[On April 26th,
1865, John
Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations
and their contexts!]
On the mundane
nature of our second presidential assassination, and why it matters.
As I’ll discuss
more in Thursday’s post, the Lincoln assassination was literally and
figuratively dramatic (if not melodramatic) in numerous ways: from its
theatrical setting and actor assassin through many other heightened and extreme
details, moments, and contexts. Interestingly enough, our second presidential assassination,
the shooting of President
James A. Garfield by Charles
Guiteau on July
2nd, 1881, was instead in many ways at the thoroughly mundane
end of the spectrum. Guiteau was a disgruntled office seeker who had supported
Garfield’s candidacy, believed he was owed a foreign service position, and when
denied that opportunity decided to kill Garfield in the hopes that his Vice
President, Chester Arthur, would be more willing to appoint men like Guiteau to
such roles. After he shot Garfield while the president waited for a train to
New Jersey for his summer vacation, each man’s actions and statements reflect
the moment’s mundane qualities: Garfield
simply exclaimed, “My god, what is this?”; while Guiteau was captured
immediately and stated, “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a
Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”
That relatively
mundane quality to the Garfield assassination reflects some important
historical contexts. The Lincoln assassination had been perceived as an
anomaly, as part of the Civil War’s violence and extremes, to the point where
Garfield did not have any sort of armed guard with him in public settings like
the train station; even this assassination did not fully change that narrative,
as the Secret
Service did not formally add presidential protection to their duties until
after McKinley’s assassination in 1901. The motivation behind this assassination
was likewise far different from the multi-layered Confederate conspiracy of
which John Wilkes Booth was part; Guiteau was a strikingly ordinary man (he
didn’t even speak French, despite his desire for the position of Consul to
France) who embodied the era’s consistent but hardly world-changing debates
over patronage,
government office-holding, and related issues. I don’t mean in any way to
downplay the horror or tragedy of Garfield’s shooting and death (particularly
the gruesome fact that he was in intensive care for eleven weeks before
succumbing to his wounds on September 19th), but compared to the
Lincoln assassination this second presidential shooting was as undramatic as it
gets.
Perhaps due to
that lack of drama, I would argue that the Garfield assassination is far less present
in our collective memories than Lincoln’s (or Kennedy’s, although of course television
and video contributed mightily to the latter’s prominence). Yet as I just
noted, those very mundane qualities can tell us a good bit about the
assassination’s historical moment and contexts. Moreover, as I argued
in this post, in just a few months in office Garfield had already begun a
number of important efforts; fortunately his successor Arthur continued many of
them, but nonetheless the assassination represented (as they always do) a
political and social attack just as much as a personal and violent one. Finally,
I would also argue that the mundane side to the Garfield assassination itself reflects
a step in the gradual acceptance of political violence as a possibility (if not
a reality) within our society, a shift that would likewise have to be linked to
the rise of guns and gun violence as a part of America’s social landscape. All reasons
to better remember our second presidential assassination, relatively boring as it
might be.
Next assassination
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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