Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West.

Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West. By David Peterson Del Mar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. x plus 300 pp.).

Social and cultural historians often lament that overworked "popular" topics seem endlessly to capture public fervor, while less "glamourous" but important subjects languish in the wings. Thus, presidents, generals, and wars never lack for a narrator, although a systematic consideration of race, class, and gender could illuminate the former three in meaningful ways. In Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West, David Peterson Del Mar seeks to redress this imbalance, producing a volume that complements his 1996 publication, What Trouble I Have Seen: A History of Violence Against Wives, and elaborates further a subject long neglected.

Drawing on a mix of public documents, newspapers, and personal writings Peterson Del Mar argues that interpersonal violence, fueled by intimate expectations and power relationships, infused cultural dynamics across time. Incorporating the complexities of age, race, gender, and culture, this text unflinchingly traces the way inflicted personal pain, employed as an agent of power, inflated distorted personalities and sustained institutional ideals. In doing so, this book turns an uncompromisingly harsh spotlight onto one of society's most unattractive traits and the policies that guaranteed its continuation.

To make his case, Peterson Del Mar sets his account in Canadian British Columbia and the American states of Washington and Oregon, moving back and forth between the two locales. To suggest the parallels and differences between Canadian and American attitudes about violence in several decades, he offers the reader six chapters; in order, these discuss early Native and/or white violence, patterns of settler violence, tenacity of violence, violence of the "other," violence of the 1920s, Asian and African American violence. An epilogue brings the discussion forward into the late twentieth century, with a concluding vignette about the dysfunctional family of the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, executed in 1976 by a Utah firing squad. Although the chapters, in the main, are written in a highly readable manner, some accounts of brutality and sexual assault are so horrific that one might need to pause from time to time.

This is a critically important book because it convincingly demonstrates that occasions of violence were not the isolated actions of a few individual and aberrant miscreants. Rather, in all their forms, violent behaviors occurred and were permitted within social and political infrastructures that cared about who had access to power and who felt that power used upon them. Ultimately, this is a chronicle about the varieties of male privilege within both dominant and oppressed cultures. It also resonates with the voices of the maimed, who sometimes tried to resist or deflect injury and death. Those efforts often proved futile in the face of multiple ways by which the least powerful--most especially women and children, as well as all persons of color--had to contend with societal networks and legal administrations that endorsed threat and harm as the instruments of control. In this book, the words of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and law enforcement officials affirm the 1960s assertion of Civil Rights activist H. Rap Brown that violence is as "American as cherry pie." Peterson Del Mar gives historical ballast to that grim observation, arguing that from the ongoing cultural, racial, and class cross-pollination of violence emerged a modern mentality that increasingly depends on conflict resolution through brutality. Thus, the overarching message of this work is discouraging--particularly so when current world governments consistently favor murder and mayhem over negotiation and arbitration.

Given the grand sweep of the content--both in chronology and theme--the chapters seem to stand more forcefully as singular essays, rather than melding into a seamless narrative. Accordingly, the general cohesiveness of the book buckles slightly. Despite the impressive documentation, it is somewhat surprising that gender and violence studies by such historians as Benson Tong, Keith Edgerton, Mary Murphy, Paula Petrik, Melody Graulich, or this reviewer do not appear to have been consulted. In fairness concerning these lapses, the author warns in advance that an "orthodox history in its organization or methodology," was not the goal of this work (p. 9).

Despite its riveting subject and insightful treatment, Beaten Down is less successful as an example of western history. Indeed, one might question whether the book is correctly titled, for although the author clearly delineates his geographic boundaries, he does not explain them within the many subregions nor larger context of the American West. In addition, the line between British Columbia and the American states seems too heavily etched, for surely frontier borders--government and law aside--were always more permeable than not, for both actions and attitudes. The inclusion of photographs and maps would have been an additional enhancement.

As part of the epilogue, it would have been informative to know what happened to the inmate Gary Gilmore's woman friend, Nicole Baker Barrett, who participated in a coordinated suicide attempt that he orchestrated from the penitentiary--a failed episode from which he recovered to face execution, while she was left ill and forgotten by American society. Was that sad tale not yet another example of the way vulnerable and powerless women absorb stunning abuses through domestic violence?

These few criticisms are not intended to detract from the valuable contribution made by Beaten Down. This slim volume highlights a topic that many scholars of the West insist is central to understanding the evolution of frontier communities, the interactions of clashing cultures, and the impact of region on the larger context of American life. Using one section of the West as his stage, David Peterson Del Mar successfully repudiates those who have declared that domestic violence, of the past or present, was/is "over-exaggerated," "rare" or a "personal" matter. Not only does he explain its pervasiveness, he lays out its public legitimacy, both of which prove to be overwhelmingly unfortunate. It is to be hoped that David Peterson Del Mar's provocative ideas will inspire more historians to examine other national arenas and geographic places for the evidence that "private" violence shaped social, economic, and political control in a country that should have relied on equality and justice, as its documents from the American Revolution promised.

Anne M. Butler

Utah State University, Emerita