Vol. 7 No. 9 (September 1997) pp. 448-450.

MURDER IN AMERICA: A HISTORY by Roger Lane. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1997. 399 Pages. $24.95 Cloth. ISBN 0-8142-0732-4.

Reviewed by Lawrence M. Friedman, Law School, Stanford University

There is an enormous literature on crime and punishment, past and present-- people are, after all, fascinated by murder and other dark deeds, whenever they occurred; but not much of the historical work is rigorous and systematic. The work of Roger Lane constitutes one of the outstanding exceptions, notably his illuminating studies of crime and violence in 19th century Philadelphia. Now he has published a more general book, MURDER IN AMERICA: A HISTORY. It is the first scholarly treatment of this particular subject. That would in itself make the book important. But it is also a very fine piece of work.

In one way, the title is misleading. This is more than a history of murder in the technical sense-- that is, a history of those homicides that would be defined as "murder" by the legal system (as opposed to manslaughter, killing in self-defense, and so on). It would be more accurate to say that the book is a history of intentional killing in America, though I can understand why author and publisher would prefer a jazzier title. Lane covers a lot more ground than "ordinary" murder. He adds, for example, capital punishment (deliberate killing by the state) and the death toll in various wars. He also takes into account police killings, casualties in riots and labor disputes, massacres of Indian tribes, vigilante killings, and the work of lynch mobs. Thus, besides the usual suspects, we read about the killing of whites and Indians during King Philip's War (17th century), in which both sides were guilty of indiscriminate slaughter; the mob attack on St. Philip de Neri's Church, in Philadelphia, in the 1840's, which, when the smoke cleared, left two soldiers and thirteen civilians dead; the work of Quantrill's Raiders, who "burned the town of Lawrence [Kansas] in 1863 and murdered all its male inhabitants" (p. 173); the shoot-out deaths of Jesse James and John Dillinger; the execution of the Rosenbergs for treason during the cold war; and many other people and situations, which a more conventional account would have left out.

Statistics on homicides, especially historical statistics, are weak. Records, where they exist, are fairly unreliable. Historians have to make do with bits and fragments-- coroners' reports and the like. Obviously, Lane's conception of the subject muddies these waters even more. It is hard enough to be systematic about homicide rates; and when you throw in the other forms of intentional killings, the difficulties are compounded. Nonetheless, Lane's conception of the subject is more than defensible-- it gives us a richer, more nuanced, more complete study of American deadly violence than would otherwise be the case.

The killers that parade through these pages are a colorful and varied lot: soldiers and vigilantes; men who kill out of jealousy and rage; brutal policemen; women who smother their babies at birth; homicidal maniacs and zealots; celebrity killers and (more numerous by far) obscure, lonely, tormented souls. Killers are of every race, and every station in life. But MOST killings, past and present, are the work of "unemployed or underemployed young men" (p. 126). Such men "have always organized themselves into gangs, strutting like peacocks and fighting like roosters" (p. 104). The modal killing comes out of this feisty cohort, and originates in some brawl, incident, or fight that turns lethal. Most killers have lacked "anything resembling a calculated motive" (p. 127); they kill out of impulse or jealousy or a perverted sense of honor. The same holds for most domestic murders.

The peacocks and roosters may be a historical constant--Lane thinks there has always been a corps of young men spoiling for a fight. Yet homicide rates have gone up and down. Mostly, in fact, down: medieval England had staggering rates of homicide, much higher than anything in American experience. The tumultuous social changes of the 19th century somehow had a dampening effect on lethal violence--at least on the kind of killing that got you in trouble with the police (lynching a black man or shooting an Indian mostly did not). Lane connects this "civilizing" effect with better policing, and with the discipline of an industrial age--the rhythms of work and the need for self-control, the demand for "regular, predictable, cooperative behavior," of the kind that "made the trains and trolleys run and kept great crowds... moving peacefully to and from work, every day" (p. 184). In the 20th century, there was a homicide bulge in the 1920's; and then a rapid decline, to something on the order of 4.5 murders per 100,000 population. A new surge started around 1960, and it more than doubled the homicide rate. Since the 1970's, the rate has been fairly flat, but on a rather high plateau. In the last few years, a decline in some cities has given police chiefs and mayors a grand opportunity to pat themselves on the back. But we still suffer from rates vastly higher than those of other Western countries.

Lane takes the story right up to the present; and he does not shy away from trying to explain WHY American homicide rates are so high. He rejects, as he should, accounts, which lean too heavily on some single factor. Poverty, demography, a plague of guns all play a role. But in the end he puts emphasis on a cultural explanation--killing results above all from the persistence of a destructively macho code, "in which to tolerate any kind of 'dishonor' without fighting was to lose the reputation for manhood." This code was particularly virulent in the south; and one of the reasons for the high homicide rates among black men is precisely this "southern heritage." Moreover, in the south, until recently, violence "directed at whites was punished savagely, violence directed at blacks ... was not." Since the law "was no help," disputes had to be settled "directly, often physically" (p. 351). Lane also points a finger of blame at slavery, as one of the mainsprings of this perverted culture of violence. Slavery was a system rooted in force; there was a "daily need to assert personal dominance" which reinforced the deadly code. The code was a white code, then, but it infected blacks as well. In the final paragraph of the book, Lane refers to slavery as "our version of original sin;" the epidemic of murders is "part of the price we pay for it" (p. 353).

Lane's explanatory apparatus seems to suggest that the murder rate is, and will continue to be, rather intractable. There are a good many people who think otherwise; and they can point to what has happened in the last few years to back them up. My own view is that it is far too early to tell whether the police chiefs or the skeptics are right. One point, however, does seem clear. There has been a dramatic improvement in Lane's larger picture--a decline in many of the other forms of intentional killing. Capital punishment is still around (especially in Texas); but killing by the police has declined. There are certainly hate crimes, including murder; but they are scattered events, not systematic or genocidal. Lynching is gone; and the bombings and killings of civil rights workers of the 1950s and 1960's is ancient history; murder "as social policy" in the south became "bankrupt" with the success of the civil rights movement (p. 264). "Ethnic cleansing" is not unknown to American history (as the native peoples can attest); but those days, too, seem to be over. There is a wealth of information in this book. The work is careful, thorough, and as rigorous as the subject and our feeble stock of data permit. I also found Lane's interpretations and explanations on the whole persuasive. Not everyone will, of course, agree. But Lane certainly makes the case for attention to history-- the time-dimension could greatly enrich the debates among criminologists and others about the causes and cures of violent crime. There is material, too, to fuel the debates on state-sanctioned killing,
though Lane has less to say at the end about causes and cures than he does about other kinds of murder. All and all, this is really good work: thoughtful, insightful, illuminating. It fills a real gap in the literature. I had very few bones to pick, some of them trivial (does Lane really think Lizzie Borden was innocent?). A more serious problem is weak and sketchy annotation. Lane has read widely and researched broadly; but he does not share his erudition with the reader. There are no footnotes or endnotes; there is a short list of books consulted for each chapter, but this list is obviously incomplete, and sometimes not very helpful. I appreciate the fact that Lane wanted his book to be readable and accessible. But it is also a book for specialists, and the specialists need more of the usual help than somebody (whether Lane or his publisher) was willing to give.

Lane's MURDER IN AMERICA, nonetheless, is essential reading for all serious students of crime, social history, and law.