Levi Johnson buried his shovel in the head of Jesse Kendall in June 1855. Kendall, the foreman of a road crew on which Johnson was working in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, had slapped Johnson with the flat of his own shovel, upbraiding him for not working. Johnson, aggrieved, returned a fatal blow.

This obscure incident by the side of a New England road was part of a murder explosion in the mid-19th century, a "time that homicide rates in the United States truly diverged from the rates elsewhere in the Western world," writes Ohio State history professor Randolph Roth in his provocatively argued new book, American Homicide (Harvard University Press, 2009).

America continues to be the world's most homicidal affluent democracy, with Baltimore stubbornly ranked among its deadliest large cities. But as we try to divine meaning from the macabre annual accounting of the city's murdered, we may be missing the lessons of history. Or so argues Roth, who contravenes the conventional wisdom about the root causes of violence. "America's homicide rate has been stuck between 6 and 9 per 100,000 persons per year for a century," he observes. "In the late 1990s the United States had full employment, a war on drugs, a million people employed in law enforcement, 1.8 million people incarcerated, a ban on assault weapons, gun-registration laws, conceal-carry laws, education reform, welfare reform ... and the highest rates of church membership and attendance in the Western world. If liberal or conservative hypotheses about homicide were right or if both were right, the annual homicide rate should have been close to 1 per 100,000 persons by the year 2000; but it wasn't and it has risen since."

Americans kill on the scale they do, according to Roth, not because of poverty, drugs, race, class, guns, or the various policy permutations of law enforcement and punishment. "The predisposition to violence," he insists, "is not rooted in objective social conditions." There are always historical counterexamples in which similar conditions did not lead to increases in homicide.

During the Great Depression, when poverty and unemployment skyrocketed, homicide dropped in U.S. cities. Before the 1890s, Roth points out, African Americans were far less likely to kill than whites and were especially unlikely to kill one another.

What happened? Roth argues that Americans kill because of feelings and beliefs about the integrity of the nation's social fabric. Plotting the fluctuating metrics of civic health against murder rates throughout our national history, he finds a correlation with changes in how we experience the legitimacy of the social order. He identifies four factors: When we no longer believe that government is stable or unbiased, when we feel authority is illegitimate, when we don't share racial or religious or political solidarity with each other, and when we don't have faith in the social hierarchy, we kill, even if those killings might appear random.

But in urban America today, we focus on a particular kind of homicide, often citing it as the prime example of the failure of the city: young, poor, black men killing each other on a disturbing, bloody scale. Where we see the quintessential measure of contemporary dysfunction, however, Roth sees urban mayhem as mere epiphenomenon in the larger historical story. The killing in Baltimore is nothing new: Major metropolitan areas simply house the largest population of those who find American institutional arrangements fundamentally illegitimate. 

Roth relies heavily on University of Maryland criminologist Gary LaFree, whose 1998 book, Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America, also works to recast the racial character of urban violence. LaFree and Roth argue that in the post-civil-rights era, the sense of the illegitimacy of the social order experienced by those trapped in hyper-segregated urban centers leads directly to murder. "Ironically," writes Roth, "for African Americans the success of the civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made the inequality that remained all the more intolerable."

Roth is at pains to point out that social inequality alone doesn't lead to murder. "As long as citizens accept the justice or inevitability of a hierarchy," he writes, "and believe they can defend their rights ... or resist oppression in nonviolent ways, homicide rates can remain moderate."

Yet murder in Baltimore and most of urban America is immoderate. Mayors can sell their crime control programs, their Comstats, their broken-windows or community-policing strategies; partisans can argue endlessly for more guns or fewer guns, for treatment-on-demand or three-strikes-and-you're-out. If American Homicide is right, these are all beside the point. "It would have been nice to end this book on a hopeful note," Roth writes. But he doesn't. He does observe that most other affluent democracies have been able produce very low homicide rates since the end of World War II, and he suggests that the best hope for ending our peculiar American carnage lies with our elected officials. "Political leaders bear the greatest responsibility for nation's political life and the homicide problem it has caused."

In America, in Baltimore, we need a shared social story, a tale that we believe about the way things work for all of us, a story about how we all hang together. If we don't have such a story, we will continue to die at each other's hand like no other place in the world.

—Michael Corbin's feature about teaching in the Maryland prison system, "Learning the Hard Way," appeared in the September 2009 Urbanite.


  On the air: A conversation with Randolph Roth on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on January 19.