Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California.

Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California. By Clare V. McKanna, Jr. (Reno, University of Nevada Press, 2002. xii plus 148 pp.).

This book raises the perennial question "How violent was the West?" through a study of 1317 homicides committed over fifty years in seven California counties. The author starts with a highly interesting concept, the idea of enclaves of violence. The author does a good job of presenting the relevant historiography, the chronology is clear, and the issues are generally well explained. His descriptions of people and places are vivid. From the evidence presented, the basic paradigm for coping with the problems of homicides appears to be grounded in California's fundamentally western subculture of violence.

This book on California homicides is divided into four chapters each of which deals with a particular ethnic group: Native-Americans, Chinese, Hispanics and whites. The author not only pays particular attention to California social history as he makes a strong attempt at integrating his discussion of his main topic, in this case homicides, within the larger cultural context of the state. The four case studies are interesting pieces of historical synthesis and interpretation in their own right, but McKanna's central purpose is to use them to illustrate a theoretical perspective on the relationship between violence and cultural tradition. Although the author does not go so far as to link cultural causes with homicide rates, he notes that strong group solidarity among Chinese and whites differs from the absence of strong cultural norms among Indians and Hispanics. Social status and race of the victims are also described as playing an important role in the way the court and the local law enforcement officers dealt with homicides.

The first chapter, entitled Red Man White Justice, not only deals with the way the criminal justice system treated the Indian defendants but also attempts to explain the level of violence among young Indians. While Spanish and Mexican authorities brought Indians into their sociopolitical system, the whites excluded them. Confronted with white intrusion and domination, the Indians community also suffered from the racism of whites, who looked at Indians as passive and irredeemable. This brought about a dramatic cultural disruption within the Indian community. In the process, many Indian youths turned to alcohol and violence. It is therefore not surprising that physical violence was the rule rather than the exception in some regions of California where Indians represented an important minority. Moreover, the Indian defendants did not benefit from any particular support in Court. The lack of appropriate legal counsel explained the high instance of plea bargaining among the Indian defendants. The fact that 26% of Indian defendants received a death penalty further demonstrates that, in California at least, white justice was imposed on the Red man.

In Chapter II, McKanna examines why Chinese were less prone to resort to violence despite the fact that Chinese immigrants suffered a great deal of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of the white population. The author notes that Chinatowns were periodically the theatre of feuds among Chinese gangs competing for the control of gambling and prostitution. In particular, he demonstrates that California Chinese rarely killed outside their racial group. Professor McKanna convincingly explains this low level of violence by a strong cultural tradition within the Chinese community and the strong support that Chinese defendants received from their community. Because of this group solidarity, Chinese accused of committing crimes were well represented by legal counsel in the courts. As a result, it was possible for those Chinese who were unjustly accused to gain justice.

In Chapter III, Professor McKanna examines how justice operated in a conquered land. As the Hispanics suffered from a lack of community ties and from poverty, the Hispanic defendants, who knew almost nothing about the criminal law, had difficulty in hiring competent counsel. Furthermore, their cultural baggage proved a liability. Whites presumed that defendants were tried by an impartial jury, which was far from the case as jurors regularly displayed racism and bigotry. Hispanic defendants differed largely from the jurors and the court officers in cultural values, way of speaking, dress and behavior, factors that played an important role during the trial process.

In Chapter IV, Professor McKanna tries to explain why whites had a significantly lower interracial homicide rate than any of the minorities except the Chinese. While the data show that whites rarely killed members of minorities, they also show that prosecutors rarely charged white defendants since the killing of an Indian, a Hispanic or a Chinese by a white man often not deemed to be a crime. For example, although whites were charged with killing 35 Indians, in only one case was a white man convicted. The phrase white justice suggests that whites had an advantage when they entered the criminal justice system. They had a better chance of acquittal than any other group, the author argues, because they were better able to hire good counsel who knew the workings of the justice system so as to achieve that goal. This was less true in the case of lower-class whites who were more likely to be prosecuted.

The author's local statistics are useful, yet they present several shortcomings. First, the author bases his study exclusively on coroner's inquests. One may raise here the issue of whether or not all homicides were investigated, particularly in the more disturbed areas. The author seems to presume, without discussion, that coroner reports represent a reliable source on the actual number of homicides in California. Secondly, although the author notes the locations for violence in different counties in California, he does not make systematic use of this information. The author should have presented more systematically the evolution of California's political and administrative sub-divisions (number of counties, their population, their ethnic composition). Moreover, it would have been very useful, for example, to identify the violent districts on maps and trace the changing locations of violent activity over time. Such an approach would have permitted an analysis of the relationship between levels of homicides and the development of the California economy and human geography. The author makes several statements regarding the frequency of various crimes, the growth in gambling houses and brothels, and trends in violent behavior that are not supported by arrest statistics. Readers would be better able to follow the evolution of public concern about violence, if they could be made to understand how homicides and social problems intermingled within the social spaces of California. Finally, although he points out that the 1850s were characterized by a high level of homicides, he does not provide information on how the level of homicide evolved between 1850 and 1900. This information would have provided the reader with a better understanding of the evolution of California towards a more stable society.

Nevertheless, this is an important book, because it provides a vivid description of homicides among four important groups in California. In his final appraisal, the author judiciously avoids claiming too much about the relationship between cultural tradition and homicides rates. His main contribution consists in showing clearly that there existed in nineteenth-century California two standards of justice and that minorities suffered from the direct and indirect prejudices on the part of white law enforcement officers. Moreover, McKanna's book is well written as his words flow with charm, clarity, and style. Despite some deficiencies, the work has several merits. Scholars as well as general readers will find useful information not available elsewhere in print.

Gilles Vandal

Universite de Sherbrooke