The L.A. Times published an op-ed on Monday touting Randolph Roth’s recent book, American Homicide (Wash. Post review). Roth is a historian at OSU who studies violence and social change, a subject I am intensely interested in as well. In American Homicide, Roth argues that the homicide rate in the United States tends to spike not as a result of gun ownership or poverty, but when people lose faith in their government. He claims that the first such notable rise in violence occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, “a catastrophic failure in nation-building,” when a significant proportion of the population became extremely suspicious of their fellow Americans.

If true, that thesis bodes ill for our current situation, in which oddly apocalyptic rhetoric over ostensibly ordinary government actions seems to be on the rise. Loss of a debate now seems to no longer be an invitation to try harder next year, but rather conclusive evidence that the entire system is corrupt. While some have expressed the fear that such rhetoric will lead to large outbursts of explicitly anti-government violence, such as that planned by the militia members recently arrested in Michigan, the connection between overwrought rhetoric and such extremists seems tenuous at best. What seems more likely is that heated rhetoric augurs simply more violence, not violence directed at a particular target.

But predicting the future is treacherous business; it is far safer to try to explain the past. And Roth’s thesis, as I understand it (I haven’t read the book), helps explain some aspects of a phenomenon I’ve been interested in for a while now—the outbreak of violence in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 and 1882, usually referred to as “the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

The “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” is usually conceived of as a single and semi-mythic instance of Western heroism, in which officers of the law faced down ruthless criminals and brought them to justice. That’s certainly the way Wyatt Earp spun the tale almost fifty years later. But what captured my interest in the subject in college, after having written a high-school book report debunking the standard story told in such films as The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and My Darling Clementine, was that the famous gunfight turned out to be simply one episode in a general storm of lawlessness that spiralled out of control in southeastern Arizona. “Lawlessness” is actually the wrong term, since it implies the absence of law. What happened in Tombstone was a struggle for control of the social order of a boomtown. Each side of the conflict had some claim to be associated with the formal structures of government—the Earps were associated with the city police force, appointed by the Republican mayor (and editor of the Republican Tombstone Epitaph); the Clantons, their opponents, were ranchers associated with the Democratic county sheriff, and supported by the Democratic Tombstone Nugget.

The irony of Tombstone was that the violence there was not the result of the absence of social order, but the result of too many social orders. Tombstone got its start in 1877 as a mining town when silver was discovered there. In five years the town swelled from a population of 0 to a city of 7,000, one of the largest in the West. More importantly, the character of the city rapidly changed. The earliest settlers were young, single male miners and ranchers raising cattle in the areas around the city (some of whom stocked their herds with cattle stolen from Mexico). The miners were a hodge-podge of different ethnicities, but the cowboys, as they were known, were primarily Southern Democrats. As the city prospered, however, a different wave of immigrants poured in—striving Northeastern Republican entrepreneurs striving to replicate the towns and communities they had left behind, with one difference: in this community they would be on top of the social hierarchy. The newcomers established more permanent government, economic, and cultural institutions: churches, stores, opera houses, social fraternities. But the rapid shift put incredible pressure on the society of Tombstone. Social norms can change, but they can’t change that fast. The county government remained beyond their grasp, as did the rowdy night life of Tombstone, despite the adoption of a controversial gun-control ordinance. It was those tensions that led to the business leaders of Tombstone, who had formed their own vigilante group, pressuring the Earps to confront the Clantons over a relatively minor incident that had essentially already been resolved. From there the violence spun out of control to such an extent that President Chester Arthur, in May 1882, issued a proclamation ordering the residents of southeastern Arizona to lay down their arms or face martial law.

Among the things that struck me as I researched the society of Tombstone, and this ties back to Roth, was the incredible antipathy left over from the Civil War. George Parsons, a Republican entrepreneur who had migrated to Tombstone early on to seek his fortune, described Democrats repeatedly as “traitors” in his diary, and expressed amazement that, essentially, all Southerners had not been rounded up and tried for treason—fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, a war that ended when Parsons himself was only fourteen. The deep distrust between Republicans and Democrats in Tombstone had some of its origins in their different norms and social practices, certainly, but Roth’s thesis suggests that the two groups may have already been predisposed to define the other as a group that put no reasonable limits on what they were willing to do. And if one’s opponents are without limit, then it does not make sense to limit one’s own behavior, as George Smiley recognized.

That’s the danger then in coming to see a system of government as not simply wrong, but deeply corrupt. Eighteenth-century Americans came to see Britain that way, and the Revolution was the result. But 1870s southerners also came to see the post-war society that way, and the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow were the results. In both cases rapid changes destabilized the existing social order, leading to violence; but it’s fairly impossible for persons bound up in that social order to make contemporaneous objective judgements about the reasonableness of their rage at the changes around them.