Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen
THE U.S. SOUTH HAS LONG BEEN viewed as a place of romance, leisure, and gentility. Southerners have been credited with warmth, expressiveness, spontaneity, close family ties, a love of music and sport, and an appreciation for the things that make life worth living—from cuisine to love.
But there has also been the claim that there is a darker strain to southern life. For several centuries, the southern United States has been regarded as more violent than the northern part of the country.1 This belief has been shared by foreign visitors, northerners, and southerners with experience outside the South. Duels, feuds, bushwhackings, and lynchings are more frequently reported in the correspondence, autobiographies, and newspapers of the South than of the North from the eighteenth century on.2 The rates of homicide in some areas of the South in the nineteenth century make the inner city of today look almost like a sanctuary. According to one accounting, in the plateau region of the Cumberland Mountains between 1865 and 1915, the homicide rate was 130 per 100,0003—more than ten times today’s national homicide rate and twice as high as that of our most violent cities.
Not only homicide but also a penchant for violence in many other forms are alleged to characterize the South. The autobiographies of southerners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often included accounts of severe beatings of children by parents and others.4 And southern pastimes and games often involved violence that is as shocking to us today as it was at the time to northerners. In one game called “purring,” for example, two opponents grasped each other firmly by the shoulders and began kicking each other in the shins at the starting signal. The loser was the man who released his grip first.5 Even more horrifying to modern (and to contemporaneous northern) sensibilities was a favorite sport of frontiersmen called fighting “with no holds barred,” which meant that weapons were banned but nothing else was. Contestants could and did seek to maim their opponents.6 Thus gouged-out eyes and bitten-off body parts were common outcomes of such fights.
Cases of southern violence often reflect a concern with blows to reputation or status—with “violation of personal honor”—and the tacit belief that violence is an appropriate response to such an affront. The journalist Hodding Carter has written that in the 1930s he served on a jury in Louisiana that was hearing a case concerning a man who lived next to a gas station where the hangers-on had been teasing him for some time. One day he opened fire with a shotgun, injuring two of the men and killing an innocent bystander. When Carter proposed a verdict of guilty, the other eleven jurors protested: “He ain’t guilty. He wouldn’t of been much of a man if he hadn’t shot them fellows.”7 A historian has written of the same period that it was impossible to obtain a conviction for murder in some parts of the South if the defendant had been insulted and had issued a warning that the insult had to be retracted.8 And until the mid-1970s, Texas law held that if a man found his wife and her lover in a “compromising position” and killed them, there was no crime—only a “justifiable homicide.”
The young men of the South were prepared for these violent activities by a socialization process designed to make them physically courageous and ferocious in defense of their reputations: “From an early age small boys were taught to think much of their own honor, and to be active in its defense. Honor in this society meant a pride of manhood in masculine courage, physical strength and warrior virtue. Male children were trained to defend their honor without a moment’s hesitation.”9
Even very young children were encouraged to be aggressive, learning that “they were supposed to grab for things, fight on the carpet to entertain parents, clatter their toys about, defy parental commands, and even set upon likely visitors in friendly roughhouse.”10 Children themselves rigorously enforced the code of honor. A boy who dodged a stone rather than allow himself to be hit and then respond in kind ran the risk of being ostracized by his fellows.11
The southerners’ “expertise” in violence is reflected in their reputed success as soldiers.12 Southerners have been alleged, at least since Tocqueville’s commentary on America, to be more proficient in the arts of war than northerners and to take greater pride in their military prowess. Twentieth-century scholars have documented the southern enthusiasm for wars, their overrepresentation in the national military establishment, and their fondness for military content in preparatory schools and colleges.13
There are many “Souths”—the Cavalier South of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, founded by the inheritors of the medieval knightly tradition of horsemanship and skill in battle; the mountain South, originating in eastern Appalachia and moving southward and westward decade by decade; the plantation South, based on growing cotton; and the western South, based on the herding of cattle in dry plains and hills that could sustain no other form of agriculture. Of the explanations that we will cite for southern violence, certain ones apply plausibly to some of these regions but less plausibly to others.
Four major explanations have been offered for the southern tendency to prefer violence: the higher temperature of the South and consequently the quicker tempers of southerners, the tradition of slavery, the greater poverty of the South, and the putative “culture of honor” of the South. We argue that the role of “honor” is independent of, and probably greater than, any role played by the other three.
