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The U.S. is in the grip of a semipermanent revolution, constantly undergoing social and economic changes that in Europe might send people to the barricades. Occasionally, Americans may still try to re-enact the two-fisted frontiersman, but the real source of much American violence is the swift pace of social change, which can be deeply disturbing to the less stable personalities in a society. Europe has usually experienced its revolutions spasmodically, at fairly long intervals, while in between it tends to defer to official authority far more than do Americans.
Measuring itself not against others but against its own past, the U.S. has good reason to believe that the country as a whole is growing less violent. The roots of violence in the American past are obvious: the Revolution, the Indian wars, slavery, the Civil War, that crucial and necessary test between two societies (when Fort Sumter was fired on, Emerson said: "Now we have a country again. Sometimes gunpowder smells good"). Race riots erupted almost as soon as the Negroes were emancipated, the worst being the New York draft riots of 1863. The Ku Klux Klan relied on raw violence to keep the Negroes from exercising the rights they had gained. In its way, frontier violence was also the result of social change: new, transplanted populations, new sources of wealth, new elites struggling for power. The wonder, perhaps, was not that the frontier was violent, but that its people tried so quickly to establish some sort of law.
Changing Pattern
In the cities, each wave of new immigration evoked violent reactions, many of which were instigated in the mid-1800s by the original Know-Nothings and their many later imitators. Immigrant groups themselves battled with one another, caught up in ethnic feuds. Above all, the American labor movement was the most violent in the world. From the 1870s to the 1930s, bloody battles between strikers and company cops or state militia were frequent. Labor leaders often deliberately used violence to dramatize the workers' plight—and, in time, they succeeded. On the fringes of the movement were some odd secret organizations, including the Molly Maguires, a band of Pennsylvania miners who assassinated fellow workers and bosses alike in an attempt to win better pay and working conditions. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) sang the praises of violence and provided numerous labor saints and martyrs. The great gangs that appeared in Chicago, New York and elsewhere in the 1920s were also social symptoms: not merely the fiefdoms of "little Caesars" bent on money and power, but the expression of a moral vacuum in the U.S.