"Your poor country," sympathized a Japanese diplomat, speaking to a friend in Washington. "I had thought that after Dallas this could not happen again. There is enough misunderstanding about you abroad. This will make it even worse. How could this happen?"
The King assassination and the subsequent riots have reinforced a world image of America the Violent: a vast, driving, brutal land that napalms Vietnamese peasants and murders its visionaries along with its Presidents. It is an image that has been persistently built up not only by bloody fact but also by fiction—in books, films and television—all the way from the westerns through the gangster stories to the more recent outpouring of sadomasochism that seems to demand a new legal definition of obscenity as cruelty. When new events put exclamation points behind the impression, and Negro Militant H. Rap Brown says that "violence is as American as cherry pie," heads nod in agreement around the world.
As ever, shocked foreigners seem to overlook conditions elsewhere. U.S. violence has never matched the Japanese rape of Nanking or the massacre of 400,000 Communists in Indonesia. Watts and Detroit were tea parties compared with assorted mass slaughters in India, Nigeria and Red China. What country has the world's highest homicide rate? El Salvador, with 30.1 deaths per 100,000 people. In comparison, the U.S. rate stands at around 5.
And yet foreigners can and should expect the U.S. to rise far above its present status as the world's most violent advanced country. Among industrialized countries, Canada's homicide rate is 1.3 per 100,000; France's is .8; England's only .7. Within the U.S., the rate typically surges upward from .5 in Vermont to 11.4 in Alabama. In some Northern ghettos, it hits 90, just as it did some years ago in the King murder city of Memphis. Texas, home of the shoot-out and divorce-by-pistol, leads the U.S. with about 1,000 homicides a year, more than 14 other states combined. Houston is the U.S. murder capital: 244 last year, more than in England, which has 45 million more people. And murder statistics hardly measure the scope of U.S. violence.
Paradoxically, the first fact to be faced is a happy one: there is much evidence suggesting that violent crime in the U.S. has—at least until recently—not been increasing relative to the population. Although the FBI reports a 35% total increase during the 1960s, many experts argue that this figure overlooks population growth, improved police statistics and the new willingness of the poor to report crimes that used to go unrecorded. On the whole, Americans are now more apt to settle their arguments through legal redress, or at least nonviolent cunning, rather than with fists, knives and guns. Organized crime has shifted from blatant violence to financial infighting; today's juvenile gangs are more talkers than fighters; very few labor-dispute slayings have occurred since the 1950s.