Temperature. It has been suggested that at least a part of the violence of the South can be accounted for by the characteristically higher temperatures of the South.14 It is indeed possible to show that variation in temperature in a locality is associated with the number of violent crimes there,15 and we will examine the role played by temperature in the most dramatic form of violence, namely homicide.
Slavery. Slavery has long been held responsible for the violence of the South.16 Abigail Adams was of the opinion that whites inflicted on themselves the same sort of violent treatment that they accorded their slaves.17 Thomas Jefferson concurred, in his Notes on Virginia, as did many other thoughtful southerners. John Dickinson, an eighteenth-century revolutionary from the eastern shore of Maryland, believed that the institution of slavery led to southern “pride, selfishness, peevishness, violence.”18 Tocqueville also believed that slavery was responsible for the South’s violence, but he emphasized, rather than the “contagion” from treatment of the slaves, the idleness encouraged by slavery:
As [the Kentuckian] lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man... and the energy which his neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.19
At several points in this book we will assess the evidence for and against both aspects of slavery as explanations for southern violence.
Poverty. A third explanation for the greater violence of the South has to do with poverty. The South is poorer than any other region of the country and always has been; in each region of the country and in every sort of population unit, from rural county to large city, poverty is associated with higher homicide rates.
A variant of the economic explanation focuses not on absolute income or wealth but rather on disparities in income. Some argue that inequality in wealth breeds violence. We will attempt to assess the role of poverty and inequality in the violence of the South both in rates of homicide and in preference for violence as a means of conflict resolution.
We believe that the most important explanation for southern violence is that much of the South has differed from the North in a very important economic respect and that this has carried with it profound cultural consequences. Thus the southern preference for violence stems from the fact that much of the South was a lawless, frontier region settled by people whose economy was originally based on herding. As we shall see, herding societies are typically characterized by having “cultures of honor” in which a threat to property or reputation is dealt with by violence.
Cultures of honor have been independently invented by many of the world’s societies. These cultures vary in many respects but have one element in common: The individual is prepared to protect his reputation—for probity or strength or both—by resort to violence. Such cultures seem to be particularly likely to develop where (1) the individual is at economic risk from his fellows and (2) the state is weak or nonexistent and thus cannot prevent or punish theft of property. And those two conditions normally occur together: Herding, for example, is the main viable form of agriculture in remote areas, far from government enforcement mechanisms.
Some cultures of honor emphasize the individual’s personal honesty and integrity in the sense that honor is usually meant today. That has always been one of the major meanings of the concept. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century compiler of the first English dictionary, defined honor as “nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness.” This is “honour which derives from virtuous conduct.”20 Honor defined in those terms is prized by virtually all societies; the culture of honor, however, differs from other cultures in that its members are prepared to fight or even to kill to defend their reputations as honorable men.
The culture of honor also differs from others in an even more important respect. In addition to valuing honor defined as virtuous conduct, it values—often far more—honor defined as respect of the sort “which situates an individual socially and determines his right to precedence.”21 Honor in this sense is based not on good character but on a man’s strength and power to enforce his will on others. Again, almost all societies value honor defined as precedence or status. The culture of honor differs from other cultures in that violence will be used to attain and protect this kind of honor. Honor, as we use the term in this book, is well captured by ethnographer David Mandelbaum’s characterization of the Arabic and Persian word for honor—izzat. “It is a word often heard in men’s talk, particularly when the talk is about conflict, rivalry, and struggle. It crops up as a kind of final explanation for motivation, whether for acts of aggression or beneficence.”22
A key aspect of the culture of honor is the importance placed on the insult and the necessity to respond to it. An insult implies that the target is weak enough to be bullied. Since a reputation for strength is of the essence in the culture of honor, the individual who insults someone must be forced to retract; if the instigator refuses, he must be punished—with violence or even death. A particularly important kind of insult is one directed at female members of a man’s family.
