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Understanding race and crime pb:Understanding race and crime pb 13/7/07 15:08 Page 1

crime and justice crime and justice

SERIES EDITOR: MIKE MAGUIRE

Understanding Race and Crime

UNDERSTANDING RACE AND CRIME

• Why are some ethnic minorities associated with higher levels

of offending?
• How can racist violence be explained?
• Are the police and criminal justice system racist?
• Are the reasons for offending and victimization among ethnic
minorities different from those among ethnic majorities?

Understanding Race and Crime provides a comprehensive and critical

introduction to the debates and controversies about race, crime and
criminal justice. While focusing on Britain and America it also takes a
Understanding
broader international perspective, with case studies including the racist
state crime in the Nazi and Rwandan genocides.

The book provides a conceptual framework in which racism, race and

Race and Crime
crime might be better understood. It traces the historical origins of how
thinking about crime came to be associated with racism and how fears
and anxieties about race and crime become rooted in places destabilized
by rapid social change. The book questions whether race and ethnicity
alone are significant enough factors to explain differing offending and
victimization patterns between ethnic groups.

Issues examined include:

• Contact/conflict with the police
• Public disorder
• Involvement with the criminal justice system

Understanding Race and Crime is essential reading for students on a

variety of criminology and criminal justice courses. It is also useful to
practitioners in the criminal justice field and those interested in

Webster
understanding the issues behind debates on race and crime.

Colin Webster is Reader in Criminology at Leeds Metropolitan

University, UK. He teaches criminology, specifically race and crime and
previously taught at the Universities of Teesside and York. He has
researched and written extensively on race, crime and social exclusion.

Cover illustration: Linda Combi

Cover design: Barker/Hilsdon

Colin Webster
www.openup.co.uk 9 780335 204779
Understanding race and crime
CRIME AND JUSTICE
Series editor: Mike Maguire
Cardiff University

Crime and Justice is a series of short introductory texts on central topics

in criminology. The books in this series are written for students by
internationally renowned authors. Each book tackles a key area within
criminology, providing a concise and up-to-date overview of the principal
concepts, theories, methods and findings relating to the area. Taken as a
whole, the Crime and Justice series will cover all the core components of an
undergraduate criminology course.

Published titles Understanding social control

Martin Innes
Understanding drugs, alcohol and
crime Understanding violent crime
Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway Stephen Jones
Understanding youth and crime Understanding risk in criminal
2nd edition justice
Sheila Brown Hazell Kemshall
Understanding crime data Understanding psychology and
Clive Coleman and Jenny crime
Moynihan James McGuire
Understanding white collar crime Understanding community
Hazel Croall penalties
Peter Raynor and Maurice
Understanding victims and
Vanstone
restorative justice
James Dignan Understanding criminology 2nd
edition
Understanding justice 2nd edition
Sandra Walklate
Barbara A. Hudson
Understanding public attitudes to
Understanding crime prevention
criminal justice
Gordon Hughes
Julian V. Roberts and Mike Hough
Understanding race and crime

Colin Webster
Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL
email: [email protected]
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk
and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2289, USA

First published 2007

Copyright © Colin Webster 2007
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency
Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained
from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street,
London, EC1N 8TS.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-10 0 335 20477 5 (pb) 0 335 20478 3 (hb)
ISBN-13 978 0 335 20477 9 (pb) 978 0 335 20478 6 (hb)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data applied for
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Poland by OZ Graf S.A.
www.polskabook.pl
Contents

Series editor’s foreword xi

Acknowledgements xiv

1 Conceptualising ‘race’ and crime: racialisation

and criminalisation 1
Biological and cultural racism 1
Race and ethnicity 2
Criminalisation and racialisation 3
The problem of ‘racism’ 3
Race relations and situational racism 5
Focusing on white ethnicity and perpetrators 6
The importance of context 6
Structure, themes and purposes of the book 7
Further reading 10

2 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 11

A transformation in how ‘race’ is thought about? 11
The beginnings in race and crime thinking in criminal
anthropology 12
The criminal type 13
Emergence of eugenic ideas in Britain 14
Applied eugenics in America 15
Eugenics in National Socialist Germany 17
The legacy of biological criminology and eugenics 21
Criticisms of biological criminology and eugenics 22
Understanding the origins of race and crime in criminology
and eugenics 24
Further reading 25
vi Understanding race and crime

3 Context: race, place and fear of crime 26

Conceptualising fear of crime: the racialisation of fear 27
Fear of crime: prevalence 27
Youngstown, Ohio: American deindustrialisation, race
and class 28
Detroit, Chicago and Harlem: segregation, inequality
and the meaning of ‘whiteness’ 30
Camden, North London: narratives of crime and decline 33
Competition over local resources: the availability of affordable
housing and ethnic enmity 34
Bow and Battersea: why are some places more racist than others? 36
Neighbourhood feelings vary by age 37
South London: cultural syncretism? 39
Understanding race, place and fear of crime 39
Further reading 42

4 Offending and victimisation 43

Introduction: are cross-national comparisons possible? 43
Offending patterns in England and Wales 44
Case study: street robbery 50
Victimisation patterns in England and Wales 51
Offending patterns in the United States 53
Victimisation patterns in the United States 54
Offending and victimisation patterns together in the
United States 55
Offending and victimisation patterns in Australia 57
European offending and victimisation patterns 58
Conclusions from cross-national data on offending and
victimisation 60
The immigration and crime thesis: intergenerational crime
patterns? 62
Understanding offending and victimisation 64
Further reading 66

5 Racist violence 67
Introduction: the British context of reform 67
Historical background to racist violence in Britain 69
A peculiarly American tradition of ‘popular justice’:
lynching and extralegal punishment in the United States 72
Case study: the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence 77
Macpherson and its aftermath: policing racist victimisation
and the law 78
Extent of racist victimisation: patterns and trends 81
Have understanding and policy towards racist victimisation
improved? 85
Understanding racist violence 86
 Contents vii

Further reading 89
Notes 89

6 Race, policing and disorder 90

Introduction: the centrality of policing in black and
minority ethnic groups’ experiences 90
Lore and disorder: history of minority–police conflict
in Britain 91
Policing black and minority ethnic communities
in Britain 94
‘Suspect populations’ 94
Attitudes towards the police 95
Contact with the police: stop and search 96
Arrests 97
Police beliefs 97
Police racism 98
Policing black and minority ethnic communities
in the United States 99
Policing black and minority ethnic communities in Australia 100
Explaining conflict and hostility between black and
minority ethnic young people and the police 101
Case study: the British ‘Asian’ disorders of 1995 and 2001 102
Explaining the Asian disorders: ‘parallel lives’? 105
Understanding race, policing and disorder 106
Further reading 109

7 Race, criminal justice and penality 110

Race and criminal justice in England and Wales 111
Overrepresentation 111
Disproportionality in the criminal justice system:
difference or discrimination? 113
Perceptions of fairness and equality 116
Race and criminal justice in the United States 116
Overrepresentation 116
Disproportionality in the criminal justice system:
difference or discrimination? 119
A note on the death penalty in the United States:
the case of Alabama 120
Race and criminal justice in other countries 121
The historical and social context of criminal and youth
justice in Britain 121
Change and continuity in the lives of black and Asian
young people 122
‘Offender’ populations and their context 123
Understanding race, criminal justice and penality 124
Further reading 126
viii Understanding race and crime

8 ‘Race’, class, masculinities and crime: family, schooling

and peer groups 127
Introduction: risk factors 127
Race, class and family structure 128
Family, masculinity and emasculation 131
The masculinity and crime thesis 132
Masculinities, race and schooling 136
School disaffection, failure and truancy 138
Race, class and peer groups 143
Understanding ‘race’, class, masculinities and crime 145
Further reading 145

9 The African-American ‘underclass’ and the

American Dream 146
Introduction: the existence of an ‘underclass’ 146
The isolation of the black ghetto: a history of segregation 148
The integration of the black ghetto 152
The paradox of the black ghetto 156
Understanding the ghetto 161
The feared and resented ghetto: beyond urban ethnography 166
Understanding the African-American ‘underclass’: the
‘balance sheet’ of segregation? 168
Further reading 169

10 State crime: the racial state and genocide 170

Introduction: criminology’s neglect of mass killing 170
The Nazi genocide 173
‘Ordinary’ perpetrators 173
The Nazi genocide 180
The decision-making process in Nazi Jewish policy 181
The Rwandan genocide 182
The legacy of racism: pre-colonial and colonial
‘beginnings’ 182
Racism and ‘Rwandan ideology’ 184
The end of colonialism and the advent of the Hutu
republic, 1959–90 185
Preparation for genocide 186
Brief lull before the storm 188
The genocide 189
Who were the actors? Organisers, killers, victims
and bystanders 189
Killing patterns 190
Understanding the racial state and genocide 191
Glossary of Rwandan acronyms and names 192
Further reading 193
Note 193
 Contents ix

11 Understanding race and crime: some concluding thoughts 194

Race, criminality, normalcy and visibility 194
Racialised geography of fear 196
Disproportionality of offending and victimisation 196
Racist violence 198
Policing black and minority ethnic communities 198
Disproportionality in the criminal justice system 199
Race, class, masculinities and crime 200
Race and the American Dream 201
The racial state 202
The myth of ‘race’ 202

References 203
Index 223
Series editor’s foreword

Colin Webster’s book, the latest in Open University Press’ Crime and
Justice series, tackles the complex and sensitive subject of ‘race and crime’
in a clear, forthright manner. His book admirably reflects the aim of the
series, which has been to produce short but intellectually challenging
introductory texts in key areas of criminological debate, in order to give
undergraduates and graduates both a solid grounding in the relevant area
and a taste to explore it further. Although aimed primarily at students new
to the field, and written as far as possible in plain language, the books are
not oversimplified. On the contrary, the authors set out to ‘stretch’ readers
and to encourage them to approach criminological knowledge and theory
in a critical and questioning frame of mind.
Webster’s book discusses core aspects of the ‘race and crime’ debate,
which has emerged in criminology in a variety of guises over the years.
A central focus is on gaining a sociological understanding of the dual
processes of ‘criminalisation’ and ‘racialisation’ and the relationships
between them – in other words, social processes which construct and label
certain groups and assign them negative attributes such as ‘criminality’ or
‘inferiority’. The two processes can easily become intertwined in what are
essentially racist discourses, he argues, to the extent that even without the
explicit use of a crime-related term, phrases such as ‘black youth’ are used
to signify ‘criminality’, and vice versa terms like ‘crime’ and ‘riot’ become
racially loaded. The early chapters explore relevant discourses both in
a historical context (especially in relation to the ‘scientific’ racism found
in early criminological writing) and in relation to current concerns
about insecurity and ‘fear of crime’, which are often overtly or implicitly
racialised.
A further key element of Webster’s argument is that, while it is import-
ant to analyse statistical patterns of both crime and victimization in
terms of ethnicity, key debates about, for example, the apparently dis-
proportionate involvement of young black men in crime, cannot hope to be
xii Understanding race and crime

resolved without a close examination and understanding of the very differ-

ent and highly specific contexts in which various kinds of incident occur.
This requires not just statistical analysis, but careful qualitative research
and in-depth case studies, aimed at understanding how human choices and
actions in particular situations are shaped by, on the one hand, broad
social structural and cultural constraints (including racial discrimination
and social injustice in the wider society, and cultural reactions to it) and,
on the other, features of the immediate context. He illustrates this through
a number of case studies, including one on street robbery. Later in the
book, his focus widens to major socio-cultural issues and their relationship
to crime, including the development of cultures among marginalised
groups in which various forms of ‘masculinity’ become highly valued, as
well as the continuing heated debates in the United States about the
claimed existence of a separate, largely African-American ‘underclass’
inhabiting black urban ‘ghettos’.
Another significant proportion of the book is devoted to debates about
race and the criminal justice system, especially questions and evidence
relating to whether visible minorities are treated differently by the police
and courts. This includes a case study of the Stephen Lawrence murder and
investigation. Finally, there is an important chapter on racist state crime,
and specifically genocide, a topic which has been surprisingly (and unjusti-
fiably) neglected by criminologists.
Despite the ambitious scope of the book, the author has managed to
tackle all the major topics without grossly over-simplifying arguments or
‘skating over’ key evidence. He has also, in my view, successfully achieved
the difficult balance between the standard ‘textbook’ approach of summar-
izing previous literature in a way helpful to readers new to the subject, and
conveying his own strongly held views and distinctive approach.
Other books previously published in the Crime and Justice series – all
of whose titles begin with the word ‘Understanding’ – have covered crim-
inological theory (Sandra Walklate), justice and penal theory (Barbara
Hudson), crime data and statistics (Clive Coleman and Jenny Moynihan),
youth and crime (Sheila Brown), crime prevention (Gordon Hughes),
violent crime (Stephen Jones), community penalties (Peter Raynor and
Maurice Vanstone), white collar crime (Hazel Croall), risk in criminal
justice (Hazel Kemshall), social control (Martin Innes), psychology and
crime (James McGuire), victims and restorative justice (James Dignan),
drugs, alcohol and crime (Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway), public
attitudes to criminal justice (Julian Roberts and Mike Hough), desistance
from crime (Stephen Farrell and Adam Calverley), prisons (Andrew Coyle)
and political violence (Vincenzo Ruggiero). One (Walklate) is already in its
third edition, four are in second editions, and other second editions are in
preparation. Other new books in the pipeline include texts on moderniza-
tion and criminal justice, criminological research methods, ‘cybercrime’,
and policing. All are topics which are either already widely taught or are
growing in prominence in university degree courses on crime and criminal
 Series editor’s foreword xiii

justice, and each book should make an ideal foundation text for a relevant
module. As an aid to understanding, clear summaries are provided at
regular intervals. In addition, to help students expand their knowledge,
recommendations for further reading are given at the end of each chapter.
Mike Maguire
February 2007
Acknowledgements

I dedicate this book to the memory of my late father Bill Webster and those
of his generation who helped defeat Nazism. I thank Ena Faal for her belief
and support over the years. Yusuf Ahmad and Karim Murji were influen-
tial in me being commissioned to write this book. Fabbeh Husein’s partner
Teresa tolerated our endless conversations about ‘race’. Les Johnston and
then Mark Simpson as heads of criminology at the University of Teesside
offered unfailing support, mostly by not asking whether I’d finished the
book. I’m indebted to Rob MacDonald at Teesside University whose
professional and intellectual encouragement, mentorship and friendship
gave me the confidence to ‘keep it real’. Another debt is owed to Ben
Bowling who helped instigate my belated academic career and has
generously supported my race and crime interests since. The University of
Teesside and its School of Social Sciences provided some sabbaticals in
which I read and thought a great deal and wrote little. Between the Pina
Colada and other seemingly more pressing research tasks, the writing of
this book got squeezed out. This is where I thank my Open University Press
editors Justin Vaughn then Chris Cudmore for their infinite patience in
supporting this long overdue book. My series editor Mike Maguire has
been a true gentleman and scholar. Finally, I acknowledge my relatively
recently gained criminology colleagues at Leeds Metropolitan University
who had no truck with the notion of me not delivering a book I said I
would when they employed me.
chapter one

Conceptualising ‘race’ and crime:

racialisation and criminalisation

Biological and cultural racism

Race and ethnicity
Criminalisation and racialisation
The problem of ‘racism’
Race relations and situational racism
Focusing on white ethnicity and perpetrators
The importance of context
Structure, themes and purposes of the book
Further reading

Biological and cultural racism

The terms ‘race’ and ‘crime’ probably already sit quite easily (or uneasily)
together in the reader’s mind, if not as a natural association, then at least as
an understandable one. This book is about the different ways in which this
association has prevailed in some of the thinking, attitudes and activities
found in modern societies towards the problem of crime and the issue of
race. Talking about race and crime in the same breath invites a number of
pitfalls. The most glaring of these is that the notion of ‘race’ does not have
any scientific validity. Classifying or distinguishing humans by the races to
which they are said to belong is completely arbitrary because all human
groups have a common biological ancestry (Cavalli-Sforza 2001; Olson
2002). It is not possible to argue on current evidence that the distinctive
behaviours of a group have a biological origin. Most of the groups to
which we belong have nothing to do with biology and everything to do
with culture (Rose et al. 1984; Montagu 1997; Diamond 1999; Jones
2000; Lewontin 2000). Of course, groups are distinctive in appearance and
2 Understanding race and crime

these distinguishing features are used socially to sort people into categories
according to the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes. Any pro-
pensity to interpret these differences in biological terms and draw conclu-
sions about their ancestry is the root of racism. Further, not only are these
physical categories deemed to constitute different races, they are often said
to be of a different ‘quality’ from one another, so that some are inferior
while others are superior. The immense consequences that ensue from this
social activity are described in this book.
Some writers argue that there has been a shift in the ways people think
about race, from the belief that race is grounded in biology to the belief
that race is based in cultural difference or descent. For example, some
people believe that it is ‘natural’ that people will want to live among ‘their
own kind’ (Barker 1981; Goldberg 1993; Solomos and Back 1996). Cul-
tural or ‘new racism’ is distinctive to the contemporary period in which
‘manifestations of race are coded in a language which aims to circumvent
accusations of racism. In the case of new racism, race is coded as culture’
(Solomos and Back 1996: 19). Whether racial groups are taken to be con-
stituted through biology or culture, what is common to racism is that it
promotes persistent exclusion or actually excludes people from entitle-
ments by virtue of their being deemed members of different racial groups.
In ascribing supposed racial characteristics to individuals said to belong
to a group different from their own, racists ‘explain’ racial differences as
natural, inevitable and therefore unchangeable. These characteristics are
then evaluated negatively to justify unequal treatment of the defined group
(Goldberg 1993; Cashmore 1996). Such beliefs can become embodied in
social practices and institutions, including those that are concerned with
the problem of crime.

