Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West

5. To Do Just as He Pleased: Violence in the 1920s

To Do Just as He Pleased Violence in the 19205 YOUNG RUTH JONES had never seen anything like it. As she lay watching in the shadows of an eastern Oregon orchard, Sam Delaney, a cowboy, confronted the charming LeVeq. LeVeq threatened Delaney; Delaney called his bluff. The two turned to each other, "stripped of their birthrights of centuries and eons-as in an earlier and more primeval gloom hairy shapes had faced each other, teeth bared." The woman from the East found the scene IJV'~'uu",," "Never before in her sheltered life had she seen two men face each other in just that way." Ruth Jones had a lot to learn about the West. Here good triumphed over evil not when honorable men went to the law or turned the other cheek, but when they screwed up their courage and literally beat bad men down. By the dose of Robert Ormond Case's Riders ofthe Grande Ronde, the unassuming Delaney had rescued Ruth Jones from the villainous LeVeq after battering and squeezing him into submission. He had also won her heart.l Other male novelists across the north Pacific slope were telling the same sort ofstory by the 1920S. The ideal man was skilled ,¥ith fist or gun; his moral courage manifested itself in a willingness to hurt and be hurt, to kill and be killed. Men hit and shot each other frequently~and with good reason. Women at first objected, then capitulated. Victorian platitudes about self-restraint melted away in the face of this new, violent man. Yet accounts ofpeople's actual lives on the north Pacificslope indicate very different trends. Violence between male peers in fact continued to decline in the 1920S and became more, not less, regulated. Protagonists were more likely to face each other across the line ofscrimmage of a football field than across, 112 To Do Just as He Pleased • 113 the dusty streets of a cow town. Acts of unregulated violence increasingly occurred in a highly private venue, within the family, where men hit not each other, but their sons, daughters, and wives. Male violence had a life outside the covers of male adventure novels. But it was women and children, not powerful peers, who increasingly bore its brunt. British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest lost much of their distinctiveness in the early twentieth century. Virtually everycorner ofthe north Pacific slope had joined modern society by the 19208. The combined population of the province and two states exceeded three million by the decade's dose, nearly triple what it had been thirty years before. These people tended to live dose to each other. More than four out of every ten British Columbians resided in greater Vancouver by 1930, when about one-half of Washington's population lived in places with more than ten thousand people. Technological changes accelerated the spread of an urban ethos. Telephones, automobiles, and airplanes shrank distances as movies and radios homogenized culture. These mediums helped spread an ethos of self-realization and the pursuit of pleasure across the map. Government also increasingly made its way into people's lives, particularly in British Columbia, where the welfare state began expanding well before the Depression's onset. In Washington and Oregon, too, the government routinely affected people's lives through swelling school enrollments, Prohibition, and closer regulation ofchild rearing. By the 1920$ the outlines of what some would later term "mass society" were very discernible on the north Pacific slope. Men and women were more apt to pursue self-fulfillment than ever before, in spite or because of living in an increasingly regulated society." These changes profoundly affected the ways in which people approached violence. Men, in particular, hoped that violence would compensate for the growing regulation and domestication oftheir lives. Leading North Americans alarmed by modernity's emasculating tendencies had prescribed violent sports, among other cures, around the century's turn, and activities like boxing , lacrosse, and football had become popular and respectable middle-class pastimes on the north Pacific slope by the 19205.' Yet these sports bore the imprint of the very strictures that so many men were chafing against. Indeed, middle-class men did not want to kick over the traces of civilized society altogether. They assured each other that the slruc- 114 • To Do Just as He Pleased tured, controlled nature oftheir violence set them apart from mere brawlers. Arthur Mayse, the son of a Baptist...