Why did the U.S. homicide rate increase in early 1900s?

[FrankJ777]

The social sciences used to have their own forums in PF, what happened to them? They used to be a great lace for discussion. Anyways, this still seems the best place to ask this question.
According to Wikipedia at least, the homicide rate in the U.S. per 100,000 persons increased from about 1.2 to 4.6 in the first decade of the 20th century. It looks like the most dramatic increase was during the years 1905 to 1907, where the rate went from 1.3 in 1905 to 4.9 in 1907. It looks like before that period U.S. homicide rates were fairly on par with the U.K., with rates barely over 1, but after that period U.S. homicide rates never again fell bellow 4. Is there a theory on why the sudden increase at that time specifically?

 

[Bystander]

Reporting? Definition?

 

[newjerseyrunner]

I could put forth my own hypothesis:
1) Industrialization caused a lot of factory workers to get laid off
2) Mechanization needed less farmers so former farmers moved to the cities
3) Immigration from Europe happened in large numbers around this time, WWI didn't start until a decade later, but it had been building up for a while

You had a lot of poor people in close quarters, that's always been and always will be a recipe for violence. Lots of these areas were non-white areas, so the government simply didn't care and preferred to add more police opposed to fixing the problems. That forced the people to protect themselves not only from each other, but the police itself became an enemy, so they formed gangs to protect themselves. Gangs fight.

People also don't like change and are more susceptible to barbaric behavior if they think their world is being threatened. Industrialization, unions, women suffrage, freed slaves, communism... all threatened the status quo. The Klan was peaking at this time, I'm sure a lot of those murders were black people. Many of the government leaders were Klansmen. Mob-lead unions were peaking at this time. The communist party was also peaking at this time, the government murdered many of its leaders.

 

[zoobyshoe]

1) Industrialization caused a lot of factory workers to get laid off

I question this. I think industrialization created many new jobs. The problem, though, is that this attracted immigrants from all over the world. The sudden influx of waves of foreigners to U.S. cities might well have contributed to social stresses that elevated the homicide rate.

Industrial expansion required an ever-growing workforce. American businesses and some Southern planters actively recruited workers from the nation's rural areas, as well as from abroad through advertisements published in foreign languages around the world. Between 1870 and 1920, approximately 26.5 million migrants from Asia, Latin America, and Europe entered all regions of the United States, with the majority settling in the Northeast and the Midwest...

https://www.learner.org/courses/amerhistory/units/14/themes/2.html

 

[russ_watters]

I question this. I think industrialization created many new jobs.

Yes, newjerseyrunner has that backwards.

The problem, though, is that this attracted immigrants from all over the world.

And workers from the farms. Either way, it increased city size/population density, which as you say caused social stress.

 

[newjerseyrunner]

I question this. I think industrialization created many new jobs. The problem, though, is that this attracted immigrants from all over the world. The sudden influx of waves of foreigners to U.S. cities might well have contributed to social stresses that elevated the homicide rate.

Good point, but I have a counterpoint. Creating jobs doesn't necessarily exclude lots of people being laid off. Industrialization created white collar jobs, it laid off blue collar workers. A former white collar worker is capable of doing a blue collar job, not the other way around.

A former office worker can work on an assembly line building tables, as can a former master woodworker. That woodworker however, can not do an office job as easily. You had a lot of people with special skills that were no longer relevant.

Fair enough, industrialization created jobs, but it shifted the workforce, which is messy. We're sort of in the middle of this again with digitilization. I have no doubt that long term, the computerization of the work force will create more jobs, but in the interm, uneducated people are going to have a rough decade or so.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Industrialization created white collar jobs, it laid off blue collar workers.

No. It created scores of blue collar jobs that never existed before. Consider auto assembly lines, and the masses of other factory jobs that never previously existed because the products never previously existed.

 

[newjerseyrunner]

No. It created scores of blue collar jobs that never existed before. Consider auto assembly lines, and the masses of other factory jobs that never previously existed because the products never previously existed.

Fair enough, but consider the textile industry. A factory full of laborers with looms were replaced with scores of automated sewing machines.

Remember, we didn't go from a pre-industrial age, to rolling cars off of assembly lines, there were a few decades in between where all of that infrastructure had to be built.

I retract what I said about industrialization eliminating jobs, it simply shifted the jobs from one kind to another and people don't like change.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Yes, newjerseyrunner has that backwards.
And workers from the farms. Either way, it increased city size/population density, which as you say caused social stress.

