To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility1
| Author | Richard V. Denenberg |
| Date | 01 January 1971 |
| Published date | 01 January 1971 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1971.tb02315.x |
KliiPOnT
OF
COMMITTEI!:
TO
ESThBLISIi
JUSTICE,
TO
INSURE
DOMESTIC
TRANQUILITY
IT
is becoming rather difficult
to
distinguish among
all
the com-
missions which have been sent out to discover why America is such
a
tumultuous nation, President Jobnson appointed the National
Commission on Civil Disorders in
1067
and the Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence in
1968,
and President Nixon
has demonstrated recently the bipartisan
appeal
of the idea by
appointing
a
Commission on Campus Unrest.
To
keep the com-
missions straight in one's mind, one must remember them
as
desperate Presidential responses to irnmcdiate crises
:
for
"
civil
disorders
)'
read rnce riots;
for
"
campus unrest
"
read the Kent
State shootings. The Commission
on
the Causes and Prevention of
Violence represented President Johnson's effort to do something
reassuring after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and,
three months later, Robert Kennedy. The fear that America had
become
a
''
banana republic," its political destiny dictated by
anyone with enough money to buy
a
pistol,
was
widespread at that
moment. Violence already had claimed the lives of President
Kennedy, Malcolm
X
and dozens of civil rights activists in the
South since the beginning of the decade. Political demonstrations
were
turning from peaceful marching to street brawling, and, in
the aftermath of the ghetto riots, the Black Panthers were talking
of urban guerrilla warfare.
President Johnson appointed
a
Commission of diverse political
persuasions, comprising two blacks, conservative and liberal Con-
gressmen, several lawyers,
a
university president,
a
cardinal,
a
psychiatrist, and
a
docker-philosopher. Directed by the President
to
go
"
as
far
as
man's knowledge takes
"
us
toward understanding
violence, the Commission created seven
"
task forces
"
of researchers
and five
"
investigative teams
')
and soon, the research directors
tell
us,
"
had begun enough new projects to launch
a
small univer-
sity with
a
score of doctoral theses." The task forces studied
"
Violence in America
:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives,"
"
Firearms and Violence in American Life,"
"
Assassination and
Political Violence,"
"
The Politics
of
Protest,"
"
Mass Media and
Violence," among other topics, and the investigative teams pre-
pared studies of selected violent episodes, including the disorders at
the
1968
Democratic National Convention in Chicago. We hardly
can
fault this prodigious scholarly undcrtaking
for
not producing
a
Final Report
of
tlic
Nntioiisl
Cornniission on the Causes
and
Prevention
of
Violence (United States Governinent Printing
Ofice,
Washington, D.C.,
December,
19G9),
xxxii
and
338
pp.,
$1.50.
75
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