Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you this week. Here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks so much for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ran Gorman, and we have a really important and timely conversation lined up for you. Over the course of the past week, the country has dealt with an assassination attempt on a former president who's currently running
for president once again, and a major party political convention. We thought this would be an appropriate time to take a look back at our country's history and learn more about the political violence we've dealt with and overcome along with the formation of political parties and the creation of nominating conventions. This is going to be a non partisan conversation, just focusing on past events and right now. To get things started, I'm joined by historian and author of the Don't Know Much
About book series, Kenneth C. Davis. You can learn more about the books he's written and his new book, The World in Books fifty two Works of great short nonfiction, which is set for release in October at Don't Know Much dot Com. Kenneth, thanks so much for coming on the show, and let's start with the topic of political violence. How far back does that go? It goes back before our founding and hello, Brian is always a great place to join you and try and connect the history to the headlines and
find out what the past has to do with the present. That's the reason I have been writing about history for more than thirty years. It's always interesting. History does not repeat itself in that phrase we often use, but there are always echoes that come down to us, and we certainly have to be
aware of the past when we're talking about what's going on today. So let's go ahead and step through some of the more notable moments of political violence, including assassinations and assassination attempts that we've dealt with here in the United States since our formation. Well, obviously we can think of presidential assassinations and assassin attempts that have been very, very prominent in recent history and certainly in earlier history.
Obviously JFA in my lifetime and Abraham Lincoln seeing the two most prominent that comes to mind. But as I said, it's a much older thing. In fact, eighteen thirty five, Andrew Jackson was the first commander in chief to survive an attempt on his life, and he was, of course somewhat violent man in his own right, had been involved in many duels. He'd killed a man in a duel, and just a reminder that in the early nineteenth century when he was president, and going back earlier to his boyhood,
he was actually a teenager during the American Revolution. America was a violent place and was born in violence. And we have to remember that. Even though we can look back and admire the past and admire what it was accomplished and think of the noble things in our history, it has been a history of
tremendous silence at different times. So there he was. In eighteen thirty five, an unemployed house painter took a shot at Jackson as he was leaving a funeral held at the at the United States Capitol Building, and the shot missed, the pistol miss fired, and Jackson actually went after his assailant with his cane, you know. So it's quite an extraordinary story. There have been numerous other attempts on presidents besides that, very very notably Theodore Roosevelt in nineteen
twelve, he was an assassination. Assassination attempt was made on Roosevelt's life, and he was at that time running for election is the curious one. He was the former president running for election on a third party, and the selah took a shot at him, hit him, and he actually then continued to make a speak. His eyeglass case and notes that he had for plan speak
saved him from a fatal in its injury. A very very famous moment came out of that because he said, this assassin's shot, it would take more than that to kill me. I'm as strong as a bull moose. And that then became the name of his political party, the Bull Moose Party. That's such an incredible story. So Theodore Roosevelt gets shot and still finishes the
speech he was giving during the attempted assassination, that's correct. And then less than a month after that attempt, Roosevelt, his Theodore Roosevelt, of course, was defeated in the election. The election of nineteen twelve was rather extraordinary. Roosevelt, as I mentioned, was running as a third party candidate. They would come to be known as the bull Moose, and he actually finished second, the best performance by a third party candidate in American presidential history.
He finished second behind Woodrow Wilson, and the incumbent president at the time was William Howard's Path, who had followed Roosevelt into office. Roosevelt was not happy with tass that the joke at the time that went that Path meant to take advice from Theodore, in other words, from Roosevelt. But the combination of Roosevelt and cast running against each other in essence split the Republican vote that year and sort of led the way for Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the election.
