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As for the part about whites being just as prone to crime as any other under the same circumstances, I disagree. Poor whites have a much lower crime rate than poor blacks or latinos. I might dare to say that whites do very well, if not better when the chips are down, and pull themselves out of some pretty bad situations. Germany in 1946-1955 for example, when they started from nothing and built the place back up on starvation wages. They did not turn to mass crime, drugs and alcohol and just give up. Forgive my opinion if you think I'm backwards, but I do think whites do better on their own for the most part. Less class division like you see in Europe, OZ, NZ and the USA before the 60's, and they create an overall safer and more sucure society then is possible with a large amount of diversity. Asian countries are the same way pretty much.
There are other aspects to explore other than race in this thread. Why did morality decline ? Could it be people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Hugh Heffner, Larry Flynt, The Simpsons, South Park, Rated R movies and the media in general ? When you tolerate a little bit of naughty, then the ACLU and the Supreme Court says you have to tolerate a lot of it. Take the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 for example...........big deal right ? That was one of the first movies where they took some bad guys, and made them into good guys. They made you root for the bad guy......thats how it starts. Pretty soon your at home with a stack of VHS porno tapes fantasizing about................whatever !
The mention of race in this thread also barely scrape the surface of the bigger picture. As many other clever posters have alluded, America was founded on gruesome unspeakable crimes and lack of morals. White settlers robbed land from Native Americans as well as committed genocide against them. Later, Whites used African slave labor to make America the richest country in the world. After slavery was abolished, Chinese laborers were exploited and basically built the railroads for peanuts. Blacks were denied basic rights for hundreds of years. To this day, Black people in America are extremely oppressed. The futile "war on drugs" is really a war on poor mostly Black and Latino people. This is the reason why the Black prison population has exploded since the 70's. Unequal legal punishments are administered for drugs that are abused by Blacks. A few grams of crack will land you in jail for a few years. A much larger amount of powder cocaine, which is mostly abused by upper middle class and rich Whites, is needed to be slapped with a similar jail sentence as a few grams of crack.
Crime is wrongly thought of as a Black or Brown problem in America. The very real crime plaguing Asian American community in many areas of California is extremely downplayed because Asians have been wrongly mythologized as the exploitable wedge of the "model minority" so that minorities will stay divided amongst each other and never threaten the wealthy Whites who run America.
Our government robs us "legally" everyday by outsourcing jobs and bailing out multi-billion dollar companies. Our government cheats us by making jobs so elusive while making education, housing and healthcare largely unaffordable. Our government is criminal in its many obscure draconian laws which can and will land you in jail for years for a nonviolent "crime". This is no joke. America has the largest prison population on the planet. White collar crime usually goes unpunished. Street level crimes of desperation committed by minorities are demonized.
First about black/latino crime in California, you were there and if you say black crime was greater then I'll take your word for it.
Not even close.
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But as we go forward in time, there's a 3 to 1 ratio of hispanics to blacks, I would think more crime would be from hispanics and of greater concern. Perpaps I have the wrong impression, but Cali hispanics seem to be the least willing to assmimilate, and more violent. Stories I've seen where they overrun a post office and put up a mexican flag, have bumper stickers that say F you this is Mexico, M13 gang violence, the 90's LA riots where half or more of the participants were hispanic.
The overwhelming majority of participants in the violence connected to the riots were black. In areas near downtown L.A. with large Central American populations there was violence by Central Americans, but East L.A. for example had no rioting.
The Los Angeles riots (which also spread to the Bay Area and Vegas) were blacks against everyone else. In a way it united every other group.
Opportunistic looting was a different story and that crossed racial/ethnic lines.
I think you fail to see differences between different Hispanic groups, including different immigrant groups. And I think you don't have the whole story either. There's a lot of assimilation in CA - both ways. Non-Hispanic white/Hispanic relationships and marriages are the norm, they are not even slightly disapproved of except in some really hard core barrios. The same can't be said for Hispanic/black relationships in SoCal (in NorCal the tension's not as bad).
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Now to answer what I qouted from you, whites do not have the kind of gang support that will protect them in prison. How many white criminals had any association with biker/ayrian nation gangs when they went into prison ?
Why did white street gangs die out in California compared to Chicago or even NYC? The Gaylords and Bronx Hoods aren't exactly "Aryan gangs" - they're not white supremacist. The Gaylords, Popes, and Simon City Royals in Chicago have black and Hispanic allies (possibly Asian allies as well although I know nothing about Asian gangs in Chicago).
