来週で１５０周年

National Geographic [US] April 2015 (単号) (2015/04/10) 不明 商品詳細を見る

洋書売り場の雑誌コーナーではリンカーン大統領の表紙の雑誌がいくつかあって、なんのことかと思ったら、暗殺された日が１８６５年４月１４日とちょうど１５０周年にあたるようです。

ニューヨークタイムズは暗殺によって歴史の流れが変わるのかという論考を載せていました。

Do Assassins Really Change History?
APRIL 10, 2015
By BENJAMIN F. JONES and BENJAMIN A. OLKEN
DAYS after John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theater and shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, declared that “assassination has never changed the history of the world.” Was Disraeli right?

One view, the “great man” theory, claims that individual leaders play defining roles, so that assassinating one could lead to very different national or global outcomes. In contrast, historical determinism sees leaders as the proverbial ant riding the elephant’s back. Broader social, economic and political forces drive history, so that assassinations may not have meaningful effects.

以下の説明にあるように、この論考の特徴は統計処理をして傾向を読み取ろうとするものです。どういう結果を導き出しているのかは、お読みになってください。まあ、焦らすほど意外な結果があるわけではないですが。。。

For any given individual historical episode, it is hard to know for sure. But averaging over many such examples, statistics can begin to provide a guide.

To better understand the role of assassinations in history, we collected data on all assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to 2004, both those that killed the leader and those that failed. There’s a lot of data: Since 1950, a national leader was assassinated in almost two out of every three years. (Today’s leaders may rest considerably easier than those in the early 20th century, when a given leader was about twice as likely to be killed as now.)



National Geographicの特集はさっそくWebで読むことができます。遺体を載せて巡回したFuneral Trainをアメリカの歴史と絡めながら紹介しています。７０歳の老人が自身の祖父から葬列のことを聞かされていたという冒頭のエピソードが印象的です。

Lincoln’s Funeral Train
On the 150th anniversary of the Great Emancipator’s assassination, Americans along the route of his funeral train reflect on his life and legacy.
By Adam Goodheart

During the weeks after Lincoln’s death, as his funeral train made a circuitous journey from Washington, D.C., back to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, perhaps a million Americans filed past the open coffin to glimpse their fallen leader’s face. Millions more—as much as one-third of the North’s population—watched the procession pass.

That history isn’t so very far away: A 70-something friend of mine recalls hearing his grandfather talk about seeing the funeral cortege as a young boy in New York City. And even today, as I recently discovered, to follow the route of Lincoln’s train is to discover how much his spirit still pervades the nation he loved and saved.

動画でも説明していますが、黒人の葬列への参加は禁止されていたんですね。現在、人種問題が再燃していますので、リンカーンの暗殺１５０周年も新たな意味合いを帯びるかもしれません。

Those words, spoken through tears by an elderly woman as she watched Lincoln’s coffin pass through the streets of lower Manhattan, captured how she and many other African Americans felt about the president’s death. Everyone—white and black—knew that Lincoln’s role in ending slavery had spawned the murderous hatred that took his life. Understandably, African Americans hoped to take their places in the front ranks of the mourners; more than 5,000 planned to march in New York City. But many white Americans had different ideas. Several days before the funeral train arrived, municipal authorities decreed that no black marchers would be allowed in the procession. Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, sent a furious telegram from Washington overruling the ban, but the intimidation had worked. The vast parade down Broadway on April 24 included Irish firemen by the thousands, German marching bands, Italian social clubs, Roman Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis, as well as special delegations of bakery employees, cigarmakers, Freemasons, glee club members, and temperance activists. A couple of hundred African Americans brought up the very rear.

当時列車というのは新技術だっただけではなくnational cultのようだったというのは、今から振り返ると見落としてしまいやすい点ですね。

In 1860s America the railroad was more than just a new technology—it was a kind of national cult. A few months before the end of the Civil War, the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison waxed mystical about the revolution that trains had brought, fostering not just economic prosperity but also human connection on a vast scale: “So may the modes of communication and the ties of life continue to multiply, until all nations shall feel a common sympathy and worship of a common shrine!”

Eugene Richards: Looking for Lincoln’s Legacy