I'm Riyan Gorman, joined by historian and author of that Don't Know Much About book series Kenneth C. Davis. You can find more about his book series and Don't Know Much dot com. So what are some other attempted assassinations in our nation's history that we should know about? Franklin D. Roosevelt in nineteen thirty three, an attempt was made on his life just two weeks before inauguration day, as an Italian immigrant took a shot at Roosevelt while he was speaking
at a rally before he was actually inaugurated. So he was the president elect. Harry Truman in nineteen fifty the target of assassin a fairly serious one. This was a number of I believe they were Puerto Rican independence fighters, that was their cause, and they attempted to assassinate Roosevelt. George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, famous sess for being a segregationist. He was also a victim of an assassination attempt that left him seriously wounded and in a hospital,
I should say a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was paralyzed from the weights down. And darld Ford in nineteen seventy five. So this is not, you know, typical on one hand, but it's not uncommon either for presidents to be targeted. And of course it was after John F. Kennedy's assassination. And we'll go back to Lincoln in a second. That really so many of the rules and regulations regarding what presidents could and couldn't
do came into effect. Now, let's talk about the first assassination of the United States President Abraham Lincoln back in eighteen sixty five, at the hands of John Wilke Spooth, an assassination that would change the course of this country. It certainly did. Well. We'll have to go back to April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States.
April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, with about eight or nine days after Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War in America, and Lincoln went out to go to a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, d c. He was liked theater, He liked going
to the theater. He had a regular box at Forts Theater. But he was going to attend the performance of Our American Cousin with the name of the play that night on April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, be Good Friday. He was then shot by John Wilkes Booth, very very well known American actor, part of an acting family in America. In fact, Lincoln had seen
John Wilkes Booth perform in a play not long before this evening. Lincoln died the next morning, April fifteenth, and of course did change the course of history. Lincoln's assassination was part of a larger conspiracy intended by Booths with co conspirators to attack a whole group of some of the most important officials in the Lincoln cabinet. The Secretary of State the vice president, who was Andrew Johnson,
and he then of course became president after Lincoln's death. It changed the course of history in a very, very, a basic, simple way. Abraham Lincoln probably would have treated the end of the Confederacy and the end of the Civil War in a very different way than his successor, Andrew Johnson did. Of course, we can only speculate on that, but it's very clear that Lincoln was a very different man from Andrew Johnson, who was no surprise to say, or no revelation to say, he was a bit of a
drunkard. He was a very, very much a Southerner at heart. He had been a slaveholding Southerner who stayed loyal to the Union, which was why Lincoln chose him as a vice presidential candidate. He thought he would be good to have a Southerner to help unite the country and unite his ticket in eighteen sixty four when he ran for reelection. Of course, his death absolutely changed
the course of American history. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by historian and an author of that Don't Know Much About book series, Ken C. Davis, discussing the history of political violence here in the United States. Sixteen years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, there would be another assassination, this one involving
President James A. Garfield. Tell us about that. That's right. Garfield was a Civil War veteran himself from Ohio, and he was very very well known for wanting to get rid of the system of patronage in the federal government. Patronage meant that you gave jobs to your friends and your friend friends, and there was a civil service at the time, but it was fairly small and most federal jobs. Of course, the federal government back then was a
lot smaller than it is today. Basically, the federal government was the War Department, the Post Office, and a few other smaller the Patent Office. But to get a job in one of those offices, that's significant, but it was largely left to patronage. Garfield was one of the men who wanted
to change that, and he was an opponent of civil service reform. And he was then approached by a man who was one of these people who was looking for jobs, Charles Guiteau, and he was apparently very very unhappy that he was not going to get a job in the new Garfield administration. Then if we fast forward just twenty years to nineteen oh one, we have the assassination of President William McKinley. Tell us about that one, that's right.