Race and ethnicity

Just as race is often confused with culture, so it is often confused with

ethnicity, so that race, culture and ethnicity are used interchangeably. In its
benign sense ‘ethnicity’ refers to a group possessing some degree of coher-
ence and solidarity based on an awareness of common origins and interests.
However, ethnic groups can be seen by their members or by others as homo-
geneous, self-perpetuating, defensive and unchanging, and many groups
who organise themselves, or are described by others, as an ethnic group are
often regarded as a ‘race’ (Cashmore 1996). Similar to cultural difference,
ethnic difference can become a coded way of talking and thinking about
race.
Whether coded or not, some people continue to believe in the existence
of races, while the explicit promotion of racism in public speech and
actions is usually considered socially unacceptable and as promoting racial
hatred, and in some jurisdictions is illegal. Because of such censure racists
 Conceptualising race and crime 3

aim to circumvent accusations of racism, usually through declaring them-

selves ‘victims’ of the presence of vilified groups. As Chapter 5 shows,
violent racists rationalise their behaviour by inverting the meaning of
racism so as to accuse their real victims of racism, thus enabling themselves
to be seen as the victims. Most racists believe that they have been victimised
in some way, as can be observed at different points in this book.

Criminalisation and racialisation

The key conceptual framework that informs much of this book relies on
an understanding of processes of ‘criminalisation’ and ‘racialisation’ and
their relationship. Criminalisation refers to the process whereby some
groups receive more attention from, and are more likely to come into
contact with, the police and the criminal justice system because of some
imputed or ascribed characteristic of criminality. Racialisation refers to
those instances where social relations between people have been structured
by attributing meaning to biological and/or cultural characteristics, as a
result of which individuals may be assigned to a social group – a general
category of persons – which is said to reproduce itself biologically and/
or culturally (Miles and Brown 2003). This process defines and then con-
fines and constructs different groups, usually through assigning negatively
evaluated attributes such as ‘criminality’ or ‘inferiority’. For example,
when criminalisation and racialisation work together, ‘the couplet Black
youth can be employed in racist discourse to signify criminality’ (Keith
1993: 234), and then terms like ‘crime’ and ‘riot’ become racially loaded.
Racialisation and criminalisation are socially constructed through pro-
cesses of interaction between groups and can be embodied in institutional
practices.

The problem of ‘racism’

The term ‘racism’ is often used in discussions of crime and criminal justice
to refer to different and discriminatory treatment of individuals and groups
by the police and criminal justice system on grounds of their supposed
racial background. The term will appear many times in this book, but a
note of caution needs to be sounded from the beginning about how racism
is understood. Some writers have used the concept of racism to refer to all
beliefs, actions and institutional processes that discriminate against and
subordinate ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ people. There are a number of well-known
problems with this all-encompassing unitary definition. According to Miles
and Brown (2003), this concept of racism can ignore social class and gen-
der divisions and conflict within both the ‘white’ and ‘black’ populations;
4 Understanding race and crime

it assumes what should be demonstrated in every particular instance (white

racism); it ignores intentional or explicit expressions of racism as indica-
tors of the presence or absence of racism, which is a particular problem
when allegations of racism in institutions are made; it limits the range of
historical instances of racism, for example, racism against Jewish, Irish,
Gypsies and other racialised groups such as the ‘unfit’ and ‘criminals’; it
suggests that racism is the prerogative of ‘white’ people, seen as a homo-
geneous and totally dominant group, and as a necessary consequence of
what white people do to black people and those from other minority ethnic
groups; it obscures the complexities and distinctions between belief and
action, the intended and unintended consequences of action. For example,
police officers may hold racist views but this does not necessarily mean that
they will act on those beliefs in their operational duties. Finally, it implies
that ‘white’ people lack the capacity to understand, analyse and explain
racism. Overall, as Miles and Brown (2003: 80) argue,
systematic comparative analysis is essential: it is necessary to demon-
strate that ‘black’ people collectively are treated in a certain manner or
experience a particular disadvantage, and that the same treatment and
disadvantage are not experienced by any other group.
The book follows this injunction as far as is possible.
Having sounded this note of caution, racism can and does promote
exclusion or actually exclude people from material and other resources,
from public space and from justice, by marking out, creating and maintain-
ing different distinct bounded groups. The expression of racism is a
response to varying material and cultural circumstances over time and in
different contexts. It has many dimensions and is historically and spatially
specific. Racism in its ‘pure’, omnipresent and isolated form is relatively
rare and usually involves territorial exclusion, ‘ethnic cleansing’ or even
extermination (Bauman 1989). Those who express racism and those who
are its victims are located in and interact with wider social relations and
ideologies such as existing economic and political relations. For example,
race and racism as ideologies can mask other forms of power such as social
class. The problem of racism requires the simultaneous explanation of a
particular instance of exclusion and its relationship with a multiplicity of
other forms of exclusion. For example, studies, whether of disproportionate
offending and victimisation or of discrimination by the police and criminal
justice system, invariably compare white and black and minority ethnic
groups to discover differences in treatment, but this in itself tells us very
little unless we take into account other factors such as social class, dem-
ography, area, gender, family, school and employment processes. In many
cases these other factors may override or cancel out the influence of race
or ethnicity. In other instances the influence of race or ethnicity may be
present among all these other factors. This book does not begin from the
position of an a priori theory of racism which then seeks instances of
racism to support the theory. Neither does it rule out the possibility that
 Conceptualising race and crime 5

racism is likely to be an important influence on some social, including

criminal and justice, processes.

Race relations and situational racism

This book employs two different conceptual approaches to understanding

race and crime (see Rex and Mason 1986; Gilroy 1987; Miles 1993;
Banton 1997; Back and Solomos 2000). The race or ethnic relations
approach explores group consciousness of difference and group conflict,
whereas the racism approach explores racism and racialisation as an ideol-
ogy masking social exclusion and having many instances and causes. There
are few reasons why these two approaches should not be combined.
Although race or ethnic relations usually involve behaviour that is at least
in part racially or ethnically motivated, the approach does not presume
from the outset that racism is necessarily present. To be sure, when indi-
viduals define someone as belonging in a racial or ethnic category other
than their own, this usually involves regarding that person as having rights
and obligations different from those of a person belonging to the same
racial or ethnic category as themselves, to discriminate against and exclude
them. A key and often ignored dimension of race or ethnic relations,
however, emphasised in this book, is that this relationship changes and is
dynamic. Whenever individuals or groups define others as belonging to
a different race or ethnicity from themselves, they implicitly or explicitly
define themselves as belonging to a race or ethnicity also. Each group
becomes dependent on the other for its identity, and changes in the situ-
ation, power or status of one group influence the position of the other.
Often this giving and taking of identity is denied when majority groups
define minority groups as belonging to races or ethnicities.
Deploying these approaches, understanding race and crime requires
attention to the changing interaction and conflict between minority and
majority communities in areas such as family, schooling, employment,
housing and other social contexts, as well as policing, crime and crimi-
nal justice, the implication being to study factors that influence, usually
negatively, this interaction – in particular, certain structural conditions
encouraging race relations situations and problems; frontier or boundary
situations of conflict over scarce resources; occupational and residential
segregation; different access to power and prestige; cultural diversity and
limited group interaction; and migrant or minority groups as an underclass
fulfilling low-waged roles in urban labour markets.
Solomos and Back (1996) have added a third integrated approach,
which they call a ‘situational model of racism’. This model attempts to
account for processes which involve the attribution of specific meanings
to racial situations, contextualises racism within the specific conditions
and instances of its enunciation, and connects these local manifestations of
6 Understanding race and crime

racism with wider or national public discourses and policies. In particular,

the authors argue (1996: 20–1) that ‘The local context has important
effects resulting in complex outcomes where particular racisms may be
muted while others flourish’.

Focusing on white ethnicity and perpetrators

In focusing on sole scrutiny of minority victims, perpetrators and commu-

nities, studies of race and crime have tended to ignore white communities
and ‘whiteness’ as an ethnicity (Phillips and Bowling 2003). As already
mentioned, it cannot be assumed that all racism and discrimination is
perpetrated by whites on blacks or other minorities. Neither is the exist-
ence of some significant minority crime a myth, although the belief that a
lot of crime is perpetrated by minorities on whites is a myth. Racisms
involve social relationships that impact on the ‘white majority’ too, and the
ways in which ‘whiteness’ and white racism come to be constructed are as
important as the construction of minority identity in understanding race,
crime and culture (see, for example, Dyer 1997; Taylor 2005).
Understanding white as well as minority perspectives on race and the
racialised situations groups construct and are victimised by, brings in
factors such as class and gender as complicating factors influencing these
situations, crime, victimisation and criminal justice. For example, the
expression of different sorts of racism is often rooted in different class
experiences, levels and positions – found in the ‘subordinate racism’ or
‘rough racism’ of the street in contrast with ‘respectable’ or institutional
racism (Cohen 1988).

The importance of context

The distinct perspective and argument of this book is that contexts of

racialisation and criminalisation processes have for too long been ignored
or have remained unknown. A quantitative survey approach has tended to
dominate the race and crime debate in ways that can hide rather than
reveal social processes, at the expense of drawing on closer-up, qualitative
studies of actual groups and situations. The dominance of this approach
may in part explain the inconsistent and contradictory findings and dif-
ficulty of drawing final conclusions from this kind of data. The debate has
been further hindered by relying solely on somewhat parochial national
data and debate rather than a more international perspective, and this
perspective is a thread throughout the book.
The importance of context can be illustrated in a number of ways.
Offenders are sometimes treated equally, but other times they are not,
 Conceptualising race and crime 7

according to context. Race, crime and criminal justice outcomes may be

influenced by the intersection of the type of crime and the place of its
commission, the age, gender and ‘race’ of the offender, and the ‘race’ of the
victim (Spohn 2000). These interaction effects between different factors
may cancel out any direct or even indirect effects of race because these other
factors or characteristics may be more important in actions and decisions.
According to Walker et al. (2004), blacks as a group do not receive harsher
sentences than whites, but those blacks who are unemployed and living in
Chicago receive longer sentences than their white counterparts, as do
unemployed Hispanics. If generally applied, this points to indirect rather
than direct discrimination in the sentencing process because African-
Americans as a group are disproportionately working-class, unemployed
and living in hypersegregated areas making them less able to raise bail
money or mount a defence – differences that result from economic or social
disparities that attach to race (Smith and Natalier 2005).

Structure, themes and purposes of the book

Having dispensed with the preliminaries of conceptualising race and crime,

the discussion now turns to the substantive areas covered in this book. Some
of these areas have conventionally (and inexplicably) been neglected or
ignored by the criminological literature about race and crime. For example,
extralegal and extrajudicial killing and lynching as ways of terrorising
and controlling African-Americans, as well as forming the historical basis
of contemporary judicial executions, have mostly been ignored in discus-
sions of racist violence and in the formation of the popular punitiveness
of the American justice system. The book attempts to fill in other gaps
such as the perpetration of racist state crime, which, like state crimes in
general, has hardly been addressed within criminology (but see Morrison
2006).
In following a sociological as well as criminological approach (see
Holdaway 1997) it is hoped to capture complex relationships between
the respective roles of individual agency, intention and choice on the one
hand, and cultural and social structural constraints on social action on the
other, while recognising that human choices and constraints on these vary
according to situations and context (see Hopkins Burke 2005). In freeing
up and wanting to widen understanding of race and crime, this requires
identifying not only, for example, injustices of racial discrimination in the
criminal justice system, but also that these injustices are linked to wider
social injustice. Indeed, as Cook (2006) argues, criminal justice is a ‘two-
way street’ in which criminal and social justice are closely linked – that you
cannot have one without the other.
Race and criminality are first associated in the founding work of crimin-
ology itself in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Chapter 2
8 Understanding race and crime

shows. Early criminology both informed and was informed by a thinly

veiled ideology of ‘scientific’ racism, which argued that some individ-
uals and populations were biologically inferior. This methodological legacy
– shorn of its more racist connotations – remains today in continued
attempts to measure and compare the physical, psychological and cultural
attributes of criminal and non-criminal populations so as to identify a
distinct ‘criminal type’. These origins of applied criminology directly
resulted in the compulsory sterilisation and detention – and in the case
of Nazi Germany, the mass elimination and murder – of the ‘unfit’ and the
‘criminal’, for the purpose of improving the ‘racial qualities’ of future
generations.
Chapter 3 provides a context to the fear of crime, a fear that can be
exacerbated in socially constructed ‘racial situations’. This is illustrated
across a contrasting range of places. Essentially, this chapter argues that
general social anxieties and insecurities, and growing ethnic diversity
arising from social, economic and cultural change, are often interpreted
through the misty lens of neighbourhood-based nostalgic narratives of
decline that induce among residents specifically racialised fears of crime.
Chapter 4 describes contrasting majority and minority crime and victim
patterns across a range of societies, but focusing on Britain and the United
States. Consistent with the book’s argument that studies lack context,
the chapter reviews an in-depth case study of street robbery to evaluate
the claim that young black men are disproportionately involved in such
crimes, as well as the thesis that among some minorities crime rates
increase across generations. Finally, the chapter tackles the issue of why
some visible minority ethnic groups appear to suffer disproportionate
rates of crime as victims and offenders compared to their numbers in the
population, and other minority groups do not.
Chapter 5 begins with a case study of the racist murder of Stephen
Lawrence and the inquiry into the failed police handling of the murder
investigation. This inquiry changed the ways in which racist violence was
policed and dealt with by the law, with considerable consequences for
patterns and trends in racist violence. How we might understand the
underlying reasons for violence found in changing race relations in local
and national contexts is explored alongside the motivations of perpetrators
and relationships between perpetrator and victim groups.
Alleged different contact, conflict and treatment between the police and
some visible minority groups are considered in the context of a more gen-
eral adversarial policing of powerless and marginalised groups. Chapter 6
addresses the debate between those who argue that visible minorities are
given inferior treatment by the police and those who argue that the exist-
ence of extensive police racism is exaggerated and that police racism and
stereotyping have little impact in terms of the way in which officers go
about their duties. Still others argue that disproportionate police attention
devoted to some minority (and other) groups simply reflects their higher
rate of offending. The chapter also focuses on one of the police’s core
 Conceptualising race and crime 9

functions, to maintain public order, and the particular resonance this has
had in situations involving minority–police relations and disorders.
Chapter 7 examines whether different outcomes for visible minorities in
the criminal justice process are the result of different types and rates of
offending between ethnic groups or racial discrimination in the criminal
justice system. Some writers have argued that once the different offending
characteristics of individuals are taken into account, any different treat-
ment on grounds of racial characteristics alone disappears and that all are
equal before the law. Other studies have remained agnostic on whether
different treatment on grounds of race or ethnicity is present or not because
of the difficulty of measuring or modelling criminal justice processes and
decision-making in the ‘real’ world, while yet other studies have argued
that a residue of racial bias against minority defendants is present at all
stages of the criminal justice process, from prosecution, conviction, sen-
tence and remand to type of court disposal. It is argued that the life con-
texts of those brought before the criminal justice system are the most
important explanation of criminal justice processes and outcomes, rather
than these processes and outcomes in themselves.
Chapter 8 takes this argument further by examining the wider socio-
logical issues that underpin processes of criminalisation and racialisation,
and the encouragement or discouragement of delinquency and criminality.
By focusing on working-class and minority youth transitions and social
exclusion in family, care, neighbourhood, schooling and training, leisure
and employment contexts, and the influence such transitions may have
in generating risks of offending, this chapter also asks whether the devel-
opment of certain sorts of masculinity encourage or mute anti-social and
offending behaviour among marginalised groups.
The discussion in Chapter 9 questions the claimed existence of a sepa-
rate crime-ridden African-American underclass inhabiting American black
urban ghettos, long characterised as responsible for a catastrophic explo-
sion of crime, joblessness, single-parent families and welfare dependency in
inner-city areas. Accused of being disconnected from and culturally and
behaviourally different from mainstream American society and values, the
isolated and segregated African-American underclass is shown to be far
more integrated into mainstream American values than previous studies
allowed. Indeed, it is the pursuit of such values embodied in the ‘American
Dream’ that can drive criminality and create hostility and resentment
towards the African-American underclass.
Following on from earlier comments that criminology has mostly ignored
state crimes in general, and racist state crimes in particular, Chapter 10,
through focusing on the crime of genocide, redresses this omission in crim-
inological research and discussion. The description and analysis of the
historical, social and political processes, eventually leading to genocide in
Nazi Germany and Rwanda, emphasise the different roles, motivations
and relationships of perpetrators, victims and bystanders in mass murder.
Contrary to popular belief, the pattern, logic and act of genocide are not
10 Understanding race and crime

the expression of incomprehensible, abhorrent irrationality on the part

of perpetrators but can be understood as a conscious, evolving, political
policy and strategy promoted by political elites to create a ‘purified’ racial
utopia.

