High Crime Rate in "Moral" Nation Explained by Our Individualistic Nature, Dec. 2, 1921

“Undoubtedly the United States Is the Most Moral Nation on Earth, But----”

By Prof. C.A. Beard, New School for Social Research

Undoubtedly, the United States is the most moral nation on earth; but when compared with nations of approximately equal civilization, its criminal statistics are appalling. We have more rigid standards of propriety than any people of Europe. We have much more moral legislation, and the police departments of a hundred cities work overtime in order to make all sorts of sins impossible. But careful reports prove there are more murders in one second-rate American city, like Chicago, than there are in all England and Wales; and as for burglary—well burglary insurance costs approximately 15 times as much in American cities as it does in European cities of the same class.

Americans are an unruly lot. Historically, they always have been. We began our independence with revolution, and incorrigible individualism is the very warp and woof of American tradition. After the Revolution, American history was very largely the story of the extensions of the western frontier. This was a continuous tale of Indian wars, of gunplay, of settling all scores between man and man. “May the best man win” is a cardinal point in our national faith; and right up to the present time Americans have never been known as over fastidious in their recognition of success.

And the history of America, since the frontier was annihilated and it became necessary to live as a settled community, has not been so altogether different. Socially, America has never been settled. The social frontier is still open to all comers, and it is our proudest American boast that this is so.

But in no country in the history of the world have there been such comers. By natural selection thousands of these immigrants have been individualistic, for had they been of the staid, settled and conformist type, they would not have emigrated.

What would you expect to be the percentage of crime in such a country? Don't you think it would be about all that the traffic would bear? Well, it is, and it always has been. And any attempt to fix the entire blame upon the laxity of some particular police department in some particular city will not get us very far toward correcting the situation.

From The Brevard News, Dec. 2, 1921