The Political-Criminal Nexus: Emerging Violent Threat to Governability in the Twenty-First Century

Roy Godson, Government, Georgetown University

Research Grant, 1998, 1999

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One of the more dangerous contemporary threats to the quality of life is the collaboration of the political establishment with the criminal underworld—the political-criminal nexus (PCN). These partnerships increasingly undermine the rule of law, human rights, and economic development in many parts of the world, especially in states in transition.

The problem is chronic in, for example, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, and Taiwan. Only the forms and balance of power among the players change. In other areas, such as Colombia, the Andes, Afghanistan, Southwest and Southeast Asia, the Balkans and the Caucuses, the problem is more acute, violent, and kaleidoscopic, and often it dominates political, economic, and social life.

Despite the potential magnitude, there is little understanding of the security threats posed by the PCNs and how and why political-criminal relationships are formed and maintained. Nor has there been systematic study of policy prescriptions for disrupting existing relationships or methods for preventing future ones from developing. Menace to Society (Transaction, 2003) is the first attempt to develop an analytical framework. Case studies of Colombia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia and the Ukraine, and the United States by leading scholars and practitioners answer such key questions as:

How do PCNs get established?
How is a PCN maintained, and destroyed?
What do the participants want from each other in a PCN?
What can be learned from those who have successfully countered the PCN?

When state institutions are weak, as in Nigeria and Colombia, the state often cannot prevent political-criminal collaboration. A lack of checks and balances, either from civil society or opposition political parties, is a key factor.

The findings indicate that political, economic, and cultural factors play a significant role in the formation and evolution of PCNs. When state institutions are weak, as in Nigeria and Colombia, the state often cannot prevent political-criminal collaboration. A lack of checks and balances, either from civil society or opposition political parties, is a key factor. Cultural patterns tend to facilitate this kind of collaboration. In patron-client relationships, individuals, criminal and noncriminal, come to accept that solutions to economic and personal needs and conflicts depend on certain leaders.

Markets and economics are also affected. In many countries, the supply and demand for illegal goods and services, not only drugs, creates a market controlled by criminals who need political help to “run” their business. In Colombia, for example, the scale of illicit funds made creation of a national level PCN a major goal of the cartels. The line between legitimate and illegitimate business is increasingly blurred.

As local problems become global, and global problems have local effects, the complex relations between criminals and political elites appear to explain much, not only about local politics, but also regional and global trends in world politics. These increasingly complicated dynamics have also created a new kind of security challenge, the contours of which are only gradually coming into focus.

There has been some progress in countering the PCN. Lessons can be learned from experiences in Hong Kong and Sicily, for example, where law enforcement has been boosted by cultural changes that have diminished political-criminal collaboration. These examples may illustrate a promising approach that has applicability elsewhere.

Low Serotonin, Cholesterol, and Violent Behavior

Beatrice Golomb, Psychology, University of Southern California

Research Grant, 1996, 1997

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We conducted several studies evaluating the link between physiological factors and violence. First, we reviewed the literature linking low and lowered cholesterol to violence and to lowered brain serotonin activity. (Low brain serotonin activity has been linked to suicide and violence against others; and to reduced “harm avoidance.”) We found that many different classes of literature converged to support a connection, including studies of populations in whom cholesterol was measured, who were followed across time for cause of death (including violent death); studies of suicide in psychiatric populations; studies of violence in institutionalized criminals; and “meta-analyses” (pooled analyses) of clinical trials comparing cholesterol-lowering drugs to placebo, in which the cause of death was stated. In addition to findings in humans, there were also studies in which it was found that monkeys assigned to a cholesterol-lowering diet were more aggressive (toward other monkeys) and had lower measures of brain serotonin than those monkeys that were not so assigned. This study, and a follow-up letter, were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1998.

We found that persons with low cholesterol at baseline were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against others, an effect that remained present after controlling for potential "confounding" factors (factors that might be linked to both cholesterol and violence, like age, sex, alcohol, and educational status).