Further reading

Instead of tackling the race and crime debate directly, as is more usual in other
accounts, the first three chapters of this book first furnish a conceptual, historical
and contextual framework in which the debate might be more fruitfully begun.
Consistently critical and interesting work on the concept of ‘racism’ is provided by
Miles and Brown (2003). This somewhat structural and analytical approach can be
balanced with the work of Solomos and Back (1996), who argue that racism should
be understood as more specific and contingent in terms of conditions that give rise
to racist expression, thought and action. Because racism is relational – it defines the
self-identity of racists as well as the ‘other’ – attention should be paid to the eth-
nicity and ideology of ‘whiteness’. Taylor (2005) offers a history of the formation
of ‘whiteness’ as an ideology. A good example of how racialisation and criminalisa-
tion processes work together is Keith’s (1993) work on race, policing and disorder.
Finally, and consistent with the ethos of the book, Cook’s (2006) marrying of
criminal justice concerns with concerns about social exclusion and social justice
provides a good indirect grounding for understanding race and crime.
chapter two

Origins: criminology, eugenics and

‘the criminal type’

A transformation in how ‘race’ is thought about?

The beginnings in race and crime thinking in criminal
anthropology
The criminal type
Emergence of eugenic ideas in Britain
Applied eugenics in America
Eugenics in National Socialist Germany
The legacy of biological criminology and eugenics
Criticisms of biological criminology and eugenics
Understanding the origins of race and crime in criminology and
eugenics
Further reading

A transformation in how ‘race’ is thought about?

If, as Gilroy (2000: 11) observes, we are living through a ‘profound trans-
formation’ in the way the idea of ‘race’ is understood and acted upon –
how racial differences are seen and prompt identities – then we need to
discover the historical legacy from where this transformation took place.
Precisely because a long-term historic decline in race thinking, racial hier-
archies and racial subordination has occurred, we might expect to see the
continuation of race thinking in more unexpected ways. Gilroy (2000: 22)
cites the examples of the apparently benign use of racial types in consumer
advertising to represent ‘exotic’ style, or a transgressive stance, or the
ideal of physical prowess, or even prestige, while the historic associa-
tions of race with crime ‘remain undisturbed’. Meanwhile we have already
seen how the emergence of a contemporary emphasis on cultural difference
and the ethnic assigning of culture, so that ‘ethnicity’ supersedes crude
12 Understanding race and crime

appeals to ‘race’, has undermined the credibility of the idea of race. If,
as Gilroy (2000) claims, the certainties of ‘race’ have receded in the con-
temporary period, then why, despite this apparent discrediting of the
idea, does the association of race with crime linger on in all its residual,
discriminatory and different forms? The answer may, at least in part, lie
in popular and criminological legacies of how we think about ‘criminals’
and ‘criminal populations’. These legacies assumed that social deviants
in general, and criminals in particular, were biologically and culturally
inferior to ‘normal’ populations, and that their inferiority was visible in
their physical appearance. Arguably, although perhaps less explicitly than
in the past, comportment, body shape, dress and physical looks continue to
have popular salience in stigmatising groups, especially the poor and the
criminal ‘underclass’, often in racialised ways (Economist 2006).
This chapter retraces and recaptures the sort of race thinking found in
the linked intellectual traditions of scientific racism, criminal anthropol-
ogy, biological criminology and eugenics. These ideas reached the zenith of
their popularity from 1900 to 1930, were implemented through ‘welfare’,
population and penal policies in a number of countries, most radically in
National Socialist Germany between 1933 and 1945, and lingered into
the 1970s in Scandinavia. Although mostly discredited today, these ideas,
it is suggested, continue to insinuate themselves into popular and occa-
sionally academic thinking about crime and criminality. For example,
such ideas saw a popular resurgence in the 1990s, particularly in America
(see Herrnstein and Murray 1994), which is a stark reminder of the con-
tinued popularity of biological thinking about human behaviour displaced
into concerns about criminality. Starting with criminal anthropology, the
chapter shows how the study of crime and criminality mapped race onto
criminality from its beginnings. Criminality was seen as inherited and
immutable and the ‘born’ criminal was an inferior biological type to ‘nor-
mal’ populations. The emergence of eugenics as a biosocial population
policy insinuated itself into crime and penal policy as well as targeting
social deviants, the ‘unfit’ and the mentally ill.

The beginnings of race and crime thinking in criminal anthropology

The early ‘scientific’ study of crime is exemplified in the writings of one

of criminology’s founders, Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). Building on
concepts widely held by nineteenth-century scientists, Lombroso’s was the
first seemingly coherent criminological theory based on empirical data and
was subsequently highly influential, particularly on American criminology
and the American eugenics movement (Rafter 1997; Gibson 2002; Black
2003; Becker and Wetzell 2006). In Criminal Man (first published in 1876)
and Criminal Woman (1893), Lombroso argued that races could be hier-
archically ranked and that inferior races are marked by their asymmetrical
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 13

physical features and inferior intellect, but Lombroso’s innovation was to

equate white criminals with non-white races (see Lombroso 2004, 2006).
On this account criminals were primitive throwbacks on the evolutionary
scale and European criminals exhibited physical and psychological features
that he believed were anomalies for the white race but normal for lower, less
civilised races. He was the first criminologist to extend physical measure-
ment to the criminal’s entire body to distinguish normality from deviancy
in the belief that external physical features – of skull, nose and ear shape,
among a litany of physical ‘anomalies’ and ‘stigmata’ – reflected internal
moral states and moral worth (Lombroso and Ferrero 2004). According to
Lombroso, criminals were destined to crime by bad biological heredity.
This theory of the born criminal attempted to demonstrate that criminals
inherited physical imperfections and abnormalities – the ‘stigmata of
degeneration’ that both signify and prove their primitive natures. Drawing
on popular conceptions that character could be read from facial (and racial)
features, these conceptions were rendered scientifically respectable, and
laid the foundations for the idea that individuals and populations are crim-
inal in their looks, including their ‘racial’ looks. Here ‘race’ and criminality
are confused in the notion of criminals as ‘a race apart’.

The criminal type

Although the physical study of the criminal, popular among early twentieth-
century criminologists, sought psychological, cultural and social, as well as
physical criteria to distinguish normality from deviancy, the non-criminal
from the criminal, this effort was analogous to attempts by scientific racism
to distinguish ‘races’ because the ‘criminal type’ was determined by heredi-
tary and physiological circumstances. Organic or physical abnormalities
were complemented by social abnormalities. An early nineteenth-century
statistician of crime patterns, Quetelet, juxtaposed the ‘typical criminal’
(young, male, poor, and with little education) and the ‘average man’ (law-
abiding, with rational and temperate habits, more regulated passions,
having foresight, in good physical and psychological health, standing for
the mainstream of civilisation, and representing the type of the nation in
which he was found) (Morrison 1995). This accruing of moral statistics
about the poor, the deviant and the dubious, their moral classification, was
to go hand in hand with new forms of governance and control of these
populations (Corrigan and Sayer 1985).
The British eugenicist Francis Galton (1822–1911) developed these
ideas by arguing that hereditary qualities such as ‘intelligence’ could be
specified across the whole population and followed the law of normal
distribution, represented graphically by a bell-shaped curve, so that the
majority of the population clustered around the ‘average’ or ‘norm’ for
any particular quality or characteristic and the two tails, containing fewer
14 Understanding race and crime

individuals, represented the extremes (deviations from the norm). In this

schema the lower classes, criminals, paupers and the unemployed held a
social position that by and large reflected their natural attributes (in this
case low intelligence).

Emergence of eugenic ideas in Britain

Galton defined eugenics as ‘the science of improving stock’. Eugenics posed

the problem of racial decline, which it saw as due to different rates of repro-
duction achieved by different sectors of the population, specifically con-
trasting the abundant fertility of the ‘unfit’ (criminals, alcoholics, imbeciles,
etc.) with a lower birth rate of the better classes. In wanting to improve the
physical and mental ‘racial qualities’ of future generations, eugenicists
argued for a policy of intervention in the process of population reproduc-
tion – forced sterilisation – which in effect targeted and aimed at reducing
the fertility of the lower classes, the physically and mentally ‘unfit’, the
criminal, the degenerate and a whole panoply of individuals and popula-
tions considered socially undesirable (Garland 1985). Criminological theo-
ries linked a rag-bag amalgam of categories of the ‘unfit’ and ‘defective’
through chains of inference and reasoning by analogy, arguing that all
could be commonly treated in ways that criminality could be treated. These
‘included mental, moral and physical defectives . . . the criminal, the pau-
per, the idiot and the imbecile, the lunatic, the drunkard, the deformed and
the diseased . . . [all of whom] are prolific and transmit their fatal taints’
(Chapple 1904, cited in Garland 1985: 147–8). Or again, Rentoul (1903:
17–18, cited in Garland 1985: 148) proposed sterilising those suffering
from ‘leprosy, cancer, epilepsy, idiots, imbeciles, cretins, weak-minded
under restraint, lunatics . . . prostitutes . . . mental degenerates . . . the sex-
ual degenerate . . . confirmed tramps and vagrants, characters well known
to workhouse officials and to the police . . . confirmed criminals’. The
essence of degeneracy was almost always known by its outward taint or
blemish – its physical manifestation. As Garland (1985) observed, crimino-
logical texts at the turn of the last century, in linking disparate themes and
categories of the ‘unfit’, most commonly drew together criminality, degen-
eracy, the nation and ‘the race’ in an open appeal to the concerns about
racial deterioration which were widespread in Edwardian Britain. Argu-
ably, the underlying agenda was political as well as racial. For many
commentators at the time, especially eugenicists, the threat and social crisis
posed by the recent enfranchisement of working-class men (and later,
women), and the problem of order which this enfranchisement was sup-
posed to address but which could trigger ‘disorder’ (demands for socialism),
were seen as a crisis of racial deterioration.
In general, commentaries at the time referred to the problem of ‘increas-
ingly disproportionate progeny’ of the ‘unfit’, who threatened to ‘swamp
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 15

our civilisation’, reduce ‘national intelligence’, national efficiency and the

survival of the Empire and its imperial race. In particular, commentators
railed against ‘degenerate families’, the abundant ‘fertility of the unfit’,
their lack of sexual inhibition and social responsibility, and the ‘racial
productivity’ of the habitual criminal. This overlapping of criminology and
eugenics in their shared view of criminality and degeneracy as an innate
essence manifested by physicalism, created overlapping target populations
– the habitual criminal, the inebriate, the feeble-minded and the defective –
and the ‘unfit’ were equated with the progeny of the criminal. For some
eugenicists, the penal system was itself a eugenic apparatus to prevent
reproduction. Finally, Garland (1985: 178) argues that both criminology
and penal policy opened up respectable ‘routes of advance for the eugenic
programme’. Despite various attempts, however, to insinuate negative
eugenics (forced sterilisation, as opposed to ‘positive eugenics’ or the
‘selection of successes for breeding’) into English legislation such as the
1914 Mental Deficiency Act and the new Poor Law, these met with little
success. Even criminological studies of ‘degenerate and criminal families’
found less favour in Britain than in the United States. Eugenics was consist-
ently opposed by Conservatives, who resisted many forms of state inter-
vention, and by Catholics on moral grounds asserting the sanctity of life,
and eugenicist programmes were rarely acceptable when presented in
explicit terms. As a consequence, forced sterilisation was never introduced
in Britain (Jones 1980; Barkan 1992; King 1999). The English campaign to
legalize sterilisation continued until 1934 before petering out, by which
time the Nazis had implemented their own eugenic sterilisation regime. In
this sense it is important to realise that the eugenics movement was more a
‘campaign’ which ebbed and flowed than a fully fledged, state-endorsed,
social and biological programme. Throughout the period of its ascend-
ancy, and even when implemented, it was surrounded by controversy and
opposition. Also, it is important to remember that not all eugenicists
believed in the existence of ‘races’ as biological groups. Some eugenicists
saw biological inheritance as an individual ‘handicap’ within families. In
this sense there are grounds for arguing that eugenics, at least in its more
benign forms, was the precursor to modern genetics (Black 2003).

Applied eugenics in America

Eugenic ideas may have originated in Britain (with Galton) but applied
eugenics began in America, and Americanised eugenics influenced the
emerging programmes in other countries, including Britain. Indeed, it was
the British eugenicist Rentoul who most explicitly fixed on the notion of
‘race suicide’ in the context of America’s supposed ‘race problem’, by argu-
ing that the ‘solution’ to America’s sacrificing of its ‘high mental qualities’
was to ‘sterilize the negro’ (cited by Black 2003: 208–9). But American
16 Understanding race and crime

eugenics had a much broader view, even though the conditions that
favoured the successful implementation of negative eugenics were prob-
ably that America was a much more racialised society than Britain at
the time (Kuhl 1994). It was in America that most eugenicist ideas first
coalesced – from the use of IQ tests to justify incarceration of the so-called
‘feeble-minded’ to the enactment of mandatory sterilization laws in at least
30 states (Bruinius 2006). Ultimately, well over 65,000 Americans were
coercively sterilised, and eventually America’s eugenic movement spread to
Germany, where it was said that ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied
biology’ (Kuhl 1994; Black 2003; Bruinius 2006). If Indiana implemented
the first sterilisation law in 1907, in the next two decades the United States
became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programmes to rid society of the
‘unfit’, and became the model for laws in Canada, Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, Finland, France and Germany. In 1933, one of the first acts of
the newly elected National Socialist Party was to enact a comprehensive
sterilisation law modelled consciously on American legislation.
This story of applied eugenics, then, is not uniquely American, but it
began there, as in Britain, with statistical warnings about the growing num-
bers of paupers and criminals said to pose a grave threat within society; in
the United States concern was expressed also about the growing numbers
of ‘unfit’ foreign immigrant races that were said to threaten civilisation
from without. In effect, the American eugenics movement created a large
‘eugenic underclass’, simply labelled ‘the unfit’, which was to be ‘cleansed’,
and of course the category ‘the unfit’ always included criminal behaviour
and most of the forcibly sterilised were ill-educated and poor. As scientists
struggled to trace and then eradicate the supposed gene pool that caused
what they referred to as ‘the three Ds’ – dependency, delinquency, and
(mental) deficiency – in America eugenics began to go out of fashion by the
late 1930s, and in England, as already mentioned, no sterilisation laws
were enacted. Finally, as knowledge emerged after 1945 about the Nazi
eugenics programme, American eugenics virtually ceased as a respectable
or plausible idea. Although the idea was to resurface from time to time,
attention shifted to the long-standing concern with miscegenation – a
eugenic concern spoken of using a less explicit eugenicist language. After all,
eugenicists believed that society must take control of human reproduction
and ethnic intermingling.
The overlap between eugenics and criminology seen in Britain was
greater in America, and lasted longer. Eugenic ideas spawned crimino-
logical research into ‘criminal insanity’ and ‘genetic criminality’, perhaps
best exemplified by studies of the descendants of supposedly criminal
families. Early examples of these studies were ‘The tribe of Ishmael: a study
in social degeneration’ (McCulloch 1988, cited in Black 2003), The Jukes
(Dugdale 1910) and The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of
Feeblemindedness (Goddard 1927), all claiming to have discovered family
lineages of congenitally nomadic criminals, vagabonds, prostitutes and
paupers (Vold et al. 2002; Hopkins Burke 2005). These studies purported
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 17

to show that criminality was passed down through inherited genes, ‘prov-
ing’ that criminal families tended to produce criminal children, and that
criminals were born, not made. In Britain, Goring’s famous study of
male prisoners in London arrived at similar conclusions using a different
method (Goring 1913, cited by Muncie 2004: 87). Other studies were to
follow from the 1930s to the 1950s. Although less explicitly racist and
conceding some intergenerational environmental influences on continued
criminality within families, these studies were still concerned to identify
and isolate the key physiological and hereditary characteristics of known
criminals (see Muncie 2004; Vold et al. 2002). More recent studies in this
tradition are assessed towards the end of this chapter.