In the Old South, as in the ancient world, “son of a bitch” or any similar epithet was a most damaging blow to male pride.... To attack his wife, mother, or sister was to assault the man himself. Outsider violence against family dependents, particularly females, was a breach not to be ignored without risk of ignominy. An impotence to deal with such wrongs carried all the weight of shame that archaic society could muster.23
The absence of the state makes it possible for an individual to commit violence with impunity, but it is not a sufficient condition for creating a culture that relies on violence to settle disputes. Hunting-gathering societies appear to have relatively low levels of violence, even though their members are not usually subjects of any state.24 And farmers, even when they live in societies where the state is weak, typically are not overly concerned with their reputation for strength nor are they willing to defend it with violence.25
Herding and Vulnerability to Loss. There is one type of economy, however, that tends to be associated worldwide with concerns about honor and readiness to commit violence to conserve it. That is the economy based on herding of animals.26 Together with some anthropologists, we believe that herding societies have cultures of honor for reasons having to do with the economic precariousness of herdsmen.27 Herdsmen constantly face the possibility of loss of their entire wealth—through loss of their herds. Thus a stance of aggressiveness and willingness to kill or commit mayhem is useful in announcing their determination to protect their animals at all costs.
Herding and Sensitivity to Insults. Herdsmen adopt a stance of extreme vigilance toward any action that might imply that they are incapable of defending their property. Early in his career, in fact, the herdsman in some cultures may deliberately pick fights to show his toughness. As the ethnographer J. K. Campbell wrote of Mediterranean herding culture:
The critical moment in the development of the young shepherd’s reputation is his first quarrel. Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, the village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary where a curse or a stone aimed at one of his straying sheep by another shepherd is an insult which inevitably requires a violent response.28
People who herd animals usually live in places such as mountains, semideserts, and steppes, where because of the ecology, crop farming is inadequate to provide for basic food needs. They have little surplus and sometimes experience genuine want. Thus they are often tempted to take the herds of other groups. As a consequence, “theft and raiding are endemic to pastoral peoples.”29 Or, as one herdsman of the Middle East put it, “Raids are our agriculture.”30 Thus skill at warfare is valuable to a herdsman in a way that it is not to a hunter-gatherer or a farmer. It is no accident that it is the herding peoples of Europe who have been reputed to be the best soldiers over the centuries, that “to the Scots, as to the Swiss, Swedes, Albanians, Prussians and other people of Europe’s margins and infertile uplands, war has been something of a national industry.”31
In addition to the “marginal” northern Europeans, many if not most Mediterranean groups—including the traditional cultures of such peoples as the Andalusians of southern Spain, the Corsicans, Sardinians, Druze, Bedouins, Kabyle of Algeria, and Sarakatsani of Greece—are characterized as holding to a version of the culture of honor.32 These groups all have economies that are greatly dependent on herding. Many other traditional societies of Africa33 and the steppes of Eurasia and North America34 also have (or had) herding economies and cultures of honor.
There are some interesting natural experiments that show that people who occupy the same general region but differ in occupation also differ in their predilections toward toughness, violence, and warfare. Anthropologist Robert Edgerton studied two neighboring tribes in East Africa, each of which included a group of herders and a group of farmers. Edgerton reported that in both tribes, the pastoralists exhibited “a syndrome that can best be described as machismo,” whereas farmers manifested “the insistent need to get along with... neighbors.”35
In North America, the Navajo and the Zuni also inhabit similar ecological niches, but the Navajo are herders and the Zuni are farmers. The Navajo are reputed to be great warriors (right up to the present—they served in large numbers and with distinction in World War II). The Zuni are more peaceable and have not been noted as warriors at any time in their history.36
An even better natural experiment came with the introduction of the horse to the American Indians of the Plains. Prior to the arrival of the horse, the tribes of the Plains had been relatively peaceful; after its introduction, many tribes began to behave like herders everywhere. They reckoned their wealth in terms of the number of horses they owned, they staged raids on their neighbors, and they began to glorify warfare.37
Since herding usually takes place in regions where geography and low population density conspire against the ability of law enforcement officials to reach their targets, defense against enemies is left up to the individual and the small community in which he lives. For many people in such circumstances, the prevailing form of law is the feud—with the threat of deadly consequences for family members as the primary means of maintaining order. Hence it should be no surprise that the feuding societies of the world are preponderantly herding societies.38
What has the reputed violence of the U.S. South to do with the culture of honor as it might be evidenced by a Greek shepherd, an East African warrior, or a Navajo? In our view, a great deal.
The northern United States was settled by farmers—Puritans, Quakers, Dutch, and Germans. These people were cooperative, like farmers everywhere, and modern in their orientation toward society. They emphasized education and quickly built a civilization that included artisans, tradespeople, businesspeople, and professionals of all sorts.