In a second study, we collaborated with an investigator from the University of Stockholm, and gained permission from the Swedish government to merge major databases in Sweden, to examine whether low cholesterol was linked to arrests for violent crime against others. Cholesterol had been measured in a population (over seventy thousand individuals) in a region of Sweden called Varmland, in the mid-1960s, and a computerized police database became available in 1966, providing follow-up information on arrests. We gained permission to merge cholesterol information with alcohol information, police arrest records, the Swedish Central Person Registry (which provided information on subjects’ age and sex, for instance), the Swedish education registry, and the Swedish mortality registry. We found that persons with low cholesterol at baseline were significantly more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against others, an effect that remained present after controlling for potential “confounding” factors (factors that might be linked to both cholesterol and violence, like age, sex, alcohol, and educational status). This work was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2000.

In a third study, we collaborated with investigators from the Helsinki Heart Study in Finland to examine whether there was a connection between “insulin sensitivity” and future suicide and accident, studying persons who had been screened for possible participation in the Helsinki Heart Study. (The “insulin resistance” syndrome is a prediabetic condition that includes a suite of correlated findings: persons with insulin resistance tend to have low HDL-cholesterol, high systolic blood pressure, and high “body mass index,” that is, weight as a function of height. Insulin sensitivity, then, refers to persons who are at the other end of the spectrum on these measures, with high HDL-cholesterol, and low systolic blood pressure and body mass index.) We hypothesized that people with markers of insulin sensitivity might be at higher risk of accidental death and suicide (though at lower risk of heart disease). We showed a biochemical mechanism by which insulin sensitivity would be expected to be linked to reduced delivery of tryptophan to the brain (and thus, potentially, reduced serotonin production, because tryptophan is the substrate for the “rate-limiting” reaction in serotonin production). The study found that people with one or more insulin sensitivity markers, including high HDL-cholesterol, low systolic blood pressure, and low body mass index, were more likely to experience death from accident and suicide than persons without these factors; and the more markers of insulin sensitivity they had, the greater this risk became. This finding was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2002.

Bibliography

1. Golomb BA. "Cholesterol and violence: Is there a connection?" Annals of Internal Medicine 1998; 128:478-487.

2. Golomb B. "Cholesterol and violence: is there a connection?" Annals of Internal Medicine 1998; 129:669-70.

3. Golomb BA, Stattin H, Mednick SA. "Low cholesterol and violent crime." Journal of Psychiatric Research 2000; 34:301-309.

4. Golomb BA, Tenkanen L, Alikoski T, et al. "Insulin sensitivity markers: Predictors of accidents and suicides in Helsinki Heart Study screenees." Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2002; 55:1-7.

Translations of Antisemitism: The History of Jews and Violence in Indonesia

Jeffrey Hadler, Anthropology

Research Grant, 1999

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I conceived my research project in May, 1998, in the aftermath of the fall of President Soeharto in Indonesia. That month saw horrendous violence committed against the Chinese community in Jakarta—torture, rape, and murder. The dehumanizing rhetoric that accompanied this violence reminded me of European antisemitic discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: describing a people who were urban, parasitic, exploitative, and antinationalistic, who participated in occult and deviant dietary and sexual rituals.

Scholars have assumed that Indonesian antisemitism is a case of “antisemitism without Jews”; that current anti-Jewish rhetoric is borrowed from Middle Eastern anti-Zionist propaganda. This viewpoint is limited. In my research I analyze the history and role of the Jewish community during the period of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. I assess the position of both Dutch and so-called “oriental” or “Baghdadi” Jews in the economic and social life of the colony, discussing the role of Zionism and imperial antisemitism, and paying particular attention to the interactions of the Jews and the Indonesians. I scrutinize the antisemitic rhetoric of the Vaderlandsche Club, an Indies racist organization that channeled funds to and was eventually superseded in the 1930s by the Dutch Nazi Party, and I analyze the particular antisemitism cultivated by the Axis during the Japanese occupation.

In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political "reformasi" and Zionism.

Indonesian colonial Jewry cut across official colonial categories, with Dutch, Arab, Chinese, and even “native” congregants. The community maintained a Zionist newspaper, “Erets Israel,” that was published from 1926 until the Japanese occupation. Jews met in the one synagogue in Surabaya and held services in Masonic Lodges and Theosophical Halls (two other groups reviled by conspiracy theorists today). In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political “reformasi” and Zionism. The Surabaya synagogue has drawn the attention of Australian Lubavitchers and is now a sort of Jewish mission field. My research consisted then of two related projects. On one hand I undertook archival research into the history of the Jewish community in colonial Indonesia. The results of this research have been presented at conferences and are the subject of a forthcoming article.