Yes, where I grew up, New England, was hit by a huge wave of French Canadian immigrants starting about 1900, who came down to work in the new textile mills that were springing up all over the place. It completely changed the population and culture. Stephen King, for example, the famous Maine author, is named Stephan, and not Steven, due to French Canadian cultural influences in his home town.

 

[FrankJ777]

Yes, I was thinking that industrialization, immigration, and urbanization might have something to do with it, but I believe that except for immigration the U.K. was experiencing simular flux, but their homicide rates seems to remain flat, and even trended down during the following decade, while the U.S.s rates remained relativity high after 1906. I don't know if guns could be the cause, as it seems that gun ownership rates and technology probably wouldn't have changed much between 1900 and 1910.
Here are the rates from Wikipedia, (I should have shown them earlier for perspective), but it seems that something dramatic happened in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade
Country 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909

United States [3] 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.1 1.3 2.1 3.9 4.9 4.8 4.6

England,

Wales[4] 0.96

1910s
Country 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919

United States [3] 4.6 5.5 5.4 6.1 6.2 5.9 6.3 6.9 6.5 7.2

England,

Wales[4] 0.81

 

[zoobyshoe]

Am I reading the chart wrong or is there no data for England from 1901 ->1909, and from 1911->1919?

 

[FrankJ777]

Am I reading the chart wrong or is there no data for England from 1901 ->1909, and from 1911->1919?

Maybe I'm reading it wrong. I assumed what it meant was that the rates were relatively flat throughout the decade. Anyways it shows that in 1900 the rate was .96, and in 1910 it was .81. I'm thinking you can interpolate, and it shows a totally different trend than the U.S. rates.
I wish I could find better data, but this is the best and most comprehensive that I've been able to find. Also It would be nice if I could find rates throughout the 1800s, but its proving difficult.

 

[dipole]

There's a very interesting spike right at the year 1920-1921, exactly when prohibition started and organized crime began to flourish.

 

[russ_watters]

So, maybe it was reporting after all:

The gist of the article is that previous studies of homicide rates in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, which tend to claim that there was a surge in homicides in that time, are wrong for a number of reasons, specifically

improving accuracy in reporting, and changes in the composition of the registration area. Within ‘comparable areas’ the homicide rate had not increased notably, but as the registration area grew it took in states with ‘appreciably’ higher homicide rates….

At least some of the early increase in violence was an artifact of policing practices, which changed from underreporting homicides to ‘over charging’ offenses by ‘one or two degrees’…in Philadelphia much of the apparent increase was caused by a transitory policy of counting deaths by automobile accident as homicides…in addition, a ‘dark figure’ of unreported murders decreased greatly. As a result, researchers now disagree about the existence of a ‘homicidal crime wave.’

http://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=89

Industrialization is tough as a reason because it didn't happen quite so suddenly and started a hundred years earlier.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Let me say this again. Before determining why something is true, it is important to determine if it is true.

The homicide rates from 1900 to 1904 averaged 2.4 per 100,000, not the 1.2 that is claimed. (Source: "Mortality Statistics 1900 to 1904", Special Report by the Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census.) This document also makes the point that counting homicides is surprisingly difficult, as causes of deaths will specify "gunshot wound' but not whether this was accidental, suicide or homicide. Indeed, the category of "Other external violence" (which excludes accidents, suicides and homicides) is three times larger than homicides.

By 1905 ("Mortality Statistics 1905, ibid), the homicide rate had doubled to 4.6, but the "Other external violence" rate had halved to 3.8.

So it appears to me that a) the numbers in Wikipedia are just wrong - they don't match the original source (and their source is a Wayback snapshot of a CDC summary of previous CDC summary of the actual primary source), and b) the numbers in Wikipedia are meaningless, as what is and what is not categorized as a homicide appears to change with time.

 

[StatGuy2000]

Yes, where I grew up, New England, was hit by a huge wave of French Canadian immigrants starting about 1900, who came down to work in the new textile mills that were springing up all over the place. It completely changed the population and culture. Stephen King, for example, the famous Maine author, is named Stephan, and not Steven, due to French Canadian cultural influences in his home town.

My understanding was the wave of French Canadian immigration to the US took place between 1840 up until the Great Depression of the 1930's (this is excluding those French-speaking communities that predate this immigrant wave, like the French Canadian communities in Michigan and Minnesota and the French Creole and Cajun communities in Louisiana). A similar migration of French Canadians migrated out of Quebec into the neighbouring province of Ontario around that period, leading to the formation of the Franco-Ontarian community.

