Assassination Vacation

Assassination Vacation (2005) is a work of nonfiction by Sarah Vowell. Vowell travels around her home of New York City as well as Washington, DC and to various spots in the northeastern United States from Ohio to New Jersey to visit sites related to three assassinated presidents and their assassins: Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, James A. Garfield and Charles A. Guiteau, and William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz. Vowell intertwines her visits to historical sites with reflections on The Impact of Political Violence in American History, The Shaping of Civic Memory, and The Tension Between Patriotism and History. 

The book mixes several genres, including memoir, travelogue, non-fiction personal narrative, and history. Vowell is an American writer and journalist who also worked as a producer and editor for the radio show This American Life on NPR (National Public Radio).

This study guide uses the 2005 first edition published by Simon & Schuster.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, sexual violence, and racism.

Summary

Vowell writes about how she was inspired by watching a musical by Steven Sondhaim, Assassins. The musical was a darkly comic look at various US presidential assassins, including John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald (the assassin of John F. Kennedy). Vowell relates the experience of watching the musical to her own anger against the president in her time, George W. Bush, remarking, “my simmering rage against the current president scares me” (6-7) due to her deep opposition to political violence. She concludes that such political rage, combined with personal mental illness or despair, can lead one to commit an act such as a presidential assassination. She also compares the tendency of people to travel to the sites of historical figures, especially those who tragically died, to Christian pilgrimages to sites associated with saints.

For her first and longest chapter, Vowell follows the trail of John Wilkes Booth, who escaped after shooting President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC. She visits the historic site where Booth’s co-conspirators made a failed assassination attempt on Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward. Afterward, she goes to the site of the barn in Maryland where Booth hid and was killed. Seeing Confederate flags and other memorabilia for sale on the way, Vowell reflects on the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was wearing a shirt with “a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Printed under Lincoln’s face was the caption ‘Sic semper tyrannis’” (57). Despite Lincoln being an American “saint”, the legacy of enslavement and the Confederacy remains strong in the United States.

Vowell then focuses on Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield. Vowell begins at Wall Street. It is the historical site of the New York Custom House, a vital source of income for the US federal government as well as a notorious, but tolerated, source for corruption. The collector of the New York Custom House was a political appointment, one of many that people approached the President for. Vowell next visits the building that once belonged to the Oneida Community, which Vowell describes as a “nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York” (137). 

After leaving the Oneida Community, Guiteau tried to gain appointment to the office of US ambassador to France. Disappointed, the mentally ill Guiteau believed God wanted him to kill Garfield on behalf of the Stalwarts, a faction of the Republican Party that Garfield had turned against. Vowell finishes this trip at the beachside community of Long Branch, New Jersey, where Garfield went to recover, only to be killed by an infection caused by poor medical treatment.

Vowell then turns to Leon Czolgosz, the killer of President William McKinley. Vowell views McKinley’s central legacy as being a president who “warmed up to the idea of empire” (202). While first opposing the United States’ involvement in the Spanish-American War, McKinley enthusiastically supported the US acquiring Spain’s former overseas territories of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Vowell compares McKinley’s actions and their consequences, especially the United States’ brutal actions in the Philippines, to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the torture of terrorism suspects that occurred under Bush’s administration. 

Vowell visits sites in New York City related to the anarchist leader, Emma Goldman, who was an inspiration for Czolgosz, who came from a difficult, working-class background. Acting on his own initiative, Czolgosz assassinated McKinley on behalf of the working class, which caused unwarranted suspicion to fall on Goldman. In the end, Vowell goes to Mount Marcy in the Adirondack mountain range. There, McKinley’s vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, received word of McKinley’s death and was sworn in.

Vowell concludes her assassination-related trips by visiting her favorite historical spot in Washington, DC, the Lincoln Memorial. Seeing that a church is holding services at the Lincoln Memorial, Vowell reflects on the parallels between Jesus Christ and Lincoln, who was even right after his assassination seen as “the country’s savior” (249). Vowell argues that people find a kind of meaning from historical relics as well as the strange historical coincidences between the different presidential assassinations, such as Lincoln’s son Robert’s nearby presence at all three assassinations.