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to Current Controversies: History Behind the Headlines
On January 30, 1835, President
Andrew Jackson went to the U.S. Capitol to attend the funeral
services of Congressman Warren R. Davis of South Carolina. As
the President filed past the casket and descended to the Capitol
rotunda, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed English house painter,
stepped up, drew a pistol, and fired point blank at the former
General. A percussion cap exploded, but a bullet failed to discharge
from the gun barrel. Lifting his cane above his head, the 67-year
old Jackson lunged at his assailant. But before he could thrash
the young man, the attacker drew a second pistol and fired again.
A second explosion rang out, but again the gun failed to fire.
The odds against both guns misfiring were 125,000 to 1.
The 32-year old would-be assassin
claimed that Jackson had killed his father three years earlier.
He also claimed to be the rightful heir to the British throne
and said that Jackson, in a conspiracy with various steamship
companies, had prevented him from getting money which would enable
him to claim the English crown. Since Lawrence's father had been
dead for twelve years and had never visited America, a jury found
Lawrence not guilty on grounds of insanity. Lawrence was hospitalized
and died 26 years later at Washington's Government Hospital for
the Insane.
Foreigners tend to perceive the
United States as a country prone to political violence and assassination.
Nine American Presidents - Andrew Jackson in 1835, Abraham Lincoln
in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 Harry
S. Truman in 1950, John F. Kennedy in 1963, Richard Nixon in 1974,
Gerald Ford twice in 1975, and Ronald Reagan in 1981 - have been
the targets of assassination. Attempts have also been made on
the lives of one President-elect (Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933)
and three Presidential candidates (Theodore Roosevelt in 1912,
Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and George Wallace in 1972). In addition,
eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, nine U.S. Congressmen, eleven
mayors, 17 state legislators, and eleven judges have been violently
attacked. No other country with a population of over 50 million
has had as high a number of political assassinations or attempted
assassinations.
The nation's voluminous record
of political violence and assassination raises many difficult
and disturbing questions. Why has the United States, with its
commitment to rule of law and due process, been so susceptible
to assassination? Has the U.S. always faced the horror of assassination
or has the crime's frequency increased in recent years? The most
troubling issue raised by political assassinations is whether
they alter the course of history.
Political assassination was unknown
in colonial America. Prior to the American Revolution, there was
not a single instance in which a major colonial official was assassinated.
There was political violence in early America, but it tended to
take the form of mob action. Crowds consisting of land hungry
frontiersmen, debtor farmers, unskilled seamen, skilled artisans,
and business and professional men, engaged in riotous dissent
against British colonial officials, profiteering merchants, or
Tories. The Stamp Act protests and the Boston Tea party were only
the most famous instances of crowd outbursts.
The other major form of political
violence in early America was the duel between politically prominent
individuals. The best-known political duel took place between
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804, but other prominent
politicians were also involved in duels, including Benedict Arnold
and Andrew Jackson, who participated in dozens of dueling situations
and killed one man. One of the last political duels occurred in
1857, when David S. Terry, Chief Justice of the California Supreme
Court, killed U.S. Senator David C. Broderick in a dispute over
the issue of slavery. It was not until Richard Lawrence attempted
to murder President Jackson that assassination appeared in the
United States.
Political assassinations in the
U.S. have tended to occur during periods of civil strife. The
assault on President Jackson coincided with the first sharp upsurge
in civil violence in U.S. history. Where there had been just seven
acts of mob violence in the 1810s and 21 incidents in the 1820s,
the number rose to 115 in the 1830s, before declining steeply
in the 1840s. Riots, mobs, and lynchings took place in all parts
of the country during the '30s, from "the burning suns"
of the South, in Abraham Lincoln's words, to "the eternal
snows" of New England. "Many of the people," declared
Niles' Register, "...are 'out of joint.' A spirit of riot
or a disposition to 'take the law into their own hands' prevails
in every quarter." Rapid urban growth, a large transient
urban population, ethnic conflict, and the disruption of local
economic markets all contributed to social turbulence. Mobs, often
led by prominent doctors, lawyers, merchants, bankers, judges,
and other "gentlemen of property and standing," attacked
abolitionists in New York and Boston, burned convents in Massachusetts
and Pennsylvania, assaulted Irish workers in Maryland, harassed
Mormons in Ohio and Missouri, hanged gamblers and prostitutes
in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and razed homes in black neighborhoods
in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Providence.
A new wave of political violence
and murder swept the nation during the decade and a half following
Abraham Lincoln's assassination on Good Friday of 1865. Between
1865 and 1877, 34 political officials were attacked, 24 of them
fatally. Among those attacked included a U.S. Senator, two congressional
representatives, three state governors, ten state legislators,
eight judges, and ten other officeholders. Much of the violence
was concentrated in the South (2,000 persons were killed or wounded
in Louisiana in the weeks before the 1868 election, 150 were murdered
in one Florida county, and in Texas, an army commander reported
"Murders of Negroes are so common as to render it impossible
to keep accurate accounts of them"). This wave of political
violence ended in 1881, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated
by Charles A. Guiteau, a frustrated office seeker, four months
after his inauguration.