In contrast, the South was settled primarily by people from the fringes of Britain—the so-called Scotch-Irish.39 These people had always been herders because the regions where they lived—Ireland, Scotland, Wales—were not in general suitable for more-intensive forms of agriculture.40
The Scottish and the Irish were descendants of the Celts, who had kept cattle and pigs since prehistoric times and had never practiced large-scale agriculture.41 Like other herding peoples, the Celts reckoned their wealth in terms of animals, not land, and were accustomed to intertribal warfare and cattle raiding.42 The Romans feared the Celts because of their ferocity (though the Romans were not impressed with the Celts’ organizational abilities). Over centuries of war, including Julius Caesar’s famous battles with the Gauls, the Celts were driven into Britain. Subsequent wars—with Vikings, Danes, Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic peoples—drove them to the least hospitable fringe areas. The battles really never ceased, however, especially along the Scottish frontier with England and between the Scottish and Irish in Ulster.
One cannot know how relevant the distant past of this culture is. But it may be worth noting that the Celtic peoples did not develop the characteristics of farmers until their emigration to America.43 They did not undergo the transformation common elsewhere in Europe from serf to peasant to bourgeois farmer. When they engaged in agriculture at all, it was generally of the horticultural or slash-and-burn variety in which a field was cultivated for three or four years and then left to lie fallow for a decade or more.44 Such a method is the most efficient one when, as is true in most of the range of the Celtic peoples, the soil is unproductive. An important characteristic of this method of farming is that it does not encourage permanence on the land. Periodic movement was common,45 a fact to bear in mind when one contemplates the behavior of the Scotch-Irish after they came to America.
The immigration of the Scotch-Irish to North America began in the late seventeenth century and was completed by the early nineteenth century. The group was composed largely of Ulster Scots, Irish, and both lowland and highland Scots.46 The impoverished, deeply Roman Catholic Irish who came later in the nineteenth century, as well as the Presbyterian, often highly educated Scots, were culturally very different from these earlier immigrants, who were both more secular and more inclined to violence as a means of settling disputes.47
Their new land, if anything, served to reinforce the herding economy practiced by the Scotch-Irish immigrants.48 With its mountains and wide-open spaces, America, especially the Appalachians and the South, was ideally suited to the herding life and to horticulture.49 The Scotch-Irish tended to seek out relatively unproductive lands to homestead, but even when they found themselves on highly productive land, they tended to farm in low-efficiency, horticultural fashion rather than in the more efficient agrarian manner that involves clearing the land of stumps, rotating crops, and making the sort of improvements that would have made movement away from the land hard to contemplate.50
The geography and low population density probably served to increase culture-of-honor tendencies in another respect as well: Because of the remoteness and ruggedness of the frontier, the law was as weak in America as it had been in Britain: “In the absence of any strong sense of order as unity, hierarchy, or social peace, backsettlers shared an idea of order as a system of retributive justice. The prevailing principle was lex talionis, the rule of retaliation.”51 Or, as a North Carolina proverb stated, “Every man should be sheriff on his own hearth.”
The southerner, thus, was of herding origin, and herding remained a chief basis of the economy in the South for many decades. Not until the invention of the cotton gin in the early nineteenth century would there be a viable economic competitor to herding. The cotton gin made possible the plantation South. But by the early nineteenth century, the characteristic cultural forms of the Celtic herding economy were well established, and at no time in the nineteenth century did southern folkways even in the farming South converge on those of the North.52
When we refer to “the South” in this book, we always mean to include the states of the deep South as well as the mountain states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia; but many of our generalizations hold, often with equal force, to the West. The herding economy moved with the Scotch-Irish to the West—that is, to Texas and Oklahoma and the mostly southern portions of the mountain West that were settled by southerners. Again, the herding economy was basic because of the ecology. Thus, it should not be surprising that the westerner, like the southerner, shared the common characteristics of herding peoples everywhere: He used violence to protect his herd and his property; he was hypersensitive to insult because of its implications for his strength and ability to defend himself; he was skilled in the arts of combat; and he was careful to train his children, especially boys, to be capable of violence when needed.
Though we have relied on the findings of the ethnographer and historian, their methods are limited in their capacity to address these issues. Even the best-considered assertions by scholars can be challenged as mistaken subjective interpretations by other scholars. Moreover, quantitative social scientists themselves have presented conflicting evidence. Some maintain, on the basis of one type of data or another, collected by one method or another, that there is no culture of honor, no greater violence, and no attitudinal network supportive of violence existing in the South today—if there ever was....
Excerpted from Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. © 1996 by Westview Press Inc. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C. All rights reserved.