Eugenics in National Socialist Germany

The scale, viciousness and virulence of the National Socialist state’s eugen-
ics programme implemented from 1933 to 1945 was incomparably worse
than that of any other country and is still popularly much less known
about than the Nazi extermination of the Jews. But as writers such as
Burleigh (1994) and Friedlander (1995) have shown, Nazi Germany’s
eugenics and ‘euthanasia’ programmes laid the foundations of rationale,
method, experience and practice for the subsequent Nazi genocide of the
Jews and other ‘racial enemies’.
According to Burleigh (2000), the Nazi state sterilised about 400,000
people in a decade, and deliberately murdered about 200,000 people in the
wartime ‘euthanasia’ programme. By the time the Third Reich was over,
the total number compulsorily sterilised had reached over 360,000, almost
all of them before the outbreak of war in September 1939 (Evans 2005:
508). One of the first things the National Socialist government did on
winning power was introduce the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Progeny [Offspring], by prescribed compulsory sterilisation,
in July 1933. The Law against Compulsive Criminality was passed in
November 1933, enabling preventive detention without trial and castra-
tion for habitual criminals. Again, eugenics was seen to overlap with crim-
inology and penal policy in Nazi thinking about their target populations.
Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick announced that the new regime was going
to concentrate public spending on ‘racially sound and healthy people’,
and reduce expenditure on ‘inferior and asocial individuals, the sick, the
mentally deficient, the insane, cripples and criminals’ (cited in Evans 2005:
507). In 1934 alone, the first year of operation of the Diseased Progeny
Law, the new Hereditary Health Courts, consisting of a judge, a public
health doctor and another medical ‘expert’, acting on referrals from public
health officers, care institutions and social workers, received over 84,500
applications for sterilisation (Evans 2005: 508). Under the sterilisation law,
patients in institutions constituted 30–40 per cent of those sterilised, and
18 Understanding race and crime

the ‘feeble-minded’ (of supposedly very low IQ) in the wider community
made up 60 per cent of those sterilised. Other categories beyond the asy-
lums, ranging from those deemed to have hereditary illnesses to the asocial
and criminals, were hunted down by official criminal and health records,
medical officials, social workers and the police. The reasons given for steril-
isation were frequently concerned more with social deviance than with any
demonstrably hereditary condition. Proctor (1988: 205) noted the role of
medical experts and the implications of the eugenics programme:
By the late 1930s, German medical science had constructed an elabor-
ate world view equating mental infirmity, moral depravity, criminal-
ity, and racial impurity. This complex of identifications was then used
to justify the destruction of the Jews on medical, moral, crimino-
logical, and anthropological grounds. To be Jewish was to be both
sick and criminal; Nazi medical science and policy united to help
‘solve’ this problem.
Indeed, the battle against the unfit and deviant began to reach its nadir
in ‘medicalised mass murder’, begun in 1939. The overall trend was
‘to remove entire groups of people, from the protection normally afforded
by the rule of law, with the asylums following the concentration camps into
an extra-legal limbo’ (Burleigh 2000: 398). An operation, known by its
codename ‘Action T4’, to decimate the adult asylum population began
at the same time as the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme. Up to 6000
children were killed and, having reached their projected target of 70,000
adult victims, the T4 perpetrators were told by Hitler to halt the mass
gassing of mental patients and to change the killing method to more con-
cealed, discrete approaches – starvation and lethal medication – as there
was ‘popular disquiet’ (Burleigh 2000: 402).
This fateful step from forced sterilisation to so-called ‘euthanasia’ was
presaged from the beginning of National Socialist rule in 1933 when
virtually all Nazi commentators drew a distinction between preventing the
future creation of ‘life unworthy of living’ through sterilisation and the
deliberate destruction of existing lives through ‘euthanasia’. The latter
was simply too controversial to be attempted in peacetime and, like the
genocide, was later conducted in secret under the cover of war. These so-
called ‘mercy killings’ never enjoyed legal sanction and constituted mass
murder even in terms of the laws of the Third Reich. These murderous
ideas, however, were not restricted to the coming of the Third Reich in
Germany as earlier soundings had been aired about reducing welfare costs
in the care of ‘cripples and idiots’. Eugenic or racial hygiene policy under
the Nazis (in its guise of ‘euthanasia’) was predicated on the idea – dis-
cussed long before the Nazi rise to power – of the destruction of ‘lives not
worth living’, and of ‘useless eaters’. Since the 1890s racial hygienists
(eugenicists) had been campaigning to put the ‘improvement of the race’
at the centre of social policy concerns and targeted those whom they iden-
tified as ‘weak, idle, criminal, degenerate and insane for elimination from
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 19

the chain of heredity’ (Evans 2005: 506). These and similar ideas were
internationally influential just as German racial hygienists looked to the
United States for their ideas.
As in other countries, the ideological foundations were already laid by
the 1920s, in concerns about population growth for maintaining national
strength and the links between ‘racial fitness’ and national efficiency
(Proctor 1988). In Germany, however, the eugenics movement overlapped
with the ‘Nordic supremacy’ movement, which was explicitly racist and
nationalist, and it was this right wing of the racial hygiene movement that
was ultimately incorporated into the Nazi medical apparatus (Proctor
1988). Here the nationalist and utopian roots of the movement were
wanting somehow to restore Germany to ‘racial purity’ by removing the
‘weakest’ to increase its strength, and retrieve all ethnic Germans into a
new Greater Germany, ultimately by means of an expulsionist population
policy and war (Weindling 1989; Aly 1999; Burleigh 2000; Kershaw
2000a; Evans 2003). These racist political peculiarities, however, were
complimented by the central place of biology in Nazi ideology, arguing
that the genetics or ‘acquired characteristics’ of particular individuals,
races and race mixtures were inherited and immutable. Hereditary or ‘race’
was transmitted from generation to generation uninfluenced by the
environment or socialisation. Although this claimed primacy of race and
biology over class, culture and economy remained contentious throughout
the period of Nazi rule, German biomedical scientists, academics and doc-
tors largely supported racial hygienic ideas and policies.
The role of criminology and penal policy in Nazi eugenics programmes
and policies can be seen in a number of ways. First, despite the rhetoric or
rationalisation provided by terms like ‘applied biology’, in reality, much
forced sterilisation was targeted at social groups, and not, as the Nazis
claimed, ‘biological’ categories having supposed serious hereditary illness.
Sterilisation appeared principally as a punishment or a measure of social
control of members of ‘the underclass, beggars, prostitutes, vagrants,
people who did not want to work, graduates of orphanages and reform
schools, the slum and the street’ (Evans 2005: 510) as well as ‘habitual
criminals’. Of course, sterilisation did nothing to correct the behaviour
of existing ‘anti-social’ families, and there were many local and regional
‘initiatives’ against the ‘anti-social’ as a group. Debates were had over
who were to be included in the list of those to be sterilised, on grounds
that it was difficult to separate hereditarily determined criminality from
ordinary environmentally conditioned deviance. In the event it was some-
what academic because ‘habitual criminals’ were now under the new rules:
they were to be incarcerated for life and therefore could not reproduce.
By 1938, Himmler’s police apparatus launched a series of massive nation-
wide raids against the ‘anti-social’, resulting in the ‘preventative arrest
and detention’ (without legal process) in concentration camps (previously
reserved for political opponents and career criminals) of 10,000 individuals,
again eliding the ‘anti-social’ with the ‘criminal’.
20 Understanding race and crime

Second, the public had to be persuaded through eugenicist propaganda

which contrasted the deviant offspring of alcoholics and prostitutes with
the norms expected of ‘decent national comrades’ (Johnson 1999;
Gellately 2001). And what better way of persuading the public of the
rightness of Nazi welfare and penal policy than to criminalise ‘race’ and
racialise ‘crime’? Films persistently elided the sick with the criminal; in the
latter case sex offenders, murderers and racial caricatures of ‘Jews’ invari-
ably featured heavily. Indeed, criminal biology was to forge a link in the
medical solution to ‘the Jewish question’ (Proctor 1988: 202–5).
Third, legislators and administrators, influenced by criminal biology,
began to assign so-called Gypsies (Romany, Sinti, Lalleri) to the criminal
classes. Increasingly subject to police harassment and the increasingly close
set of regulations governing them, the majority of Gypsies had criminal
records ‘which simply confirmed law enforcement agencies in their view
that they were hereditarily disposed to criminality’ (Lewy 2000; Evans
2005: 525). If there was a certain ambiguity in Nazi circles before 1938
about the racial and criminal providence of ‘Gypsies’ there was none about
African-Germans – the so-called ‘Rhineland bastards’, and the children
were sterilised in 1937, almost certainly on the basis of Hitler’s authority
alone. Next on the list of ‘racial minorities’ were homosexual men, 50,000
of whom were arrested, two-thirds of whom were convicted and sent to
prison (although homosexuality was criminalised in many other countries
as well).
Fourth, one of the leading research efforts of Germany’s racial hygiene
institutes was twin studies (for example, studies of identical twins raised
apart) and the heritability of criminality (Wetzell 2000). Criminal biology
was given a new urgency under the Nazis to discover early signs in the
detection of criminal behaviour before the actual onset of the criminal
career (although Lombroso was rarely cited by Nazi criminal biologists,
probably because of his Jewish ancestry). Concerns on the part of criminal
biologists were close in many ways to those of racial hygienists because
the former argued that crime is both genetically determined and racially
specific, and criminals were said to be reproducing at a faster rate than the
non-criminal population. This was reflected in an accelerated interest in
criminal biology throughout the Nazi period, which contributed to the
belief that Jews were racially disposed to commit certain forms of crime.
Nazi medical authorities followed this lead and conspired in the ‘solution
of the Jewish question’ by arguing that if Jews were racially disposed
to commit crime, they were so disposed to suffer from a host of other
‘diseases’. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, however, the Jews in par-
ticular came to occupy a special place in Nazi ideology, not as merely social
ballast to be removed by imprisonment, or by removal from the chain
of heredity, but as racial enemies. The regime was about to enter an
altogether different phase of its racial policies. The discussion of this phase
begins in Chapter 10.
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 21

The legacy of biological criminology and eugenics

In critically assessing the legacy described above, care is needed not to fall
into the trap of condemning all subsequent and continuing biological crim-
inology tradition after 1945 simply through ‘guilt by association’ with
racism and Nazism. For example, twin and adoption studies continue,
aimed at isolating ‘a genetic factor’ in criminality, but they must be judged
on a scientific basis in their own terms. Just because twin studies were a
major research interest under Nazi scientific racism, this does not mean
that post-war and recent studies are implicated in or motivated by racism.
For example, one of the best recent studies (Mednick et al. 1987, cited in
Muncie 2004) concluded that certain factors are transmitted by convicted
parents to increase the likelihood that their children – even after adoption –
will be convicted for criminal offences. Exactly what is inherited remains
unknown. There is not the space here to examine the detailed problems of
such studies, but they are not ones of racism, and with these and other sorts
of biological criminology studies mostly lay elsewhere (see Muncie 2004).
Instead I will focus on traditions and studies that might be considered to
belong to a racist criminological framework – surprisingly so, given the
legacy described above. It is also noted here that although we live in
more subtle times, the tendency to believe that outward appearance reveals
inner characteristics continues in many forms of popular culture, and can
become racialised (Dyer 1997).
Whatever the efficacy of studies that purport to show the extent to which
biological differences explain differences in human behaviour, and particu-
larly in criminal behaviour (from theories which suggest that criminals are
imbalanced in their diet, chromosomes, neurotransmitters, hormones or
nervous system to those which emphasise inherited general intelligence) –
and this author for one is extremely sceptical – importantly these studies
are about individual level differences. Very few studies claim that bio-
logical inheritance and/or biochemical effects that might determine, influ-
ence or predict human behaviour are the property of social or racial
groups. In some cases though, biocriminology, even in overtly racist forms,
continues today, where the ‘born criminal’ is often code for the defiant,
the poor, and the black. For example, the best-selling social science book
of the 1990s, Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) The Bell Curve, claimed
that American blacks and Latinos inherit low intelligence, that intelligence
differs by racial group, and that low intelligence predicts criminality.
Meanwhile, criminal anthropological work continues in Canada and the
United States, notably in Rushton’s (1997) study Race, Evolution, and
Behavior. Again, these claims are unusual in that studies of a correlation
between low IQ and delinquency unusually refer to differences in ‘intelli-
gence’ between individuals within groups, not between groups. This is
particularly puzzling when in a different context Wilson and Herrnstein
(1985) in their book Crime and Human Nature, for example, argued that
22 Understanding race and crime

biology should be considered as one element within explanations that

should otherwise rely on many factors. Some people carry with them
the potential to be violent or anti-social and that environmental condi-
tions can sometimes trigger anti-social responses. Sociobiologists view
biology, environment and learning as mutually interacting and dependent
factors. Overall, most studies that evoke biological factors that may gener-
ate a predisposition towards making criminal decisions, argue that this
occurs only when they interact with certain other psychological, social or
environmental factors.
Herrnstein and Murray (1994), however, argued that differences in
average intelligence are found between racial and class groups and that
IQ predicts criminality between these race and class groups. This gives
rise to the intergenerational transmission of a ‘culture of poverty’ based
on the inheritance of innate ability which is different between blacks and
other groups. Conceding some environmental influences on poor blacks,
and some convergence between a new black middle class and whites in
terms of their cognitive abilities, poverty and its associated problems,
including crime, are explained primarily in terms of the lower cognitive
ability of the poor compared to other groups. In particular, inherited
intelligence is on average lower among blacks than whites and other
ethnic groups, with clear implications for different rates of criminality
between blacks and whites. These views about innate racial or ethnic
differences are clearly aimed at the African-American underclass. The
authors go on to argue that high-IQ people are shrinking as a proportion
of the population as low-IQ people have more children and have them at
younger ages. The result is that American society is both ‘dumbing down’
and becoming polarised into two very different groups. In conceding that
environmental factors may influence behaviour, they go on to recommend
some policy prescriptions such as reconstituting the traditional family, an
end to ‘state-subsidised’ births that inadvertently encourage inappropriate
births, especially among poor women, and the adoption of children out
of a bad environment into a good one at birth to raise IQ (Herrnstein and
Murray 1994: 410–13, 415–16). These claims are assessed in the next
section.

Criticisms of biological criminology and eugenics

Biological criminology began as an attempt to morally judge and classify

different populations as ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ based on popular concep-
tions that criminals not only act differently but also look different from
the ‘normal population’. Biological and anthropological criminology’s
theoretical and methodological errors are legion (see Gould 1996). First,
whether physique, appearance or intelligence is being measured, these
studies find statistical associations (correlations) of factors, not that any
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 23

one factor causes another. Second, measures around the average hide
wide variation within and overlap across populations, and may not be
true of individuals. Therefore, it is arbitrary to use these average values
to distinguish between populations. This is the basis of Herrnstein and
Murray’s (1994) fallacy in asserting that average differences in IQ between
American whites and blacks are largely inherited. Human populations are
highly variable for all behaviours. Third, biologically inheritability is an
individual phenomenon, not a group one. In any case, why should the
violent behaviour of some desperate and discouraged individuals point to a
specific disorder of their biology, brain or inheritance? Fourth, body type is
influenced by social factors, including the adequacy and type of nutrition,
extent of manual labour and social class position. Fifth, to posit the hered-
itability of criminality is to forget that such a specific behaviour as crimin-
ality cannot be genetically transmitted because it is a legally and socially
defined construct. Sixth, we do not inherit behaviour, height or intelligence
as such, as fixed capacities at birth; rather, we do inherit a capacity for
interaction with particular environments, so that any biochemical pre-
paredness for some behaviour may or may not be triggered. In any case, it
is practically impossible to control for environmental and social influences
and thus to be able to measure precisely the exact influence of a genetic
effect. We certainly do not know when and how external environmental
effects on the body trigger genes. Finally, studies that compare criminals
and non-criminals are misleading because the former are only represen-
tative of a highly selected subset of those apprehended, charged and
convicted. Biology has virtually nothing to tell us, so far, other than in very
minor ways, about human consciousness or what it is to be human, never
mind criminal!
Much of Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) argument rests on a belief
that IQ actually measures intelligence using a single measure or number
rather than what is culturally and linguistically learnt; that intelligence can
be hierarchically ranked; and that it is genetically based and effectively
immutable. These general claims and premises in effect reward learnt
knowledge about the language and mores of the dominant culture and
penalise subordinate cultures for their lack of experience or knowledge of
the dominant culture. Moreover, there is plentiful evidence that these
premises do not hold. For example, Thurston’s (1947) discovery of mul-
tiple intelligences concluded that we are better at some things than others.
Similarly, Gardner (1993: 4–8) argued that the ways in which different
competencies and abilities are judged are highly culturally variable, and
that there exist several relatively autonomous and irreducible human intel-
lectual competences. The crucial fallacy, however, as already mentioned,
consists in assuming that if heredity explains variation among individ-
uals within a group (white Americans), it must also explain variation in
average IQ between groups (whites and blacks). But group and individual
differences are entirely separate phenomena. One result offers no basis to
speculate about the other. Even if IQ were highly inheritable within groups,
24 Understanding race and crime

the average difference between whites and blacks in America might still
only record the environmental disadvantage of blacks (see Fischer et al.
1996; Devlin et al. 1997).

