We need only think back to the first decades after the American Revolution, when the northern United States had in all likelihood the lowest homicide rate in the Western world, and the lowest in our nation’s history, not only because of political stability and an outpouring of patriotic feeling, but because the promise of the Revolution was being realized with the end of slavery and indentured ser. [...] They surged during the Sectional Crisis from the Mexican War through the Civil War and Reconstruction, declined slightly at the end of Reconstruction as an uneasy peace settled on the nation, and rebounded in the South in the late nineteenth century with the imposition of segregation and disfranchisement and in the North with de facto segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans and immig. [...] Two such examples are the decline by a third in the real wages of the poorest forty percent of the population in Western Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the decline in self-employment in the United States in the nineteenth century, as fewer and fewer families had the capital necessary to own a shop or farm. [...] 9 In the last four decades or so, the greatest threat to the legitimacy of the social hierarchy in the United States has been the end of intergenerational upward mobility for the children of parents in the bottom half of the income distribution. [...] The odds today are only 50-50.13 The decline in intergenerational upward mobility in the United States has been caused by the increase in economic inequality since 1980, which has seen nearly all of the benefits of economic growth go to the wealthiest 1% of the population, at the expense of citizens in the bottom half of the income distribution.
- Pages
- 39
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- GOVERNMENT LEGITIMACY 1
- SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AND AMERICAN 1
- HOMICIDE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1
- Violence 1
- Politics 1
- Democracy 1
- GOVERNMENT LEGITIMACY 2
- SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AND AMERICAN 2
- HOMICIDE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 2
- Violence 2
- Politics 2
- Democracy 2
- INTRODUCTION 4
- TODAYS HOMICIDE PROBLEM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 5
- THE DEEP PATTERN NATION BUILDING 7
- PAST AND PRESENT 7
- POLITICAL STABILITY 9
- LEGITIMATE SOCIAL HIERARCHY 12
- FELLOW FEELING 18
- LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT 28
- LOOKING FORWARD 33
- CONCLUSION 34
- NOTES 35
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 38
- The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is a leader in creating and disseminating knowledge on the nature consequences 39
