From Lincoln to King, from lynch mobs to clinic bombings, America has never been the land of peaceful politics. Violence is not our shameful exception — it is our rule
The mythology of the United States holds that it is a nation of laws, founded by philosopher-statesmen in powdered wigs, guided by reason and compromise. That is the bedtime story. The reality, naked and unwashed, is that America has always been a republic of the gun, where political disputes are often settled not with ballots but with bullets, bombs, and ropes.
Anyone who imagines otherwise is a sucker.
Consider the fate of our presidents. Abraham Lincoln was shot down by a Confederate romantic who thought he could reverse the verdict of Appomattox with a derringer. James Garfield was dispatched by a crank who wanted a government job. William McKinley was killed by an anarchist waving the bloody shirt of European radicalism.
John F. Kennedy had his brains blown out in Dallas. Theodore Roosevelt only survived because the assassin’s bullet struck the manuscript of his campaign speech in his coat pocket — a literal text saving the flesh.
Four assassinations, one near miss: this is not the record of a pacific democracy but of a frontier saloon with better stationery.
The disease spreads well beyond the White House. Senators, governors, and judges have been gunned down with dreary regularity. Huey Long, that demagogue of the bayous, fell to an assassin’s bullet in Baton Rouge. Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles by a man enraged over his Middle East policies.
Federal judges from Robert Vance to John Wood were blown up or shot by men who mistook the gavel for a weapon and decided to reply in kind.
Civil rights produced not just legislation but a harvest of martyrs. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on a Memphis balcony, Malcolm X in a Harlem ballroom, Medgar Evers in his driveway. James Meredith was shot on the road in Mississippi. George Wallace, apostle of segregation, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.
If America is unique, it is in its habit of shooting both its heroes and its villains with equal enthusiasm.
And what of the mob? Lynching, that most American of pastimes, claimed thousands of Black lives from Reconstruction to the middle of the 20th century. These were not spontaneous eruptions but deliberate political theater, designed to enforce white supremacy and keep Black citizens from the ballot box. The rope was not just a weapon; it was a ballot box stuffed in public, a warning nailed to the body of democracy itself.
More recently, abortion providers have taken their place in the long gallery of targets. David Gunn, Barnett Slepian, George Tiller — doctors murdered in the name of “life.” Bombings and arsons turned clinics into war zones. Extremists called themselves soldiers in God’s army, proving once again that piety in America often rides shotgun with fanaticism.
From the Haymarket bombing to Oklahoma City, from civil rights to Charlottesville, from Ford’s Theatre to the steps of the Capitol on January 6th, the story repeats: America is not immune to political violence; America is addicted to it. The republic is forever one bad mood away from bloodshed.
So let us bury the pious fiction that the United States is a haven of ordered liberty, serenely different from the blood-spattered histories of Europe or Asia. Our own soil is rich with the bones of those murdered for politics, race, or creed. Violence is not the exception here. It is the national character.
