Sarah Vowell— Assassination Vacation

These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us — us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools. The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?

There is a lesson here for the terrorists of the world: if they really want to get ahead, they should put less energy into training illiterate ten-year-olds how to fire Kalashnikovs and start recruiting celebrities like George Clooney. I bet nobody’s inspected that man’s luggage since the second season of ER.

However, careful readers who are also symbolism devotees would have noticed that the date in 1861 when the Baltimore mob clashed with the Massachusetts soldiers was April 19 — Patriot’s Day — the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, when the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War. It is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was wearing a T-shirt. On the back of the T-shirt, perhaps as a nod commemorating Patriot’s Day, was the famous quote from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” On the front of McVeigh’s shirt was a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Printed under Lincoln’s face was the caption “Sic semper tyrannis.” McVeigh ordered his shirt from a catalog sent out to subscribers of Southern Partisan, the pro-Confederate magazine. As if McVeigh wearing the shirt isn’t disgusting enough, the catalog sold out of most sizes of the shirt after McVeigh made the news. People actually heard that a mass murderer responsible for 168 deaths was wearing clothing celebrating another murder and they wanted to dress up like him. According to media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, by December of that year, the catalog reassured Partisan readers who had ordered the shirt: Due to a surprising demand for our anti-Lincoln T-shirt, our stock has been reduced to odd sizes. If the enclosed shirt will not suffice, we will be glad to refund your money or immediately ship you another equally militant shirt from our catalog. And if the shirts were too big or too small, the readers could have cheered themselves up with one of the fetching, one-size-fits-all bumper stickers like “Clinton’s military: a gay at every porthole, a fag in every foxhole.” If the shirt’s popularity with readers of Southern Partisan, a magazine on the fringes, seems just that — on the fringes — three years after McVeigh inspired the shirt’s commercial success, a Missouri senator would do an interview with the magazine announcing, “Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.” And if that random senator still seems on the fringe, what with representing Missouri and/or kookily complaining about Jeff Davis’s bad rap, it’s worth noting that three years after saying that, the Missouri senator, John Ashcroft, became the attorney general of the United States, which is to say, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in all the land.

Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, our hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among our fellows with compassion and respect. As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.

Take, for example, the commencement address he delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. Traditionally, these pep talks to college graduates are supposed to shove young people into the future with a briefcase bulging with infinitive verbs: to make, to produce, to do. Mr. Loner McBookworm, on the other hand, stands up and breaks it to his audience, the future achievers of America, that the price of the supposedly fulfilling attainment of one’s personal and professional dream is the irritating way it cuts into one’s free time. He tells them, It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure — the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below. The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word “dude.” Keep in mind that at that moment Garfield was a presidential candidate. The guy who theoretically wants the country’s most demanding, hectic, brain-dive-denying job stands before these potential gross national product producers advising them to treat leisure “as your gold, as your wealth, as your treasure.” As Garfield left the podium, every scared kid in the room could probably hear the sound of the stock market crashing him back to his old room at his parents’ house where he’d have plenty of free time to contemplate hanging himself with his boyhood bedsheets.

You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

While a nuclear family is capable of low-key but toxic resentment, a commune is Three Mile Island waiting to happen. In Sleeping Where I Fall, his memoir of living on an anarchist collective farm in California in the 1960s, Peter Coyote admits to the way his annoyance with his fellow communards sometimes trumped his laissez-faire ideals, leading him to tape up a list of house rules including, “It’s fine if you want to take speed, just don’t talk to me!” Regarding Mutual Criticism, Valesky proclaims, “It would relate to personality issues, the whole idea being maintaining group stability, group harmony. Resolving conflicts would all be done by the group such that at the end, there would be a feeling that something has been discussed that needed to be.”

One learns more about the Oneida Community by considering Charles Guiteau than the other way around. There are Oneida traits in Guiteau for sure. He always credited the community with inspiring his abstinence from liquor and profanity. He plagiarized Noyes in some of his loony later speeches, especially the bits about the second coming of Christ in 70 A.D. But really, the fact that the commune put up with such an exasperating egomaniac for five full years speaks volumes about the Oneida Community’s capacity for tolerance.

“What might a vigorous thinker do, if he could be allowed to use the opportunities of a Presidential term in vital, useful activity?

