Opinion: 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.

And for pundits predicting that this weekend’s assassination attempt will amount to a political win for Mr. Trump: Not all of these assassination attempts generated the kind of sympathy that one might have expected from the public.

From 1865 to 1901, three presidents were murdered, and the 20th century was arguably worse in terms of political violence. John Kennedy was murdered. A bullet hit former President Teddy Roosevelt in the chest when he was running for president on a third-party ticket in 1912. (Mr. Roosevelt continued speaking for more than an hour as he was bleeding.) President-elect Herbert Hoover was the target of a plot in Latin America to bomb his train, but authorities foiled it in the nick of time. An anti-elite Italian immigrant laborer shot five people in Miami, killing Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, and just missing his target, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. Mr. Truman, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Mr. Reagan were all the subjects of assassination attempts.

Historically, many politicians have blamed mental illness as the cause of these attacks. They argue that a sick individual, acting on his or her own accord, with easy access to firearms, is unrepresentative of a good society. And yet the United States has sat alone as the most politically violent of all industrialized democracies. Canada’s prime ministers in the 20th century all survived their terms in office; not a single one was shot. Since Japan’s establishment as a full parliamentary democracy in the wake of World War II, only one prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was assassinated, after he left office, while giving a speech in support of a candidate for the Japanese upper house of Parliament. Although Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher survived a bombing attempt by the Irish Republican Army in 1984, Britain has lost only one prime minister to assassination, and that happened in 1812. Since the Federal Republic of Germany was created in 1949, not a single chancellor has been murdered. Among all major democracies, then, when it comes to assassination attempts on heads of government, the United States is the leader of the pack.

After Mr. Truman was attacked, some reporters speculated about whether an outpouring of good will would boost his party’s fortunes in the 1950 midterm elections. “The attempt this week to assassinate Mr. Truman will transform into a triumph the enthusiastic reception on which he could always count,” The Times’s Arthur Krock, a leading columnist, wrote of Mr. Truman’s reception at an upcoming St. Louis rally where he was giving a final campaign speech. “When the audience beholds him,” Mr. Krock wrote, “it will be acutely mindful of the peril he escaped and the philosophic calm and courage with which he appraised it.” A few days later, the Democrats were badly defeated.

Teddy Roosevelt’s survival sealed his reputation as a tower of strength, but he denounced the press as the reason his assailant hated him — “Blames Savage Newspapers for the Assassination,” one newspaper reported. He lost his White House bid that year.

Mr. Ford never garnered much political support, despite two attempts on his life. He almost lost the Republican nomination to Mr. Reagan before losing re-election to Jimmy Carter just more than a year after almost being murdered.

Mr. Reagan’s case is more the exception than the norm. A brilliant image maker, he used his survival and recovery after a few months in office to make a case for economic recovery through his conservative economic policies.

The near miss on Saturday in Pennsylvania has generated sympathy for Mr. Trump among the MAGA faithful and perhaps, for a time, even among his critics. But the attack may also remind at least some Americans of his role as an agent of chaos and violence, especially on Jan. 6, 2021.

If nothing else, the attack on the 45th president is likely to accelerate the fracturing of the country, hardening our divisions. As the Secret Service escorted Mr. Trump off the stage, blood streaming from his ear, he mouthed the word “fight” to his followers.

Matthew Dallek is a historian and a professor of political management at George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies. Robert Dallek is a presidential historian and the author of “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” They are working on a book about failed presidential assassination attempts and political violence in the 20th century. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Opinion: Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon

Opinion: Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon

Opinion: Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon

Opinion: Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon

Opinion: Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon