A New Take on American Violence

David T. Courtwright’s latest book should be widely read as a provocative contribution to the ongoing debate as to why the United States has long been the most violent and disorderly of developed nations. He begins Violent Land with a simple syllogism: young men are prone to violence and disorder, America has historically attracted a disproportionate number of young men, ergo America has been a violent and disorderly place. The full argument is a bit more complex. As the subtitle indicates, the book takes us from the nonagricultural frontier, with its demography highly skewed toward young males, to the modern inner city, with a somewhat lesser imbalance in favor of females. But it is above all single young men who make trouble, and the young men of the ghetto are disproportionately single.

Stated simply the argument is of course reductive. But Violent Land, anything but unsophisticated, makes it clear that culture and social structure mediate demography in many ways. It may also be objected that like much of “social science” this book simply dresses the obvious in statistics. It is after all not news that young men, especially young men left to themselves in groups or gangs, will strut like peacocks and fight like roosters; professional historians, from Edmund Morgan on colonial Virginia to those of us who have long identified the “bachelor subculture” with urban crime and violence, have hardly ignored this. And Courtwright has indeed drawn on an unusually wide range of scholarly disciplines—his own list encompasses “anthropology, biology, criminology, demography, epidemiology, psychology, sociobiology, and sociology” (p. 7). But he wears his “science” lightly: there is not a word of jargon in the book, which is not merely “accessible” to a wide audience but written with a panache that should make it as good a read for anyone as it was for this (somewhat) admiring reviewer, and his underlying argument is spiced with a wealth of insightful detail.

Is this then the “definitive” statement on American violence? Aside from the fact that none of us would recognize such a beast if we saw it, Violent Land has a number of serious flaws, including one, in my opinion, at its very core. But it is at the very least an important contribution to a wider debate. And if the central thesis appears to belabor the obvious it is stated with style, and in the later chapters its implications are boldly explored along lines not usually familiar among academics.

After a brief introduction, Courtwright opens with two chapters that review the relevant scientific and social scientific literature. Thoroughly familiar with the often fatal consequences of dissing one’s peers, whether in the saloons of Dodge City or the streets of Harlem, he is in general gentle with the rest of us. But the statement that the importance of genes and gender “is not yet generally accepted by historians” (p. 270) is a little unfair. Surely we do not dismiss so much as assume the biological bases of young men’s propensity to violence, just as all demographers do not feel it necessary to start with the birds and bees. He himself takes nothing for granted; after running through the relevant worldwide statistics on male homicide, accident, drunkenness, drug addiction, and other forms of disorder, Courtwright provides a lively primer on sociobiology, suggesting that the young man’s tendency toward aggression is countered, as a reproductive strategy, by the fact that women—who in most cases make the ultimate sexual choices—insist on other and opposite qualities, those involving commitment and stability.

Chapters 3 to 12 then take us on a selective tour, roughly chronological, of the social consequences of these sociobiological truisms as applied to American history. The list of the ills brought on by an excess of testosterone is a long one: “social disorder” is here defined as everything from chronic ill-health to homicide, all of it exacerbated by the commercialized exploitation...