My second project was more ethnographic and is ongoing—a study of the small community of Indonesian Jews in Jakarta and Surabaya and their relationship to both an Indonesian state that does not recognize Judaism as a religion and to a community of Muslim neighbors who are increasingly angry with Israel, the United States, and the perceived role of international Zionists in destabilizing Indonesia and the Islamic world. Furthermore I speculate about whether the ideological justifications for current anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia were not maintained throughout the New Order in easily translated antisemitism. If the violence of the late 1960s was hung on an anticommunist reed, then the racist rhetoric of 1998 echoed with antisemitism. Chinese are depicted as antinationalists, practitioners of native labor abuse and then reflexive capital flight. Such shadowy “conglomerates” and peripatetic urban exploiters are as Jewish as they are Chinese stereotypes. Of course Southeast Asians have a much longer experience of Chinese contact than they do Jewish interaction. However, in the face of state-sanctioned silence when it came to discussions of the Chinese, it is plausible that anti-Chinese rhetoric migrated towards antisemitism in the Soeharto era. This second project, since it involves a living and potentially threatened community, is far more difficult to publicize.

Social Dominance and Coercive Strategies of Resource Control in Children

Patricia H. Hawley, Psychology, Southern Connecticut State University

Research Grant, 2001

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Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological or behavioral maladaptation (impulsivity, social cognitive deficits) that puts the child at risk for peer rejection. Yet we casually observe that many high-status and well-accepted individuals (e.g., CEOs, political leaders) are modestly aggressive in their own right. Is aggression in some contexts adaptive and socially competent?

A strategy-based evolutionary perspective on resource control and social dominance suggests that there are at least two types of aggressive individuals: those who engage in purely coercive strategies of resource control (e.g., make threats of harm) and those who balance coercion with prosocial strategies (e.g., promise reciprocation, friendship). Hypothesized here is that those who balance the two strategies enjoy high resource control and high status. Furthermore, these children were hypothesized to be relatively socially skilled, in contrast to prevailing views that suggest aggressive children are particularly unskilled.

Two independently measured resource control strategies (prosocial and coercive) give rise to five resource control groups: prosocial controllers (high prosocial control, low coercive control); coercive controllers (high coercive, low prosocial); bistrategic controllers (high on both); noncontrollers (low on both); and typical children (midrange on both).

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics.

One hundred and sixty-three preschoolers participated in this study. Teachers were asked via questionnaire about the children’s resource control abilities and strategies (prosocial, coercive), personalities, aggressive behavior, and social skills. The children were interviewed for their verbal ability, moral reasoning (e.g., “Is it right or wrong to take a toy from another child?”), and social problem-solving skills (e.g., “What would you do to get a turn?”). We also assessed whether the children were esteemed by peers by asking each child to nominate peers who they most liked. Those who received the most nominations were considered well-accepted.

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics. For example, bistrategics were well above average on peer acceptance and highest on attention to social cues (they know how they make others feel) and emotional manipulation (they can pretend to be angry/sad to get what they want). Prosocial controllers were rated equally as accepted and equally skilled as the bistrategics, but not emotionally manipulative. Coercive controllers were neither accepted nor skilled, but, like bistrategics, highly manipulative. The bistrategic personality profile stands out as low on anxiety and high on extroversion. They were rated high on all types of aggressive behavior (hitting, social exclusion) like coercive controllers, but uniquely high in relational aggression (i.e., social exclusion; “you can’t play with us”). Despite their aggression, they were the least likely to admit to using coercion and most likely to claim to use competent strategies on the social problem-solving measure. Furthermore, they were the most developed in their moral reasoning. Last, they as a group received the most “like most” nominations from their peers.

The approach applied here highlights the utility of exploring different subgroups of aggressive children. Aggressiveness paired with prosociality may be in some ways adaptive and, rather than being associated with skills deficits, appears to be associated with indicators of social competence.

Bibliography

1. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Strategies of control, aggression, and morality in preschoolers: An evolutionary perspective. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 85, 213-235.

2. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Prosocial and coercive configurations of resource control in early adolescence: A case for the well-adapted Machiavellian. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 279-309 (Special volume: Aggression and adaptation: The bright side to bad behavior).