Whites being auctioned off in prison is possible - haven't heard that story but since black gangs in CA prisons are allied with the Nortenos and with Asian gangs I can believe it happens. Note that there are white Surenos (and whites in Hispanic gangs with no Hispanic heritage)
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As for the part about whites being just as prone to crime as any other under the same circumstances, I disagree. Poor whites have a much lower crime rate than poor blacks or latinos. I might dare to say that whites do very well, if not better when the chips are down, and pull themselves out of some pretty bad situations.
While South Boston (although that's now being gentrified), the Kensington and Fishtown neighborhoods in Philly, the Hampden and Pigtown neighborhoods in Baltimore, etc. are not as bad as the worst black neighborhoods in those cities they show all the same pathologies. Hampden in Baltimore has a higher crime rate than 95 percent of all urban neighborhoods in America and that's overwhelmingly white.
The Five Points in NYC in the 19th century (where Chinatown is now) was as bad as the absolute worst neighborhood anywhere in the US right now and possibly worse. Overwhelmingly white. I take it you're unfamiliar with the "Gangs of New York"?
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Germany in 1946-1955 for example, when they started from nothing and built the place back up on starvation wages.
They had help. The Allies wanted to get Germany back on its feet ASAP to avoid making the same mistakes that were made after WW1. Rationing ended in Germany before Britain. The Germans only took matters into their own hands when Britain announced they could no longer afford to support Germany, but the foundations were already there.
I note you're leaving out a current example - Greece right now. Their society is coming apart.
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They did not turn to mass crime, drugs and alcohol and just give up.
Like poor whites in the UK right now? Know anything about Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, etc.? Or those East Coast US urban neighborhoods I mentioned, or in small towns throughout America.
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Forgive my opinion if you think I'm backwards, but I do think whites do better on their own for the most part. Less class division like you see in Europe, OZ, NZ and the USA before the 60's
I think you mean the USA from the New Deal until the 1970s.
The 19th and early 20th century US had major class divisions. And white gangs who were very ruthless. "Ragen's Colts", a street gang which had political sponsorship and which included a young Richard J. Daley, massacred blacks in Chicago in 1919. There were shootings in Chicago schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when Chicago's black population was tiny. Chicago in 1900 according to Otto Bettman's "The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible" had the highest crime rate in the world, twice as high as New York, which was in turn four times as high as London.
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and they create an overall safer and more sucure society then is possible with a large amount of diversity. Asian countries are the same way pretty much.
Reliable crime statistics on China are virtually impossible to find but it is agreed violent crime is rapidly on the increase there, even the Chinese government admitted that.
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There are other aspects to explore other than race in this thread. Why did morality decline ? Could it be people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Hugh Heffner, Larry Flynt, The Simpsons, South Park, Rated R movies and the media in general ?
More like people like Lyndon B. Johnson, Dean Rusk, MacGeorge Bundy, William Westmoreland, Richard M. Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew....the list goes on.
The people you named greatly enriched American culture and reflected its foibles and follies.
Somehow I think those who committed war crimes are more culpable for a general disregard for order and peace.
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Take the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 for example...........big deal right ? That was one of the first movies where they took some bad guys
Duel In The Sun from 1946 predated Butch Cassidy by many, many years.
Or White Heat from 1949. Or Dillinger from 1947. Etc. etc. etc.
Goldenchild08, you make the foundation of America sound like a borg invasion. Our founding fathers were not perfect, but they came up with a system that would work better than any other, a system that was copied by many others. Native Americans were going to be conquered, if not by white europeans then by someone else later on, that was bound to happen. As for America becoming the richest country in the world from slavery, thats wrong, America was not all that wealthy after the civil war, and did not become all that rich or powerful until 30 or 40 years later. Chinese laborers came over here and worked for peanuts because they wanted to, because it was a better opportunity than what they had back home. Nobody forced them to stay here after their opportunity for employment had expired. Blacks were oppressed by whites, they too decided to stay and stick it out. They are not oppressed today by anyone but themselves, many of them are doing OK because they took the steps it takes to succeed. Hard drugs have to remain illegal because if you could buy them cheap at the store, soon half the population would be nonfunctional and have catastrophic psychological/health problems. and be dropping like flies. It would be a social disaster. I do agree with the last part of your post however, about our government selling us out.
Majoun, the Gangs of New York and Five Points is reaching back pretty far, I am focusing on period 40's to early 60's as being a much better point of reference to compare with the period afterwards, as most people born before the the 30's are dead. Social conditions in the 19th and early 20th century were bad, we know that, but things got better after WW2 and in many ways they got worse again after the 60's.
