A confused and tedious treatment of the legal doctrine and moral
tradition in America of "no duty to retreat" - the doctrine that
one need not retreat when attacked, but may stand one's ground and
defend oneself. Brown (Northwest & Pacific History/Univ. of
Oregon; Strain of Violence, 1975) points out that under English
common law, a murder defendant, in order to successfully argue
self-defense, had first to convince the jury that he had used all
available means of avoiding the situation. Brown also recognizes
that American courts have vitiated and, in most cases, eliminated
this requirement. In several long, digressive chapters, he examines
the role of the gunfighter in the Old West, particularly in a war
between settlers and railroad interests in California in the
1870's. Advancing a historical theory seemingly irrelevant to his
subject, Brown reduces the history of the West to a confrontation
of socioeconomic forces (he repeatedly labels it the "Western Civil
War of Incorporation," a war between industrial and agrarian
forces) but fails to explain clearly how a "duty to retreat" would
have applied in these cases. He goes on to advance a number of
sociological theories about the crime surge in American society
(although choosing not to mention drugs, demographics, or the
proliferation of guns), and argues, finally, that America's refusal
to retreat has embroiled it in foreign wars (though one could make
a similar argument about the foreign policy of Britain, which has
etained the duty to retreat). Brown's information and theories are
interesting enough, but too little logical thread holds the various
arguments together as the author digresses from his legal argument
to sociohistorical theorizing. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Richard Maxwell Brown's brief study of 'violence and American
values' is quite simply a tour de force of provocatie,
well-conceived, and smoothly written historiography....rich with
novel insights, new conceptualizations, and solid documentation."
-Richard W. Etulain, in Reviews in American History. "Fascinating
and provocative, No Duty to Retreat is an authoritative examination
of violence not only on the American frontier and in American
society at large, but in American jurisprudence as well." -Robert
M. Utley, author of High Noon in Lincoln, Billy the Kid, and
Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western
Military Frontier. " No Duty to Retreat] is a delightful book and a
provocative one to contemplate....It belongs in the library of all
westerners." - Gordon Morris Bakken, in Montana: The Magazine of
Western History. In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a
Missouri public square in the West's first notable "walkdown." One
hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four
threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire,
what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard
Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a
uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier
gunfights like Hickok's. When faced with a deadly threat, we have
the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to
retreat. Richard Maxwell Brown is Beekman Professor Emeritus of
Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon and the
nation's leading expert in the history of violence in American,
western, and frontier history
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