Mechanisms Underlying “Pathological” Forms of Aggression in Rats

Jozsef Haller, Biology, Institute of Experimental Medicine

Research Grant, 2001, 2002

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The involvement of the overproduction of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) in the etiology of mood disorders (e.g., anxiety and depression) is well established. In contrast, the psychopathological consequences of glucocorticoid underproduction received comparatively little attention, despite the fact that disparate human studies suggest an involvement of glucocorticoid deficiency in abnormal human aggression. We have recently reported that experimentally induced glucocorticoid insufficiency induces abnormal forms of aggression in rats. Such rats target their attacks to vulnerable parts (mainly the head) of their opponents. In addition, intention signaling (threat behavior) is deficient in these rats. These data suggest that glucocorticoid deficiency is a risk factor in the etiology of aggression-related psychopathologies.

In the present work, we aimed at understanding the mechanisms of glucocorticoid insufficiency–induced aggression, with special reference to mechanisms involved in fear and anxiety. In addition, possibilities of counteracting the behavioral anomaly are surveyed.

In the experiments performed so far, we have shown that chronic but not acute glucocorticoid deficiency facilitates aberrant attacks. An acute suppression of glucocorticoid synthesis decreased aggressive behavior without affecting attack targeting. In contrast, chronic glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect the level of aggressiveness, but increased attacks aimed at vulnerable body parts of the opponents, and decreased intention signaling. Glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect anxiety levels in nonsocial settings but induced signs of anxiety in the social interaction test of anxiety. This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general. Glucocorticoid deficiency also induced deviant cardiovascular responses in challenging situations. Rats with experimentally induced glucocorticoid deficiency showed decreased heart rate increases when challenged with an opponent in familiar or unfamiliar environments. The difference was not due to differences in work load, as glucocoticoid deficiency did not affect locomotion in either setting. Notably, violent criminals were shown to have decreased basal heart rates and decreased cardiovascular reactivity in challenging situations.

This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general.

We have also studied the effects of glucocoticoid deficiency on the aggression-induced activation of various brain centers. We have assessed the neuronal activation patterns induced by aggressive behavior in rats. The so-called cFos technique employed provided results largely consistent with those provided earlier by lesion and stimulation techniques. We have noticed, however, that the activation of a neuronal path involving the hypothalamic attack area, mediodorsal thalamus, and frontal cortical areas is a prerequisite of attacks. We have also noticed that the activation patterns of brain centers involved in aggression control were not affected by glucocorticoid deficiency. In contrast, glucocorticoid deficiency induced a strong activation of the brain centers involved in the stress response and fear. Currently, we investigate the connections and the neurochemical nature of neurons involved in aggression control, to get more insights into the neural control of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced abnormal aggression.

The data presented above suggest that fear is an important determinant of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced aggression. Therefore, we assessed whether anxiolytics are able to suppress the abnormal behavioral pattern induced by glucocorticoid deficiency. Surprisingly, the serotonergic anxiolytic buspirone aggravated rather than ameliorated the behavioral anomaly. Studies are currently being performed with other anxiolytics and compounds used for treating aggression-related human disorders.

Blackfoot Traditional Models of Aggression and Healing

Russel Barsh, Native American Studies, University of Lethbridge

Research Grant, 1995, 1996

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The Blackfoot of Montana and Alberta were once regarded as the most aggressive tribal people of the North American prairies. Between 1820 and 1870 they repelled Cree, American, and Canadian encroachments, and retained control of Canada’s largest Indian Reserve (the Blood Reserve, Alberta) and second-largest U.S. Indian reservation through treaties negotiated in 1868 through 1877. However, outsiders who lived with Blackfoot people—from eighteenth-century British fur traders to early-twentieth-century ethnographers—witnessed very little interpersonal violence within Blackfoot communities.

In Never in Anger, her study of a Canadian Inuit community nearly fifty years ago, anthropologist Jean Briggs explored the paradox of an externally very violent society that is internally peaceful. Briggs focused on child-rearing practices that emphasized respect for the human body, as opposed to the bodies of the marine mammals that comprised the bulk of the Inuit diet. Since Briggs’s study, most Inuit have stopped hunting—and grown considerably more violent towards each other. In Blackfoot country, a thousand miles to the south, interpersonal violence has also increased sharply since the 1950s.

