Joe Biden said political violence in America is “unheard of.” If only.
The overwhelming rhetorical response to the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump has been to say there is “no place for political violence” in U.S. politics. Just do a quick TwiX search on that phrase – here’s Barack Obama’s version, Alexandria Ocasia Cortez’s, Gretchen Whitmer’s, for instance.
Joe Biden used those words, too, in his remarks soon after the shooting. “There’s no place in America for this kind of political violence,” the president said. “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.”
The sentiment is undeniably admirable. But it is not factually correct. The thesis that political violence in America is “unheard of” runs up against a long history of American political violence. Indeed, a different post could focus on the systemic use of force in preventing Black voters from exercising their rights to suffrage after the Civil War.
But if we confine ourselves only to violent attacks on individual political figures the list is still expansive – recall, for instance, the shootings of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) in 2017 or Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in 2011. A California man, angry that the Supreme Court planned to overturn Roe, plotted to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022. Someone planted pipe bombs outside both the Republican and Democratic National Committee headquarters on January 5, 2021. And of course the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol the next day threatened lethal violence against a wide range of elected officials, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Vice President Mike Pence.
Yes, America has a long history of political violence
Historian Joanne Freeman wrote a whole book about interpersonal violence inside Congress in the lead-up to the Civil War. And the tally of assassinations, and attempted assassinations, of presidents is depressingly long as well. The first might have been a failed attempt on the life of Andrew Jackson in 1835. Until now, the most recent (luckily another failure) was the shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981. In between we have the murders of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. And serious attempts were made to kill William Howard Taft (in 1909), Franklin Roosevelt (in 1933, as president-elect), Harry Truman (1950), and Gerald Ford (twice, in 1975).
Presidential campaigns have hardly been immune from violence either. A gunman shot Theodore Roosevelt while he stumped for a return to office in 1912 – TR was saved by the thickness of his folded speech and glasses case in his suitcoat’s inside pocket. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel after he won California’s Democratic primary. In 1972, George Wallace was shot and paralyzed (by a gunman who had wanted to kill President Richard Nixon but nearly literally shifted his sights.)
After Robert F. Kennedy’s death, the U.S. Secret Service extended protection to major candidates. When threat levels to a particular presidential candidate are high that assignment can come early in the campaign. Obama received Secret Service protection in May 2007, for instance, and Trump himself in November 2015.
All of which is to say that political violence has had a prominent place in the United States across its history. It would be nice to think things have changed and that such violence is indeed beyond the pale, literally unthinkable. But the July 13 attack on former president Trump shows that the past is very much with us.
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