April 26, 2018: Assassination Studying: John Wilkes Booth

[On April 26^th, 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 three stages to the drama of John Wilkes Booth.

I think it’s generally well-known that John Wilkes Booth was a professional actor before he became involved in the Confederate conspiracy that led to him assassinating President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April 14^th, 1865. Perhaps our collective memories also include the detail that John’s brother Edwin Booth was an even more acclaimed and successful actor, likely the most famous of their generation. But I’m not sure very many Americans know that their father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a prominent English actor who ran away to America with his mistress Mary Ann Holmes to start a family—but was still married to Adelaide Delannoy Booth for the first three decades of his time in America, making both John and Edwin (along with their eight siblings) illegitimate (Junius and Adelaide only finalized their divorce when John was thirteen years old). Illegitimate sons who go into the same profession in which their father achieved fame, competing with each other (and their brother Junius Brutus Booth Jr., another professional actor) as well as that father—I’m not sure exactly what Dr. Freud would have to say, but I’m quite sure he’d have some thoughts.

Perhaps such potential familial and psychological issues go hand-in-hand with his theatrical training to explain the deeply dramatic nature of John’s assassination of Lincoln. It’s not just that he was the conspirator assigned to kill the president, nor that he chose to do so at a theatre where he was a well-known performer and guest (although yes on both counts). It was also and especially his actions after he shot Lincoln: jumping down from the president’s box onto the stage; raising a knife above his head (he had just stabbed Major Henry Rathbone, a Union officer present in the box with the Lincolns); and proclaiming “Sic semper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants]” before making his escape. Of all the political assassinations about which I’ll write this week, and really all the ones with which I’m familiar at all, it’s only Booth’s of Lincoln that I would call as much performance art as violence, or for that matter at least as much about the assassin as about his intended target. None of that lessens the horror and tragedy of the assassination in the slightest, but it does reflect another layer to the lifelong drama of John Wilkes Booth’s identity and career.

That drama had one more particularly prominent stage, but one that was also much less within Booth’s control: the 12-day manhunt that concluded with Union Army Sergeant Boston Corbett shooting Booth as he hid inside a Virginia barn that soldiers had set on fire. Yet while Booth was more the subject of than the actor in this final drama, I have to believe he would have enjoyed the nationwide headlines and attention, the obsession with finding Lincoln’s assassin that consumed the nation throughout those twelve long days in April. Many late 20^th century assassins or would-be assassins have been described as seeking celebrity or fame through their acts of political violence (including the young woman on whom I’ll focus in tomorrow’s post), but I don’t believe that any of them have come close to the notoriety achieved by John Wilkes Booth. The manhunt wasn’t a particularly long-running drama, but I would argue that it took and held center stage in the public consciousness far more fully than any theatrical production with which the Booths (brothers, father, any of them) were involved. A bittersweet final victory for our most dramatic assassin.

Last assassination studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 25, 2018: Assassination Studying: William McKinley

[On April 26^th, 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 still highly relevant but tricky question raised by our third presidential assassination.

First, it’d be disgenuous of me not to share this earlier post on William McKinley’s 1901 assassination, in which I argued for a couple reasons why (despite the killing’s obvious horror and tragedy) I couldn’t entirely mourn McKinley’s death. I can’t say that my position on that has evolved in the last couple years; while certain orange current commanders in chief have pushed most everybody further down the list of worst US presidents, I would still say that McKinley likely and comfortably occupies a spot in the top ten. To be honest, McKinley’s inaction in response to the 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre—and, more exactly, in response to the most heart-rending letter from an American citizen to her president I’ve ever encountered—would be enough all by itself to merit his inclusion on the worst-of list, and it’s far from the only black mark on the McKinley administration. Obviously McKinley did not deserve to die and his assassination was a national tragedy, but his was far from a good presidency and I won’t pretend otherwise.

When it comes to the specific details of his assassination, I think they reflect a particularly clear version of a question that has become part of many contemporary conversations about terrorists or mass shooters: where was he radicalized? Unlike the obviously Confederate or strikingly personal motivations of the Lincoln and Garfield assassins, the factors that pushed former steel worker Leon Czolgosz to shoot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6^th, 1901 were far less immediately apparent. Historians have generally boiled those factors down to anarchism, one of the late 19^th century’s most consistent boogeymen and often a short-hand for cultural fears of various groups (Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Jews, communists and socialists, labor activists, and intellectuals, among others). Czolgosz had attended a speech by the radical activist Emma Goldman on May 6^th, 1901 in Cleveland, and the moment has become a particularly clear touchstone for arguments that he was radicalized into an anarchist perspective by the experience and saw assassinating the president as his way to contribute to the cause.

That may well be the case—but at the same time, it’s difficult for me to believe that Czolgosz went from having no radical opinions on May 5^th to assassinating the president on September 6^th, and so attributing the change solely or even mostly to Goldman feels like both a simplistic answer and a way to further demonize such socialist activists. I’ve seen some historians make the case that it was the violent suppression of an 1897 strike by Slavic miners at Pennsylvania’s Lattimer Mines that truly angered Czolgosz and set him on the path toward political violence, and to my mind that narrative makes a great deal of sense, both in terms of the longer arc of an individual’s radicalization and as a event sufficiently egregious (it came to be known as the Lattimer Mines Massacre) to engender political violence. Yet even then, I’m highlighting a single event or moment as the source of Czolgosz’s radicalization, when the likeliest explanation is both multi-faceted and gradual, a lifelong series of stages that led him to the Exposition grounds with a pistol hidden beneath his handkerchief. We would do well to remember the long arc when we consider the radicalization of today’s politically violent actors as well.

Next assassination studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?

April 24, 2018: Assassination Studying: James Garfield

[On April 26^th, 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 2^nd, 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 19^th), 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?