With a team of Blackfoot students and elders, researcher Russel Barsh asked two questions: Could the recent growth of interpersonal violence amongst the Blackfoot have been the result of changing child-rearing practices (weak socialization), as well as decreasing economic self-sufficiency (a source of frustration and conflict)? Could self-awareness of changes in child-rearing promote action by the Blackfoot community to address violence through the revival or adaptation of traditional socialization strategies?

Participants concluded that Blackfoot traditional child-rearing focused initially on making the child fully human, that is, understanding and accepting social responsibilities, by about age seven.

Over the course of nearly three years, Barsh and his team organized a number of retreats with a wide cross-section of Blackfoot “grandmothers and grandfathers”—people highly regarded among their peers as virtuous and knowledgeable. The work began with an All-Smokes ceremony hosted by the research team that was facilitated by members of the Horn Society, one of the traditional sacred societies that keep Blackfoot knowledge. The approach taken was ethnomethodological: helping knowledgeable Blackfoot people address the research question in their own way, challenging them from time to time with empirical evidence and further questions. All work was done in the Blackfoot language, analyzed in Blackfoot, and only summaries and conclusions were translated into English. This made full use of the distinctive semantics and conceptual vocabulary of Blackfoot, and helped protect the intellectual property of Blackfoot participants. At the same time, it was expected that the retreats would foster a wider discussion throughout the community of more than twenty-five thousand Blackfoot people in Alberta and Montana.

Participants concluded that Blackfoot traditional child-rearing focused initially on making the child fully human, that is, understanding and accepting social responsibilities, by about age seven. The collective role of the community in this maturation process was underscored, and especially the role of the sacred societies and individual “grandparents” (collectively recognized older teachers or mentors). Self-control and deference to others’ feelings and needs were uppermost, older participants recalled. Contemporary violence was attributed to the breakdown of mentoring relationships between “grandparents” and young children, and to public education programs (although administered by Blackfoot school boards) that stressed information acquisition and individual success, as opposed to kinship, moral philosophy, shared responsibility, and the feelings of others.

Consequences of this collaborative community study were mixed. Participants presented their findings and recommendation to Blackfoot educators and elected leaders but were gently rebuffed; mainstream curricula, and mainstream training of teachers and young parents would continue unaltered. Nevertheless, the issues raised continue to be debated within the community. Both Blackfoot researchers completed graduate degrees and are teaching younger Blackfoot professionals at a community college and university. One of the facilitators recently launched a social research institute on the Blood Reserve, as well as a University of Calgary–based Canada Fund for Innovation project, The Virtual Circle, aimed at promoting socially useful research by Native scholars.

Economic Stress and Crime in Japan

Aki Roberts, Sociology, University of New Mexico

Research Grant, 2002

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This research had three main parts. First, I examined the effect of levels of economic stress (income inequality and unemployment) on Japanese crime trends in the forty-seven Japanese prefectures (geographical units similar to provinces or states), with data from ten time points between 1955 and 2000. For the second part, using the prefectural-level time-series data, I examined both short-term (immediate) and long-term (lasting) effects of economic stress variables on violent crimes through “error correction” models. Economic stress, measured by unemployment and within- and between-prefecture income inequality, is significantly and positively associated with robbery rates. In the “error correction” analysis, unemployment and both measures of income inequality also had significant and positive short- and long-run effects on robbery. This suggests that high levels of those economic stress variables increase robbery rates immediately, and also have lasting effects. Unemployment also had significant and positive effects, including short- and long-run, on homicide, but income inequality measures did not. It may be that the nonsignificant results for income inequality reflect the more directly economic nature of robbery compared to homicide.

The most common explanation for Japanese postwar crime rates links unique cultural characteristics to a system of exceptionally effective informal social controls that, at the macro level, suggest low levels of social disorganization. However, in general measures of social disorganization (divorce, female labor participation, and urbanization) were not significantly associated with violent crime rates. None of the measures of social disorganization had significant effects in the robbery models. The significant and expected positive effects of divorce on homicide were the only evidence consistent with the social disorganization account.

The results of the pooled time-series analysis of forty-seven Japanese prefectures found that economic stress variables were better predictors than social disorganization variables of violent crime trends in postwar Japan.