Understanding the origins of race and crime in criminology and eugenics

Much of the discussion in this chapter points to the question whether the
modern discipline of criminology is ‘still in the grip of positivist vision’
(Morrison 2006: 48). Starting in the nineteenth century, criminology
became engrossed in two complimentary and convergent traditions – the
statistical analysis of populations brought to bear upon crime and criminal
justice, and the emergence of a positivist, specialist ‘science of the criminal’.
Garland (2002: 16) has argued that criminology was structured around
these two basic projects – ‘the governmental and Lombrosian’, the former
an ‘administrative task’, the latter a ‘theoretical project’ – and that they
were mutually supportive. Concerns with the ‘social question’ and the
‘problem’ of the poor (fears of disorder) merged with the ‘racial question’
and the ‘problem’ of racial decline through fears about the fecundity and
progeny of the poor and the criminal. Complimenting these concerns was
(Garland 2002: 21):
Another line of inquiry which flourished in this period, and whose
advocates would later be seen as progenitors of criminology, centred
not upon the population and its governance by a well-ordered state,
but instead upon individuals and their ability (or lack of ability) to
govern themselves.
All these elements congealed into the very stuff of criminology’s concerns,
and ‘the underlying theme animating all of these studies was a concern
with governance and the use of empirical data and scientific methods to
improve government’s grip on the population’ (Garland 2002: 24). The
idea of a specialist, independent, distinctive criminological science emerged
centred on the figure of the ‘criminal type’. Eventually, this pseudo-scientific
movement applied its ideas by targeting certain individuals and groups –
racially defined – for the prevention, treatment and elimination of the
‘unfit’ and criminal. At odds with the classicist ‘egalitarian’ legal principles
which had previously underpinned criminal justice processes, the con-
ception of the hereditary criminal type chimed with deep-rooted cultural
and racist prejudices of the time and offered scientific respectability to
middle-class perceptions of the ‘criminal classes’ (Garland 2002: 27).
Criminology’s origin and legacy in race thinking and its influence on race
policy should remind us that knowledge about criminality and the ongoing
attempts today to identify and differentiate criminals from non-criminals
should carry with them a warning from history about the dangers of binary
thinking – ‘us’ and ‘them’.
 Origins: criminology, eugenics and ‘the criminal type’ 25

Further reading

The historical development and influence of criminology have often been greatest
when it reflected and reinforced popular prejudice and government interests.
Garland (2002) has demonstrated this for Britain, and Becker and Wetzell’s (2006)
collection does it from an international perspective. The role that biological crim-
inology played – with all its implicit and explicit racism – can be discerned from
Gibson’s (2002) work on Lombroso and Black’s (2003) work on the history of
American eugenics.
chapter three

Context: race, place and fear of crime

Conceptualising fear of crime: the racialisation of fear

Fear of crime: prevalence
Youngstown, Ohio: American deindustrialisation, race and class
Detroit, Chicago and Harlem: segregation, inequality and the
meaning of ‘whiteness’
Camden, North London: narratives of crime and decline
Competition over local resources: the availability of affordable
housing and ethnic enmity
Bow and Battersea: why are some places more racist than others?
Neighbourhood feelings vary by age
South London: cultural syncretism?
Understanding race, place and fear of crime
Further reading

Although race relations situations may have as their ultimate cause rapid
global social change, they are manifested locally at a smaller rather than
at a larger scale. Accordingly, racial situations first have to be described
and understood at the neighbourhood level. Different neighbourhoods are
differently placed to cope with urban social, demographic and economic
change. A locality’s capacity (or lack of capacity) to adapt to change may be
seen in fears and anxieties directed towards those who may be most imme-
diately linked (however fallaciously) with change. As this and subsequent
chapters show, not only can criminogenic factors coalesce, concentrate and
become entrenched in certain neighbourhoods, so also can fear of crime.
This chapter links fear of urban crime to particular changing neighbour-
hood economies and broader urban labour, housing and other markets
(McGahey 1986) so as ‘to integrate the study of individual differences and
life histories with the study of the effects of communities and broader
social context’ (Smith and McVie 2003: 171). The essential argument,
 Context: race, place and fear of crime 27

though, of this chapter is that ‘race’ and ‘racial situations’ can become
repositories for ‘fear of crime’.

Conceptualising fear of crime: the racialisation of fear

The concept of ‘fear of crime’ has a wider reach than responses to ques-
tions about crime and victimisation and their measurement in crime sur-
veys. As Goodey (2005: 66) argues, such responses may more accurately
display more general and amorphous feelings of ‘vulnerability’, ‘insecur-
ity’, ‘concern’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘anger’. In race relations or ‘racial situations’
these anxieties – although often ‘coded’ as ‘fear of crime’ – may take on
wider meanings in which fear of crime emerges as an aspect of wider
fears of social change. Using qualitative case studies, this chapter explores
the ways in which real or imagined forces of change are associated with
the co-presence or proximity of different ethnic groups and how this influ-
ences perceptions and fears about race and crime. Chapter 9 pursues this
theme by focusing on the alleged existence of an isolated and feared
African-American ‘underclass’.
The presence or proximity of black and minority ethnic people can exac-
erbate white fear of crime and lead to the belief among whites that they
face a higher risk of becoming a victim of crime and that the perpetrator is
likely to be of a different ethnicity. In Britain, Australia and the United
States perceived high levels of urban crime are often believed to be syn-
onymous with the presence of minorities (Webster 1997, 2003; Collins
et al. 2000; Bowling and Phillips 2002; Poynting et al. 2004; Walker et al.
2004). These fears are based on a mixture of mythical and real beliefs
about who is a ‘typical’ offender or victim, while ignoring the broader
picture (Goodey 2005). Fears can be projected onto groups, as people
come to believe that crime is mostly inter-racial, even though most people
are more likely to be criminally victimised by younger members of their
own ethnic group, and young people generally are more likely to be victim-
ised because of where they live or where they go (Bowling and Phillips
2002; Phillips and Bowling 2002; Walker et al. 2004, 2006; Bureau of
Justice Statistics 2005; Nicholas et al. 2005).

Fear of crime: prevalence

Both the British Crime Survey (BCS) and the National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS) in the United States show consistently high levels of fear of
crime (Walker et al. 2004, 2006; Wood 2004; Bureau of Justice Statistics
2005; Nicholas et al. 2005). Despite levels of crime and the risk of becom-
ing a victim of crime having fallen substantially since peaking in the early
28 Understanding race and crime

to mid-1990s in both the USA and the UK, comparatively high proportions
of people still believe the crime rate to have risen. Despite the BCS 2004/5
recording the lowest level of risk of becoming a victim of crime since the
BCS started in 1981, 63 per cent of people thought that crime in the country
as a whole had increased. However, worry about burglary, car crime and
violent crime has fallen by one-third since 2000. Also, people have rela-
tively more positive perceptions of crime in their own area than nationally,
with 42 per cent thinking that crime in their local area had increased. The
proportion of people perceiving high levels of anti-social behaviour – from
speeding cars, graffiti and rubbish to ‘kids hanging around in the streets’ –
in their local area, after increases over the last decade, stabilised and
recently fell significantly. Over a third said that anti-social behaviour was a
‘very big’ problem in their area. There is considerable variation between
places and between social groups in fear of crime and in the levels and
types of crime and anti-social behaviour perceived. Area characteristics are
the strongest predictors of perceiving high levels of crime and anti-social
behaviour. Those living in poor areas were four times more likely to
perceive high levels than those in wealthy areas (Wood 2004; Nicholas
et al. 2005; Walker et al. 2006). Pantazis (2006) has shown that crime
risks, psychological criminal harm, insecurity, and perceptions of ‘dis-
order’ are much greater in poorer and socially excluded places than in
affluent places.
The following contrasting studies draw out different themes associated
with fear of crime in local racial situations. As can be seen, patterns diverge
and converge across different localities, although the predominant themes
that emerge are identified at the end.

Youngstown, Ohio: American deindustrialisation, class and race

Youngstown, Ohio, has been widely seen as a place of lost industry –

the epitome of a deindustrialised town – or, more recently, of corruption
and criminality. Deindustrialisation emerges as a key motor of change
and decline influencing urban areas in several of the case studies reviewed
here and elsewhere that heightens racial and class inequalities (Johnston
et al. 2000; Webster et al. 2004; MacDonald and Marsh 2005). For
example, Linkon and Russo’s (2002) study of Youngstown strongly impli-
cates loss of work with class and ethnic conflict, anxiety and segregation,
and the emergence of a ‘new underclass’. Rapid social and economic
change became popularly represented by the media through the lens of
fear of crime so that, over the period studied, Youngstown’s epithet ‘Steel-
town U.S.A.’ changed to ‘Crime Town U.S.A.’, and finally ‘Murdertown’.
In Youngstown, as elsewhere, the largely African-American South Side
was worse affected by deindustrialisation and was least able to adapt to
change.
 Context: race, place and fear of crime 29

The first arrival and rapid growth of African-American immigration

from the Southern states between 1900 and 1930 saw the rise of local
racism and the Ku Klux Klan. Through chain migration newcomers
boarded with other recent migrants, creating separate, segregated neigh-
bourhoods, reinforced by the assignment of steel company workers’ hous-
ing, while workplace segregation was reinforced through the practice of
hiring by personal connections – newcomers followed earlier migrants of
their own ethnic group into similar levels and types of jobs. Thus while
white workers dominated the skilled jobs, nearly all African-American
workers were found in the unskilled, dirty and dangerous jobs in the coke
plants and blast furnaces. This mirroring of residential and workplace
segregation is found in many multiethnic manufacturing places in the
United States and Britain (Fevre 1984; Kalra 2000). In-migration reached
its peak in the early 1930s just as the Depression hit the steel industry, with
Youngstown the hardest hit of America’s industrial cities (with Denver),
with unemployment at 23 per cent.
An upturn in fortunes during the Second World War led to very signifi-
cant improvements in pay and conditions among steel workers during the
1950s as a result of strike action. But these post-war gains affected workers
differently. While whites were able to move to the suburbs – helped by
racially discriminatory home loans and higher wages – African-Americans,
meanwhile, could only buy homes in the city. As whites moved out of the
city, more African-Americans moved in, helped by new public housing
developments. Escalation of this trend in the 1960s towards racially based
suburbanisation (encouraged by changes in transportation patterns) saw a
continuation of racially based hiring practices and workplace segregation,
enforced by labour and company agreements, and an ‘underlying solidarity
around whiteness’ (Linkon and Russo 2002: 42). White flight to the sub-
urbs broke down more ethnically mixed working-class neighbourhoods,
and lending and real estate practices prevented black home buyers from
moving to the suburbs. Work, leisure and residential places became more
ethnically divided, and the suburbs became more class divided, while at
the same time residents and businesses moved away from the city centre,
causing the downtown area to decline. Already we can observe the emerg-
ing classic twentieth-century American urban pattern of race relations
which links ethnically based changed fortunes, residential and workplace
segregation, white flight and suburbanisation.
As Youngstown stagnated economically in the 1950s, local organised
crime and political corruption flourished. From 1974, as whites sought
other employment in the emerging automobile industry and warehousing,
new legislation and white flight from steel jobs improved wages and condi-
tions for non-white workers. Nevertheless, because African-Americans
were less likely to have savings or significant home equity, and were
more dependent on the steel industry, they were disproportionately vul-
nerable when the mills closed. From 1977 a series of steel works were again
closed and unemployment reached 25 per cent in 1983, hastening the
30 Understanding race and crime

abandonment of the city core, and workers either sought other kinds of
work that often paid less or left the area. Many lost their homes, property
values fell ‘precipitously’, and houses and city blocks were left empty.
Most of the abandoned property was in the city, in neighbourhoods
that had been populated mostly by African-Americans. Linkon and Russo
(2002) argue that the longer-term consequence of this vulnerability was
an intensification of racial divisions in the Youngstown area, which by the
1990s was among the most segregated communities in the country. Between
1980 and 2000, Youngstown often had the highest per capita murder
rate in the country, and white crime fears largely focused on drug-related
crime largely in black neighbourhoods. However, organised crime and an
extensive pattern of bribery and corruption among the city’s political lead-
ers were more significant. African-American perceptions of the crime prob-
lem attributed the disproportionate impact of the mill closures on black
families and the lack of economic opportunity for urban youth as the
main causes. These perceptions further split the city and its suburbs and
neighbourhoods within the city along lines of class and race.
The study found that class and race conflicts rooted in the steel industry
were linked to the city’s high crime rate, and from early on local organised
crime had protected the interests of immigrants against white racism.
Linkon and Russo (2002: 244) concluded their study by suggesting that
a severe loss of population, a rising minority population, increasing con-
centrations of poor black residents and rising poverty rates in the city can
be largely attributed to discriminatory housing authority policies, white
flight and the fact that most of the economic growth in the Youngstown
metropolitan area was located outside of the city. The effects of economic
and racial segregation in the Youngstown area were the development of ‘a
system of geographic, economic, and cultural apartheid’.

Detroit, Chicago and Harlem: segregation, inequality and the

meaning of ‘whiteness’

Similar patterns to the above are found in Sugrue’s (2005) important case
study of deindustrialisation processes in post-war Detroit. As the study
notes: ‘Despite more than half a century of civil rights activism and chang-
ing racial attitudes, American cities . . . remain deeply divided by race’
(2005: xvii). The transformation and decline of Detroit was the result of a
combination of three forces that occurred simultaneously. First was the
flight of relatively well-paid, secure and unionised jobs. Second was the
persistence of workplace discrimination, especially in the private sector,
despite legal and civil rights gains. Third was intractable racial segregation
in housing, leaving some places behind while others thrived. Sugrue (2005:
xviii) argues that segregation led to the uneven distribution of power and
resources in metropolitan areas:
 Context: race, place and fear of crime 31

the story of metropolitan areas, like Detroit, is a history of the ways

that whites, through the combined advantages of race and residence,
were able to hoard political and economic resources – jobs, public
services, education, and other goods – to their own advantage at the
expense of the urban poor.

Sugrue (2005: xviii–xix) goes on to argue that American public policies

have encouraged segregation and that policies continue to be blinded as
to the causes of the marginalisation of African-Americans in modern
American life.

The transformation of Detroit was not the ‘natural’ inevitable conse-

quence of market forces at work . . . Still widespread is the assumption
that blacks and whites live apart solely because of personal choice . . .
Deeply rooted is the belief that unemployment and poverty are the
fault of poor people and their deviant attitudes and behaviors, not the
consequence of macroeconomic changes that have gutted urban labour
markets . . . The fate of Detroit and other cities like it . . . was not
primarily the result of the supposedly pathological behaviors of the
poor, the lack of a work ethic among African Americans, or the break-
down of the ‘traditional’ nuclear family in inner cities. Those argu-
ments . . . continue to appeal to those who believe that the causes and
solutions of social problems start and end with poor people themselves.

In this and other contexts the ‘flip side’ of deindustrialisation – capital

flight and the introduction of labour-saving technologies – was the pro-
cess of suburbanisation – the movement of whites from central cities to
suburbs – which left in its wake areas devastated and emptied of hope or
opportunity.
In contrast to Sugrue, Hartigan’s (1999) study of three predominantly
white Detroit neighbourhoods – one outlying and two inner-city – argues
that for various reasons whites in these neighbourhoods in the metro-
politan Detroit area have resisted the pull of ‘white flight’ to the suburbs.
On this basis we are asked to think differently about race and resist the
urge to draw abstract conclusions about whiteness and blackness. Such
categories, it is argued, are too limited to capture the construction and
nuance of ethnic and racial identities and encounters. The study challenges
common assumptions that inner-city areas are uniformly disproportion-
ately populated by an African-American underclass, and that racism is
necessarily concentrated among working-class whites and particularly
within a white underclass. The study found that class backgrounds influ-
ence experience and understanding of racial identity and difference.
Although it is the case that 80 per cent of Detroit’s metropolitan area
population is black, whereas its surrounding suburbs are mostly 90 per
cent white, and that massive white flight did occur between 1950 and
1990, for whites who remained in the city, especially in the decimated
inner-city areas, the significance of race has drastically altered.
32 Understanding race and crime

Racism was influenced by class distinctions made by whites about other

whites such that whiteness itself can be racialised rather than simply being
in opposition to blackness. Poor whites, just as blacks, were racialised by
more affluent whites, and these class distinctions can be more important
than racial distinctions. For example, whites were at least as concerned
about growing poverty, the increasing presence of poor whites and rental
homes as they were about obvious and inevitable shifts in their neighbour-
hood’s racial composition. Whites also shared a range of frustrations
stemming from their precarious economic and social position rather than
racial hatred and anxiety. Similarly, although whites in inner-city neigh-
bourhoods felt that Detroit generally was a difficult and dangerous place
in which to live, and that the majority of violent crimes that whites
encountered were reported as involving black perpetrators, few whites
assumed a racial motive for the crime.
Kefalas’ (2003) comparable ethnographic study of a white working-class
neighbourhood in Chicago’s Southwest Side unpicks the construction of
white racism in a ‘white enclave’ contiguous with Chicago’s African-
American West Side ghetto. This juxtaposition of the connotations ‘enclave’
and ‘ghetto’ itself reveals an American nomenclature of class (enclave) and
race (ghetto) showing how class and race intersect. Normally, studies focus
on race – the opposition of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ – based in a histor-
ical narrative that claims that on the arrival of blacks, ‘blue-collar’ whites
violently opposed integration because they appeared to have the most to
lose. From their perspective, blacks ‘violated racial norms of conduct’,
threatened to spread poverty and crime, and undermined the sanctity and
preserve of white home ownership and white territorial claims on their
neighbourhoods. Furthermore, among working-class urban whites unable
to flee there is a terror of neighbourhood turnover (Kefalas 2003: 3–4). Just
as in Hartigan’s (1999) study above, Kefalas shows that this traditional
historical account needs to be refined to take account of class-based as well
as race-based fears.
In Kefalas’ study residents spoke of making ‘a last stand’ and of defend-
ing their neighbourhood against physical decline, poverty and crime. Resi-
dents’ fears about graffiti and crime were not merely expressions of racism;
rather, they reflected their insecurities about what they saw as holding
onto ‘respectability’ and order. In the neighbourhood studied residents
recounted how fears about crime and racial turnover had forced working-
class whites to abandon sections of the city that were once deemed afford-
able, safe, stable, working-class, and white. Although proximity to the
‘ghetto’ underpinned the racial context of working-class fear, race was not
the only source of anxiety:

Beltwayites’ racism then can be seen as a byproduct of their efforts

to fortify the cultural and moral boundaries between themselves
and more stigmatized groups. Class-bound ideologies and bound-
aries make it difficult for garden [a local, racially loaded description
 Context: race, place and fear of crime 33

of the area connoting the ‘last stand of a peaceful place’ against

the ghetto] dwellers to reconcile themselves to [the] existence of
white teenage mothers, white homeless, white drug addicts, white
gangbangers, white single mothers, and poor whites. Whites are
respectable, and respectability keeps people safe from the dangers
posed by destructive social forces. (Kefalas 2003: 155; emphasis in
original)
Although among white racists of all class backgrounds, ‘the category of
black is equivalent to the category of poor’ (Kefalas 2003: 159), few
whites, or blacks, wanted to live in close proximity to high-poverty areas,
regardless of race. It was intolerance of poor people, rather than their race,
that defined the neighbourhood.
In a different way, Jackson’s (2001) ethnographic study of African-
Americans in Harlem, New York, rejected simplistic arguments about
poverty, class, race and behaviour, arguing that approaches that posit poor
people’s ‘behavioural choices’ as primary causes of their economic plight,
or alternatively, that these behaviours are ghetto-specific responses to
poverty rather than causes, are both mistaken. Rather, he argued that
boundaries are constantly crossed and negotiated, and behaviourally iso-
lated class- and race-based, homogenised groups and places cannot be said
to exist in any meaningful way.

