Why America's Murder Rate Is So High

By Fox Butterfield

July 26, 1998

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MURDER in the United States has been dropping dramatically for years, to
the lowest level since the modern crime wave began in the 1960's. But this
encouraging decline has masked a fundamental fact -- that there is no such
thing as an American murder rate.

In fact, there are sharp regional differences in homicide, with the South
having by far the highest murder rate, almost double that of the
Northeast, a divergence that has persisted for as long as records have
been kept, starting in the 19th century. The former slaveholding states of
the old Confederacy all rank in the top 20 states for murder, led by
Louisiana, with a rate of 17.5 murders per 100,000 people in 1996. The 10
states with the lowest homicide rates are in New England and the northern
Midwest, with South Dakota's the lowest at 1.2 murders per 100,000 people.

It's Personal

Experts note, in addition, that much of the disparity in murder rates
between the South and other sections of the country stems from a
difference in the character of Southern homicide. In the South, many
murders are of a personal and traditional nature: a barroom brawl, a
quarrel between acquaintances or a fight between lovers. Elsewhere,
homicides usually begin with another crime, like a robbery gone bad, and
typically involve strangers.

Most important, the experts say, the high Southern murder rate is a key
factor behind America's disproportionately high homicide rate compared
with other democratic, industrialized nations. In 1996, the last year for
which data are available, the United States murder rate was 7.4 per
100,000 people. The next closest country was Finland, at 3.2 per 100,000
people, with France at 1.1, Japan at 0.6 and Britain at 0.5.

While the United States has much more murder than comparable countries, it
does not necessarily have much more crime. England has a higher rate of
burglary. France has a higher rate of auto theft. The Netherlands and
Australia have about the same total crime rate.

''The whole American scandalously high homicide rates are Southern in
origin,'' says Roger Lane, a professor of history at Haverford College and
author of ''Murder in America: A History'' (Ohio State University Press,
1997). Until the 1960's, Professor Lane said, America's big cities
actually had murder rates lower than the national average, since the
national rate had been skewed upward by Southern homicides.

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The question of why murder is so prevalent in the South has fascinated
observers as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the early 1830's
recorded a remark by a young lawyer he encountered in Alabama. ''There is
no one here but carries arms under his clothes,'' the lawyer said. ''At
the slightest quarrel, knife or pistol comes to hand. These things happen
continually; it is a semi-barbarous state of society.''

A study of 19th century judicial records completed in 1980 by Michael
Hindus, a lawyer, found that from 1800 to 1860 the murder rate in South
Carolina, an overwhelmingly rural, agrarian area, was four times higher
than that of Massachusetts, then the most urban, industrial state. More
than a century later, the difference persists in almost the same
magnitude. In 1996, the murder rate in South Carolina was 9 per 100,000
people, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation; in Massachusetts
it was 2.6 per 100,000 people.

High Southern homicide rates challenge a central theory of criminology,
which predicts more murder in densely populated urban areas where crowding
and poverty break down traditional social ties and values.
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Southern homicide was typically rural, and over the years many theories
have been advanced to explain it. Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled
through the South in the 1850's and wrote about it in ''Journeys and
Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom,'' pointed to the persistence of
frontier conditions in the region. Southern plantation agriculture,
characterized by widely scattered settlements and a lack of roads and
schools, left the region a frontier until after the Civil War, helping to
breed lawlessness.

'Primal Honor'

Contemporary historians have suggested other sources of Southern
bellicosity. David Hackett Fischer, a professor of history at Brandeis
University, says a critical factor was the heavy settlement of the South
by immigrants referred to today as Scotch Irish -- people from the north
of Britain, the lowlands of Scotland and the north of Ireland.

These settlers, whom Benjamin Franklin described as ''white savages,''
brought with them a culture based on centuries of fighting between the
kings of England and Scotland over the borderlands they inhabited. They
had a penchant for family feuds, a love of whisky and a warrior ethic that
demanded vengeance, Professor Fischer said.

The mother of Andrew Jackson, herself an immigrant from the north of
Ireland, advised her boy: ''Andrew, never tell a lie, nor take what is not
your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle
them cases yourself.'' He did, becoming a famous pistol dueler.

Behind such toughness was an ethic of ''primal honor,'' according to
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a professor of history at the University of Florida.
Above all, honor meant reputation. ''You identified yourself on the basis
of what others think of you, so appearances mattered,'' Professor Wyatt-
Brown said.

Honor was reinforced by slavery. Slavery by its nature dishonors one group
and contrives to give all honor to another. In the South, race helped turn
the distinction between master and slave into an absolute divide,
perpetuating whites' belief that they were people of honor. And since
slavery could be maintained only by the daily exercise of brute force,
slave owners became very sensitive to the slightest threat to their
superiority, a touchiness that expanded from plantation fields to all
areas of their lives, Professor Lane said.

Outlaw Legacy

The Reconstruction period after the Civil War, in which white Southerners
often resorted to terror or killings to restore their political control,
helped perpetuate the high level of violence in the South, a problem that
reached its apogee in the 1890's with lynching.

The cult of honor was gradually transmuted into African-American slave
society, scholars now believe, as slaves and their emancipated descendants
found themselves outside the law in the South, with sheriffs, judges and
juries all controlled by whites. ''For blacks in the South, there was no
alternative to settling disputes personally and physically,'' said
Professor Lane.

The South in the 20th century has become more like the rest of the nation,
as it has become more urban and industrial. Waves of whites flocking from
the cold North to the Sun Belt states and the great migration of blacks
going the other way also have made the regions more similar.

But the concern with honor persists, especially in smaller cities and
rural areas, said Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the
University of Michigan. In analyzing homicide data for whites, Professor
Nisbett found there was no difference in murder rates between white males
in the largest cities in the South and the rest of the country. But in
medium-sized cities, with populations between 50,000 and 200,000, Southern
white males commit murder at a rate twice that of their counterparts in
the rest of the nation, he said. In small cities, with populations from
10,000 to 50,000, the ratio is 3 to 1 and in rural areas it is 4 to 1. The
excess murder in the South, he said, comes from crimes ''where you could
plausibly say an insult had been involved.''

Professor Nisbett devised a psychological test, administered to students
at the University of Michigan, that appears to demonstrate a Southern
sensitivity to insult and disposition to violence. In the test, a person
unexpectedly bumps into a subject as he walks down a corridor, and calls
him a jerk. Out-of-state white male students from the South, even pre-med
students, tend to react with anger and show measurable increases in levels
of testosterone and cortisol, hormones that indicate stress. White
Northern males typically respond by laughing the incident off and do not
show the same hormonal reactions, Professor Nisbett said.

In the view of historians, traditional Southern influences and attitudes
help explain Louisiana's ranking as the state with by far the highest
homicide rate. Before the Civil War, Louisiana had the most brutal
conditions for slavery, in large part because it was the one state where
sugar cane was grown, and cane production is particularly harsh work.