The third part of the research was intended to foster a more general understanding of the relationship between economic stress and crime trends. I examined whether differences in levels of economic stress can account for the changing discrepancy in the United States and Japanese violent crime rates through time-series analysis of data from both countries between 1951 and 2000. The results of the pooled time-series analysis of forty-seven Japanese prefectures found that economic stress variables were better predictors than social disorganization variables of violent crime trends in postwar Japan. However, according to the results of time-series analysis of differences in violent crime rates between United States and Japan, differences in both economic stress and social disorganization measures helped explain the differences in violent crime rates between two countries. These differences were associated with differences in the level of divorce, female labor participation, income inequality, and poverty.

A paper on the results of the prefectural-level time-series is under review by the journal Criminology. I am waiting to submit the results from the “error correction” models and time-series analysis on United States and Japan differences to academic journals because I would like to cite the prefectural-level time-series paper if it is accepted for publication in Criminology.

Intimate Violence in Community Context

Christopher R. Browning, Psychology, University of Chicago

Research Grant, 1999

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This research applies the social disorganization perspective on the neighborhood-level determinants of crime to partner violence. The social disorganization approach focuses on the role of neighborhood characteristics such as poverty, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity in limiting the social resources available to achieve shared community goals. Specifically, I hypothesize that trust, attachment to community, and the associated willingness of residents to intervene on behalf of one another—the combination of which has been described as collective efficacy—may help limit the prevalence of violence between intimate partners. The analysis brings data from the 1990 Decennial Census together with the 1994–95 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey, the 1994–95 Chicago Homicide Data, and the 1995–97 Chicago Health and Social Life Survey to study the impact of neighborhood characteristics on partner violence, above and beyond the effects of individual characteristics. Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level. However, collective efficacy exerts a more powerful regulatory effect on nonlethal violence in neighborhoods where the tolerance of intimate violence is low. Finally, collective efficacy also increases the likelihood that women will disclose conflict in their relationships to various potential sources of support. This research points to the importance of neighborhood environment for regulating violence between intimate partners.

Findings indicate that collective efficacy is negatively associated with both neighborhood-level intimate homicide rates and self-reports of nonlethal partner violence at the individual level.

The Mind of the Segregationist

David Chappell, History, University of Arkansas

Research Grant, 1999

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The biggest result so far of my project, “The Mind of the Segregationist,” is one-third of my book, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004, University of North Carolina Press). An advance review in the Atlantic Monthly (November 2003) assessed the book as “one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement.” My summary of the book appears as the lead article in the Journal of the Historical Society (Spring 2003).

Still in the works is the larger project the grant supported, an entire book devoted to segregationist propaganda and strategy, tentatively titled The Mind of the Segregationist. I have drafted about half of that manuscript—most of the three most important chapters: on constitutional arguments, on religious arguments, and on the “classics” of segregationist thought (Herman Talmadge’s You and Segregation, Judge Tom Brady’s Black Monday, James J. Kilpatrick’s series of “Interposition” editorials, former Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Byrnes’s article in U.S. News and World Report, etc.).

My HFG grant covered travel expenses to the archives of prominent segregationists, and of southern leaders who wrestled with segregationism but decided not to support it. The most interesting in the latter category was the popular evangelist Billy Graham. Graham and his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell (a prominent conservative southern Presbyterian editor and former missionary, who answered much of Graham’s mail and guided him on practical and spiritual questions), both declared publicly, in Life magazine in 1956, that segregation could not be biblically or constitutionally justified. Ebony magazine made much of Graham’s stance, praising him lavishly in September 1957, but historians have ignored it—along with Graham’s refusal to practice segregation in his southern “crusades” after 1954 or so and his public endorsement of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. Segregationists attacked Graham for deviating from what they understood as the conservative course on race. Graham was often soft-spoken about his integrationist stance after 1956, but he stuck to it.

Graham’s position on race would have been career suicide had he run for public office. Elected southern leaders went the opposite way, achieving near unanimity in their “Southern Manifesto” of opposition to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions of 1954 and 1955 (Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Al Gore Sr. were the only southern senators who declined to sign). Graham, however, remained one of the most popular figures in the South, and on most issues one of the most conservative.

The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought.

Other religious leaders of the white South were closer to Graham than to the elected politicians. Both the Southern Baptist Convention and the (southern) Presbyterian Church in the U.S. voted by strong majorities to support public school desegregation in 1954. The vote in the SBC, the more democratic of the two all-southern denominations, was roughly nine thousand to fifty. Segregationists attacked their own churches in order to promote segregationism, though surprisingly few congregations achieved enough unity or militance on the question to withhold funds from the denomination or to withdraw from it, or even to threaten to do so.