Camden, North London: narratives of crime and decline

Turning now to Britain, similar arguments to those presented above have

been made about the limitations of homogenising ethnic and class groups
into hermetically sealed and fixed social or cultural entities. Watt (2006)
studied social and spatial polarisation in inner-London Camden between
an impoverished white working class located in council (public) housing
estates and an affluent home-owning middle class. The study explored
place images, social identity, and the ways in which residents draw on
class- and race-based distinctions to describe their neighbourhoods, all of
which seemed rooted in narratives of urban decline associated with ‘race’
and respectability. Again, however, perceived socioeconomic status can
easily override race through people making social distinctions of ‘taste’ and
moral judgements of self-worth and the worth of others. In this case Watt
points to the ways in which council tenants often become represented as
an unruly crime-prone ‘underclass’, and council tenants draw a distinction
between ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ fellow tenants. Just as Jackson (2001)
pointed to the salience of supposed behavioural factors in stereotyping
judgements in Harlem, so Watt describes how ‘roughs’ are characterised by
violence (whether to people or property), frequent drunkenness and petty
criminality, whereas respectability was signified by sobriety, respect for the
34 Understanding race and crime

law, hard work and ‘keeping up appearances’ by the maintenance of a

clean and tidy home.
Watt’s study of Camden showed how ‘narratives of urban decline’ were
a prominent theme in the accounts of white working-class tenants who had
either been brought up in the area or had lived there for many years. But
unlike that found in some other studies, the source of decline was not
located in links between the presence of minorities and fear of crime.
Instead, Camden residents pointed to local job losses, deteriorating public
welfare services, physical decay, paucity of council housing provision, poor
youth facilities and so on as sources of this decline. Although gentrification
was welcomed by some and not others, of most concern were low-status
‘outsiders’, ‘newcomers’, ‘problem’ tenants and families. Extended social
networks – ‘knowing people’ and ‘being known’ – were crucial to a sense
of security and belonging, and compensated for, and were in tension with,
more general narratives of urban decline. Watt (2006: 788) concluded that
the main preoccupation of white working-class council tenants in Camden
was to maintain respectability: ‘The result was a permanent underlying
urban anxiety about being too close, socially and spatially, to concentrated
poverty’. Although crime was a cause for concern, only occasionally was
it associated with the presence of ethnic minorities per se rather than
the presence of ‘roughs’ and ‘problem’ tenants.

Competition over local resources: the availability of affordable housing

and ethnic enmity

An important source of ethnic enmity in multiethnic settings, especially in

places such as London’s East End, has been growing competition over
scarce local resources brought about by twin processes of deindustrialisa-
tion and housing policy since the 1970s. Much of what has happened to
council housing in Britain since the early 1980s has been a direct result of
government housing policy to encourage home ownership. Central govern-
ment controls on council house building and the sale of existing local
authority properties under right-to-buy legislation (tenants’ right to buy
their council house at heavily discounted prices), although unsurprisingly
highly popular among beneficiaries, resulted in growing shortages of afford-
able council housing. Lack of new building and the loss of social housing to
private ownership meant that, whereas previously council housing had
been dominated by white working-class families and married couples in
employment, the sector became increasingly dominated by a ‘needs-based’
allocation of ever scarcer accommodation based on criteria of ‘homeless-
ness’, disadvantage, overcrowding and family size. As a result, the profile
of the council housing population became poorer and more socially and
ethnically diverse, while at the same time worsening local employment
circumstances linked to economic restructuring and deindustrialisation
 Context: race, place and fear of crime 35

meant that the number of council renting households containing no one

in paid employment trebled from a fifth to two-thirds from 1967 to 1993
(Power and Tunstall 1995; Social Exclusion Unit 1999). Inevitably, as
public sector housing came to increasingly accommodate disadvantaged
groups, notably minority ethnic groups, female lone parents and young
people, housing became a key source of local stigmatising and racialising
discourses about race, crime and class, particularly as only slightly better-
off locals felt that they or their grown-up children were being denied access
to affordable housing.
The implications for race relations of these well-known processes are
explored in Dench et al.’s (2006) restudy of the ‘new’ East End of London.
The first study was carried out in the 1950s when the area was much less
ethnically diverse than it is today. This, then, is a case study of processes of
growing ethnic diversity in the context of growing housing and job scar-
city. Since the 1950s, and especially during the 1980s, a new Bangladeshi
community had settled which by 2001 constituted a third of the population
of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and Bangladeshi children made
up three-fifths of school enrolments. As elsewhere in Britain, Bangladeshis
are likely to be the poorest minority ethnic group. The economic situation
of most Bangladeshis in London, like their white working-class counter-
parts, means they have a low level of access to private housing. During the
1970s relations between whites and Bangladeshis were formed by struggles
taking place around housing, particularly tenancy allocation in public
housing which allowed established white tenants to secure new tenancies
for, and pass tenancies onto, family members. Partly due to housing short-
ages, this traditional practice was replaced by personal need, especially
‘homelessness’, as the overriding criterion for allocation, at the expense of
long residence in an area, length of time on a waiting list or ‘good beha-
viour’. Thus a younger Bangladeshi population living in overcrowded social
housing competed with whites and were seen as being given preferential
treatment compared to whites.
This push of social policy in an Americanised direction gave rise to
increasingly bitter local white sentiments because it opened up the East End
to settlement by outsiders and local control was lost. Although Bangladeshis
did not directly compete with whites in the local labour market – their
niche was family businesses and catering – changes in the local economy
put a premium on formal qualifications rather than traditional informal
networks in getting employment. Deindustrialisation and economic restruc-
turing in the 1970s and 1980s and the closing of the Docks left the rela-
tively formally unqualified East End white working class unprepared to
compete in the new emerging knowledge-based economy, while some
young Bangladeshis were beginning to gain qualifications. This has led
to rivalry and resentment in the different relationship of Bangladeshis
and whites to schooling. The school success of older Bangladeshi pupils
compared to other groups including whites, the growth of ethnic segrega-
tion in schools and the flight of white parents to white faith schools
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 against the sobering terrors of the race problem that
confronts America, it has succeeded in keeping out colored
aliens. It has agitated for a Henry George land tax and for
the national ownership of public services and obvious
monopolies. And with one exception this is the full catalogue
of its misdeeds." [The "one exception" is the abolition of
coolie labor.]

Charles E. Russell,
The Uprising of the Many,
chapter 24
(Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, 1907).

See, also, (in this Volume)

Labor Organization: Australia.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1905-1906.
Mr. Deakin’s precarious ministry.
Power of the Labor Party without responsibility.
Its principles and its "Fighting Platform."
Important legislation of 1905.
The Federal Capital question.
General election of 1906.

Mr. Reid, the Free Trade Premier, had taken office on an

agreement with Mr. Deakin, the Protectionist leader, that the
tariff question should not be opened during the term of the
existing Parliament. But the truce became broken early in
1905, each party attributing the breach to the other, and the
Reid Ministry, beaten on an amendment to the address replying
to the Governor-General’s speech, resigned. The
Protectionists, in provisional alliance with the Labor Party,
then came back to power, with Mr. Deakin at their head.

Of the political situation in 1905 it was said by a writer in

one of the English reviews: "The Labour Party can dictate
terms to the Ministry, and ensure that its own policy is
carried out by others. It is strongest whilst it sits on the
cross benches. During the few months it was in office it was
at the mercy of Parliament; it left most of the planks of its
platform severely alone, and it had, during that time, less
real power than it has had either before or since. It is not
likely again to take office, unless it can command an absolute
majority of its own members to give effect to its own ideas,
and, indeed, it perhaps would be better for Australia that it
had responsibility as well as power, rather than as at present
power without responsibility. However, if not at the next
general election, the party is bound ere long to get the clear
Parliamentary majority it seeks. Under these circumstances,
great importance attaches to its aims and organisation. …

"To quote from the official report of the decisions of the

last Triennial Conference of the Political Labour
organisations of the Commonwealth, which sat in Melbourne last
July, the objective of the Federal Labour party is as follows:

"(a) The cultivation of an Australian sentiment, based upon

the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in
Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community,
(b) The security of the full results of their industry to all
producers by the collective ownership of monopolies, and the
extension of the industrial and economic functions of the
State and Municipality. The Labour party seek to achieve this
objective by means of a policy that they invariably refer to
as their platform. The planks of what is called the ‘Fighting
Platform’ are as follows:

"(1) The maintenance of a white Australia.

(2) The nationalisation of monopolies.
(3) Old age pensions.
(4) A tariff referendum.
(5) A progressive tax on unimproved land values.
(6) The restriction of public borrowing.
(7) Navigation laws.
(8) A citizen defence force.
(9) Arbitration amendment."

J. W. Kirwan,
The Australian Labour Party
(Nineteenth Century, November, 1905).

A strike in one of the coal mines of New South Wales during

1905 brought the Arbitration Act of that province to an
unsatisfactory test. The dispute, concerning wages, went to
the Arbitration Court and was decided against the miners. They
refused to accept the decision, abandoning work, and the
court, when appealed to by the employers, found itself
powerless to enforce the decision it had made. The judge
resigned in consequence, and there was difficulty in finding
another to take his seat.

The Labor Party secured the passage of an Act which gives the
trades-union label the force of a trade mark. Another
important Act of 1905 modified the Immigration Restriction
Act, so far as to admit Asiatic and other alien students and
merchants, whose stay in the country was not likely to be
permanent, and which, furthermore, permitted the introduction
of white labor under contract, subject to conditions that were
expected to prevent any lowering of standard wages.

The location of a federal capital became a subject of positive

quarrel between the Government of the Commonwealth and that of
New South Wales. By agreements which preceded the federation,
the Commonwealth capital was to be in New South Wales, but not
less than a hundred miles from Sydney. This hundred-mile
avoidance of Sydney was considerably exceeded by the Federal
Government when it chose a site, to be called Dalgety, about
equidistant from Sydney and Melbourne. New South Wales
objected to the site and objected to the extent of territory
demanded for it. Mr. Deakin proposed a survey of 900 square
miles for the Federal District. New South Wales saw no reason
 for federal jurisdiction over more than 100 square miles.

Ultimately Dalgety was rejected and a site named

Yass-Canberra, or Canberra, was agreed upon and the choice
confirmed by legislation. It is in the Murray district, about
200 miles southwest of Sydney.

A general election in the Commonwealth, near the close of

1906, gave the Protectionists a small increase of strength in
Parliament, and the Labor Party gained one seat, raising its
representation from 25 to 26. The losers were the so-called
Free Traders, or opponents of protective tariff-making. Their
leader, Mr. Reid, in the canvass, dropped the tariff issue and
made war on the State Socialism of the Labor Party. He held in
the new Parliament a considerably larger following than the
Protectionist Premier, Mr. Deakin, could muster, but it
contained more Protectionists than Free Traders.

{33}

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1906.
Developing the water supply.

See (in this Volume)

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES: AUSTRALIA.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1907.
The "New Protection," under the Tariff Excise Act.

See (in this Volume)

LABOR REMUNERATION: THE "NEW PROTECTION."

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1907.
Statistics of state schools.

See EDUCATION: AUSTRALIA.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1907 (April-May).
Imperial Conference at London.

See BRITISH EMPIRE: A. D. 1907.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1908 (December).

Population of the Commonwealth.

According to a letter to the London Times, from Sydney,

"the population of Australia on December 31, 1908, was
estimated at 4,275,304 (exclusive of full-blooded blacks),
showing an increase of 509,965, or of 13.5 per cent. in the
eight years of federation. That," said the writer, "is not a
satisfactory expansion, and we should have fared better. New
South Wales gained 231,367, or 17 per cent. and Western
Australia 87,143, or 48.4 per cent. but all the other States
fared indifferently. There is reason to hope that in the
change of fashion, Australia will again grow into some favour
with the emigrant from home."

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1908.
Change of Ministry.

Late in the year, the Ministry of Mr. Deakin lost the

provisional support of the Labor party, which had kept it in
control of the Government for nearly four years, and suffered
a defeat in Parliament which threw it out. For the second time
a short-lived Labor Ministry was formed, under Mr. Andrew
Fisher.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1908.
The Governor-Generalship.

After five years of service as Governor-General, Lord

Northcote returned to England in the fall of 1908 and was
succeeded by Lord Dudley.
AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909.
Attitude of the people toward immigration.
Land-locking against settlement.

See (in this Volume)

Immigration: AUSTRALIA.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909.
A summary of sixty years of growth and progress.

Sir John Forrest, Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia,

in his Budget Speech to the Federal House of Representatives,
in August, 1909, surveyed the position of Australia as part of
the British nation,—a continent, he observed, containing two
billion acres, with a coast line of 12,000 miles, no other
nation having right or title to any part of this splendid
heritage of the Southern Hemisphere, which was another home
for the British race. Sixty years ago, said Sir John, the
population of Australia was 400,000 and there were no
railways. Now the inhabitants numbered nearly four-and-a-half
millions, of whom 96 per cent were British. They had
£112,000,000 deposited in banks and deposits in savings banks
to the amount of over £46,000,000, the depositors in these
being one-third of the entire population. They had produced
minerals to the value of £713,000,000. Ten million acres were
under crop. During last year Australia had produced 62,000,000
bushels of wheat. It had exported butter of the value of
£2,387,000 and wool of the value of £23,000,000. Australia had
90,000,000 sheep, 10,000,000 cattle, and 2,000,000 horses. The
oversea trade in 1908 represented £114,000,000.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909.
Proposed federalization of state debts.

On the 8th of September, 1909, the Government introduced a

Bill in the House of Representatives for the amendment of the
Constitution so as to enable the Commonwealth to federalize
 the State debts incurred since the inauguration of the
Commonwealth, in addition to those then existing. The Premier
urged that if the agreement was carried out the Commonwealth
would be freed financially, and if the debts were taken over
the per capita payments would be appropriated to meet the
interest on the debts, the States making up any deficiency.
The Bill was passed by the House on the 7th of October.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909.
Federal acquisition of the Northern Territory.

A Bill providing for the transfer to the Commonwealth of the

vast unpopulated Northern Territory of the Australian
Continent was before the Parliament of the Commonwealth during
the last summer. In advocating its passage, the Minister for
External Affairs explained that "the area to be transferred
under the Bill was equal to France, Germany, Belgium,
Switzerland, and Italy together. Port Darwin was nearer to
Hongkong than to Sydney, and while the Northern Territory
remained unpeopled it was a perpetual menace to Australia. The
military authorities, Sir George Le Hunte, formerly Governor
of South Australia, and Lord Northcote, formerly
Governor-General of the Commonwealth, had all strongly urged
its effective occupation, and Mr. Roosevelt had advised the
Commonwealth to fill its ‘empty north.’

