American Homicide by Randolph Roth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 655 pp.

In American Homicide, Randolph Roth attempts to use the massive amount of historical data that he and his colleagues have assembled for the Historical Violence Database to explain patterns in the murder rate over broad historical time periods. His goal is to try to understand from an historical perspective why the United States is the most violent nation among affluent Western nations today.

And violent it is: from 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate for the U.S. was 9 per 100,000 people. The first-world democracy with the next highest rate is Canada, with only a quarter of the homicides per capita as the United States. Australia ranks third, with only a fifth of the U.S. number. If the murder rate in the United States continues, 1 out of every 142 children born today will be murdered. Even if the lower rate of 6 per 100,000 that the United States experienced during the 1990’s continues, nearly 1 out of every 200 newborns will eventually be murdered.

The risk of being murdered is by far highest in the South, moderately high in the Southwest, and lowest in the North. Poor Americans experience the highest murder rate, but even middle-class and affluent Americans run a much greater risk of being murdered than do people in other affluent democracies. Such high homicide numbers today make it hard to believe that America’s homicide rate was once the lowest in the Western world.

Roth and his colleagues compiled the historical data that informs his book by examining “every scrap of paper on criminal matters in every courthouse, every article in every issue of a number of local newspapers, every entry in the death records, and every local history based on lost sources, local tradition, or oral testimony” (xi-xii). The results are monumental, and they make all of this data available on the Historical Violence Database from the Criminal Justice Research Center at The Ohio State University.

Roth begins his book by discounting the usual explanations for the high homicide rate in the United States, such as urban poverty and unemployment, substance abuse, or support for law enforcement. He shows how each explanation does not stand up to close historical or geographic analysis. Instead, Roth identifies four main correlations to homicide rates over four centuries:

1. The belief that government is stable and that its legal and judicial institutions are unbiased and will redress wrongs and protect lives and property.
2. A feeling of trust in government and the officials who run it, and a belief in their legitimacy.
3. Patriotism, empathy, and fellow feeling arising from racial, religious, or political solidarity.
4. The belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate, that one’s position in society is or can be satisfactory and that one can command the respect of others without resorting to violence (18).

Roth systematically analyzes homicide among Anglo-Americans, other European immigrants, African-American slaves, and Native Americans from colonial times to the present. Roth even compares American homicide rates with European ones to get a sense of how unique violence in America really was at the time.

From its very beginning, America was a violent place. Seventeenth-century colonial America had high homicide rates, mainly due to political instability and an absence of unity among settlers. Law and order was also difficult to uphold on the colonial frontier with its competing jurisdictions and assorted notions of justice.

Roth contends that indentured servitude during this time had a strong impact on homicide rates, because it disrupted the social hierarchy. The institution forced free men and women down to the bottom of the social ladder, where they were remained for years living as near-slaves. Not surprisingly, this arrangement created power struggles between servants and their owners that often ended violently. In the mid-seventeenth century, indentured servitude accounted for 29 percent of the homicides in New England, 50 percent in Virginia, and 67 percent in Maryland.

Once political stability was achieved on the frontier in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, homicide rates dropped dramatically. Roth cites three events in particular that galvanized colonial society and led to a sharp drop in murder rates, which continued throughout much of the eighteenth century. King Philip’s War was one, by unifying colonists who lived on the front line in New England in their fight against a common enemy. The Chesapeake area experienced a similar unifying effect during its transformation into a slave society, when white slave owners put aside their differences in the interest of defending white supremacy. The third event was the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which brought all colonists together when the governmental reforms that accompanied it appeared to benefit the colonies as a whole.

The low homicide rate among unrelated adults through much of the eighteenth century did not last, though. The Revolutionary Period and its political turmoil saw the return of high homicide rates, with people questioning both government legitimacy and the loyalties of their fellow neighbors.

After America’s homicide rate dropped once again in the early nineteenth century as the country was coming together and taking shape, the rate soared in the mid-nineteenth century. This time, the murder rate diverged sharply from the rest of the Western world after roughly following worldwide trends up until this point. Roth’s account for why the homicide rate in the U.S. skyrocketed at this time in history should give us pause, if not chills. My guess is that Roth wrote the following passage before our recent partisan squabbles really took shape, but it certainly seems to mirror descriptions of our current political situation:

The Democrats failed as a national party and the Whigs failed altogether, leaving the two-party system in ruins. Parties that were more aggressive ideologically took their place. The leaders of these parties questioned the legitimacy of national institutions and challenged other Americans’ morality, patriotism, and right to citizenship. They used extreme rhetoric to generate partisan enthusiasm, and they encouraged righteous and retributive violence, especially in defense of property or rights (301).

