"Halting the Slaughter of the Innocents": The Civilizing Process and the Surge in Violence in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

In 1906, the Reverend Frank G. Smith, of Chicago’s Warren Avenue Congregational Church, warned that “we are in the throes of a moral spasm” (Chicago Tribune, 22 January 1906). The Reverend W. R. Leach shared this view, bemoaning that “not in twenty years as pastor in Chicago have I seen crime as it stalks to-day. It is an epidemical scourge” (Chicago Record-Herald, 26 September 1904). Another critic termed the city “Satan’s sanctum” (Curon 1899). Other commentators eschewed the language of the jeremiad but offered similar assessments, often casting their observations in comparative and quantitative terms. Responding to a study that concluded that “Chicago leads America in homicide,” Police Chief John M. Collins explained that “Chicago is a kind of rallying point for the scum of the earth” (Chicago Record-Herald, 31 July 1906). Peter N. Hoffman, the coroner of Cook County, reported that the city’s homicide rate hovered at 20 to 25 times that of London (Cook County Coroner 1915: 60). In 1914 alone, Hoffman added, twenty more people died from gunshot wounds in Chicago than were killed during the Spanish-American War (Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1914). Edwin W. Sims (Chicago Tribune, 10 December 1920), the president of the city’s crime commission, calculated in 1920 that Chicago experienced twelve times as many murders as all of Great Britain, while a Cook County judge (Chicago Tribune, 28 January 1918) insisted that there were “more crimes committed today in the city of Chicago by young men in a year than were committed by all the nations of Europe in the last hundred years.” According to a local statistician, “conditions in Chicago today are [the] most criminal and damnable of any large city on the face of the earth” (Chicago Tribune, 21 September 1906).

Contemporary observers often exaggerated the scope of the “epidemic of lawlessness,” though homicide rates did indeed surge during this period (Chicago Record-Herald, 22 February 1906). The level of lethal violence had been relatively stable in the city during the late 1870s and the 1880s. But beginning in the 1890s, Chicago’s homicide rate pulsed upward (Table 1). It rose by 41% during the 1890s, by an additional 30% during the 1900s, and by another 34% during the 1910s. The city’s homicide rate swelled by 51% during the early 1920s, spiking to 18.9 per 100,000 in 1925, an increase of over 400% in 50 years (City of Chicago Department of Health 1931: 1138).

The rising homicide rate in turn-of-the-century Chicago poses an enigma that this essay will seek to explain. According to an influential theoretical model for explaining the history of violence, the city’s homicide rate should have fallen during this era. Norbert Elias’s concept of a “civilizing process” suggests that cultural and institutional forces should have discouraged aggression and contributed to a declining homicide rate, as occurred in many European cities. Ironically, the effort to inhibit or reduce impulsive and volatile behavior in Chicago significantly increased the city’s homicide rate. As law enforcers struggled to discourage wild behavior, they criminalized a widening range of conduct and thus unwittingly inflated Chicago’s homicide rate.

During the last few decades, historians have rediscovered the work of Elias, a German sociologist, and have adapted his concept of a “civilizing process” to explain long-term patterns of violence. Elias (1978 [1939]; cf. Fletcher 1997; van Kriecken 1989) argued that the rise of court culture, along with the expansion of state institutions, transformed social conventions. In particular, members of the elite launched civilizing “offensives” or “missions” intended to elevate standards of comportment. The new sensibilities encouraged refinement or civility and rejected aggressive and impulsive behavior as well as the gratuitous infliction of pain or suffering. This civilizing process...