"By the terms of the agreement the Commonwealth would assume

responsibility for the debt of the territory, amounting to
£2,725,000, and the accumulated deficit of the past
administration, amounting to £600,000. The measure provided
for the taking over of the Port Augusta-Oodnadatta Railway at
a price of £2,240,000, and for the Commonwealth to undertake
the construction of a trans continental line connecting the
territory with South Australia, at an estimated cost of
£4,500,000. The latest reports showed that the interior of the
territory was a fertile and well-watered white man’s country,
the healthiest in the tropical world, and that it was capable
 of carrying a large population."

Despatch from Melbourne to The Times, London.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909 (May-June).

Opening of the session of Parliament.
Programme of business proposed.
The political situation.
Coalition under Mr. Deakin against the ministry.
Its success.
Resignation of Premier Fisher and Cabinet.
Return of Mr. Deakin to power.
His programme.

The Federal Parliament was opened at Melbourne on the 26th of

May. In the speech of the Governor-General, Lord Dudley, as
reported to the English Press, he stated that "notwithstanding
a decrease in the Customs and postal revenue, arrangements had
been made to pay old-age pensions from July 1. Large financial
obligations would be incurred in the near future and would
demand careful attention. Parliament would be invited to
consider the financial relations between the Commonwealth and
the States, with a view to an equitable adjustment of them.
Proposals would be submitted for the establishment of a
Commonwealth silver and paper currency.

{34}

"The Governor-General went on to refer to the coming Imperial

Defence Conference and the establishment of a General Staff
for the Empire. Engagements had, he said, been entered into
for the building of three destroyers, and Parliament would be
asked to approve a policy of naval construction including the
building of similar vessels in Australia and the training of
the necessary crews. A measure providing for an effective
citizens’ defence force would be introduced at an early stage.
"It being recognized that the effective defence of Australia
required a vast increase in the population, it was proposed to
introduce a measure of progressive taxation on unimproved land
values, leading to a subdivision of large estates, so as to
offer immigrants the inducement necessary to attract them in
large numbers.

"Proposals would be submitted for the amendment of the

Constitution, so as to enable Parliament to protect the
interests of the consumer while ensuring a fair and reasonable
wage to every worker to extend the jurisdiction of Parliament
in regard to trusts and combinations, and to provide for the
nationalization of monopolies."

See (in this Volume),

LABOR REMUNERATION: THE ‘NEW PROTECTION’.

In an editorial article on the situation at this juncture in

Australia, which was, it remarked, "as interesting as it is
obscure," the London Times rehearsed the main facts of
it as follows:

"It will be remembered that towards the close of last year the
withdrawal of its support by the Labour party led somewhat
unexpectedly to the defeat and resignation of Mr. Deakin’s
Cabinet. A Labour Ministry was subsequently formed, and was
enabled by Mr. Deakin’s refusal to combine with the Opposition
against it to prorogue Parliament and get into recess. It has
since elaborated a programme, announced by Mr. Fisher, the
Prime Minister, to his constituents at Gympie, a few weeks
ago, and recapitulated yesterday in the Governor-General's
speech, which strongly resembles in most particulars the
national policy advocated by Mr. Deakin when in power, and
includes besides one or two additional proposals, such as ‘the
nationalization of monopolies,’ more exclusively the property
of the Labour party itself. These latter aspirations are
probably more pious than practical, and are certainly not the
issues on which the Labour Ministry is now to stand or fall.
It will stand or fall by its proposals for the readjustment of
the financial relations between the Commonwealth and the
States, the establishment of a local flotilla designed for
coastal defence, the creation of a citizen army based on
universal training, and the imposition of a progressive land
tax calculated to bring about the subdivision of large
estates.

"This latter proposal is the only one in which the Labour

party cannot claim to be carrying out the spirit, if not the
letter, of Mr. Deakin’s own programme; but, curiously enough,
it does not seem to be the question on which Mr. Deakin has
taken immediate issue with them. He is taking issue, we
gather, first and foremost on the question of defence. The
Labour Ministry is to be censured for refusing to make the
offer of the Australian Dreadnought in the name of the
Commonwealth. In taking this line Mr. Deakin has already made
it clear that he has not in any way modified his previous
views on the necessity of providing immediately for the
creation of an Australian flotilla, but he considers that this
necessity should in no way prevent Australia from adding in
emergency to the strength of the British fleet. Speaking at
Sydney last month, he said: ‘Our defence needs not only our
own flotilla but a fleet on the high seas as well. It is for
us to recognize that by joining New Zealand and making our
offer of a Dreadnought for the Imperial Navy … the
Commonwealth must do its share to prove the reality of
Australia’s federal unity, to prove the unity of the Empire,
to stand beside the stock from which we came.’

"On this point there is no obscurity. It presents a clear

difference of view dividing Mr. Deakin and the two sections of
the Opposition with which he has now coalesced from the policy
of the Ministry in power. But while it provides a rallying
ground from which the coalition may defeat the Ministry, it
provides no subsequent line of united advance. The terms on
which the coalition has been formed seem indeed to contemplate
no definite policy at all."

The coalition against the Ministry of Mr. Fisher, referred to

in the above, accomplished its purpose on the day after the
opening of Parliament, by carrying a vote of adjournment which
the Ministry accepted as a vote of want of confidence, and
resigned. The former Premier, Mr. Deakin, then resumed the
reins of Government, with a following that does not seem to
have been expected to hold together very long. On the
reassembling of Parliament, June 23, the Prime Minister made a
statement of the business to be submitted to the House,
including along with other measures the following: "A Bill
would be introduced establishing an inter-State commission
which, in addition to the powers conferred by the
Constitution, would undertake many of the functions of the
British Board of Trade. It would also undertake the duties of
a Federal Labour Bureau, which would comprise the study of the
question of unemployment and a scheme for insurance against
unemployment. The commission would also assist in the
supervision of the working of the existing Customs tariff. …
An active policy of immigration would be undertaken, it was
hoped with the cooperation of all the States. … The
appointment of a High Commissioner in London with a
well-equipped office was necessary to take charge of the
financial interests of the Commonwealth, to supervise
immigration, and to foster trade and commerce. … The Old Age
Pensions Act was to be amended in the direction of simplifying
the conditions for obtaining the pensions. … The policy of the
Government in the matter of land defence would be founded on
universal training, commencing in youth and continuing towards
manhood. A military college, a school of musketry, and
probably a primary naval college would be established to train
officers. The counsel of one of the most experienced
commanders of the British Army would be sought for with regard
to the general development and disposition of Australia’s
adult citizen soldiers.
 "In view of the approaching termination of the ten year period
of the distribution of the Customs revenue provided for in the
Constitution, a temporary arrangement was being prepared,
pending a satisfactory permanent settlement of the financial
relation between the State and the Commonwealth."

{35}

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909 (June).

Federal High Court decision on Anti-Trust Law.

See (in this Volume)

COMBINATIONS, INDUSTRIAL, &c.: AUSTRALIA.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909 (July-September).

The Imperial Defense Conference.
Defense Bill in Parliament.
Proposed compulsory military training.

See (in this Volume)

WAR, THE PREPARATIONS FOR: MILITARY AND NAVAL.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909 (September).

Coal Miners strike in New South Wales.
See (in this Volume)
LABOR ORGANIZATION: AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1905-1909.

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1909 (September).

Meeting at Sydney of Empire Congress of Chambers of Commerce.

See (in this Volume)

BRITISH EMPIRE: A. D. 1909 (SEPTEMBER).

AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1910.
The last year of a troublesome Constitutional Requirement.
Article 87 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of
Australia (see in Volume VI. of this work), reads as follows:

"During a period of ten years after the establishment of the

Commonwealth, and thereafter until the Parliament otherwise
provides, of the net revenue of the Commonwealth from duties
of custom and of excise not more than one fourth shall be
applied annually by the Commonwealth towards its expenditure.
The balance shall, in accordance with this Constitution, be
paid to the several States, or applied toward the payment of
interest on debts of the several States taken over by the
Commonwealth." This, which has been known as the Braddon
section, has imposed a serious handicap on the Federal
Government. As its working was described recently by an
English Press correspondent, "it made the Commonwealth raise
four pounds whenever it wanted to spend one. It made the
States begrudge the Commonwealth every penny it spent, even
out of its own quarter—for every penny saved out of that
quarter was an extra penny for the States. And it prevented
every State Treasurer from knowing, until the Federal
Treasurer had delivered his Budget speech, how much money he
was likely to get from Federal sources for his own spending."

At the end of the year 1910 the requirement of the Article

will cease to be obligatory, and the Federal Parliament will
be free to make a different appropriation of the revenue from
customs and excise. Meantime the subject is under discussion,
and in August, 1909, it was announced that a conference of the
State Governments had come to an agreement—subject to
ratification by the Federal Government—which provides for the
annual per capita payment of 25s. in lieu of the three-fourths
of the Customs revenue which has hitherto been returned to
them. Western Australia to receive a special extra
contribution of £250,000, decreasing by £10,000 annually until
it ceases. Until the arrangement becomes operative, the
Commonwealth may deduct from the statutory payments to the
States £600,000 annually towards the cost of old-age pensions.
 The readjustment of State shares in the Customs revenue is
said to involve an annual loss to New South Wales of
£1,000,000. According to a London newspaper correspondent,
"the main effects to the Commonwealth are the abolition of the
book-keeping system between the States, the power to issue
Australian stamps, telegrams, &c., and the securing of about
£2,300,000 a year, or more, additional revenue. The States
lose revenue to a similar amount, but there is a transfer of
old-age pensions to the amount of nearly £1,000,000, of which
they are relieved. In three of the States, all of which suffer
little by the change, the pensions are new, and a considerable
boon to the people. But more than half the money sacrifice
falls upon New South Wales, and it goes to relieve her less
prosperous neighbours. Well, that is true Federation!
Naturally the Southern States would have nothing but a per
capita distribution from the Commonwealth, and the New
South Wales Ministers agreed to it with their eyes open. At
present the Commonwealth Government secures the further
revenue needed. But whether this agreement will so distinctly
suit that Government as the State populations grow is another
matter."

A Bill for the required amendment of the Federal Constitution

was introduced in the House of Representatives by the Prime
Minister, Mr. Deakin, on the 8th of September. On the 4th of
November, in opposition to the Government, an amendment to the
Bill, limiting the duration of the agreement, instead of
giving it force in perpetuity, was carried in committee of the
whole by the casting vote of the chairman. On the 1st of
December the Bill had its third reading in the Senate.

----------AUSTRALIA: End--------

----------AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: Start--------

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1870-1905.
 Increase of population compared
with other European countries.

See (in this Volume)

EUROPE: A. D. 1870-1905.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1902 (June).

Renewal of the Triple Alliance.

See (in this Volume)

TRIPLE ALLIANCE.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1902-1903.
Notice by Austria of intention to end, in 1904, the
Customs Union which formed part of the Ausgleich, or
Federation Compact of 1867.
Language struggle in Austria.

The difficulties between Austria and Hungary, concerning a

renewal of the Ausgleich, or federation compact of 1867, which
created the dual empire,—some account of which is given in
Volume VI. of this work,—were compromised in 1900 by an
agreement which extended the Ausgleich temporarily until 1907.

See, in Volume VI.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1899-1900.

It was stipulated, however, in the agreement, that if no

permanent settlement of the questions involved should have
been reached by the end of the year 1902, either party to the
Ausgleich should be free to dissolve the Customs Union
that formed part of it after 1904, provided that said party
should have formally denounced the compact prior to January 1,
1902. The formal notice or denunciation was given accordingly
by Austria, whose government gave notice that it would end the
Customs Union unless better terms from Hungary could be
 secured. In Hungary the Independence party led by Ferencz
Kossuth, the son of Louis Kossuth, was eager for the break,
desiring no union with Austria beyond that of the two crowns
on one head. The tariff question seemed insoluble, because
Hungary wanted protection for its agriculture, which Austria
believed to be greatly disadvantageous to herself.

{36}

The prime ministers of the two Governments came to an

agreement which was submitted to the two parliaments early in
1903, but obstruction in both bodies prevented any effective
action. On other questions the antagonism was no less
pronounced. The Hungarian Independence party was resolute in
determining to separate the Hungarian from the Austrian army,
making it distinctly Hungarian, under Hungarian officers and
using the Hungarian word of command. This drew from the
Emperor, in September, a public announcement that he must and
would hold fast to the existing organization of the army. At
length, in December, Kossuth agreed, for his party, to abandon
obstruction on condition that Parliament should proclaim, as a
principle, that "in Hungary the source of every right, and in
the army the source of rights appertaining to the language of
service and command, is the will of the nation as expressed
through the legislature." But though obstruction from the
Independence party ceased then it was continued by a Catholic
party, on grounds of personal hostility to the Protestant
Premier, Count Tisza, and the Government, deprived of
authority to recruit the army, kept in service the men whose
term had expired.

An almost equal deadlock of legislation prevailed in Austria,

where the struggle over language questions between Czechs and
Germans went fiercely on; while Croatia was full of rebellious
spirit, excited by the Magyarizing policy of its Hungarian
governor.
 Twice, during 1903, the Hungarian administration underwent a
change, the Szell Ministry giving way in June to one headed by
Count Kuen Hedervary, he, in turn, being displaced by Count
Tisza in October. The latter was a son of Koloman Tisza, who
had formerly held the reins in Hungary for many years.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1903-1904.
Concert with Russia in submitting the Mürzsteg Programme
of reform in Macedonia to Turkey.

See (in this Volume)

TURKEY: A. D. 1903-1904.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1904.
Paralysis of Government in both divisions of the dual empire.

Legislation in both Austria and Hungary was paralyzed

throughout 1904 by obstructive oppositions which nothing could
pacify. In Austria it was the battle of Czech against German
for language rights; but, in the end, the German Premier, Dr.
Körber, lost the support of his own race, by allowing Italian
law-classes to be formed in the University at Innsprück, with
a faculty of their own. He resigned on the last day of the
year, and was succeeded by Baron Gautsch.

In Hungary the obstruction was maintained by a combination of

three parties,—the Independence Party of Ferencz Kossuth,
which is irreconcilable in its repudiation of the union with
Austria, the Liberal-Conservative Separatists, so-called, led
by Count Apponyi, and a Catholic People’s Party, under Count
Zichy. The extraordinary attitude of these practical
anarchists, as they would seem to be, is indicated by a
performance at the opening of the session of the Hungarian
Parliament on the 13th of December, 1904, which is described
in the Annual Register, as follows:

"They entered the House before the usual time of meeting,

 assaulted the police when they endeavored to prevent some of
the members from mounting the President’s platform, tore down
the woodwork, destroyed the furniture, and finally had
themselves photographed, with the ex-Premier Baron Banffy at
their head, in the midst of the ruin they had wrought. This
extraordinary scene was described by M. Kossuth as ‘a symbol
of the political maturity of the Magyars, who, after asserting
their rights, refrain from excesses;’ and by Count Apponyi as
‘an evidence of the importance attached to continuity of legal
right in Hungary.’ When the broken furniture was removed and
the House was restored to something like its former
appearance, the members returned; but all the attempts of the
Government to speak were howled down by the Opposition." The
Opposition which accomplished this paralysis of Government in
Hungary numbered, in its three divisions, only 190 members,
out of 451.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1904-1909.
Effects in Europe and on the Triple Alliance of the
Russo-Japanese War.

See (in this Volume)

EUROPE: A. D. 1904-1909.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1905.
Action with other Powers in forcing financial reforms
in Macedonia on Turkey.

See (in this Volume)

TURKEY: A. D. 1905-1908.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1905.
Hostility to the Serbo-Bulgarian Customs Union.

See (in this Volume)

BALKAN STATES: BULGARIA AND SERVIA: A. D. 1902.
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1905-1906.
Continued deadlock, seated mainly in Hungary.
Resignation of Count Tisza.
The Fejervary Ministry.
Dissolution of the Hungarian Parliament.
Kossuth and his allies take office.
Universal male suffrage adopted in Austria.

The deadlock of political forces in the Dual Empire was

prolonged through another year, Hungary being the main seat of
the block. Elections for the Hungarian Diet, in January, went
heavily against the Ministry of Count Tisza and strongly in
favor of that section of the Opposition which bore the name of
the Independence Party and which was led by Ferencz Kossuth.
Count Tisza resigned, and the Emperor-King endeavored to make
terms with Kossuth, Apponyi, and Andrassy under which the
Government might be carried on with parliamentary support.
This proved impracticable, especially by reason of the
insistent demand of the Opposition for a separation of the
Hungarian from the Austrian part of the imperial army, and the
determination of the sovereign not to yield to that demand.
Count Tisza and his colleagues were kept in office until June,
despite a heavy vote of censure in the Diet, and then the
Emperor appointed as Premier General Baron Fejervary, who
commanded no more support than his predecessor had done. The
majority in the representative chamber denounced the Ministry
as unconstitutional, and issued a manifesto, calling on the
people to withhold taxes and military service from this
simulacrum of Government, which had no lawful claim to either.
This was accepted as good counsel by great numbers of people,
and grave embarrassments resulted from the non-payment of
taxes.