In some ways, there are two books riding parallel with one another throughout Roth’s book. One is quantitative, with its presentation of large quantities of data and number crunching. The other is interpretive, with lots of anecdotal evidence, notable stories of murder, and his attempt to explain fluctuating homicide rates through political, social, and economic trends. The latter requires the more convincing of the two. Roth, for example, cites war as a divider at times and a unifier at others, depending on whether the murder rates are up or down through that period. Granted, war is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to an essential element, but the difficulty in ascribing its effect on murder rates illustrates just how tricky interpreting numbers can be when they involve so many variables in motive, emotion, and method that murder does.

Not surprisingly, Roth’s interpretive assessment of his data has received the most critical attention from other historians. In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore takes Roth to task for grafting what she sees as dubious conclusions onto quantitative data, as though Roth is simply generating raw numbers and then looking for entry-points to slap his own agenda on top of them. As she puts it, “if you know what the homicide rate is, it’s easy to find a story that fits your data.”

Lepore, however, ungenerously characterizes Roth’s data-collecting methods, which required him to comb through countless qualitative sources to extract quantitative numbers. I would like to believe that this exhausting process informed his interpretation of the data. Yes, it is possible to come up with various stories to fit the numbers, but the job of the historian is to find the best story that fits the availability of evidence. Time and more research will tell whether or not there is any weight to Roth’s interpretations. If we take Lepore’s strict rules for what qualifies as historical evidence to heart, we would indeed arrive in a “no man’s land” that would “devolve into meaninglessness,” which, ironically, is how she characterizes Roth’s project.

Homicide statistics for the twentieth century are surprisingly not as complete or as readily available as they are for the centuries that preceded it. The reason for this discrepancy is that the official data gathered by twentieth-century government agencies only record the number of victims–not the circumstances of their deaths–out of reluctance to specify motive before cases have been played out in court. For this reason, we will have to wait for more data to be collected before drawing firm conclusions about the most recent century.

Even if we don’t buy into Roth’s overarching conclusions, he presents the most comprehensive picture of American homicide to date. More studies will follow. A separate volume, Child Murder in America, will appear at a later date, since, according to Roth, the patterns for murders of children or by children are fundamentally different from those involving adults. So far, Roth’s work has greatly enhanced our understanding of violence and murder in America and shows great promise for future work on this topic.

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A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Mihm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 457 pp.

Counterfeiting was widespread during the early history of the United States. Some estimates from the time claimed that between ten and fifty percent of the circulating currency was counterfeit. Such high numbers were probably an exaggeration, but to put these early guesses into perspective, a U.S. government survey conducted in 1911, well after a standard federal currency was put into place, concluded that only one thousandth of one percent of the total paper currency in circulation was counterfeit.

Stephen Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States chronicles a wild time in the early stages of American capitalism when countless banks issued thousands of bank notes that functioned as paper currency. Not surprisingly, this confusing array of monetary bills created the perfect conditions for counterfeiting, which often blurred the distinctions between the real and the false, the capitalist and the criminal, and the legitimate and the criminal enterprise.

Banks began issuing bank notes as an easy means of facilitating exchange without dipping into their precious metals holdings or other assets. The holder of such a bank note could show up at the bank that issued it at any time and demand the equivalent amount in gold or silver. With the bank’s backing, though, these notes were mostly meant to be transferred to someone else in exchange for goods or services, so that bulky gold or silver did not need to pass hands.

In order to discourage counterfeiting, the banks employed professional engravers to produce their notes, and each note was signed by an official at the bank. With each bank issuing its own form of currency, however, keeping track of the designs of each bank note was near impossible. And when Andrew Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, which at the time was the closest the U.S. had to a centralized bank, the number of banks and currencies proliferated exponentially. Counterfeiters seized on this opportunity. They employed engravers of equal if not superior talent as those who turned out the real thing, and in some cases, the engravers themselves produced both real and counterfeit bills, depending on who was paying the bill.

Mihm nicely weaves together anecdotes involving the colorful personalities of the counterfeiters, bankers, and detectives with informative passages about counterfeiting and the early banking system. He takes full advantage the fluid boundaries, false distinctions, and deep ironies that define the world of counterfeiting in the early U.S. to move his narrative along. At a time when there often wasn’t enough currency circulating to facilitate trade, counterfeit money actually provided a much-needed public service. As long as the person accepting the bill took it with confidence that he could pass it along to someone else, what did it matter if the note was real or fake?

The total value of bank notes issued almost always added up to more than what the banks had in reserve, on the assumption that all of the notes they issued would never be redeemed at the same time. In a practice that resonates today after the Madoff scandal and the recent banking crisis, some banks issued currency with practically no backing at all. These “wildcat banks” would eventually fail, especially in times of economic crisis, and leave anyone holding their notes out to dry. People openly wondered what made these banks any more legitimate than counterfeiters, since both parties issued notes without any backing. Ironically, counterfeit money could sometimes be exchanged with more confidence than the notes issued by these spurious banks, since it usually imitated notes from banks with solid reputations.

Many of the early counterfeiters congregated along the border between Canada and Vermont to help avoid the American authorities and take advantage of the different systems of law. Mihm shows how these counterfeiters ran a complex, professional network of producers, sellers, and buyers of counterfeit money that ran down the east coast. To distribute their counterfeit bills, these counterfeiters often employed horse thieves, who naturally used stolen horses to deliver their shipments. As a result, the area became a center for both counterfeiting and trafficking in stolen horses.

Counterfeiting followed the westward expansion of canals and roadways that opened up new areas of the country to commerce. In these new territories, counterfeiters took advantage of lax laws and enforcement, a less structured banking system, and a great need for a means of exchange. Eventually, however, counterfeiting settled in large cities, where urban anonymity made it easier to pass fake bills to unsuspecting shopkeepers.

Mihm describes an “economy teeming with notes neither totally real nor completely counterfeit” (239). When read together with Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter (read the EAC review), one begins to appreciate the security of our present-day currency and realizes that the confidence we place in it is actually a recent phenomenon. While today’s would-be counterfeiters have moved on to employ more sophisticated tactics to take advantage of our complex financial system, Mihm’s book entertainingly chronicles a time when counterfeiting, a crime that was much more prevalent back in the early stages of capitalism than it is today, was the preferred method for “making” money.

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Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 318 pp.

In Newton and the Counterfeiter, Thomas Levenson (Head of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT) tells the little known story of Sir Isaac Newton’s career as Warden of the Royal Mint. In this government position, Newton unwittingly found himself responsible for cracking down on the widespread counterfeiting of England’s coinage. His initial reluctance to take on this role of policing England’s currency was replaced in time by enthusiasm as he pursued one accomplished forger in particular, William Chaloner.

Levenson begins with Newton’s early life and his appointment at the age of 26 to the top mathematics professorship at Cambridge University. In this position, the thrifty Newton was essentially set up for life with a generous yearly stipend in exchange for one course of lectures every three terms. These minimal teaching duties practically gave him unlimited time to spend thinking and researching. After a long period of apparent inactivity, Newton eventually wrote and published one of the greatest scientific works in history, his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia.

Levenson excels in explaining Newton’s mathematical and scientific discoveries in plain language. Within a handful of pages, Levenson managed to give me a basic understanding of calculus and the relationship between motion and gravity that all of my college math and physics classes were apparently unable to do. His description of the creation of the modern banking system is just as enlightening.

Unfortunately, in recounting Newton’s early life, Levenson unnecessarily uses several annoying narrative conceits, where his telling of the story imposes too much on the story itself. Here is one example: “Newton, just twenty-two, was working on the bleeding edge of contemporary knowledge. Now to push further.” Who is doing the pushing here? Newton? Levenson? The added quip does nothing to move the narrative along and forces the reader to stop and try to figure out what it is doing there. Levenson also has a tendency to withhold basic information and then reveal it only at the very end of a passage, perhaps in an attempt to create narrative tension where there isn’t any. Once his story gets moving, however, Levenson drops these feeble efforts at making his narrative popular in tone and allows the historical events to drive the action on their own.

In many ways, Levenson’s book is a story about creating money out of nothing. In another little-known chapter of his life, Newton dabbled in alchemy. Not surprisingly, he approached the task of turning base metals into gold with a scientific rigor that no one had used before, although like everyone else his efforts did not produce any solid results. Eventually, Newton grew tired of life in Cambridge and, with the help of some friends, gained a post at the Mint in London, which was characterized by gross neglect and general incompetence. At this point, England was just embarking on a massive recoinage project in an attempt to stop the devaluation of British currency, and Newton brought his rigorous analytic methods to the management of this project with spectacular results.

In his new government position, Newton also came up against William Chaloner, a career counterfeiter who openly challenged Newton and the policies of the Mint in two published pamphlets. Chaloner had already had several brushes with the law where he was accused of clipping and forging coins, but he had always been able to turn in fellow conspirators in exchange for his freedom. Full of confidence, Chaloner published his critical pamphlets as part of an elaborate scheme to gain a post at the Mint, or at the very least to witness first-hand the machines used to produce the official coins.

Detailed information about criminal cases in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is hard to come by, and Levenson uses the resources available to him to full advantage. He benefits from Newton’s meticulous recording of his thoughts and actions into ledgers and journals. He also relies on Chaloner’s two published pamphlets and a fairly detailed biography of the forger that appeared shortly after his death. Through these sources, Levenson gains unusual insight into a seventeenth-century criminal case and how Newton approached his role as a criminal prosecutor.

