cause of political turmoil and violence. Perhaps the most prominent
proponent of this argument is James C. Davies, who states that we are
most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic
and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal in those
conditions. Thus it is not the traditionally most downtrodden
people—who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural
order of things—who are especially liable to revolt. Instead, revolution-
aries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste
of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have
experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they
desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them.^15
Davies has gathered persuasive evidence for his novel thesis from a
range of revolutions, revolts, and internal wars, including the French,
Russian, and Egyptian revolutions as well as such domestic uprisings
as Dorr’s Rebellion in nineteenth-century Rhode Island, the American
Civil War, and the urban black riots of the 1960s. In each case, a time
of increasing well-being preceded a tight cluster of reversals that burst
into violence.
The racial conflict in America’s cities during the mid-1960s repre-
sents a case in point that many of us can recall. At the time, it was not
uncommon to hear the question, “Why now?” It didn’t seem to make
sense that within their three-hundred-year history, most of which had
been spent in servitude and much of the rest in privation, American
blacks would choose the socially progressive sixties in which to revolt.
Indeed, as Davies points out, the two decades after the start of World
War II had brought dramatic political and economic gains to the black
population. In 1940, blacks faced stringent legal restrictions in such
areas as housing, transportation, and education; moreover, even with
the same amount of education, the average black family earned only a
bit more than half of its counterpart white family. Fifteen years later,
much had changed. Federal legislation had struck down as unacceptable
formal and informal attempts to segregate blacks in schools, public
places, housing, and employment settings. Large economic advances
had been made, too; black family income had risen from 56 percent to
80 percent of that of a comparably educated white family.
But then, according to Davies’s analysis of social conditions, this
rapid progress was stymied by events that soured the heady optimism
of previous years. First, political and legal change proved substantially
easier to enact than social change. Despite all the progressive legislation
of the forties and fifties, blacks perceived that most neighborhoods,
jobs, and schools remained segregated. Thus the Washington-based
victories came to feel like defeats at home. For example, in the four
years following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to integrate all
194 / Influence