Political Violence May Be Un-American, but It Is Not Uncommon
On Saturday, hours after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump with an AR-15-style assault rifle, President Biden sounded a familiar refrain: The United States, he assured the public, settles its differences peacefully; political violence is un-American and abhorrent. “We cannot allow this to be happening,” he said. “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard-of.”
Americans transfer power peacefully from one party to another most of the time, and most elections are fair and free from the taint of bloodshed. But the attack on Mr. Trump is one on a list of fairly common attempts on presidents’ lives — acts endemic to the political culture and part of an alternative tradition of political violence. This tradition contradicts a kind of mythic faith, held widely by Americans, in a political system that shuns the bullet and embraces the ballot.
Presidents and former presidents are members of one of the most intimate clubs on earth, and they have almost always described political violence, especially attacks on one of their own, as unnatural exceptions to an otherwise peaceful polity. After Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1950, former President Herbert Hoover wrote Mr. Truman that “assassination is not a part of the American way of life.”
Ronald Reagan echoed the point shortly after a bullet nearly killed him in 1981. He declared that Americans’ uplifting response to the close call had “provided an answer to those few voices that were raised saying that what happened was evidence that ours is a sick society.”
“Sick societies don’t produce young men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that’s what his duty called for him to do,” Mr. Reagan said. “Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.”
At this moment, it’s worth pausing to remember that, contrary to Mr. Hoover’s assurance, assassination attempts are very much “a part of the American way of life.” Of the 46 presidents in U.S. history, four have been murdered. In the 20th century alone, there were at least six serious failed attempts on the lives of presidents and one on a former president. At least one-quarter of presidents have been killed or nearly killed by an assassin.