Readers who pick up Levenson’s book because they are intrigued by the notion that Newton may just well be England’s first detective will strike gold. Levenson’s book not only offers an engaging account of Isaac Newton’s pursuit of William Chaloner, but it effortlessly educates the reader in a wide range of scientific, economic, and criminal subjects that characterize late seventeenth-century England, subjects that continue to have a profound effect on our modern society today.

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Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas M. Truxes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 288 pp.

Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas M. Truxes is about British attempts to stop trade between New York City merchants and the French during the Seven Years’ War (1754-63), otherwise known as the French and Indian War. The book isn’t about crime per se, but the line between legal and illegal trade drives its action and storyline, and it has enough descriptions of criminals and criminal activity to hold the interest of early American crime fans.

The issue of mercantile trade was contentious in eighteenth-century Britain even without the backdrop of war. England’s movement toward an economy based on the unlimited, unfettered accumulation of capital in the eighteenth century led to questions about where the line between legal and criminal behavior should be drawn, since the end goal of both merchant and criminal appeared to be the same. Commentators throughout the century often compared mercantile and criminal activity and openly wondered what constituted the difference between the two. John Gay’s theatrical hit of the century, The Beggar’s Opera, opens with the criminal businessman, Mr. Peachum, surrounded by account books and singing, “Through all the Employments of Life / Each Neighbour abuses his Brother; / Whore and Rogue they call Husband and Wife: / All Professions be-rogue one another.” Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees satirically equates economic and criminal values and argues that political corruption is a requisite for success in commerce, trade, and society in general.

Truxes shows how the expanding British Empire created situations where the distinction between legal and illegal trade was complicated, especially during wartime. New York City merchants who had built their businesses on trade with the French in North America were suddenly told by the British that they could no longer do business with the enemy now that war had broken out between the two countries. Not surprisingly, these merchants fought to protect their trade interests by any means possible and increasingly turned to smuggling to do so. The merchants’ strong ties to colonial officials and their deep pockets, which they could use to bribe politicians and potential informants, greatly limited the government’s ability to stop such trade.

Defying Empire is filled with fascinating and colorful characters: well-connected, ruthless merchants who will stop at nothing to protect their economic interests; professional smugglers who work directly for these men of “property and position.”; and gritty sailors and common criminals who populate the city streets. The book’s center of energy comes from George Spencer, an obstinate New York merchant who attempted to inform the government about the smuggling activities of his fellow merchants in the hope of a big reward and instead found himself feeling the full weight of their political influence by spending twenty-seven months in jail on false bankruptcy charges.

Truxes captures the spirit of early New York and is at his best when describing the crimes that took place on its rough and tumble streets. The connection between war and crime was apparent to anyone living in New York City. The scarcity of accommodations for troops during wartime forced many hard-edged soldiers into the city, especially during the winter months. Their presence noticeably raised the city’s crime statistics, resulting in a sharp increase in drunkenness, fighting, theft, and prostitution.

Unfortunately, Truxes’s descriptions of trade activities in the West Indies lack the spirit of his New York sections and are much more academic in tone. In order to get around British limits on commerce, American merchants developed an intricate system to make it appear like they were trading with neutral or friendly nations and not the French. A basic understanding of these trade maneuvers, though, is necessary for setting up the moment when George Spencer finally gets his day in court against the New York merchants who helped imprison him. Here, Truxes’s description of the shady deals, questionable testimony, and unexpected twists that occurred throughout these proceedings is highly entertaining.

A good deal of the corruption in the regulation of overseas trade was the result of neglect by the British government to follow up on reports of illegal trade. Every now and then, the government would send an eager official to America to investigate the situation, but he would inevitably become frustrated by the bureaucracy and obstructions put up by colonial officials and the American merchants and give up.

At the very end of the war, the British government finally enacted legislation to make it easier to prosecute illegal trade and made moves to enforce the law by placing British warships in the Manhattan harbor. The capture of any ship that engaged in illegal trade could bring a fortune to those involved in the seizure, because they would be entitled to half the proceeds from the disposal of the ship and its cargo (the other half would go to the king). Yet even this incentive could not result in the prosecution of more than a few token offenders of the law.

Defying Empire is ultimately a scholarly book, but the storyline is strong enough to hold the attention of readers who want to learn about the seedy side of New York City’s mercantile culture and history. At times, it requires intense focus to keep all the characters straight, but the “Glossary of Persons” near the end of the book is a tremendous help in this regard. Crime is not the central focus of Truxes’s book, but when read in this context, what emerges is a picture of eighteenth-century white-collar crime perpetrated by New York merchants during a time when the economic interests of Great Britain and its colonies were increasingly at odds.

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