the symptom of some more basic pathology which must be cured before the fever will disappear."¹

This bipartisan search for causes led to a priority on long run strategies, not short run tactics. Most strategically, the Commission identified lack of employment and educational opportunity in inner city neighborhoods -- set within a larger American culture of material success and a tradition of violence that the media transmitted particularly well. "To be a young, poor male; to be undereducated and without means of escape from an oppressive urban environment; to want what the society claims is available (but mostly to others); to see around oneself illegitimate and often violent methods being used to achieve material success; and to observe others using these means with impunity -- all this is to be burdened with an enormous set of influences that pull many toward crime and delinquency. To be also a Black, Mexican or Puerto Rican American and subject to discrimination adds considerably to the pull."²

Understood in these terms, violence in America, concluded the Commission, could be reduced by "nothing less than progress in reconstructing urban life... We must take more effective steps to realize the goal, first set in the Employment Act of 1946, of a useful job at a reasonable wage for all who are able to work. We must provide better educational opportunities for all our children."³

Unlike many Presidential panels, the Commission was forthright on money, time and budget priorities. "We recognize that to make our society essentially free of poverty and discrimination, and to make our sprawling urban areas fit to inhabit, will cost a great deal of money and will take a great length of time. We believe, however, that we can and should make a major decision now to reassess our national priorities by placing these objectives in the first rank of the nation's goals."⁴ The Commission recommended new investments of $20B per year in 1968 dollars, an amount worth $87B today. This, remember, was a consensus position by roughly equal numbers of conservative, moderate and progressive commissioners -- almost all white men.

Consistent with a long run "reordering of national priorities," the Commission recommended that new level of investment serve as "an initial goal" and that federal funding "should continue to increase" until the goals of a new national urban and criminal justice policy were met.⁵

The Constitution framed the Commission's vision. "The Preamble of our Constitution does not speak merely of justice or merely of order; it embraces both. Two of the 6 purposes set forth in the Preamble are to 'Establish justice' and to 'insure domestic tranquility.' If we are to succeed in preventing and controlling violence, we must achieve both of these goals."⁶

This was a moral vision. The Violence Commission identified with the earlier Kerner Riot Commission's recommendation that there could be "no higher claim on the nation's conscience" than urban reconstruction.⁷

This 30 year update of the National Violence Commission, then, is a reminder to Americans of how things were not so long ago. It is a snap shot that compares then and now.

If in 5 years nothing has happened, I shall be the most disappointed man in America," said Milton Eisenhower in the New York Times in December of 1969.⁸ Yet the Commission's recommendations have not been much acted upon. One result is that America today has neither established justice nor insured domestic tranquility. That is the primary conclusion of this 30 year update.

How do we stand on justice today? Almost a quarter of all children 5 and under live in poverty. America is the most unequal country in the industrialized world in terms of income and wealth. The "digital divide" is accelerating the gulf between our haves and have nots. The average CEO makes 419 times as much as the average worker, and this ratio has greatly increased over the last 3 decades. The states spend more on prison building than on higher education, whereas the opposite was true at the time of the Commission. One in 3 young African-American men is in prison, on probation or on parole, up from one in 4 a decade ago. The rate of incarceration of African-American men today is 4 times higher than the rate of incarceration of Black men in pre-Mandela, apartheid South Africa. A primary reason is the racial bias in our drug sentencing laws. Filled disproportionately by minorities, our rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex is run by white men, and rural white communities seek grants for prisons to help in local economic development.⁹

How do we stand on domestic tranquility today? There have been drops in violent crime, fear and unemployment since about 1993. That is welcome news -- though homicide was up about 10% in New York City in 1999. More important, in spite of the sevenfold increase in the prison population since the Violence Commission, fear and rates of violent crime are, for the most, part higher today than in 1969, when the Commission expressed citizen "concern about high levels of violence in the United States." Specifically, in a national poll in 1967, Americans were asked, "Is there any area right around here -- that is within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" In 1967, 31% answered yes. In 1998, 41% answered yes. Similarly, the FBI Index of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault combined) has increased from 1969 to 1998. (Appendix 5). And America's rates of violence remain much higher than most other industrialized nations, as in the 1960s. Today the rate of homicide death for a young man is 23 times higher in the U.S. than in England. In 1995, handguns were used to kill 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States.¹⁰

Although the Violence Commission report examined collective and political violence, greater attention was directed to individual acts of violence, such as common crime in the street and violence in the home. In 1968, the Kerner Riot Commission had already released its report on collective violence. The present volume also limits itself to individual crime, but points to many common causes underlying individual and collective violence. The role of media and firearms in individual violence was a priority of the Violence Commission, and remains so here. Public shootings in schools, places of worship and day care centers have replaced the political assassinations that horrified the nation in the 1960s, but many of our recommendations on firearms control have continued relevance to political assassination. Domestic terrorism has emerged as a serious issue since the Commission. However, the subject would take another volume, and we have chosen not to address it here.

The present volume is a synthesis that represents the position of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation. It was edited and written by the Foundation's president, Lynn A. Curtis, who was staff co-director of the Crimes of Violence Task Force of the Violence Commission. This volume was approved by the Trustees of the Eisenhower Foundation, some of whom were staff directors or deputy directors on the original Commission.

The update draws on papers by a panel of experts, and we also add other conclusions and recommendations. A separate book will be published with the papers of the panel. Appendix 2 has the tentative Table of Contents for that book. Many of the contributors were directors, co-directors or deputy directors on the staff of the original Commission. Some wrote papers for staff task forces or testified before the Commission. Some are Trustees of the Foundation. Biographical summaries of all contributors to the forthcoming book are found in Appendix 3.

Appendix 4 has the Foreword to the forthcoming book. It is written by Fred Graham and Hugh Davis Graham. Fred Graham covered the original Commission for the New York Times in 1969. Hugh Davis Graham was staff co-director of the Commission's Task Force on Historical and Comparative Perspectives.

The professional staff of the Violence Commission published task force reports. The presidentially-appointed Commissioners drew on the staff reports, but published their own, final, Commission report.

Although many Commission professional staff and other experts have contributed to the present update, none of the original Commissioners have contributed. Most have passed away.

The sections that follow regain a perspective on American violence that has been lost over the last 30 years, in our view; ask whether the Commission's "City of the Future" has come to pass; assess media, firearms and violence; propose new policy for the new century; and articulate campaign finance reform, communications and other strategies leading to a new national political alliance.

Notes

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