Angry Heritage

Americans are among the world's most volatile and law-breaking people, yet their government is one of the stablest. For nearly three centuries, this paradox has puzzled the world and, especially in the past few strife-torn years, America itself. Last week a group of historians, social scientists and lawyers told the nation what many Americans had al ready suspected: "We have become a rather bloody-minded people in both action and reaction."

The group was a task force appointed by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. The commission itself was established by Lyndon Johnson a year ago, shortly after the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The task force, which is sued its meticulously researched 350,000-word report on the anniversary of Kennedy's death, examined the historical precedents and foreign parallels of contemporary violence in America.

"Americans have always been a violent people," the scholars found. Interest groups have typically used force both for protection and to gain their ends, but few Americans recall their heritage of violence. The civics-book image of America as a Promised Land, the task force lamented, has obscured in most citizens' minds the fact that their country's history is littered with illegal acts of violence.

Two Responses. The report compared home-bred civil disturbances and those in 84 other countries, measured on a complex scale. On that scale, despite the American penchant for violence, the U.S. ranked below the midpoint, at 46th, in the severity of collective wrath.

"Despite its frequency," the group said, "civil strife in the United States has taken much less disruptive forms than in many non-Western and some Western countries. The nation has experienced no internal wars since the Civil War and almost none of the chronic revolutionary conspiracy and terrorism that plague dozens of other nations."

Still, the scholars discovered that the level of violence has persisted in the U.S., while in other countries it has abated with the march of industrialization.

"The first and obvious answer," they suggested, "is that some fundamental grievances in the United States have not only gone unresolved, but have intensified in recent years." If violence is to be controlled, the task force warns, it will be only through a judicious combination of strengthened police power and alleviation of the grievances.

Political Scientist Ted Robert Gurr of Princeton, one of the editors of last week's report, said that if he had to begin the study again, he would devote more attention to individual violence.

On the day that Gurr's report was released, police across the country recorded about 40 murders and 770 cases of aggravated assault.

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