Political Violence is America's Enduring Legacy
The political response to Trump's assassination attempt has been to claim that violence has "no place in American society". Historian Paul VanDevelder asks which country they've all been living in?
When I read Barack Obama's pathetic statement after the Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, I just shook my head in sadness.
When I heard Biden speak a few minutes later, I thought, as a historian, what is this man smoking? Then came all the others, parroting the same vacuous phrase: ‘there is no place in this society for political violence.’
The truth is that this nation was born in political violence. The earliest citizens were brazen, crude, violent people. Upon hearing alarming reports about political violence in settler communities on the Appalachian frontier, George Washington and the 1st Congress sent Major Caleb Swan to investigate. Swan reported back that the white settlers “are the most abandoned violent wretches that can be found anywhere…there is scarcely a crime but some of them has not been guilty of.” American Exceptionalism had been born. Blood flowed like a river.
The 19th century was a blood bath. Ethnographers estimate that political leaders like Jackson and Polk initiated policies that wiped out millions of Native Americans. In 1842 Congress hired Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the grandson of the Revolutionary War hero General Ethan Allan, to investigate atrocities on the Trail of Tears. President Tyler’s secretary of war, John C Spencer, told Congress that Hitchcock’s final report would never be seen “without my heart’s blood.” The ensuing brawl on the House floor entrained dozens of representatives. Guns were drawn before Capitol police restored order. The report has never been found.
The following decade saw one out of six California Indians survive the first years of statehood. We followed that travesty by killing 700,000 men in a Civil War that arguably accomplished NOTHING to address the character defects in American society, to say nothing of the Indian Wars, wherein U.S. troops marched into Denver after the massacre at Sand Creek wearing the eviscerated vaginas of Cheyenne women as hat bands. Lest we be duped by deference into thinking these were male oriented monstrosities, the good women of Denver sewed together those vaginas into a frieze they hung over the stage of the new opera house for the Christmas pageant.
While those atrocities were winding down to Wounded Knee, eleven thousand black men and women were strung up in the South during Jim Crow and not one white man ever spent a day in jail for those crimes. Teddy Roosevelt turned a blind eye to all of that and exported the taste for mayhem to the Philippines, killing tens of thousands as a prelude to the murderous race riots in Washington DC, in 1919, and the slaughter of the Bonus Army protestors in 1932.
These events were all a dress rehearsal for the killing of millions in South East Asia at the request of corporate America, justified by an absurd notion advanced by John Foster Dulles – ‘the domino theory’ – at the added surcharge of 54,000 American teenagers. The year 1968 was in the middle of all of that, wherein political violence raged from the first day to the last. The night Martin Luther King was assassinated eighteen American cities were ablaze, followed by the singular political event in many of our lives, the assassination of Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles. Then came Bloody Chicago, the free-wheeling political violence of Mayor Daly’s uniformed thugs at the Democratic convention in August that year.
Political violence has been and IS, sadly, an embedded feature of America's political DNA. Our leaders – from Jefferson and Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Trump and Biden – have been deft at finding proxies to do the dirty work, whether in Selma, Saigon, San Salvador, Santiago, Wounded Knee, Grenada, Kabul, Baghdad, Gaza, Tulsa. No matter, we're always there, more than willing to pull the trigger, drop the bomb, light the fire, launch the missile. You can count on us.
The unasked, unanswered question hanging over all of this in 2024 is, to my mind, simply this: When is a leader in this country going to step up to a podium and call a spade a spade? Who more than Trump has been calling for, nay, demanding, violence in the streets to flex his will?
Who is going to stand up and call out Trump and his sycophants, not to mention Biden and all the other politicians with Palestinian blood on their hands. They would all do well to remember an ancient Roman political axiom: ‘that which begins in blood usually ends in it.’
Political violence is America's first and last name. Until we own that, it will continue to own us. Shame on Obama. He should know better than to utter such vacuous, cynical words. Shame on Biden. He can’t help himself. Shame on Josh Shapiro, and on the New York Times editorial board, and on the Washington Post editorial board, and all the cartoon politicians who parrot the nonsense that “there is no place for political violence in America”. Political violence may not have been born here, but surely, we adopted it before we were ever a nation and made it our own. It lies at the heart of America’s story, and if you could remove political violence from that story the entire narrative would fall apart. There’s no hiding from that. There is only wave after wave, generation after generation, of denial.
For two hundred plus years, American society has been the embodiment of political violence. So called American exceptionalism – a la Heritage Foundation – drips with blood. Give me one politician with the spine to call out all of that. Just one. Many, many, millions of us are waiting.
Then, maybe then, we’ll have a leader with the spine, the vision, the courage, the honesty of soul, to lead us out of this house of darkness.
Journalist and historian, Paul VanDevelder, is the author of Coyote Warrior (Little, Brown) and Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory (Yale University Press).