Integrationists ridiculed the absurd attempts of a few lay and clerical leaders on the fringe of the segregation movement to use the Bible to justify segregation. But the integrationist reaction seems to have exaggerated the extent and the influence of biblical arguments among segregationists. Far more common than segregationist “proof-texting” in the records of both religious and secular segregationists are statements of an increasingly heated anticlericalism. The southern white churches ended up conflicted, passive, and relatively silent on race questions. As frustrating as that silence was to Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, it was also frustrating to the segregationists who felt abandoned and betrayed by their own churches. The segregationists recognized that their cause was greatly weakened by their inability to match what the Black leader Fred Shuttlesworth called his “weapons of spiritual warfare.”

The archival record suggests that segregationism, though it was the leading issue in southern election campaigns from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, did not go as deep in southern white culture and psychology as historians have hitherto thought. The further one went below the surface of opinion polls and demagogic single-issue campaigns, the less solidarity and confidence one found among white southerners on segregation. Their segregationism did not have nearly the cultural and spiritual resonance that the defense of slavery had had one hundred years earlier. In the slavery struggle, the South’s leading ministers and theologians confidently and resourcefully claimed slavery was a “positive” good, sanctioned by the Bible as well as the Constitution and classical philosophy. There is nothing like that confidence and commitment to segregation a hundred years later: though the opinion polls show overwhelming numbers “favor” segregation, they do not show how much white southerners were willing to sacrifice to defend segregation. The polls do not reveal the deep conflict among white southerners over how best to defend segregation.

If we seek to understand how an impoverished, disfranchised, and unarmed minority succeeded in overthrowing the system of segregation, we must learn how they found and exploited the fissures and pressure points in southern white society. The conflict between the white South’s political and religious institutions helps us begin to understand that although white southerners overwhelmingly supported segregation, they were not about to make significant sacrifices to defend it, and the were incapable of unifying behind any particular strategy of defense.

Had American liberals grasped that basic truth about the white South, they might have found the nerve to challenge segregation a lot earlier and more effectively than they did. As things turned out, American liberals were instead dragged with little preparation into the wake of an indigenous Black southern movement. That movement’s greatest gift, my research suggests, was that its leaders understood the white South better than the liberals—or the racist politicians who represented the white South—did.

Mental Representations of Attachment in Twins: A Study of Monozygotic Female Pairs Concordant and Discordant for Abnormally Aggressive Behavior

John N. Constantino, Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine

Research Grant, 2001, 2002

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Previous research has suggested a link between the quality of early social relationships and the development of aggression. This association is most pronounced when children are maltreated, but the mechanism by which social experience influences social developmental outcome is poorly understood. One possible mechanism is that relationship-relevant experiences are incorporated into an internal working model (mental representation) of social relationships that is used on a moment-to-moment basis in the context of social interaction. Most previous studies of attachment characteristics and psychopathology have not been able to control adequately for the possibility that any observed association might be due to genetic influences that independently affect both. This study represents an initial step in elucidating the genetic structure of mental representations of attachment (MRA) and the extent to which MRA in turn might mediate the development of abnormally aggressive behavior. Specifically, this study examines concordance in attachment status among pairs of female adolescent monozygotic twins, as well as their non-twin siblings (NTS) and relates attachment classification to several parameters of antisocial development.

The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder.

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has been completed on 40 pairs of identical female twins, concordant or discordant for a presence or absence of conduct disorder. The AAI is an established, one-hour, audiotaped interview that assesses an adult or adolescent subject’s current state of mind with respect to relationships. It inquires about the subject’s own early relationships with caregivers, and about previous experience with separation, loss, or trauma. It classifies an individual’s mental representation of attachment into one of four categories (secure-autonomous, insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied, insecure-unresolved), which correspond to the four attachment categories used to classify parent-infant dyads in the Ainsworth Strange Situation.

The results to date indicate that mental representations of attachment are substantially influenced by shared environmental influences and are associated with current levels of aggressive behavior, as well as histories of arrest and symptoms of conduct disorder. These findings support the notion that mental representations of attachment are, in large part, a function of environmental factors, and that they may play a mediating role in the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior. Interventions that promote the development of secure parent-child relationships early in life may help prevent the development of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior.