Climate of Violence

Does violence have a climate? I am not talking only of the "long hot summers" of 1965 and 1966, when violence crackled in almost every major ghetto from Harlem to Watts: It is less a physical than a social and moral climate I have in mind. I am asking about the line that can be drawn from hate and frustration to mass death.

Consider some of the acts of violence that have thrust this question at us in the past three or four years: the killing of an American President; the wave of terror on the streets and in the dark hallways of the big cities; the racial clashes, North as well as South; the teenage gang violence.

Last summer, a mass killing took place that shook the nation to the core and made Americans ask what had gone wrong with their mode of life, to have made such an act possible. It was the case of Charles Whitman, the young University of Texas architectural student, who killed his wife and his mother, then climbed to a high tower on the Austin campus with a whole artillery of weapons and rounded out his killings to 15 while wounding double that number.

This killer from the high tower was, on the surface, an all-American boy who had been an eagle scout, had married a girl who was the home-town beauty, and had friends and a good social life. But he suffered from headaches, from a brain tumor; and the separation of his parents triggered a deep-lying resentment of his father, who had been a tyrant to his children and had beaten his wife over a period of 25 years.

Whitman's sickness, and that of our other young killers, goes very deep—deeper, probably, than we shall ever know. Deprivation amidst affluence, reaction against repression, the effort to assert masculinity in the face of deep self-doubts, a cultural conditioning that teaches that there are no bounds except what the individual sets and no codes except what he recognizes. A failure of identification, whether with a father or anyone else, with the consequent suffused rebellion that issues in senseless violence and takes random people—or the society itself—as the target. Finally, the profusion of guns and easy access to them, with or without telescopic sights, by mail order or direct sale, for cash or credit, with no names asked or given.

This is the climate of frustration, of emotional deprivation, of hate. The component (continued on page 118)Climate of Violence(continued from page 99) elements of the climate are not always the same in each case of individual and mass violence. Thus, the great act of symbolic violence of our time, the killing of President Kennedy, needs understanding in separating out the elements of the twisted individual mind and the social climate of hate.

Writing of death, an early English poet, Thomas Traherne, spoke of the "immortal wheat, which never should be reaped." Such was John Kennedy, cut down in his prime before his greatness could be harvested. We have been re-enacting, in our collective mind and conscience, the dark tragedy of that November day three and a half years ago. Yet despite the deeply felt horror at President Kennedy's murder, and the tributes to him by historians, public figures and ordinary people, the climate of hate, which nourished if it did not produce the act, has not wholly been dissipated.

I am not one of those who say that it is always "the system" that is guilty of human crimes and never the particular man. The recent doubts about the Warren Commission Report turn on the question of whether Oswald alone was the killer or whether (as Edward Jay Epstein has suggested) there were two men firing the shots. Yet it was clearly not a far-flung conspiracy. I could wish, however, that the complex problem of the "right-wing climate," in Dallas and in Texas generally at the time of the assassination, had been handled in a less gingerly manner in the Report. Logically, indeed, there was no connection, since Oswald saw himself as a member of the radical left and not of the radical right. But what counts psychologically is the fact that it had little to do with left or right in Texas, but with their common climate of authoritarianism and hate.

There is an extreme view that holds the whole of America responsible for Kennedy's death, recognizing only gradations of sickness in the nation. One finds it in Hans Habe's book The Wounded Land, which was an almost catatonic response to the Kennedy killing, leaving the author incapable of distinguishing between the psychotic elements of hate and the ferment and turbulence of a nation bursting at the seams with change. Yet the Warren Report might have braved the risk of dissenting footnotes from Southern members of the Commission, and might have explored the link between the specific act of violence and the pervasive climate of hate in Dallas immediately before the assassination: the black-bordered advertisements against Kennedy in the Dallas papers, the privately printed handbills announcing that the President of the United States was wanted for treason, the mushrooming of superpatriot organizations—some national, some specifically Southern, some very local, but all of them sharing an inexpungeable belief that New Frontier liberalism was only an American outpost of the Russian and Chinese Communist conspiracy and that Kennedy was a conscious tool or an unconscious dupe in its hands. Actually, all of this is there in the Report, including the shabby schemings and maneuverings of Dallas extremist groups to use the Kennedy visit as a take-off for launching this or that fanatic cause with a burst of national publicity. It is there, even if its implications are officially and formally disowned.

One often finds Texas—and California, too—singled out from the rest of the nation as special case studies of right-wing extremism. I don't mean to fall into the trap of using either of them as a kind of "fall-guy state." Actually, one finds California producing as striking examples of left-wing extremism as of right-wing. One may also add that the bloodiest ethnic riots in recent American history took place in Los Angeles. The fact is that both Texas and California have a particular climate of emotional intensity, which is the result partly of their frontier tradition, partly of the way they have telescoped in a brief period a series of stages of development that took other regions longer to traverse. Thus, their extremism is not due, as some have thought, to their being backward and stagnant states, but rather to the speed with which they have grown in population and wealth. What has happened has been that a new urban-corporate-consumer economy has been quickly superimposed upon an earlier society that was at once feudal, individualist and vigilantist. There has not been time enough for the kind of transition from earlier to later social structure that the Eastern and even the Midwestern states made; and not time enough, therefore, for habits and attitudes of democratic moderation to be formed. Elements of the same telescoping of stages will be found in some of the recently formed Southern industrial centers as well.

I am not suggesting that Texas, California and the South are the sole centers of American violence today. Every nation has had a tradition of violence, and America is no exception; nor has any section or class or ethnic group been exempted from the pervasiveness of violence. America was born out of a revolution and grew by pushing ever farther along a lawless frontier. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America, noted the remarkable respect for law among the Americans he saw on his visit in 1831, the role of religion in setting norms of conduct and the rise of something very like a civic religion—a feeling of participation in the society and its problems and decisions—that helped curb the violent growing pains of a young society.

But on the California frontier in the gold-rush days and on the cattle frontier at the turn of the century, the breakdown of the old codes and inhibitions brought a new violence that threatened to escalate beyond control. The response, in the name of law and order, was a summary vigilantist violence as lawless in essence as the violence it was invoked to repress. The tenacity with which Texas and the other Southwestern states still cling to the idea of complete freedom of buying and possessing guns is part of that vigilantist tradition. During the Civil War, which was in itself the ultimate violence of fratricidal bloodshed, there was an additional marginal violence in the draft riots. In the halcyon days of early corporate and industrial growth, there was class violence between mercenary strikebreakers hired by the employers' associations and the new militant trade unions using their organizing drives to establish their position. All through American history there has been violence among farmer groups, from Shays' Rebellion in the late 18th Century to the battles against mortgage foreclosures during the Great Depression. All through American history, also, there has been race violence, from the slave rebellions before the Civil War to the great race riots of the 20th Century— in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), Detroit (1943), Cicero, Illinois (1951), the 1964 riots in Philadelphia, New York, Jersey City, Rochester, Chicago and the deadly Los Angeles riots of August 1965.

Against this historical record in America one must place, for the larger perspective, the even more blood-drenched record of dynastic struggles, civil wars, class conflicts and ethnic murderousness in world history, from the early dynasties of China and India through the whole bloody history of the Middle East, of tribal Africa and of Europe from the early Greeks to the Nazis, and the political and civil violence of the Latin-American republics. Within this frame, the contemporary violence in the United States becomes not a unique thing but part of the inherent pattern of men's struggle and conflict in seeking to build a community out of the varied experience of diverse human beings.

The great symbolic death happening of the Kennedy assassination shook up the nation and startled it into a new awareness of the need for understanding the roots, as well as the bitter fruits, of violence. Although it was a single event, it was the central tragedy in the whole pattern of violence. For all its blackness, it was the crevice of light that illuminated the meaning of the whole structure of violence, especially the violence of (continued on page 162)Climate of Violence(continued from page 118) extremism. Groups of scholars, criminologists, public administrators and political observers began to pool their insights and experience in an organized effort at understanding and prevention.

There was also, for a time, an effort to exploit politically the popular fears and passions aroused by the issue of violence on the streets. Barry Goldwater raised the specter of widespread terror as soon as he was nominated for the Presidency at San Francisco, and kept at it, spottily but persistently, all through the campaign. He cast his net widely, including in his indictment the whole violence pattern, from delinquency and addiction to rape in dark doorways, and from peaceful civil rights demonstrations and sit-downs to the turbulent big-city racial riots. He might have made considerable political capital of this issue had he not scared potential voters away by his stand on other problems. He voiced the fears of many more people than those who voted for him, and got a response from farmers and from small-town and suburban dwellers who shared a sense of the sinfulness of the big city. In another election, with different candidates, it may become the basis of a formidable political coalition.

The angry right, with its "tough" approach to violence, is an anomalous position. On the one hand it deplores all forms of lawbreaking, identifying itself with a rigorous support of the letter and spirit of the law. On the other hand, in the tradition of Goldwater's classic dictum—"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice"—it places itself on the side of a vigilantist course that is in some ways the most dangerous violence potential of our time. Thus, the angry right, with its pent-up frustrations and its cult of extreme panaceas for real and imagined ills, is itself part of the lawless violence pattern in America.

It is hard to talk of the angry right without jumping ahead of our story and talking of racist violence. For the psychic drive of the far-out right today lies in the specter of an invasion and an impending take-over of the nation both by the Communists with their fellow travelers and by the Negroes with their Northern white supporters. This carries with it a racist-rightist paranoid fusion, overlaid with delusions of grandeur: the belief that they act in the name not only of a higher moral law but of a higher political patriotism as well. They are fearful men—fearful of the explosive social changes taking place in American civilization, fearful of new ideas and of the idea carriers, fearful of new waves of voters (especially the Negroes) who will displace their local hold on power, fearful of winds of change in the outside world. They are frustrated men who see the immense strength of America, both military and economic, and ask why it should not be used—by a preventive missile war if necessary—to destroy the missile power of the Communist enemy and wipe it off the face of the earth.

They are men who yearn for a simpler society, like the small-town agrarian American society of the past. They feel themselves (in Housman's line) strangers and afraid in a world they never made, a world of unsettling transformations they cannot understand. Unlike the militant Negroes, whose demonstrations, and even riots, are part of a larger strategy of hope for a newer and more equitable society, the violence of the far-out right is part of an unthinking and reactionary strategy of despair. They have come increasingly to feel that they dwell in an occupied country—a land once theirs that has been invaded by foreigners, beatniks, Reds—and that a massive resistance movement, both to ferret out the subversives and to confound the invaders, justifies any degree of violence and the use of any weapons.

They form a curious mélange of groups—the thought-suppression groups such as the Birch Society, the religious hale groups such as the Christian Fronters and the Rockwell American Nazi Party, the military action groups such as the Minute Men of America, the hard-core white-supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and many others. Unlike the far-out groups on the left, such as the Russia-oriented Communist Party and the China-oriented "Progressive Labor" Communists, they have no power centers outside the United States to count on for abetting their planned violence. There was a time, under the shadow of fascism, when they did; but, happily, that time has passed.

In clinical terms, one of the most interesting of the groups is the Minute Men movement, centered in the Midwest and Southwest and based on the premise that American foreign policy will continually be betrayed by appeasement of world communism; that the Communists will invade and occupy the United States, aided by their subversive Fifth Column from within; and that only devoted resistance bands, with arms and with guerrilla training, will be able to survive against the onslaught. It sounds farfetched, but there are other groups as well—the Paul Revere Associated Yeomen, the Counter-Insurgency Council, and a mushrooming cluster of other equally far-out fringe outfits—that are convincing one another of this apocalyptic vision, and that are busily training, secretly and in dead earnest, for the coming of The Day. In fact, one of the most striking attitudes in far-out circles, both on the right and on the left, is the sense of expectation in waiting for the take-over: The far-out left is convinced that the right will make the first attempt at direct violence and that a revolution on the left will follow; the far-out right is convinced that the Communists will make the takeover, but that later a well-prepared right will overcome them.

By any rational judgment, both are suffering severely from paranoid delusions. But they are not to be taken lightly. The instruments of a sense of mission, on the part of any group of True Believers or of any individual like Oswald, inevitably, are firearms. Since 1959, the U. S. Government has supplied a legitimate and responsible organization, the National Rifle Association, with free guns and ammunition valued at well over $12,000,000, and has sold an additional quantity of larger guns at cut rates. A number of foreign governments have put their earlier-issue rifles, guns and other weaponry—including bazookas, mortars and hand grenades—on the market and these, too. are openly for sale in America, are distributed through mail-order houses and move unimpeded in interstate commerce. Thus, there is a recklessness in the present sale and free distribution of firearms that the nation can badly afford.

Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut has several times introduced legislation intended to regulate the sale and shipment of guns in interstate commerce and to make records of the identity of those involved. After the multiple killings from the high tower at the University of Texas, President Johnson added his own persuasive urgency to the Dodd legislation. Inevitably, there has been an outcry against these proposals. There are three levels of approach to the issue. On one level there is the question of honest citizens who want weapons in sell-defense, and gun lovers who genuinely enjoy the discipline of marksmanship and want to practice it in groups. For either of these categories there is no real problem, since they need not fear the record of their purchases of guns and ammunition.

On a second level, there are individual crackpots with a sense of mission, such as Lee Oswald, and the twisted mass killers, such as Charles Whitman. It may well be argued that no limiting legislation will reduce the chances of multiple killing and of assassination attempts by such men, since anyone demented enough to work out a plan as coldly as Oswald and Whitman did will manage to get hold of a weapon somehow. Restrictive laws (it is argued) would therefore accomplish little more than to punish the large majority for the possible sins of a minute number of psychotics. This is the argument thai Governor Connolly of Texas has used against the antigun bill. There is some substance to this contention. Laws by their nature often inconvenience the well-intentioned many in order to get at a few malfeasors. It is always a question of balancing social gains against losses. Yet on looking back, there were only three ways by which the act of violence by Oswald could have been prevented: possibly by better psychiatric care given to him as a boy; by better security around the President; by a firearms law that would have made it at least harder to have acquired that mail-order gun with a telescopic sight.

It is the third level of approach that counts most—that of private paramilitary violence. I am not speaking now of individual True Believers, but of groups that are convinced that only privately organized firepower can save the nation, or their race or religion or whatever, from enemies with sinister plans or strength. It is argued that the Constitution guarantees every American the right to bear arms, presumably on the ground of defending the nation against tyrants and tyranny, domestic and foreign, and on Jefferson's principle that the tree of liberty must periodically be watered by the blood of patriots. But Americans have come in time to ease up on the idea that every government is a tyranny to be overthrown. And, as Carl Bakal has pointed out in his richly documented book The Right to Bear Arms, the record shows how far the recent uses of guns, too freely bought, have departed from the original intention. Even bypassing the obvious fact that this constitutional right will still exist for every individual, under proper safeguards of identification, there is the additional fact that the nature of warfare has been wholly transformed since the framers of the Constitution guaranteed the individual right to bear arms. Given a hostile modern enemy armed with tanks, flame throwers, bombers and atomic weapons, the chance of overcoming it by rifles and machine guns seems a distant one.

But the real danger of groups with easy access to guns is not their ineffectiveness against a foreign enemy but their effectiveness against one another. Senator Dodd, who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and has studied both the Nazis and the Communists to good effect, knows the lesson of the Weimar Republic, when paramilitary armed groups of Communists, Socialists, monarchists and Nazis marched, drilled and practiced their shooting skills against one another until they created an intolerable climate of tension and a vacuum of social order: It was into this vacuum that the Nazis moved. In America, too, the danger of the proliferating groups that believe they have the mission of saving their country by direct action is that they will engage in private violence against groups they hate, and thus destroy not only the public order but a goodly part of the heritage of decency as well.

Not surprisingly, some of the groups on the far-out right have tried to infiltrate the police. This is true particularly of the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan boasts openly that local Southern sheriffs and deputies have joined them—which raises the question of how you can police lawless groups when you are yourself part of them. There have also been incidents involving Bircher recruitment of police in Los Angeles; in Santa Ana, California; in Philadelphia; and in New York City. There will be others.

The lot of the American policeman is not a happy one, not only because he has to meet the mounting tide of crime and violence but also because he feels aggrieved at overlenient judges, pampering parents, "bleeding-heart liberals," slushy sociologists and timid public officials—all of whom he sees involved in a conspiracy to bypass effective law enforcement. Often himself a small property owner who is worried about the falling value of his house as Negroes move into white neighborhoods, and probably a father worried about the busing of Negro children to his neighborhood school or of his own children to a predominantly Negro school, the policeman has been one of the early forces behind the "white backlash." He bears the brunt of criticism and abuse for "police brutality" in coping with demonstrations, counter-demonstrations and the grilling of suspects in criminal cases. In actual riots, he gets much more than criticism hurled at him. The policeman of today is likely to be bristling with defensiveness, and it is natural for him to be tempted by a movement that builds and butters him up, and tells him that he is sinned against, not a sinner.

Natural, perhaps—but also dangerous. Since the police must deal with violence in all its forms, they cannot identify themselves with any "cause" organization on any side of the great struggles of our time. A police force with a substantial Bircher contingent, for example, could not be trusted to be politically neutral in any civil liberties case involving the expression of dissenting opinions, nor in a civil rights case or a racial clash. If the local police in America should become politicized and fanatic, their policemen's clubs would themselves become bludgeons of lawless violence and would evoke in the end an ungovernable violence from their civilian targets. Resentment breeds resentment, hatred evokes hatred, until we are caught in a spiraling interaction of passions and violence that may someday blow the American social fabric to kingdom come.

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We need to distinguish two kinds of violence—that of the rebels for a cause and that of the rebels without a cause. In a sense, the crustacean True Believers of the far-out right, of whom I have been speaking, belong to the first category. But the movement that has caught the attention and imagination of our decade—the civil rights movement—also inevitably involves a degree of cause violence in the form of sit-downs, marches and demonstrations, and the angry passions they evoke on both sides. This, in turn, must be distinguished from the violence of racial riots, which is not in itself part of the civil rights cause, but which flows from the same bitterness about inequalities of treatment and from the same smoldering sense of injustice.

The evils against which the cause violence protests are real evils, not fantasies. In the South, there has been an exclusion of the Negro from the whole range of equal life chances, including schooling, housing, jobs, medical attention, police and court treatment, even church services. This exclusion had hardened into legal molds that had to be broken. The civil rights demonstrations, not only in the South but throughout the nation, cannot be understood except against this background of the accumulation of anti-Negro outrages in the South, and the life-and-death risks of fighting back against them in the context of the garrison state. With the help of the Supreme Court decisions, of national Negro organizations and of sympathetic and even militant young whites from both North and South, the Southern Negroes have taken the risks. The cohesive-ness of the Southern Negro community, and especially the cement of religious belief, has held them together remarkably in the struggle. This has been true even in the face of episodes like the willful bombing of a Negro church in Birmingham, whose victims were a huddle of little Negro girls in white Sunday dresses, or the shotgun shooting of local NAACP organizers, or the three young men—two Northern whites, one Southern Negro—who were beaten, shot and buried deep at a dam site in Mississippi.

It is worth noting that both sides in the South have invoked the principle of a "higher law" that has justified the breaking of formal legality. The civil rights demonstrators, trying to show up the injustice of local ordinances and state prohibitions, have appealed to the higher law of human decency, religious belief and the American conscience. The men of Neshoba County, Mississippi—whoever they were, Klansmen or others—who killed and buried the three young civil rights workers, also thought they were carrying out a higher law. Their extremism was in pursuit of their conviction about Mississippi's freedom to set its own rules in the treatment of its Negroes, in the teeth of the U. S. Supreme Court's decisions against segregation and in the teeth of both legislative and Presidential action in Washington. They had been told—by their high state officials, by Klan leaders, by local rabble-rousers—that the Federal officials and the Federal court system had usurped the rights of the states, that troublemaking interlopers from the North—"Communists," "Jews," "Nigger-lovers"—had conspired to break up their way of life. They felt they were making a last stand against these conspiring forces.

"They have to strike at what they can reach," wrote William Bradford Huie about the gas-station attendants, insurance salesmen, poor farmers, small tradesmen, store clerks, sheriffs and deputy sheriffs who make up the vigilante cadre in the small towns of the Deep South. They struck at James Meredith, at Medgar Evers, at the little girls in the Birmingham church, at the Detroit housewife and the Boston minister who came to Selma, at the divinity student and the priest who came to Hayne-ville, Alabama. They reach for whatever symbolic target of their hatred they can strike at, always confident that they possess the inward grace of a divine right to protect the true Southern and American way.

