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In a moral sense, violence is not power but an act of despair, an admission of failure to find any other way to gain a goal. By definition, every society is committed to nonviolence; the violent are suicidal, for society must repress acts against law and order. Yet realistically, one cannot gloss over the fact that violence often pays off. In the violent subculture of a juvenile gang, the nonviolent are considered cowards, and violence produces not guilt but status.
As a Force for Reform
It is undeniable that all through history, violence has been the chief means of social reform. Even primitive Christians, proclaiming love, destroyed pagan temples to dramatize their cause. The Boston Tea Party had the same purpose. The 13th century King John's Magna Carta illustrated the oldest inducement for social reform: fear of "revolution or worse." To his credit, Marx argued against violence until societies were really ripe for change; most Western European labor terrorism disappeared as a result. But in romantic countries, including the U.S., revolutionary violence often became a mystique for purging feelings of inferiority. Explains Brandeis University Sociologist Lewis Coser: "The act of violence commits a man symbolically to the revolutionary movement and breaks his ties with his previous life. He is, so to speak, reborn."
At first glance, group violence may not seem to be the U.S. paradigm. Individualists claw their way through the unrelieved shootings, stabbings, rapes and lynchings of American fiction; lone duelers against fate people the works of writers as various as Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Saul Bellow. James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking and his numerous uptight descendants—the Western marshal, the private eye—are solitary scouts strewing the wilderness with dead Indians and renegades. Still, the singular misfits who tamed the frontier with bile, brawn and bowies were also members of often hostile groups—cattlemen v. sheepherders, for example. Indeed, U.S. history roils with political violence, much of it self-defense by countless groups against what they considered majority injustice.
The Revolution, a prime example, was followed by farmer uprisings over debts and taxes—the Shay and Whisky rebellions. In the mid-1800s, the nativist Know-Nothings fought rising Irish political power by killing Roman Catholics, burning churches and ultimately controlling 48% of the House of Representatives. In 1863, the Irish, fearing that Negroes would take their jobs while they were drafted into the Civil War, conducted a frightful race riot in New York City that killed an estimated 2,000 people and injured 8,000. The Civil War killed 500,000 soldiers—the equivalent of 3,000,000 in today's U.S. Afterward, the supposedly defeated white South defeated Reconstruction with a guerrilla war in which the Ku Klux Klan and other whites killed thousands of would-be Negro voters, imposed segregation, and infected the North with the very racism that the Civil War supposedly ended. Over the years, a dozen or more major Northern race riots followed the same pattern: whites invading black neighborhoods and killing scores of Negroes.