REVIEW: All God's Children by Fox Butterfield

Fox Butterfield is one of those old-school journalists. He has a name like 'Fox Butterfield,' first of all. He spent most of his 30-year career writing for the New York Times, and was part of the 1971 Pulitzer-winning team behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers. He served as the newspaper's bureau chief in China, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Boston, and he worked as a correspondent in Washington and New York. He was still writing for the Times up through 2005, covering crime and criminal justice. Butterfield wrote three heavily-reported books. One of them was published in 1965 and was about American missionaries in China. The second, from 1982, was China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. It won the National Book Award.

But what I'm looking at now is his third and last book: All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995, reissued 2008).

Willie Bosket was a brilliant young man (literally: an IQ near genius level) who grew up in Harlem. He was tried for shooting dead a man on the New York City subway while attempting to rob him ... and then, eight days later, murdering another man during another attempted subway robbery. This was in 1978. Bosket was fifteen years old. After being convicted of the crimes in family court, Bosket received the maximum sentence: five years in a youth facility. The public backlash at the length of the sentence spurred the state legislature to pass the Juvenile Offender Act, permitting minors to be tried in adult court, and receive adult penalties, for severe crimes. This was the very first time that any state in the U.S. made way for the "tried as an adult" exception for violent youth crimes; of course, others have since followed its example.

Bosket was released in 1983 from an adult facility he was sent to after an escape attempt at the detention center. Very shortly later, he committed several other assaults. While in prison for 25-years-to-life, he seriously attacked several guards, which added two life sentences to his incarceration. Bosket's violent behavior incited the prison system to design a special wing for him.

In All God's Children, Butterfield follows the history of men in Willie Bosket’s family (it is interesting that he focuses solely on men) all the way back to their days as slaves in South Carolina. He wants to reveal how decades -- centuries -- of persistent cruelty, poverty, and illegitimate ideas of "honor" create a "tradition of violence" that is inherited, one generation to the next, if there is nothing to interrupt the pattern. In the case of the Bosket family, Willie's father killed two men. His grandfather was a violent criminal. His great-grandfather was notorious even in a county -- Edgefield, South Carolina -- that Butterfield believes was the most violent in the country; its murder rate was higher than New York City's in the mid-nineties.

To lay it out plainly, Butterfield says that the interconnected causes of violent crime are these:

The traditional honor code in the South threaded through both upper and lower classes.
The honor code demanded violent behavior to earn or maintain status.
The honor code, initially inhabited by upper-class Southerners, was ultimately adapted into a ‘code of the streets.’
The honor code is passed through generations unless there is an outside intervention.
Parental influence is especially significant in its potential to intervene, perpetuate, or tolerate the tradition of violence.
If intervention does not take place at a young age, an individual has little hope of escaping the cycle.
Where traditional positive interventions are lacking (parenting, churches, schools), they can be imitated, as various modern programs demonstrate.
Recent cultural changes make it even easier for the tradition of violence to persist; most particularly, the declining influence of institutions that require codes of obedience.

About those antebellum honor codes: Butterfield describes Southern attacks against Cherokees and settlers, guerrilla fighting during Revolutionary War, and Civil War-era bloodshed both on the battlefield and off. He notes that between 1800 and 1860, the murder rate in South Carolina, “an overwhelmingly rural, agrarian area," was "four times higher than that in Massachusetts, then the most urban industrial state." Butterfield uses this evidence to discard a major tenet of ecological crime theory, which cites dense population areas and anonymity as predictors of violence. Instead, Butterfield believes the honor code of the South was a far more forceful spur toward violence. He writes:

For honor required gentlemen to pay great attention to appearances to ensure proper respect, and when it was not forthcoming, violence could quickly erupt. In practice, this meant that it was as intolerable to call a man a liar as to hit or shoot him.

However, despite extensive historical research, Butterfield’s analysis is weak. His assertions that the honor code directly translated into violence, and that the honor code translated into today's street code, are interesting, but unconvincing.

On the first point, Butterfield relies on anecdotal ‘proofs.’ For example, he tells the (factual) story of a Southern senator who beat an abolitionist with his walking stick. There is a section that attempts to mimic the senator thinking through his options—considering, then dismissing, the options of pursuing a lawsuit, challenging a duel, or fatally killing him with a pistol or sword—before dramatizing the assault. This is an entirely imagined line of reasoning. Butterfield then concludes that the story “underscored how strongly the dictates of honor governed life in Edgefield.” In what the North would consider a criminal act, he says, the South considered a justifiable defense of honor.

But he's making a big leap about the senator's rationale for the stick-beating. The actual evidence, besides the facts of the assault, are some written statements where the senator describes the abolitionist as "an insult to my State." Butterfield does not dig into why the honor code of the South would've turned the senator's experience of an insult into an act of violence, beyond the paraphrased sentiment that the code 'demanded violent behavior to earn or maintain status' and the totally made-up monologue from the senator. Nor does he look at it from the other angle: why such violent honor codes didn't exist in the North in the same way. Also unresolved are corollary issues that might play into the causes of violence, including access to weaponry and the compounding effect of desensitization.

Therefore, in this anecdote and others, Butterfield's account is one of correlation, rather than causation. Intriguing though it may be, I am not yet persuaded that the Southern honor codes were the primary cause of violence in the region.

Butterfield's contention that the honor code among Southern elites morphed into today's street code is also hazy. He merely states that “in time, this mentality would spread to others in South Carolina, to the Boskets, and in them it would not always be deemed glorious." For an old-school reporter, I'm surprised at the gloss here. Butterfield argues that this tradition of violence can be stopped with appropriate intervention -- but he curiously never articulates why this tradition ceased among the Southern elites. As crude or cruel as any politician may be, after all, there is not a one that would personally beat up a political opponent these days.

Butterfield argues that certain societal factors smooth the path for the tradition of violence: a society that, for example, is less religious, goes to church less often, neglects its public schools, has fewer jobs, has more broken families and is more racist. By addressing these factors, he says, society can intervene in the tradition of violence and put it to an end. If this is what intervention looks like, what was the intervention that diminished the tradition of violence among Southern elites? Did they, as a class, get more jobs, better schools? What, really is the difference between these elites and those on the streets, and why do the honor codes that Butterfield says have a common origin now look so different? We don’t know. Butterfield neglects the most potent opportunity to legitimize his theory of violence's origins.

It's not that Butterfield's theories are necessarily wrong; he simply doesn't have enough follow-through to make them persuasive. Regardless, his extensive examination of the tradition of violence is informative as long-view description, if not analysis. By revealing the generational nature of much violence, he amplifies the significant scope of what, finally, is necessary to interrupt the cycle. All God's Children reminds us that, “If prison was the sole solution to the problem, we should be among the safest nations on earth."

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