I agree with many of your picks for moral bad guys that you picked from the Vietnam era. Many of them were cold war warriors that just plain got it wrong and got this country in a lot of trouble. However, I don't think the people I picked did anything to enrich American culture as you say. I have been entertained by them, yes, but my thoughts were just a little more dirty and less moral for the experience of it. When you watch enough of that stuff, it's bound to have a negative effect on you, and people say "just turn it off", but like millions of others, I never had that kind of discipline. So now I have all this dirty stuff floating around in my head that would never be there, had the Hays Code not broken down in the early 60's, had pornography not been allowed, had dirty comics not made me laugh at dirty stuff. It really makes "dirty deeds done dirt cheap" a lot more socially acceptable and more to the front of peoples minds.
I think I read somewhere that 1965 was the start of America's crime wave. That was the start of the hippie movement and crime started to go up with the breakdown in society connected with drugs, rock music and a lack of respect for authority. It has been downhill since then.
My parents said that before that year life was more peaceful, the crime rate was very low, families were stronger, illegal drug use was limited and kids behaved in school.
Historians: was 1965 the start of the downward spiral in American society?
Actually I'd say it started with prohibition. The concept that the govt could regulate us to that degree never existed prior to that. Prohibition set the stage for huge organized crime empires that still exist today. The breakdown in society has nothing to do with drugs or music & everything to do with the nanny state that was born with prohibition.
Hard drugs have to remain illegal because if you could buy them cheap at the store, soon half the population would be nonfunctional and have catastrophic psychological/health problems. and be dropping like flies.
If hard drugs were legal, street gangs would no longer have any means of support, and would wither away. There would be a general decrease in crime across the board. Note that when Prohibition ended there was a major decrease in crime - despite the Great Depression. Certainly America would be a safer place and there would be more social cohesion.
Note that the massive spike in crime in the 1970s/80s was fueled by punitive policies. In the 1966 New York gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Frank O'Connor, the DA of Queens, advocated adopting a British style system of making heroin available by prescription in response to the already considerable rise in crime in NYC (and other Northeastern cities, which would soon spread to the rest of the US). Nelson Rockefeller, the GOP incumbent, advocated cracking down further and advocated what would become known as "war on drugs" policies. Because Rockefeller won that election by a landslide (never mind that he was a popular and highly monied incumbent and O'Connor came off like Archie Bunker) the issue of legalizing drugs became taboo in US politics. It has remained so ever since with a few exceptions like Ron Paul. Harsh crackdowns on drugs disproportionately affected poor minority communities and caused crime in those communities (and crimes committed elsewhere by people from those communities) to become more violent and savage. You mentioned rape of white prisoners who weren't seasoned criminals - said white prisoners were also victims of the War on Drugs. Making hard drugs legal would also save governments plenty of money. The reason why drugs remain illegal is because of the power of cartels, Big Pharma, and the prison-industrial complex.
Note that when Britain ceased to make hard drugs available by prescription and adopted American style drug laws, it found out that with American style drug laws came American style crime.
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Majoun, the Gangs of New York and Five Points is reaching back pretty far, I am focusing on period 40's to early 60's as being a much better point of reference to compare with the period afterwards, as most people born before the the 30's are dead. Social conditions in the 19th and early 20th century were bad, we know that, but things got better after WW2 and in many ways they got worse again after the 60's.
So nobody during that time period remembered the early twentieth century? I highly doubt that.
You assumed that the America created by the New Deal was somehow the natural order of things, that the society that would not have existed without FDR would have somehow existed. The 19th and early 20th centuries are evidence it was not the natural order of things. The postwar society you idealize (and which had some very good aspects) was the creation of Roosevelt.
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I agree with many of your picks for moral bad guys that you picked from the Vietnam era. Many of them were cold war warriors that just plain got it wrong and got this country in a lot of trouble.
I forgot to add Robert MacNamara, although at least he apologized - making him the Albert Speer of American war criminals.
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However, I don't think the people I picked did anything to enrich American culture as you say. I have been entertained by them, yes, but my thoughts were just a little more dirty and less moral for the experience of it.
Fabricating evidence to send soldiers off to die in foreign wars is the real obscenity.
Tom Lehrer, who you'd probably also blame for "subverting good morals", stopped doing satire when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize - with warmongers winning the Peace Prize, real life had become stranger than satire.