William McKinley was another veteran of the Civil War, his vice president with Theodore Roosevelt, who would of course take his place and go on to much more fame. William McKinley was actually a pretty impressive character and might have been if he had survived his assassination and gone on to another term, really been one of the great presidents in history. But because he was killed and wasn't able to finish the things he set out to do, kind of forgotten and erased
by history, but very very significant. He was the twenty fifth President of the United States, elected eighteen ninety six, forgive me, and then assassinated in nineteen oh one. He was a member of the Republican Party. They
were dominant in the country at that time. He led America into one of its first overseas wars, the War against Spain, that really took place mostly in the Philippines, but also led to the control of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, glomb So he was a very very important figure transitioning from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century and really begins projecting America in many ways as a world power. That's something that Theodore Roosevelt, after he became president, would continue
to do even more aggressively. But a very important figure in history. Now, McKinley was assassinated by a man who was essentially an anarchist, and an anarchist at that time was actually more than just what we think of an anarchists
today. It was really a much more organized group in a sense. But this man who wanted to assassinate McKinley hope do the deed because he wanted Americans not to be so aggressive around the world, and he saw America as an imperial nation and he was going to end that by taking getting rid of McKinley. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by historian and author of the Don't Know Much
About Book series Kenneth C. Davis. Then we get to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty three by Lee Harvey Oswald, one that's still discussed and debated to this day. It's absolutely true, Ryan, this is the one in a way that never really goes away. We've been thinking about it and talking about it since it happened in November of nineteen sixty
three. I will date myself and say I was a nine year old child at the time, and it was a very very powerful moment in my young life. And I mean many people remember have seen all of these scenes on television. We were kind of watching them live. Although I was in school that day. I remember the factodian of the school walked into the into our classroom, went over to the teacher and whispered something. Her faith went white,
and she told us class, something terrible has happened. Cousin Kennedy has died. You all are dismissed. And I remember walking home that day really not sure what was going on, being nine years old, not fully understanding politics and history quite yet, but knowing that this was an extraordinary series of
events. Of course, a few days later, John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Awful, was also killed, shot as he was being led by the police through a garage, and again it's a moment that absolutely changes history. We can only speculate on what Kennedy would have done in finishing his first term and then going on to a second term, which probably would have been almost a certainty that he would have won reelection, extremely extremely popular.
At the time, we had not yet fully engaged in Vietnam, although Kennedy had begun that process, and there's a lot of speculation as to what might have happened differently if Kennedy had lived and then had a second term instead of Lyndon B. Johnson taking over Kennedy's term and then winning election in his own
right in nineteen sixty four. And then finally we get to the most recent attempted assassination prior to what just took place involving former President Donald Trump, you had the shooting of Ronald Reagan while in office in nineteen eighty one, also a very very memorable moment to me, as for many many of us who
were around at a time when he was elected. Of course, the country was in a confused moment, and we had gone through the Watergate period that the resignation of Richard Nixon, followed by Gerald Ford, who was also the victim of an attempted assassination in nineteen seventy five, then followed by the Carter administration, and the Carter administration, we were dealing with a lot of difficulties, and Ronald Reagan came onto the scene and talked about making a mourning in
America. And the assassination attempt took place on March thirtieth, nineteen eighty one, that would have been in Reagan's early in Reagan's first administration, and he was shot outside the Washington Hilton. I didn't pass that spot many times since, and it's always astonishing to walk past it and feel that moment. He was shot by a man named John Hinckley outside the Washington Hilton as he was
leaving an event there, and he was also struck by the bullets. Was his sub secretary, James Brady, and Reagan, of course went to the hospital immediately underwent surgery. There were stories that came out about his humor and joking with the doctors as he was going as the surgery, which only seemed to magnify this larger what had become a larger than life character on the American political scene at the time. He later believed and he said, I believe.
He told the biographer that he believed that God had spared his life for chosen mission. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by historian and author of the don't know much about book series, Kenneth C. Davis. You can learn more about the books he's written at don't Know Much dot com. Let's switch gears here, Kenneth and talk about something else that took places past week, the Republican National Convention. We won't talk about the convention itself, but we'll talk
about the history of political parties and these nominating conventions. Let's start with political parties and how they came about. It's a really interesting question, and it's
been a really extraordinary evolution over the decades. There was a time when the political convention was a moment of such high political drama in this country because we did not have a primary system through most of our history, so that when we went to convene, no matter which party it was, there was this element of what is going to happen, Who is going to emerge from this meeting with enough delegates to win the nomination. So it was a much more
profound moment of political drama, historical drama in many cases. But we have to go back to the very beginning when we talk about political parties, to the ideas of the founding fathers like George Washington and others. They did not like the idea of parties, and they would have used the word facts. George Washington in particular warned about it in several of its speeches and including his
