Martin Meenagh blog

The thirty-fifth president of the United States was shot in Dallas in 1963 on the 22 November at around 12:30 pm. That single sentence is the most that Americans and historians from across the political spectrum can agree on in 2014, which in itself offers the outline of a suggested answer to the question of why the assassination was controversial. Unlike the previous assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, the assassin was not seen and did not identify himself or themselves during the shooting. Subsequently, out of the Warren Commission’s partial investigation, the internal Secret Service and FBI investigations, the three Congressional Investigations (the Pike Committee, Church Committee and Committee on Assassinations), the Assassination Records Review Board, and the notorious Garrison investigation by the District Attorney of New Orleans, only the Warren Commission identified one assassin to the exclusion of all others. Shortly after the killing itself, President John...

James Garfield was president of the United States for a little less than eight months (or 200 days), which makes him the second-shortest serving president after William Henry Harrison. For almost the whole period he was either comforting his extremely ill wife, or suffering the aftermath of an assassination attempt. It is therefore remarkable that his Administration had any achievements at all. Nevertheless, serious reform of the Post Office, the Civil Service and of the conventions involving presidential deference to the Senate all occurred as a result of Garfield’s initiatives. Garfield managed a reduction of bond payments on the United States debt that saw interest rates cut from 6% to 3.5%, and also promoted African American figures and interests at a time when there was political sense in ignoring that constituency. It is also possible to talk to the circumstances of Garfield’s election in term of two key achievements. Garfield’s ‘dark horse’ nomination effectively preven...

There have been at least three distinct versions of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in American history. The first, as described by the republican congress of the 1870s, was established by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee in 1866. It was a collection of night-riders, lawbreakers and terrorists whose structure might well have been unsystematised but whose purpose throughout the Deep South was to undermine African-American votes, rights, and equality by legal and extralegal means. This Klan was effectively suppressed by the Grant Administration, which turned federal troops against it, though ballot intimidation, lynching, and the exclusion of black people from civil society continued via other means. The Second Klan arose in the years before World War One, and was heavily influenced by nativist suspicion of Catholics, Jews and Hispanic minorities as well as African-Americans. The Klan’s third existence was as a congeries of putative ‘white rights’ groups that ...

The Revolutions of the late eighteenth century in Europe and the United States are inevitably bound up with the history of Freemasonry. This is because many of the most prominent revolutionaries were members of Masonic Lodges, or drew upon ideas of governance and Reason which had been touted by Masons as essential to their movement. In addition, Masonry offered a semi-secret link between established money and new money, and a way for men to validate their social mobility with established rituals and a common fraternal bond that involved the promotion and protection of each other (women were not added to this structure until the 1850s, and then in a separate order). Masons were and are Deists who were opposed to Churches, particularly of the Catholic sort, and hierarchical, to the point of obsessive secrecy and obscurity in their higher rites. Nevertheless, many prominent American leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Andrew Jackson were open about their member...