09/16/2024
Michael Luo - Editor of newyorker.com
In 1970, two historians, Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, published “American Violence: A Documentary History,” an exhaustive catalogue of eyewitness accounts and contemporary reports of riots, rebellions, and assassinations in America, covering more than three hundred years. The kaleidoscopic book examines a hundred and seven episodes of domestic political violence, organized into a handful of loosely defined categories. The Hamilton-Burr Duel, of 1804, is included in Part VI, covering “Personal Violence.” The Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre of 1871, in which eighteen Chinese men were killed, is included in Part IV, under the heading of “Religious and Ethnic Violence.” The murder of Malcolm X, in 1965, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, are covered in Part VII under “Assassinations, Terrorism, Political Murders.”
In an extended reflection that opens the book, Hofstadter notes that “violence has been frequent, voluminous, almost commonplace” in American history, yet he observes a kind of collective amnesia regarding such events in the country’s citizenry. Part of the problem is the sheer variety of the violence, which makes coherent explanations elusive. “For historians violence is a difficult subject, diffuse and hard to cope with,” he writes. “It is committed by isolated individuals, by small groups, and by large mobs; it is directed against individuals and crowds alike; it is undertaken for a variety of purposes (and at times for no discernible rational purpose at all).”
What are we to make, then, of the events near West Palm Beach on Sunday? For the second time in the span of a little more than two months, a man with a gun allegedly tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump. The threat of violence—directed against our elected officials, but also against our fellow-citizens, and often the most vulnerable among us—seems almost constant. Yet, nowadays, the tendency to quickly move on from these events seems more pronounced than ever, stemming from a combination of apathy, helplessness, and exhaustion.
Hofstadter was writing in the wake of the violent tumult of the late nineteen-sixties, which triggered a period of introspection about the nature and causes of American violence. “Today we are not only aware of our own violence; we are frightened by it,” Hofstadter writes. Decades later, his observation demands fresh examination, given how inured we have become to the ubiquity of guns, mass shootings, and political extremism. Are we still frightened by our own violence?