Here is a Wikipedia article regarding the Quebec diaspora (the French Canadian immigration to the US largely originated from Quebec):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_diaspora

 

[Jeff Rosenbury]

Labor unrest?

 

[Evo]

Here is a paper on it that back what Russ and V50 posted, it was a change in reporting.

The state homicide values I use start in 1900 and continue
to 1950, but the values are not available for every year in this time frame. Alaska is not
included in this analysis because it is not geographically close to other states and I was
unable to find a complete set of observations from this time period for Alaska that would
be reliable. In order to observe the trends in different states over the course of the time
frame, I used Stata software to generate a scatterplot of each region. (See Figure 2)

I then compared these regional trends that I created to the national trends I have
observed from data available through the Historical Statistics of the United States
website. x The national data that was used was gathered from descriptive information on
all death certificates filed in all the states in the United States and the District of
Columbia. xi Currently, it is believed that over 99 percent of deaths in the United States
are reported. However, data for the years before 1933 are known to be missing or
incomplete for three reasons. First, they are based on death certificates only from states
in the U.S. Death Registration Area. The first six years of the published national level
data from 1900 to 1905 represent only ten states and the District of Columbia. Texas
was the last state to enter the registration area in 1933. Second, admission to the
registration area required initially only that at least 90 percent of deaths be recorded.
Third, prior to 1907, deaths by homicide were often very underreported within the
official death registration states themselves, since they were often recorded incorrectly
as accidental deaths. xii

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1137&context=hsshonors

 

[zoobyshoe]

My understanding was the wave of French Canadian immigration to the US took place between 1840 up until the Great Depression of the 1930's (this is excluding those French-speaking communities that predate this immigrant wave, like the French Canadian communities in Michigan and Minnesota and the French Creole and Cajun communities in Louisiana). A similar migration of French Canadians migrated out of Quebec into the neighbouring province of Ontario around that period, leading to the formation of the Franco-Ontarian community.

Here is a Wikipedia article regarding the Quebec diaspora (the French Canadian immigration to the US largely originated from Quebec):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_diaspora

I don't know what to tell you. When my grandparents generation came down from Canada to work in the mills, there were no French Canadians already there in that region. The locals were British Yankees and there was a sharp delineation between the two cultures. Maybe the towns of Holyoke, Lowell, Manchester, Woonsockett, etc. had older French Canadian populations from the 1840's, but we were not aware of them. As far as I knew, all the French Canadians in all the small towns around us with textile mills had come down at the same time as my grandparents. All the people my grandparent's age had thick French Canadian accents. People my parents age spoke fluent English, but could converse in French with the older ones. My generation was raised completely in English and couldn't speak French.

 

[StatGuy2000]

I don't know what to tell you. When my grandparents generation came down from Canada to work in the mills, there were no French Canadians already there in that region. The locals were British Yankees and there was a sharp delineation between the two cultures. Maybe the towns of Holyoke, Lowell, Manchester, Woonsockett, etc. had older French Canadian populations from the 1840's, but we were not aware of them. As far as I knew, all the French Canadians in all the small towns around us with textile mills had come down at the same time as my grandparents. All the people my grandparent's age had thick French Canadian accents. People my parents age spoke fluent English, but could converse in French with the older ones. My generation was raised completely in English and couldn't speak French.

I suppose this would be dependent on what part of New England you and your family were from. Perhaps those towns you mentioned, or towns in up-state New York or Vermont that border Quebec had the earlier French Canadian populations?

BTW, as an aside, my great-great-grandmother was of French Canadian descent via Michigan, but I'm not certain if her family was descended from the earliest French Canadian colonists dating back to the time of New France (of which Michigan was a part, first settling in Quebec from France, and then migrating to the Michigan settlements around the 18th century) or descended from the later wave of immigrants that arrived during the 19th century, similar to those who settled in New England.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Perhaps those towns you mentioned, or towns in up-state New York or Vermont that border Quebec had the earlier French Canadian populations?

The wiki article you linked to says they did. I don't know those towns and we had no relatives in them. We knew there were French Canadians all over New England but our perception was that they'd all come down at the same time as my grandparents. That wiki article is the first mention I ever heard of any earlier waves of immigration.

All I'm saying is that any large population movements from French Canada to New England before 1900 is news to me. I'm not asserting it didn't happen.