There have been some Negro voices that have called for an answer in kind, with weapons and firepower. A Negro defense organization, the Deacons, has been quietly formed in the Deep South, and their members are ready to shoot back when their lives are threatened. This may deter some murders; but despite some manic talk by a few Negro writers about killing the whites in a civil war, the Negroes know that in the nation as a whole, they are in a minority. Violence on their part would trigger a larger violence by those whites who hate them and perhaps alienate many Americans who are today marginal or neutral. This applies also to the contention of some black-nationalist leaders that the cause of civil rights parallels the revolutionary nationalisms of Africa. There is every reason for the American Negro to take pride in the new independent black republics of Africa and to derive psychic strength from the triumphs of the African peoples in winning their freedom, much as American Jews get psychic strength from the emergence of Israel. But the situation neither of the Jews nor of the Negroes in America is that of a colonial majority, but rather of a minority winning equal access to equal life chances in a democracy that at least in rhetoric and increasingly in fact is dedicated to the idea of equality.

In the Northern cities, the racial riots of the summers of 1965 and 1966 have shown how thin the veneer of public order is when turbulent passions are engaged. There is a deeply cherished theory of the sociologists that the roots of these disturbances—as in the Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, Rochester and Los Angeles riots—are to be found in the social environment of the Negro ghettos. There is enough truth in this view to make it an easily embraceable one, especially since so many of the violent racial episodes in Northern and Western cities during the 1965 and 1966 summers were triggered by trivial incidents—a cop making an arrest, a fight between youth gangs, a hydrant turned off on a hot day. For the grinding poverty in the Negro ghetto is a harsh fact, not to be ignored. Slum living, official indifference, police hostility, overcrowding, unemployment, rent gouging, overcharging in the stores—these are all part of the squalor of life among what may be called the underclass.

But while all this furnishes the tinder, it does not explain the heat of the flame. The heat comes from anger, not necessarily at conditions in the ghetto but at the gap between the rhetoric of American life and the reality of Negro life in America. It comes from resentment at unequal treatment that persists even when conditions are improving; and it has to do less with the life in the ghetto than with what is happening outside, especially in the highly publicized Southern struggles. The young Negroes, whether in Harlem or in Watts, were striking out symbolically at whatever they could reach—at cops, photographers, store windows, loot, whites in passing automobiles. It was the violence of a man locked in an airless, oppressive room, who feels he must break the windows in order to breathe.

Despite the squalor of the Negro slums, it would be a mistake to see the current race violence in America as part of a downward arc of Negro living conditions. The violence was far less intense when these conditions were far worse; it has become sharper as these conditions have grown better. Actually, it is the violence of a people on the mend and on the move, but rightly impatient at the slow rate of improvement, deeply resentful of lingering inequities and injustices, bitter at outrages become intolerable, responding to them with a sharpened bitterness under leaders who are themselves caught in a competition of militancies and who find themselves talking of "black power" and brushing aside any cooperation with whites. De Tocque-ville, writing on the French Revolution, noted that the great explosion came not when the condition of the peasant was at its worst but when the reforms had begun and were on their way. He noted also the role of the intellectuals in creating the revolutionary image to which the people responded. Both these observations apply to the breakthrough of the American Negroes. Each gain has intensified the need for further gains, because what counts is not the objective situation so much as the distance still to be traversed between the condition of the Negroes and that of the whites. While living standards have risen for the Negroes, the expectation of what is possible has risen even faster. The gains in freedom have a way of feeding on themselves. Moreover, the image created by Negro and white intellectuals, of the gap between what the Negro is and what he ought to want, has played a decisive role in making him want it.

In the most general sense, all resentments of minority groups derive from the pathos of their situation. The violence of the American Negro, especially in the riots of the big cities, is what it is because the Negro feels himself, for all his gains, an outsider in American society. He knows that, from the local sheriffs and mayors to the President, he is ruled by whites, and that his black brothers are in very few of the seats of power. If he is lucky enough to be employed in the industrial society, he often feels alienated from his job, especially since he has never had the discipline in industrial technology that the white child has from childhood on. In many cases, he doesn't get the chance at developing the skills that the industrial society requires. With automation, he will find himself in a world in which the unskilled and semiskilled workers will become a decreasing force.

