A Fair Trade Book
Title: Assassination
Vacation
Author: Sarah Vowell
Author's web site: http://www.barclayagency.com/site/speaker/sarah-vowell
Date: 2005
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6004-6
Length: 258 pages
Quote: “‘I went to…Assassins…the
Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and
would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if
they could gun down a president.’…Now,a
person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that, as
these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins…they probably didn’t want
to think about presidential gunshot wounds.”
Nevertheless, the success of what has to have been the worst
idea for a musical in human history gave Vowell the funding to travel to sites
involved in the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley,
and write about them. The idea of a musical about famous murders from different
periods in history makes me a bit queasy; I can deal with the idea, though, of
a lovably eccentric writer studying the history
of famous murders. Simon & Schuster gambled that a lot of other readers
would, too. I’ll admit I’d probably enjoy reading Vowell’s travel stories more
if they’d been organized around a more appealing theme, but the histories of
famous inventions, famous businesses, famous battles, have been done. And
Vowell does have that “Wednesday
Addams” image thing going on, although it’s never completely dominated her life
and writing and many Washington Post readers
like her better when she lets it drop. (You know, the nice, likable aunt who
just happens to list terror, horror, and gross-outs among the things she most
enjoys sharing with her nephews…) And, after all, the three assassinations took
place within a budget-friendly distance from the city for whose main newspaper
Vowell works, a newspaper that aaalways promotes
historical tourism…
So off she leads us on, among other places, a visit to
Hildene, home of Robert Todd Lincoln, who—after burying his father—“was only a
few feet away when James A. Garfield was shot…in 1881” and “[i]n 1901…arrived
in Buffalo mere moments after William McKinley fell. Robert Todd Lincoln’s
status as a presidential death magnet weighed on him…when he was asked to
attend some White House function, he grumbled, ‘If only they knew, they
wouldn’t want me there.’” Her conclusion:
“It’s impossible not to compare him with his father: Abraham Lincoln freed the
slaves; Robert Todd Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.”
(Robert Todd Lincoln's life may once have been saved by John Wilkes Booth's brother Edwin, as Dan Lewis told us a few weeks ago:
There are side excursions to sites associated with other
historic crimes. At the hotel “where Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981…I feel
reverent, though not so much about Reagan.” In full “Wednesday” aspect, Vowell
resents “the cheery way [Reagan] yukked it up during his recovery. Not that I
blame him…the one time I came to in an ambulance (following a bike accident…)[t]he
medic asked me who the president was and I answered, ‘George Bush, but I didn’t
vote for him.’ It pains me that like Reagan, faced with the profundity of death
my first conscious impulse was to act…smart-alecky.”
Vowell also visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, who she
thinks has much in common with John Wilkes booth. “Besides the fact that they
looked alike with their dark hair, dark eyes, and dark moustaches, they were
both the sons of actors…Poe died—of what root cause, no one knows for
sure…slumped over in a polling place, probably because he had been hired as a
‘repeater,’ i.e…paid to go from one poll to another voting again and again. In
other words, both Booth and Poe died thwarting the will of the electorate.”Then there’s a visit to a museum that displays preserved
remains of assassins and victims, including fragments of the bodies of Booth
and Charles Guiteau. There’s a sculpture, one of many, of Lincoln’s hands: “the
right hand is larger than the left…Lincoln’s right hand was swollen from all
the congratulatory shaking.”
A visit to Garfield’s home reveals him to be an
obsessive bookworm who slipped away from various obligations to curl up with a
good book. Guiteau, on the other hand, belonged to a commune that had a formal
rule that paired young men with older women, for birth control purposes; all
the members supposedly lived in a state of spiritual love so all-embracing that
physical embraces were just a way to relax, except for Guiteau, who was
nicknamed “Charles Gitout” because none of the older women wanted to relax with
him. There’s a verse from a Garfield
campaign song warning that failing to elect the Republican (Garfield) would
revive the Confederacy (“The nation’s flag will lose its stars…and we’ll all
wear gray”; note the absence of any concern about the ex-slaves, which, in
fact, almost no Northerners actually felt before, during, or after the War). An
even more ridiculous song, or poem, was recited by Guiteau before his death (“I
am going to the Lord. I saved my party and my land”).
Vowell’s comments on the Washington Monument are bids for
attention from “goth” types. So are her comments on the less famous Garfield
Monument, in which, grotesquely, images of Garfield at different ages appear
together, making the President “appear like a dirty old man…about to take his pick
of street hustlers” as he looks down on his younger selves. (President Grant,
by contrast, she allows is “blatantly hetero.”) At Niagara Falls, she observes
that the Canadian side offers a “better view” that “was denied President
McKinley…he was very careful not to walk too far across the bridge into Canada
because no sitting American president had ever left the country.”
Vowell raises the question of how much Emma Goldman really
did, in real life, influence Leon Czolgosz (“Shol-gosh”) to murder McKinley. In
the musical, she’s told us, they had a love affair. In reality, Goldman may or
may not have been a virgin, physically, after a brief marriage, when she fell
in love with someone called Berkman, and describes Czolgosz as a fanboy who
asked her to recommend books he could read. Goldman did say, and write, things
that encouraged violence—until her fan shot the President, after which she
wrote some discouragements of further violence. She was jailed, and later
deported, for the generally seditious tendency of her life and writing. People
wanted to believe she was a co-conspirator, if not even closer than that, to
Czolgosz. Both he and she always denied that.
At least Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt behaved as if
he’d been coached to regard his promotion to President as “the worst of all
news”; when notified that McKinley was dying, he “sat back down and finished
his lunch.” Vowell tours what is still marked as the “ROUGH ROAD” TR and a
driver descended in a horse-drawn buggy, in the dead of the night, to get TR
back to Washington to assume his presidential duties. By way of lights, “There
was one lantern, and Roosevelt was
holding it.” Nevertheless, Roosevelt would later be shot by a troubled soul who
claimed that McKinley had told him “Avenge my death” in a dream; the bullet
bounced off the contents of TR’s pockets, allowing him to crow that “It takes
more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.”
If you enjoy this kind of wacky tour of the sidelights of
history, read Assassination Vacation;
it contains many more of them. It is, to the fullest extent its morbid subject
matter allows, a fun read. (I’ve not even mentioned the totem poles.)
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