{37}

In the August number (1905) of The American Review of

Reviews Count Albert Apponyi, leader of one of the parties
united more or less in the Hungarian Opposition, gave the
Hungarian side of the political issues with Austria. In part,
he wrote: "The writer had the honor of delivering at St.
Louis, at the Arts and Science Congress of last year, a short
historical account of our relation with the Austrian dynasty.
There are to be found the chief facts, which show:
(1) That our forefathers called that dynasty to the Hungarian
throne, not in order to get Hungary absorbed into an Austrian
or any other sort of empire, but, on the contrary, under the
express condition of keeping the independence and the
constitution of the Hungarian kingdom unimpaired;
(2) that this condition has been accepted and sworn to by all
those members of the dynasty (Joseph II. alone excepted) who
ascended the Hungarian throne;
(3) that, nevertheless, practical encroachments on our
independence, followed by conflicts and reconciliations, have
been at all epochs frequent;
(4) but that a juridical fact never occurred which could be
construed into a modification of that fundamental condition of
the dynasty’s title to Hungary. …

The physical person of the ruler is, in truth, the same in

both countries, but the juridical personality of the King of
Hungary is distinct and, as to the contents of its
prerogative, widely different from the juridical personality
of the Emperor of Austria. Hungary is the oldest
constitutional country on the European Continent. The royal
prerogative in her case is an emanation of the
constitution,—not prior to it,—and consists in such rights as
the nation has thought fit to vest in her king. In Austria, on
the other hand, the existing constitution is a free gift of
the Emperor, and has conferred on the people of Austria such
rights as the Emperor has thought fit to grant to them. The
title of ‘Emperor of Austria-Hungary’ … [sometimes used] is
simply nonsense. The time-hallowed old Hungarian crown has not
been melted into the brand-new Austrian imperial diadem. That
imperial title does not contain, to any extent, the Hungarian
royal title. The Emperor of Austria, as such, has just as much
legal power in Hungary as the President of the United States
has. He is, juridically speaking, a foreign potentate to us.

"On these fundamental truths, no Hungarian—to whatever party

he may belong—admits discussion. … The Liberal party,
vanquished at the last elections, does not in the least differ
from the victorious opposition as to the principles laid down
in these pages; it only advocated a greater amount of
forbearance against the petty encroachments which practically
obscured them. That policy of forbearance became gradually
distasteful to the country; seeing it shaken in the public
mind, the recent prime minister, Count Tisza, formed the
unhappy idea of gaining a new lease of power on its behalf by
a parliamentary coup d’état. The rules of the House
were broken, in order to prevent future obstruction, chiefly
against military bills. This brought matters to an acute
crisis. The parliament in which that breach of the rules had
taken place became unfit for work of any sort, the country had
to be consulted, and down went the Liberal party and the
half-hearted policy it represented with no hope for revival.

"The army question, with its ever-recurring difficulties, is a

highly characteristic feature of the chronic latent conflict
between the Austrian and the Hungarian mentality. It amounts
to this, that, as we are a nation, we mean to have an armed
force corresponding to our national individuality, commanded
in our language, and serving under our flags and emblems. It
would be unnatural for any nation, and would be, in fact, an
abdication of the title of ‘nation,’ to renounce such a
national claim. The Austrians, on the other hand,—and,
unhappily, their influence is still prevalent in this
question,—not yet having abandoned the idea of a pan-Austrian
empire, uncompromisingly adhere to the present military
organization, which makes the German language and the imperial
emblems prevalent throughout the whole army, its Hungarian
portion included."
In September, 1905, the Emperor-King summoned the chiefs of
the opposing coalition to Vienna and renewed his endeavor to
make terms with them; but his own conditions, relative to the
army, to the language of command and service in it, to the
tariff relations between Austria and Hungary, and to other
matters of dispute, were apparently as uncompromisable as
theirs, and only intensified the bad feeling in the country.

A little later the Fejervary Ministry announced a programme of

policy which offered concessions and many excellent measures,
but all save one of them were scorned. That one was a proposal
of universal suffrage, with direct secret balloting, which in
both Hungary and Austria had now become a subject of wide
popular demand. The agitation for it became clamorous in the
later months of the year, especially in the Austrian towns.
But the leaders of the Hungarian Opposition were supposed to
be personally hostile to universal suffrage. "As
representatives of the most educated, wealthy, and powerful
race in the kingdom, they have long enjoyed absolute political
control. But universal suffrage," says a contemporary
journalist, "would so increase the non-Magyar elements in
Parliament as to deprive the Magyar leaders of much of their
ascendency. At present these leaders are strong enough to
defeat the King’s magnificent programme, announced by Baron
Fejervary. But such a defeat would place them in an
embarrassing position. They would have definitely assumed an
attitude which belies their name of Liberal."

The Fejervary programme was well planned to be troublesome to

the opponents of the Government. While not surrendering to
their demand for the Magyar language of command in the
Hungarian part of the Imperial army, it proposed that the men
who do not speak that language should be trained in it as far
as possible. And it included a number of other most important
measures: for compulsory free education; for compulsory
insurance of workmen; for small farm grants to the peasantry;
 for the conversion of mortgage debts that weigh on small
landowners, and for various taxation reforms. Evidently the
Opposition endeavored to keep public attention and public
feeling focused on the claim for a distinct Hungarian army,
with the Magyar language for its word of command. Kossuth, the
dominating leader of the coalition against the Government,
defined the argument for this claim. No mention, he said, is
made of any common army in the agreement on which the Dual
Empire is founded. The Hungarian Constitution vests in the
Emperor of Austria, as King of Hungary, "all those things
which refer to the commanding and administration … of the
Hungarian army."

{38}

But the Constitution does not hint that the Hungarian army
should be commanded in German. It has not specifically
forbidden such a thing, but in another part of the
Constitution it is provided that the language of public
services in Hungary shall be Hungarian. And is not the army a
"public service"? he asked. Besides, he explained: "A century
ago the Hungarian magnates, generally, paid for their own
soldiers, and ours was not, in the beginning, a State army.
When the combination with Austria came about, the officers
were of all nations, and the Austrians brought in many of
their own. To tell the truth, our own Hungarians were too
lazy—there is no other word for it—to take the trouble to
reorganize and start a Hungarian army, so they left it to the
Austrians for the time being. It was for this reason, and with
the consciousness of this defect, that Article XI. expressly
left the language of command to be determined,
constitutionally, later. But we also expressly confined it
within the limits of our own Constitution … and we spoke of a
Hungarian army, not a common one."

The year 1906 opened with the discords of the situation in

Hungary rather heightened than lessened, and on the 19th of
February the Emperor dissolved the Hungarian Parliament,
announcing that he did so for the reason that the parties of
the Opposition had "persistently refused to take over the
Government on an acceptable basis without violating the Royal
rights as by law guaranteed." Disturbances on the occasion
were prevented by strong forces of soldiery and police. Two
days later the Austro-Hungarian tariff and a commercial
treaty, both of which had been refused ratification in
Hungary, were promulgated as of force, pending future action;
and by various other arbitrary measures the Emperor-King
assumed the right to prevent a governmental collapse. This
attitude on the part of the sovereign appears to have produced
a change of attitude among his opponents; for early in April
M. Kossuth and Count Andrassy entered into an arrangement with
him for the formation of a Ministry by themselves and their
associates of the Coalition, with the understanding that the
army question should be put aside until after the election of
a new Parliament, to meet in May. At that session they
promised to pass the budget, the new international commercial
treaties, to maintain in every way the existing condition of
things between Austria and Hungary, to permit the passage of a
bill providing for universal manhood suffrage, and then for
Parliament to terminate its labors, allowing the election of a
new one under the universal suffrage system, the Cabinet to be
re-formed conformably to the desires of the parliamentary
majority. Thereupon the Emperor-King requested Dr. Alexander
Wekerle, a former Hungarian Prime Minister, to form a Cabinet,
including in it Kossuth, Apponyi, Andrassy, and Zichy. At the
election, held soon after, the Independence party won about
250 out of 400 seats. The new Parliament was opened on the 22d
of May.

In Austria, the grand event of 1906 was the franchise reform,

which extinguished the whole system of class representation
and established a representative Parliament on the broad basis
of a manhood vote. "Every male citizen who had completed his
twenty-fourth year and was not under any legal disability was
 entitled to be registered as a voter after one year’s
residence. Every male, including members of the Upper House,
who had possessed Austrian citizenship for at least three
years and had completed his thirtieth year, was eligible for
election as a deputy; but members of the Upper House elected
to the Lower could not sit in both at once. Voting was to be
direct in all provinces. In Galicia, however, every
constituency would return two deputies, each voter having one
vote, so as to permit of the representation of racial
minorities, the population being composed of Poles and
Ruthenians. Voting was to be obligatory under penalty of a
fine wherever a provincial Diet should so decide. This Bill
was passed, in the face of the opposition of the Conservative
and aristocratic members of both Houses and of the extreme
representatives of the various nationalities, mainly through
the influence of the Emperor. He regarded it as the only way
to get rid of Parliamentary obstruction, and the best means of
stimulating loyalty to the dynasty."

Two changes of Ministry occurred in Austria during 1906, Baron

Gautsch, as Premier, giving way to Prince Hohenlohe in April,
and the latter resigning in June, to be succeeded by Baron
Beck. Count Goluchowski, who had been Austro-Hungarian
Minister of Foreign Affairs since 1895, resigned in October,
because of ill-feeling against him in Hungary, and was
succeeded by Baron Aehrenthal.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1906 (January-April).

At the Algeciras Conference on the Morocco question.

See (in this Volume)

EUROPE: A. D. 1905-1906.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1907.
Effects of universal and equalized suffrage in Austria.

Elections were held in Austria a few months after the passage

 of the law which introduced equal and universal male suffrage,
and the character and disposition of the elected Reichsrath,
which met in June, 1907, afforded indications of some
remarkable effects from the extension and equalizing of the
franchise. It was expected, of course, to popularize the
Reichsrath, and break the domination of the upper classes in
that body; but, according to reports, it has done much more.
Prior to 1896, the members of the Abgeordncten or lower house
of the Reichsrath, then numbering 353, were all divided into
four sections, elected by four classes of people, as follows:
85 elected by the owners of large landed estates, 22 by
chambers of commerce and manufactures; 115 by town taxpayers
assessed for five florins of annual tax, and by doctors of
universities; 131 by country taxpayers assessed for five
florins yearly. In that year the membership was enlarged by an
addition of 72, who were to be representatives of the whole
people, elected by universal male suffrage, while the old
classified representation remained as before. The new law has
swept away the whole system of a classified representation,
and the representative house is now leveled to one footing, as
a body of deputies from the people at large.

The most conspicuous effect of this in the elections appears

to have been a sudden break of the power which the German
element in the much-mixed population of the Austrian dominion
has been able to exercise hitherto. Hence, it must be the fact
that the Germans hold far more than their proportion of the
property which the old system represented, and derived from
that, formerly, a weight in the Reichsrath which their numbers
cannot give them on the equalized vote.

{39}

Altogether, in the various Cisleithan states—the two Austrias

proper, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Silesia, Salzburg, Tyrol,
Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Istria, Dalmatia—they form a
little more than one third of the total population, the other
two thirds being mainly Slavonic, in many divisions,
principally Czech, Polish, and Slovene.

Ten years ago the Austrian Reichsrath was offering a spectacle

of factious disorder so violent that it drew the attention of
the world, and was made entertaining as well as interesting by
Mark Twain, then a resident for some months at Vienna and
writing descriptions of the scenes of tumult that went on
before his eyes.

See in Volume VI. of this work

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897 (OCTOBER-DECEMBER).

The specially bitter race quarrel was over a language question

between the Germans and the Czechs. The Czechs had succeeded
in forcing the government to give their own tongue its
rightful public use in Bohemia, where the German had displaced
it officially for along time past. The determination of the
Germans in the Reichsrath to undo this change practically
paralyzed that legislature for a number of years, and seemed
to be driving the realm of the House of Austria to inevitable
wreck.

Indeed, some factions of the Germans made no concealment of

their wish for such a wreckage, out of which the German Kaiser
at Berlin might pick the pieces that it pleased him to take.
They have never doubted the sympathy and countenance of their
kinsmen in the neighboring empire, and that has emboldened
them to an attitude which a minority, in other circumstances,
would hardly take.

Within the last few years there has been a quieting of the
antagonism; but most observers of the state of things in
Austria have looked for serious troubles to arise, whenever
the great personal influence of the present Emperor is
withdrawn by his death. The imperial dominion of the Austrian
archdukes could not be dissolved and its parts redistributed
 without subjecting the peace of Europe to such a trial as it
never yet has gone unbrokenly through. If the Germans lose
disturbing power in the Reichsrath, as the late elections are
said to indicate that they will, and if racial factions give
place to political parties, as a consequence of the equalized
and universalized suffrage, then Austria may possibly be
welded into a nation, and her neighbors may not be tempted to
quarrel over her dismembered remains.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1907.
Final negotiation of a new financial Ausgleich.
Adjustment of the vexed questions of tariff, joint debt,
and revenue quotas.

The long struggle toward a readjustment of the

Ausgleich or Agreement of 1866 between Austria and
Hungary, on its financial side, was brought to a close on the
8th of October, 1907, by the signing of a new agreement that
day. It continued the common customs arrangement until 1917,
and provided that commercial treaties concluded with foreign
powers must be signed by the representatives of both Austria
and Hungary—a concession by Austria to Hungary. Hitherto the
Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs had conducted such
negotiations. On its part, Hungary made the minor concession
of conforming its stock exchange laws to those of Austria.
Previously, excise duties had been common to both states;
henceforth they were to be left to each state to be determined
and levied. In the joint fiscal burden, Hungary’s contribution
was increased from 34.4 per cent to 36.4 per cent. Provision
was made for a court of arbitration, composed of four Austrian
and four Hungarian members, who must chose a ninth member as
chairman.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1908-1909.
Hungarian politics.
The State Bank question.
Split in the Independence party.
M. de Justh, a new party leader.
Attitude of M. Kossuth.
Deadlock returned.

The complete deadlock of legislation in Hungary from 1904 into

1906 was overcome but partially, and not for long, by the
patched-up coalition which started the wheels of Government
anew, under Dr. Wekerle, in April, 1906, as related above. In
the course of the next two years the Wekerle Ministry
accomplished some useful legislation, besides achieving the
ratification of the important tariff and commerce agreement
which settled long-troublesome disputes with Austria; but its
very slight coherent energy was exhausted soon,—too soon for
its promise of universal suffrage to be fulfilled.
Practically, it seems to have been at the end of its
capabilities for some time before the spring of 1909, when, in
April, it resolved to resign, and began an effort to escape
from office which went on through the year without success.
The Crown could induce no one to take from Dr. Wekerle the
impossible task of government, and kept that unfortunate
gentleman in his powerless place.

In Austro-Hungarian politics a new contention had now been

developed, which divided the Independence party, led hitherto
by M. Kossuth and Count Apponyi, so that it acquired on the
new question a third more extreme sectional chief, in the
person of the President of the Chamber, M. de Justh. The
followers of M. de Justh were demanding the transformation of
the existing joint State Bank into two autonomous banks,
connected in operation, but distinctly Hungarian in one
organization and Austrian in the other. This demand was
opposed in Austria as determinedly as the obnoxious demand for
army use of the Hungarian language in Hungarian regiments, and
the Crown would give sanction to neither. Apparently, neither
Kossuth nor Apponyi would act with M. de Justh on the bank
question, and the Independence party lost, consequently, its
advantage as the largest of the various parties in the
 Chamber.

In November, when a test of numbers occurred at a conference

of the party, the following of M. de Justh was found to be
largely in the majority. A resolution demanding the separate
Hungarian State Bank was adopted by 120 votes against 74,
despite a declaration by M. Kossuth that he would quit the
party if it took that stand. According to a Press report of
what occurred at the conference, the burden of Kossuth’s
speech to the conference was "that without his name and his
leadership the party would never have obtained the majority,
and that many of those who were about to vote against him owed
their seats in Parliament to his recommendation. His speech
was indeed a scarcely-veiled threat that when deprived of the
support of his name his opponents would find themselves
forsaken by their constituents. The defeated minority
proceeded forthwith to constitute itself as the ‘Independence,
1848, and Kossuth party,’ as distinguished from the
‘Independence and 1848 party,’ over which M. de Justh now
reigns supreme."

{40}

Immediately after his triumph at the party conference M. de

Justh resigned the presidency of the Hungarian Chamber and
presented himself for reelection. In that test he suffered
defeat, the combined forces of the Andrassy Liberals, the
Clerical People’s party, and the Kossuth group casting 201
votes against 157. The Croatian Deputies abstained, owing, it
is said, to a promise made to them by Dr. Wekerle that, if
they remained neutral, he would deliver Croatia from the
oppressive rule of the Ban, Baron Rauch. The political
situation in Hungary was thus more than ever confused.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1908-1909.
The "Greater Servia Conspiracy."
Alleged treasonable movement of Servians in Croatia.