The Negro family unit, broken by the will of the slaveowners and slow to reconstitute itself in the intervening century, forces the Negro male child to grow up in a context where there is often no male model on which he can shape himself. The religious cohesiveness and the community fabric of the tight Southern Negro community have not found new roots in Northern urban soil. The Negro has become uprooted from family, religion and community, with a resulting high incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction and lawlessness. Unwilling to face the extent to which he has become separated from his own identity, the Negro strikes at the enemy without.

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There remains the violence of rebels without a cause. It includes the violence of teenage groups wielding machetes, switchblades and baseball bats in "rumbles"; classroom and school-hall violence; reefer-smoking and drug-addict violence. It includes auto thefts, holdups, robberies and rapes committed not by professional criminals but by the unprofessional young. It includes "thrill killings" by the bored or desensitized, and multiple killings like those in Chicago and Austin. It includes the everyday hooliganism of lower-class youth on the streets, on buses and subways, and the holiday hooliganism of middle- and upper-class youth on the beaches, at suburban debutante parties, in summer-resort towns. It is a fact that the figures on the increases in major crimes are as steep in the suburbs as in the big cities. They are no respecters of class or locale.

When I speak of the rebels without a cause, I am speaking of young people of every class who harbor a sullen and diffused resentment against their elders, against "outsiders," against society as a vague constrictive entity. Too often we speak of this violence as "senseless" when we mean that it doesn't make any sense to us. But it makes sense—a distorted kind of sense, but still sense—to the lower-class youngster whose hand wields the switchblade, or to the middle-or upper-class youngster who, in a drunken state, wrecks a motel room or goes out and smashes up his car and his date. They, too, whether out of resentment or out of an intolerable sense of emptiness, are striking at whatever and whomever they can reach, not for some cause but because they have nothing that commits them to life. They do not rage with a fanatic passion of hatred, like a Black Muslim or an Alabama lyncher or a member of a gun squad of the far-out right. Yet their kind of violence is that of a person on the way to becoming desensitized. It is the violence arising from anomie—from an absence of values—and may therefore turn out to be the most dangerous violence of all.

America will survive its civil rights struggles and riots. In fact, the nation will be enriched by the tumbling down of caste walls and by the new access to life experience on the part of groups hitherto cut off from the mainstream of the culture. America will even survive the political hate groups, not by trying to legislate hate out of existence—for that cannot be done—but by the sustained educational and cultural explosions that will make these primitivist hatreds obsolescent and even absurd. But the anomie of the uncommitted may prove in the end the more fearful malady.

It arises in part from some of the same breakdowns that I noted in speaking of the American Negro—the uprooting experience of our time, the failure of the adolescent to identify with an effective model, the breakdown of a cohesive community. What is involved at base is a generational struggle that goes beyond those of past generations and that is at once the root and the fruit of the breakdown of communication between the generations. The earlier generational struggles were those between the children and their foreign-born parents, or between parents still clinging to rural and small-town mores and adolescents eager for the experience of city life and rebelling against traditional religion and moral codes. In the present era, the struggle still operates on the ground of changing moral codes and value systems, but something new has emerged—a "youth culture" with a language of its own and a contempt not only for the values of the older generation but, in niany rases, for any values at all. The most fundamental thing that has happened has been an erosion of trust: Many in the younger generation—often with justification—have no trust in the older generation and its purposes and its institutions and they feel themselves in turn untrusted. What fidelity they have is for one another, in the urban roving gangs and street-corner clusters or in the suburban fun groups that have made "having fun" the imperative of our time.

It is hard to grow up in America and to achieve a sense of selfhood within this frame. Every adolescent must pass through two crucial periods: one when he identifies himself with a model—a father, an older brother, a teacher; the second when he disassociates himself from his model, rebels against him, reasserts his own selfhood. Both are necessary. But if the first has been a failure, the second cannot take place in a healthy way. Instead, the identification is likely to be with a group or gang in a similar plight, and the rebellion becomes a striking out against authority and society as a whole, with consequences we have already seen in the pervasive violence of our time.