In the twentieth century, there
have been three peak periods of political violence and assassination.
The first occurred at the turn of the century, a period of bitter
labor strife, widespread lynching, and six major race riots. A
second eruption of civil violence occurred during the late 1920s
and 1930s, stimulated by bootlegging and the Depression.
Political violence reached a new
peak during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Attacks were made
on four of six Presidents (one successfully, one nearly so). Among
those murdered were three U.S. ambassadors, a Presidential aspirant
(Robert Kennedy in l968), a neo-Nazi (George Lincoln Rockwell),
a rock star (John Lennon), and three black leaders (Malcolm X,
Medgar Evars, and Martin Luther King).
Who are the individuals who have
attempted to murder our national leaders? Have they tended to
be alienated, psychotic misfits, living on the margins of society
and craving publicity? Or have they tended to be rational individuals
with clearly defined political goals? In general, Presidential
assailants have tended to be outsiders, unusually sensitive to
the political cults or sensations of the time. Few have had steady
employment (only two of eleven worked regularly in the year leading
up to the assassination attempt). Only one was married with children.
A large number were immigrants or children of immigrants (seven
of eleven). Few carefully planned their assault (all but two fired
pistols, which are only effective at close range).
Assassins' motives have ranged
across a wide spectrum. Some have clearly been mentally deranged,
like Richard Lawrence or John Schrank, who wounded Theodore Roosevelt
as the ex-President ran for a third term in 1912, or John Hinckley,
Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men in 1981.
Schrank claimed the shooting was ordered by President William
McKinley's ghost as punishment for Roosevelt's attempt to establish
a dictatorship. Hinckley, a jury found, lacked the ability to
control his actions because he suffered from a mental delusion
involving actress Jodie Foster.
Other assassins had clear political
or ideological motives for their crimes but suffered from a paranoid
or schizophrenic style of thinking and chose their victim almost
at random. Giuseppe Zangara, a 32-year old Italian bricklayer,
who shot at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 but killed
Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead, believed that the U.S. government
was hostile to immigrant radicals. He originally planned to shoot
Herbert Hoover before he read in a Miami newspaper that President-elect
Franklin Roosevelt would be in town the next day. Samuel Byck,
a 44-year old Philadelphian, was angry at the Small Business Administration
when he rushed a gate at Baltimore-Washington International Airport
in 1974 and killed a security guard in an aborted attempt to seize
an airliner and stage a kamikaze-style attack on the White House.
Only a small number of assassination
attempts have been motivated by ideology, such as John Wilkes
Booth's assault on President Lincoln in 1865 or anarchist Leon
Czolgosz against William McKinley in 1901 (declared Czolgosz,
"I don't believe in the Republican form of government and
I don't believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill
them").
In only two cases was the assassin
a member of an organized conspiracy: in 1865, when John Wilkes
Booth and five other men plotted to assassinate President Lincoln,
General U.S. Grant, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary
of State William H. Seward, and in 1950, when two Puerto Rican
nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, protesting
American dominance of their country, attempted to shoot their
way into President Harry Truman's temporary residence at Blair
House. Even in these instances, however, there was no plan to
seize control of the government or alter government policies -
the traditional goals of a political conspiracy.
Have assassinations altered the
course of American history? Yes, but not in the way that the assassins
desired. Rarely has the assassin's political goal been realized.
Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert Kennedy to protest the Democrat's
support for Israel, but the man who was elected to office, Richard
Nixon, was himself a staunch supporter of the Jewish state and
provided indispensable aid to Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King failed to derail
the civil rights movement.
The very heinousness of the crime
has often led to a reaction against the assassin's objectives.
John Wilkes Booth was dumb-founded by the reaction to his murder
of President Lincoln. He expected to be celebrated in the South,
but he was shocked to find himself repudiated. As he wrote in
his diary, "A country that groaned beneath his tyranny and
prayed for this end and yet now behold the cold hand they extend
me."
It was not an historical accident
that America's plague of assassinations began with an attack on
Andrew Jackson. As President, the old General succeeded in shifting
political authority away from Congress to the office of the Presidency.
He also succeeded in popularizing the notion that the Chief Executive
was the true representative of the American people. By increasing
the emphasis that the nation places on the Presidency, Jackson
made the office an increasingly important symbol for Americans
but also a ready target for disgruntled individuals. Throughout
American history, assassins have exhibited little animosity or
even interest in the individual who holds the Presidency. Instead,
by striking at a President they have sought to attack a symbol
and an office. |
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