farewell speech. He thought that the idea that people would belonged to one party or another was dangerous and that people should instead of the independent and line up behind what ever bill was being proposed and vote on its merits. But that's just not the way the world worked, and it's certainly not the way politics worked. And almost immediately while George Washington was still president, there was the
movement to create political parties. In the beginning, they were called the Federalists, and Washington, although he was never actually a Federalist, probably would have been aligned with them. His vice president, John Adams was a Federalist, so was his secretary of the Frederie, Alexander Hamilton. On the other side, where the men known as at that time Democratic Republicans a little bit confusing, they would eventually morph into the Democratic Party, and they were led by
Tom Jefferson principally and men like James Madison. So this was something that evolved almost from the beginning of the country that we were because there are no there's no constitutional reason for parties. They're not mentioned. There's nothing. And all of these rules that relate to conventions are party rules, not federal rules that
are embodied in our constitutions. It's the way it's evolved. Early on in our history, the decision of who would be made president was really left to the party members in Congress, and they would meet in what was called a caucus, and out of the caucus with the eventual nominee. The first political convention, as we would understand it, took place in eighteen thirty one, and it's a curious one because it was a third party convention by a a
group called the Anti Masons. Anti Masons feared the growing political and financial power of the secret Society of Free Masons. Now throughout our history, many many presidents have been Free Masons, including George Washington and other founding fathers. But this group was met with great suspicions early on in American history as a secret
society that was doing all sorts of nefarious things. So in eighteen thirty one, the Anti Masons met in Baltimore in Maryland and chose their candidates for presidents. And that was where the really the first inventions in American history that actually nominated the candidates for presidents, And when did we morph into the setup we have now where the voters decide who the nominee is going to be or play a prominent role in that decision. Well, this is something that's much more
recent contemporary. Although I'm showing my age when I say nineteen sixty eight is recent and can temporary in nineteen seventy two, really not until that period that we start to get the convention and nominating process as we know it today. From the eighteen thirties right up until the nineteen sixties, most of the conventions were as I mentioned, they didn't have primaries in all the states at that time, so people went to the convention expecting that they were going to negotiate
for who would be the candidate. There were a handful of primaries in those years, but not as we understand it today, where there's a primary in actually every state, and a candidate very often today now has the delegates necessary to win the nomination before the convention actually meets. So this is something that evolves slowly, just as our democracy evolved. You know, we went through a period for a long time that only white men over twenty one who owned
property could vote in this country. Gradually, very slowly, that changed. Of course, the fifteenth Amendment gave black mails the vote. Eventually the women got the vote in the early twentieth century. Nineteen seventy two, I was eighteen years old. I was able to vote because of the change in the amendment. So we have a process in this country where democracy slowly opened up to more and more people, and that was being reflected in the parties themselves.
The people who were mainstream members of the party felt that the whole process of selecting a candidate was left to too many secret deals made in what they called smoke filled rooms. And as we progressed through the twentieth century, more and more people began to object to that process. And in nineteen sixty eight, which is a year we have to come back to and talk about both in terms of political conventions and political violence, that was the turning point.
After nineteen sixty eight, especially in the Democratic Party, the brass roots members, the rank and file members said we have to come up with a different way of selecting our candidate, and the primary system as we know it today came so much more prominent. That meant in nineteen seventy two, a fellow named George McGovern, quite a liberal leaning Democrats, was able to win the nomination through the primary system as opposed to waiting for the nominating convention or a
big change in our history. And then last thing I want to touch on while we're talking about major party political conventions, of course, the infamous one in nineteen sixty eight where you had a combination of the two topics we've discussed on this show, political violence and a party's convention. Of course, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A few weeks later, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who was challenging for the Democratic Invention
nomination. At that point, Lyndon Johnson historically had resigned from I should say, chosen not to run again. He could have run as a second term president, he chose not to a political earthquake in this time, in this moment. And then the nineteen sixty eight Democratic Invention in Chicago famously disintegrated into a riotous scene of mayhem, a riot that was largely blamed later on on the Chicago police we could spend another half hour talking about that one, all
right. Historian and author of the Don't Know Much About book series Kenneth C. Davis. You can learn more about the books he's written, including his new book The World in Books fifty two Works of Great Short Nonfiction, which is set for release in October at Don't Know Much dot Com. Again, that's Don't Know Much dot Com. Kenneth. We can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on the show and step us through our country's interesting
history, especially in this current moment after the week that we've experienced. We really appreciate the time and insight. Thank you, Ryan, thanks so much. And everybody please remember your vote is your voice, so register if you haven't, and make sure you vote on election day. All Right, And that's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman, Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again real soon. Thank you,