Shackling the Texans
The U.S. state of Wyoming was created by the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, which called for the construction of a railroad to connect the eastern and western United States. The Union Pacific was built west from the Missouri River to link up with the Central Pacific heading east from Sacramento, California. In 1867 it reached what was to become the state of Wyoming, at that time merely a county of the Dakota Territory. By July 1867, settlers were already arriving and General Grenville M. Dodge, chief engineer of the Union Pacific, began the survey for a city at Cheyenne, which would become the capital of the state. It was to be four miles square with well-organized blocks, alleys, and streets. The Union Pacific, the beneficiary of a huge land grant from the government as an incentive to get the railroad constructed, started selling off the lots three days after Dodge surveyed them. The first went for $150. By August 7, though Cheyenne was mostly a city of tents, a mass meeting in a local store chose a committee to write a city charter. On September 19 the first newspaper of the town, a triweekly tabloid called the Cheyenne Leader, was launched. By December the newspaper was advising its readers to carry guns at night for self-protection because of “frequent occurrences of garroting.” On October 13 of the next year, the editor asserted:
Pistols are almost as numerous as men. It is no longer thought to be an affair of any importance to take the life of a fellow being.
At this point Cheyenne resorted to vigilante justice to solve the problems endemic to the American frontier. In January 1868 three men were arrested for theft but released on bail. The next morning they were found tied together with a sign that read “$900 stole … $500 Recovered … Next case goes up a tree. Beware of Vigilance Committee.” The next day vigilantes caught and hanged three “ruffians.”
In the rural cattle areas, things were much worse. As Edward W. Smith of Evanston told the United States Public Land Commission in 1879, “Away from settlements the shotgun is the only law.” As the cattle spread, conflicts between ranchers and homesteaders grew, and the reaction of the cattlemen led to the Johnson County Range War. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, a special six-car train sped north from Cheyenne, carrying twenty-five Texas gunmen along with another twenty-four locals who had joined them. The men had a “Dead List of seventy men” they intended to kill.
We don’t have information about the homicide rate in Cheyenne in the 1890s, though data for the mining town of Benton, California, suggests that there it may have reached an incredible high of 24,000 per 100,000! More likely it was closer to 83 per 100,000, the rate during the California gold rush, or 100 per 100,000, the rate in Dodge City, Kansas, in the days of Wyatt Earp.
This sounds as bad as Lagos when Soyinka was trying to make it there with his Glock pistol at the ready. But things turned out quite differently in Wyoming (actually, they turned out rather differently from what Kaplan expected in Lagos too, as we’ll explain in Chapter 14). The anarchy, fear, and violence were contained. Indeed, the Texans were soon holed up at the TA Ranch surrounded by lawmen from the town of Buffalo who were warned of their arrival. After three days of siege, the cavalry came, ordered in by President William Henry Harrison, and shackled all of the Texans and their collaborators. Today Wyoming largely enjoys freedom from fear, violence, and dominance. It has one of the lowest homicide rates in the United States, about 1.9 per 100,000.
Wyoming has a pretty good record when it comes to helping people break free from the cage of norms too. Take the subjugation of women. Even during the worst of times, women in Wyoming did not face the same restrictions as those in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan or many parts of Africa. But as everywhere else in the world, women in the first half of the nineteenth century had very limited power and no say in public affairs, and had to put up with myriad constraints on their behavior, both because of their unequal status in marriage and because of the norms and customs of their societies. That started to change as women got the right to vote. The first place in the world to grant female suffrage was Wyoming in 1869, earning it the nickname the Equality State. This wasn’t because Wyoming’s customs and norms favored women compared to other parts of the world. Rather, the state’s legislature granted them voting rights, partly to make it more attractive for women to move to this new state, partly to ensure that there would be enough voters to meet the population requirement for statehood, and partly because once African Americans began gaining full citizenship and voting rights, it seemed less acceptable to leave women out of this process. We’ll see in the next chapter that there are many reasons why the cage of norms often starts breaking down once a state capable of shackling the hoodlums and enforcing laws is in place.
The Shackled Leviathan
The Leviathan that got the Warre under control and started to break the cage of norms in Wyoming is a different kind of beast from the ones we have discussed so far. It wasn’t absent except in the very early days. It had the capacity to shackle the Texans. Since then it has massively expanded this capacity and can now resolve myriad conflicts fairly, enforce a complex set of laws, and provide public services that its citizens demand and enjoy. It has a large, effective bureaucracy (even if it is at times bloated and inefficient) and a huge amount of information about what its citizens are up to. It has the strongest military in the world. But it doesn’t use this military power and its information to repress and exploit its citizens (for the most part). It responds to its citizens’ wishes and needs, and it can also intervene to loosen the cage of norms for everybody, particularly for its most disadvantaged citizens. It is a state that creates liberty.
It is accountable to society not just because it is bound by the U.S. Constitution and by the Bill of Rights, which emphatically exalts the rights of the citizens, but more important because it is shackled by people who will complain, demonstrate, and even rise up if it oversteps its bounds. Its presidents and legislators are elected, and they are often kicked out of office when the society they are ruling over doesn’t like what they are doing. Its bureaucrats are subject to review and oversight. It is powerful, but coexists with and listens to a society that is vigilant and willing to get involved in politics and contest power. It is what we’ll call a Shackled Leviathan. In the same way that the Leviathan can shackle the Texan gunmen, so that they cannot do harm to ordinary citizens, it can itself be shackled by common people, by norms, and by institutions—in short by society.
It is not that the Shackled Leviathan isn’t Janus-faced. It is, and repression and dominance are as much in its DNA as they are in the DNA of the Despotic Leviathan. But the shackles prevent it from rearing its fearsome face. How those shackles emerge, and why only some societies have managed to develop them, is the major theme of our book.
Diversity, Not the End of History
Liberty has been rare in human history. Many societies have not developed any centralized authority capable of enforcing laws, resolving conflicts peacefully, and protecting the weak against the strong. Instead they have often imposed a cage of norms on people, with similarly dire consequences for liberty. Wherever the Leviathan has shown up, the lot of liberty has hardly improved. Even though it has enforced laws and kept the peace in some domains, the Leviathan has often been despotic, thus unresponsive to society, and has done little to further the liberty of its citizens. Only shackled states have used their power to protect liberty. The Shackled Leviathan has been distinctive in another sense too—in creating broad-based economic opportunities and incentives and promoting a sustained rise in economic prosperity. But this Shackled Leviathan has arrived on the scene only late in history, and its rise has been contested and contentious.