Today's "On This Day" covers the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. He was killed by Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist son of Polish immigrants who took "class warfare" to an extreme. He later said “I killed President McKinley because I done my duty.” I didn’t believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none.”
Our "On This Day"
for July 2 contained several fascinating, little-known facts about the
assassination of President Garfield. The defense
asserted by assassin Charles Guiteau at his trial: “Some of these days
instead of saying ‘Guiteau the assassin’, they will say ‘Guiteau the
patriot.’”
The beliefs of Czolgosz and Guiteau are hardly exceptional as assassins go.
Self-delusion of a noble, heroic purpose is a common thread connecting
murderous lone actors of history.
What convinces an assassin
that he’s a national hero? How does one man, out of so many millions
who might share similar political beliefs and passions, conclude that
it is his destiny to commit murder for the greater good?
Guiteau
defended his action as “a political necessity,” and was so confident of
general approbation that he instructed General William Tecumseh
Sherman, “I am going to the Jail. Please order out your troops and take
possession of the Jail at once.”
Our “On This Day”
about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln reveals a similar theme, as
John Wilkes Booth was shocked at the public’s grief and failure to
applaud the murder. His letters provide disturbing insight into his
motivations, such as this excerpt printed by the New York Times:
“When a country like this spurns justice from her side, She forfeits
the allegiance of every honest freeman, and should leave him
untrammeled by any fealty soever, to act, as his conscience may
approve.”
The 2009 assassination of abortion doctor George
Tiller once again echoed this same sad, deluded tale. Although many
tried to link the murder to the heated rhetoric of our cable news
culture, only one man translated this passion into violence.
FindingDulcinea Senior Writer Shannon Firth analyzed
Tiller's murder and explored the motives of assassins, detailing the
three types categorized by author Kris Hollington. There are “wolves,”
who seek notoriety, “jackals,” who are hired hands, and finally
“foxes,” who are “novices hoping to make a political statement.”
According
to Hollington, these foxes are intensely passionate, but are also
“ordinary, unremarkable people, often failures: the antithesis of the
men and women they try to kill.” Although they justify their actions in
political and often religious language, “it’s all within the troubled
mind of the lone individual… almost a movie in their mind.”
Do
their personal failures, then, prod them towards an alternate reality,
in which they can play the film-star heroes? John Hinckley, Jr.,
possibly inspired by the movie Taxi Driver, believed that by shooting Ronald Reagan he could win the love of actress Jodie Foster. He later explained himself, according to PBS,
with this rumination on fiction: “The line dividing life and art can be
invisible. After seeing enough hypnotizing movies and reading enough
magical books, a fantasy life develops which can either be harmless or
quite dangerous.”
I suppose heroism, and even history, is always
something of a fiction, a combination of reality and the myths built
around it. But I can’t stop wondering what it takes to push an
individual into a myth so fatal, so extreme, and so disconnected from
the society he believes he is saving.
Founder & CEO
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