Excerpt from: Slate (click for full article)
The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., have led many people to characterize school violence as a modern affliction, a byproduct of our national obsession with guns and media violence. But the deadliest school-related massacre in American history happened in 1927, at an elementary school in Bath, Mich. A school board member named Andrew Kehoe, upset over a burdensome property tax, wired the building with dynamite and set it off in the morning of May 18. Kehoe’s actions killed 45 people, 38 of whom were children.
Like the Newtown school shooting, the Bath bombing was a major news story. Ellsworth writes, “I think we had the greatest demonstration of American sympathy ever awarded a grief stricken community. Thousands and thousands of cars stayed in line for hours. I have a gas station one-half mile west of Bath on the main road to Lansing, where there was a double row of traffic all day. In the afternoon it took about four hours to get three miles, but I don't remember … hearing a single horn sounded. It was like a great funeral procession. Everyone's heart was filled with sympathy.”
But the attention was short-lived. In an interview this summer with the Christian Science Monitor, Arnie Bernstein, author of 2009’s Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing, noted that “there wasn't a media frenzy like today. The media came in and left. Three days after it happened, Lindbergh took off and flew to Paris, and that part of it was over.”
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