Born in Blood

The United States may or may not be the land of freedom, a beacon of liberty, and a city upon a hill, but it is undeniable that it stands alone among affluent nations in its violence, with homicide rates towering above those of every comparable nation. Levels of interpersonal conflict have waxed and waned over time, and historians and criminologists have devoted enormous attention to these patterns, producing a rich scholarly literature on the history of American violence. In Born in Blood, however, Gac approaches the history of American violence from a very different perspective, focusing on its cultural and ideological roots.This study explores violence as an expression of American political culture rather than as a form of behavior. Written in the intellectual tradition of American studies, Gac analyzes how political institutions, presidents, generals, and leading thinkers defined, constructed, and preserved a vision of American liberalism that justified and even selectively encouraged violence. This book does not examine patterns of interpersonal conflict and devotes scant attention to the most common forms of violent conduct, such as domestic abuse, drunken brawling, and gang activities. Thus, the book takes an unusual tack on the subject, adding a distinctive perspective to our understanding of America’s remarkably violent past—and present.Gac argues that “American violence” is an “artifact of the American Revolution” (13). In the war for independence and subsequent state formation and constitution making, American intellectuals forged a variant of liberalism that institutionalized violence. Thus, the late eighteenth century represented a “pathbreaking moment” that shaped the nation’s history of “violent self-determination” (13). During and after the Revolution, coercion and even brutality became enshrined as a legitimate tool for preserving versions of liberty and freedom grounded in hierarchy, inequality, and racial dominance, “placing authority solely in the hands of White men” (247). This institutionalized defense of violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, offered capacious cultural license for the use of coercive force, ranging from George Washington’s sadistic brutality toward soldiers who failed to adhere to his standards of military discipline to the horrific whipping of enslaved Africans, all in the service of social stability.Opening with captivating vignettes of violence and brutality in the Age of Revolution, Gac’s narrative jumps to the Civil War era, when new ideas about freedom and later workers’ rights challenged such a view of liberalism. He argues that leading writers and political authorities refined their views but managed to maintain the late eighteenth-century formulation, casting late nineteenth-century dissenters as threats to liberty and social order and hence justifying lynching and violence toward labor activists as necessary for the preservation of American freedom. In short, Born in Blood argues that American notions of liberal democracy remained—and remain—moored to late eighteenth-century defenses of racial dominance, inequality, and colonization. Gac concludes his narrative by linking this culturally inscribed and institutionalized framework to the recent murders of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor. “It is the liberal state,” he explains, “that consolidates and directs violence” (268).Though laden with insight, Gac’s argument is curiously incomplete. His analysis focuses on an American culture of violence more than on violence as behavior. Gac does not draw from, engage, or even cite the massive scholarship on violent conduct, missing the opportunity to demonstrate that culture influenced patterns of behavior. Particular episodes of emblematic brutality illustrate his interpretation but stop short of establishing a connection between presidents’ pronouncements and trends in interpersonal relations. Gac’s thoughtful analysis, for instance, does not explain why the prescriptive tolerance for coercion in the era of the revolution failed to produce high rates of murder or assault in much of early nineteenth-century America. But this quibble aside, Born in Blood offers a fascinating perspective on an important, timely issue

Biology · Criminology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society