In 2003 and 2004, as I was traveling around in the footsteps of McKinley, thinking about his interventionist wars in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States started up an interventionist war in Iraq. It was to be a “preemptive war” whose purpose was to disarm Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, weapons which, as I write this, have yet to be found, and which, like the nonexistent evidence of wrongdoing on the Maine, most likely never will be. At the outset of the war, President Bush proclaimed that “our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure,” just as President McKinley stated, regarding Cuba, “It is not a trust we sought; it is a trust from which we will not flinch.” I downloaded the Platt Amendment’s provisions toward Cuba from the National Archives’ Web site, saw the provision requiring the Cubans to lease land to the United States for a naval base, and then thought about the several hundred Taliban and other prisoners of the War on Terror being held there at Guantánamo Bay. I read a history book describing how McKinley’s secretary of war Elihu Root finally — after press uproar sparked Senate hearings — got around to ordering courts-martial for U.S. officers accused of committing the “water cure” in the Philippines, and, closing the book, turned on a televised Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was grilled about photographs of giddy U.S. soldiers proudly pointing at Iraqi prisoners of war they had just tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison. I went to NYU to hear former vice president Al Gore deliver a speech calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation; Gore asked of the administration’s imploding Iraq policy in general and the Abu Ghraib torture photos in particular, “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?” Then I walked home through Washington Square Park, where Mark Twain used to hang out on the benches in his white flannel suit when he lived around the corner, and sat down in my living room to reread Twain’s accusation that McKinley’s deadly Philippines policy has “debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world.”

As the Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí worried, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?”

After the United States signed a treaty with Spain in 1898, we occupied Cuba for the next five years. Cuba became nominally independent thanks to an American act of Congress signed into law by McKinley in 1901. It was called the Platt Amendment, but a better name for it might have been “Buenos Dias, Fidel.” It kept Cuba under U.S. protection and gave us the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. Which we did for the next half century, reoccupying the country every few years and propping up a series of dictators, crooks, and boobs. The last one, a sergeant named Batista, was one of the monsters created in part by American military aid. When the revolution came in 1959, all American businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. Yankee, said Castro, go home. And, oh, by the way, how do you like them missiles? Which is to say: Our failed postwar policy after the Spanish-American War actually led the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1962. And over a century later, Cuba still isn’t free.

Under the galling yoke of government, ecclesiasticism and the bonds of custom and prejudice it is impossible for the individual to work out his own career as he could wish. Anarchism aims at a new and complete freedom…. We merely desire complete individual liberty and this can never be obtained as long as there is an existing government.

In 1901, at the time of the McKinley assassination, Robert Todd Lincoln had just become president of the Pullman Company, a position he would hold until 1911. So by Emma Goldman’s criteria Robert Todd Lincoln would have made an exceedingly perfect mark for Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo instead of President McKinley. And given his second career as the presidential angel of death, Robert Lincoln was even in town at the time.

“Can idealists be cruel?” It’s thrilling, even though I did want to reach into the page and pat her head, breaking it to her that, Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.

Roosevelt had bumped into Lincoln here in Buffalo before heading to the Adirondacks. Lincoln had brought his family to town to see the Pan-American Exposition, never suspecting their vacation would see him reprise his cameo role as presidential assassination omen for the third and final time. Lincoln wrote to the new president, “I do not congratulate you for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as a desirable garment, but I do hope that you will have the strength and courage to carry you through a successful administration.” Roosevelt must have wanted to write back to Robert Todd — tod, the German word for death — Lincoln, “Well, since you brought it up, can I interest you in a diplomatic appointment in Katmandu?”

There is a wonderful photograph of a clearly enchanted Robert Todd Lincoln sitting in the audience at the ceremony — sitting with the white people in the audience. Because the Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony was segregated. Segregated!

The people who visit the memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out “It’s a Small World After All” flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren.


Loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way; it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble, the structure’s a fake and ye olde Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel. But the Lincoln Memorial is still my favorite place in the world and not just in spite of its many stupid flaws. It’s my favorite place partly because of its blankness, because of those columns that are such standard-issue Western civ clichés they don’t so much exist as float. Inside the Lincoln Memorial I know what Frederick Douglass meant when he described what it was like to be invited to Lincoln’s White House: “I felt big there.”

Starcher’s inventory includes the important facts that Lincoln was elected in 1860 and Kennedy in 1960; that both their vice presidents were named Johnson, the first Johnson being born in 1808 and the second one in 1908; that John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839 and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939; that the names Lincoln and Kennedy each have seven letters, the names Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson are thirteen letters each, and there are fifteen letters in the names John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Starcher concludes, “Friends, that these things are verified facts prove that truth really is stranger than fiction and that history does repeat itself.”

While the list points out the fact that both presidential wives witnessed their husbands’ murders and had children who died while their husbands were in the White House, the list daintily ignores the fact that both women spent way too much money on clothes. And then there is the ridiculous detail about how Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and then escaped to a warehouse, while Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and then made haste to a theater. But Booth didn’t run to a warehouse. He ended up in a barn. A barn is the same thing as a warehouse if you think that a puppet is the same thing as a potholder.