U.S. Assassination Attempts: Not an Especially Important History
Yet one story I find especially compelling.
TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED
I have nothing useful to add to ongoing discussions of the meaning of former president Trump’s being shot at during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. I do find it possibly worth considering, in the context of what people are calling the current American culture of political violence—each side blames it on the other—the high number of attempts to assassinate presidents and presidential candidates we’ve had here.
The successful ones are well-known, of course. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and John Kennedy were killed, and so was presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Some unsuccessful attempts are well-known too, most notably the attempt on President Reagan and the two (2!) on President Ford.
In the wake of the Trump shooting, the 1912 attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt is getting some replay as a kind of parallel. TR was a former president who, having served only one full term (when vice president, he’d succeeded the assassinated McKinley), was seeking non-successive reelection and got shot while on his way to give a speech. In the iron-man mode that many are now projecting on Trump, Teddy gave the ninety-minute speech with a bullet lodged in his ribs. Then he went to the hospital.
Then he lost the election.
An attempt was also made on Franklin Roosevelt’s life—and while few people talk about that one these days, I find the episode especially interesting.
When five shots splatted out, on February 15, 1933, FDR was neither the president nor a candidate but the president-elect, having won the 1932 election; inauguration for his first term was only weeks away (presidential terms used to begin in March). The country was of course in the most disastrous economic shape it's ever been in. Hence FDR’s election.
The shooting occurred in Miami, where the president-elect had just disembarked from a 263-foot yacht owned by the son of Vincent Astor, son of the late John Jacob Astor IV, one of the richest Americans of his day. Pre-inauguration, FDR and a small group of pals had been on a twelve-day, stag, Harvard-alum fishing-and-chilling cruise, because that’s what people like that did back then. At about 9:00 P.M., in an open car, prior to his planned departure northward by train, the president-elect stopped off at the annual encampment of the American Legion in Bay Front Park and with 20,000 legionnaires and Miamians cheering, hoisted himself onto the top of the back seat and spoke briefly, then dropped back down.
He’d seen the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, standing nearby. “Hello, Tony,” FDR called out, and beckoned him over. Cermak stood on the running board and chatted with FDR because cars had running boards back then.
In the crowd, at close range, stood Guiseppe Zangara, 32, an anarchist bricklayer, unemployed in part because of medical problems, who had just bought a .32 Colt revolver at a pawnshop in town. Taken by surprise by the brevity of the speech, Zangara feared he might be missing his chance.
As he pushed his way forward, raised the pistol, and opened fire on FDR, a woman standing beside him, later identified by the press as “Mrs. W. F. Cross, wife of a Miami physician”—because that’s how women were identified back then—grabbed his arm and twisted it, changing his aim. Zangara did get off five shots in rapid succession. None of them hit the president-elect. A Secret Service agent was bleeding from the hand. A few civilians were also hit and wounded.
And Mayor Cermak fell from the running board. As FDR sat stock-still, gritting his teeth in anticipation of possible further shots—paralyzed, remember, from the waist down—the driver started the car. They’d driven about fifteen feet when FDR saw Cermak lying crumpled on the ground and called out to to the driver to stop. The driver did, but Secret Service were of course yelling at him to go, go! and now the president-elect was yelling at him to get Cermak into the car.
A tough spot for the poor driver. Somehow Cermak was placed beside FDR in the back seat, and the car took off.
One thing that strikes me about the story is that only months before, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Stadium, at the end of June, Cermak had played a key role in the Stop Roosevelt effort coming out of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which had come very close to achieving its aim and nominating Al Smith for the presidency instead. Having failed, Cermak was in Miami specifically to meet the yacht and glad-hand, suck up to, and schmooze the president-elect in hopes of smoothing over the unpleasantnesses within the party and keeping Chicago and Illinois operatives and elected officials in the good graces of the new leader.
The mayor’s moves at the convention had been quite impressive. He’d stacked the gigantic new stadium not only with true Al Smith supporters but also with local boneheads paid in cash and booze to boo and howl at FDR speakers and cheer for Smith’s. Handing his police force 10,000 tickets to the event, Cermak deputized them as door enforcers, ordering them to admit only the right people and turn away delegates’ spouses and others who had actually purchased their tickets. He also exercised his control over the Illinois delegates released by Senator John Hamilton Lewis, the state’s “favorite son” candidate, to keep them from going over to FDR.
And at the last minute, the mayor had gasoline siphoned out of the tank of the car that was to carry the powerful California politician William McAdoo to the convention to release his all-important delegation to FDR. McAdoo, his car stopped dead, traffic honking, furious at Cermak, leaped on the back of a police motorcycle. But his famously long legs made riding impossible.
McAdoo did charge into at the hall, at the last minute, and get to the rostrum just in time to release his delegates, putting FDR nearly over the top amid deafening shouts, trash-and-bottle throwing, slugfests, and bloody noses because, need I note, that’s how we did things back then. It was clear that FDR was going to win the nomination after all, so Cermak made another classic hardball move. He turned on a dime, right there at the convention, faster and more adroitly than his Stop Roosevelt allies in the DNC. Knowing he had to get Illinois on the bandwagon right away or suffer disastrous losses of federal patronage, he went to the podium—to the wild cheers of his paid thugs, who hadn’t gotten the memo—and asked for calm. The thugs now started booing him, too, but Cermak went ahead and committed the Illinois delegation to FDR.
The place went even crazier. Al Smith was as enraged at Cermak as William McAdoo was.
Party politics—when it was fun.
Now, in the car, leaving the scene of the shooting, Roosevelt got his arm around Cermak, who was slumped unconscious against him, and put a finger to his wrist. The mayor was alive, Roosevelt could tell, and while at first he couldn’t find a pulse at all, he held onto him and talked softly: “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move. It won’t hurt if you keep quiet.”
As they drove, Cermak’s pulse began to improve. At the hospital, FDR waited, and when Cermak came out of ER, the two managed to speak, but they were both pretty sure that the mayor wouldn’t make it, and while FDR tried to cover up his expectation, they were right. Cermak’s bullet wound was complicated by ulcerative colitis. He died in the hospital on March 6. Everyone else shot by Zangara survived.
Mrs. W. F. Cross—she did have a first name, Lillian—told reporters, “My mind grasped the situation in a flash. I said to myself, 'He's going to kill the president.' I caught him by the arm and twisted it up.” Once the shots had been fired, the crowd turned on Zangara and beat him, some yelling “kill him!” because when people back then were enraged and freaked out, en masse, that's something they sometimes did.
Police managed to take the shooter safely into custody, where he pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder. “I have the gun in my hand,” Zangara explained. “I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists,” he added, because that’s how anarchists talked back then. Having been sentenced to eighty years, he said, “Oh, judge, don't be stingy. Give me a hundred years.”
“As a man I like him all right,” Zangara said of Roosevelt. “Presidents—always the same bunch.”
After Mayor Cermak died, Zangara was convicted of murder and was executed in the electric chair at the state prison in Railford, Florida, because—
But no. Enough for today.
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Further Reading
“Woman's courage foils shots assassin aimed at Roosevelt”, UPI Archives, February 16, 1933.
Parts of my account of the shooting and its aftermath are drawn from the FDR biographies Traitor to His Class, by H.W. Brands; and FDR, by Jean Edward Smith.
I’ve read too many books and primary sources on the 1932 campaign to credit them here. I really like Behind the Ballots, a memoir by Jim Farley, a major FDR campaign operative, critical to the victories of ’32. I don’t think anyone’s ever proven that Cermak engineered McAdoo’s car running out of gas, but Cermak had supplied the vehicle, and McAdoo was sure that’s what happened, and why not?