Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (review)

Social and cultural historians often lament that overworked "popular" topics seem endlessly to capture public fervor, while less "glamourous" but important subjects languish in the wings. Thus, presidents, generals, and wars never lack for a narrator, although a systematic consideration of race, class, and gender could illuminate the former three in meaningful ways. In Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West, David Peterson Del Mar seeks to redress this imbalance, producing a volume that complements his 1996 publication, What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence Against Wives, and elaborates further a subject long neglected.

Drawing on a mix of public documents, newspapers, and personal writings Peterson Del Mar argues that interpersonal violence, fueled by intimate expectations and power relationships, infused cultural dynamics across time. Incorporating the complexities of age, race, gender, and culture, this text unflinchingly traces the way inflicted personal pain, employed as an agent of power, inflated distorted personalities and sustained institutional ideals. In doing so, this book turns an uncompromisingly harsh spotlight onto one of society's most unattractive traits and the policies that guaranteed its continuation.

To make his case, Peterson Del Mar sets his account in Canadian British Columbia and the American states of Washington and Oregon, moving back and forth between the two locales. To suggest the parallels and differences between Canadian and American attitudes about violence in several decades, he offers the reader six chapters; in order, these discuss early Native and/or white violence, patterns of settler violence, tenacity of violence, violence of the "other," violence of the 1920s, Asian and African American violence. An epilogue brings the discussion forward into the late twentieth century, with a concluding vignette about the dysfunctional family of the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, executed in 1976 by a Utah firing squad. Although the chapters, in the main, are written in a highly readable manner, some accounts of brutality and sexual assault are so horrific that one might need to pause from time to time.

This is a critically important book because it convincingly demonstrates that occasions of violence were not the isolated actions of a few individual and aberrant miscreants. Rather, in all their forms, violent behaviors occurred and were permitted within social and political infrastructures that cared about who had access to power and who felt that power used upon them. Ultimately, this is a chronicle about the varieties of male privilege within both dominant and oppressed cultures. It also resonates with the voices of the maimed, who sometimes tried to resist or deflect injury and death. Those efforts often proved futile in the face of multiple ways by which the least powerful—most especially women and children, as well as all persons of color—had to contend with societal networks and legal administrations that endorsed threat and harm as the instruments of control. In this book, the words of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and law enforcement officials affirm the 1960s assertion of Civil Rights activist H. Rap Brown that violence is as "American as cherry pie." Peterson Del Mar gives historical ballast to that grim observation, arguing that from the ongoing cultural, racial, and class cross-pollination of violence emerged a modern mentality that increasingly depends on conflict resolution through brutality. Thus, the overarching message of this work is discouraging—particularly so when current world governments consistently favor murder and mayhem over negotiation and arbitration.

Given the grand sweep of the content—both in chronology and theme—the chapters seem to stand more forcefully as singular essays, rather than melding into a seamless narrative. Accordingly, the general cohesiveness of the book buckles slightly. Despite the impressive documentation, it is somewhat surprising that gender and violence studies by such historians as Benson Tong, Keith Edgerton, Mary Murphy, Paula Petrik, Melody Graulich, or this reviewer do not appear to have been consulted. In fairness concerning these lapses, the author warns in advance that an "orthodox history in its organization...