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When you watch enough of that stuff, it's bound to have a negative effect on you, and people say "just turn it off", but like millions of others, I never had that kind of discipline. So now I have all this dirty stuff floating around in my head that would never be there
By that line of thought one could argue in favor of banning the Bible or at least banning the Bible in languages other than Latin so the masses couldn't understand certain things (just as medical books on sexual topics were often in Latin prior to the late 1950s and 1960s). Plenty of sex and violence in the Bible. (Said sex and violence in the Bible made Cecil B. DeMille a wealthy man and more recently it made Mel Gibson wealthier.)
If anything, censorship makes what is being censored more attractive.
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had the Hays Code not broken down in the early 60's, had pornography not been allowed, had dirty comics not made me laugh at dirty stuff. It really makes "dirty deeds done dirt cheap" a lot more socially acceptable and more to the front of peoples minds.
The Hays Code should never have existed in the first place. Nor should the Comics Code have existed in the first place.
While filmmakers got pretty good at working around the Hays Code and deliberately subverting it, it did retard the intellectual content of US films compared to European films - which is why early 1930s films seem more "adult" than US films of the later '30s or '40s as a whole. European and Japanese comics got more sophisticated than US comics did due to the Comics Code.
Violent crime rates actually peaked in the late 1980's / early 1990's and have been declining since then.
The crack cocaine crisis that motivated much of that crime also peaked around 1990. Drugs are still a real problem though, but have been for a long time...
In terms of morals, I think you have it right. The Sexual Revolution (probably precipitated by the introduction of the contraceptive pill and a number of other factors) really corrupted American morals, and in a lot of respects the country's morality has deteriorated further since. Imagine Jersey Shore in 1965...
In colonial-era Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, I've read that actually a HUGE percentage of the population were prostitutes, and a huge fraction of brides were pregnant at the time of marriage. Also, only a fraction of colonial-era Americans officially belonged to a church - probably a smaller proportion that today. (Of course, many lived in isolation in the wilderness).
100 years ago, a huge proportion of Americans were addicted to drugs. Many of the Civil War injured had become addicted to pain-killers. Until 1906 there was no Federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate medicinal claims or ingredients. Babies were prescribed addictive narcotics for teething pain, and some died from this.
Duels with pistols were a common way of settling arguments. President Andrew Jackson, I think, killed people at duels.
I read a long poem by Robert Frost which discusses a (train) traveling salesman in Vermont about 1900, being afraid of being robbed and murdered by a stranger who he shared a room at a village Inn. Not the image I always had of the bucolic, cozy Vermont of Grandma Moses !
Last edited by slowlane3; 05-27-2012 at 09:52 PM..
The best-selling book "Freakanomics" made the point that the U.S. crime rate dropped sharply, a certain number of years after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalized abortion. In other words, many aborted babies came disproportionately from high-risk, dysfunctional households, and they would have grown into criminals, had they lived.
Did you people forget about the Wild Wild West in the late 1800's and early 1900's? Did you forget about the Mafia during the 20's-50's? What about Blacks being lynched in the South by the KKK? What about the U.S. Military exterminating the Native Americans? What about the Japanese being interned to camps during WW2? What about McCarthyism?
America has always been a violent country. It is no worse today than any other time. In fact, crime has been declining steadily since the mid-90's. The reason why crime seems so bad today is due to the media. You have CNN, Fox, and MSNBC constantly reporting how bad crime is. Every time some drunk guy robs a liquor store or 2 men fight at a bar it is BREAKING NEWS. So we are constantly being reminded how bad crime is. This is what the media wants, because they want ratings. Nobody would watch CNN if all they reported on was little Johnny winning the science fair.
The other reason why things seem so bad is the War on Drugs, which started during the Reagan administration. We suddenly invented all of these new drug crimes to lock people up for life sentences, when in the 60's, they would get a slap on the wrist. So on paper, it seems our prisons are more crowded than ever, but it is mainly due to drug crimes, which are now a major industry.
I think why the original poster and others hold the 50's and 60's in such high regard are because they were great times for white middle-class people. If you lived in a middle-class white neighborhood during those years things were generally very safe. You could leave your home doors unlocked while you were away on vacation in some areas. That said, things were not so good for Blacks or other minorities.
Last edited by Nolefan34; 05-29-2012 at 09:05 PM..
I think I read somewhere that 1965 was the start of America's crime wave. That was the start of the hippie movement and crime started to go up with the breakdown in society connected with drugs, rock music and a lack of respect for authority.
1965 was also when those awful people risked their lives and their careers and their own freedom to march unselfishly on behalf of those whose civil rights were denied by the authority they were supposed to respect. Civil rights had to wait for those who were willing to break down society.
Interesting how "morals" becomes a problem when immorality comes under attack.
Last edited by CowanStern; 05-29-2012 at 09:51 PM..
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