As a historian who has written about folk heroes, I can see how Luigi Mangione—who was arrested last week and indicted Tuesday on charges that include first-degree murder—has personalized a big, amorphous issue, crystallizing it into a clear moral parable. Suddenly it was no longer the language of in network, out of network, annual deductibles. It was the language of heroes and villains, the shooter as cold-blooded killer or culture warrior, Thompson as money-grubbing CEO bleeding Americans dry or good family man bleeding out on the street. Overnight, a faceless corporation, made invisible by arcane laws and corporate jargon, stood exposed, naked in its greed.
We like to think of American history as orderly, democratic, fair. Actually, violent episodes often drag issues people would rather avoid into the public forum. For decades, politicians contrived compromises to keep the issue of slavery from exploding, but Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion in 1831 jolted Southerners into an awareness that slaves might wish to cut their throats. A wave of repression followed. About 30 years later, John Brown’s bloody plot to foment a slave revolt awakened many Northerners’ rage against the “slaveocracy,” ratcheting up the momentum toward civil war. Or, to take a different issue, workers’ rights: A strike that had simmered in the Colorado coalfields for a year exploded in April 1914 with “Bloody Ludlow,” when state guards torched a miners tent colony, killing 11 women and children. Public fury, congressional investigations, and presidential intervention followed.
But the example from history that strikes me most forcibly comes from the Great Depression. Unlike Mangione, John Dillinger was no scion of a wealthy family. He did not attend an Ivy League college or even finish high school, and he certainly never wrote a manifesto or intended to make a political statement. But between fall 1933 and summer 1934, he embarked on a series of bank robberies that helped galvanize Americans’ hatred of financial institutions. Just as Thompson’s shooter has called attention to the predations of insurance companies, Dillinger was a lightning rod for the public’s hatred of banks.
Dillinger had spent most of his adult life behind bars for a botched stickup, and by the time he got out of Indiana State Prison, just months after Franklin Roosevelt took office, he was 30 years old, with no job prospects. But he had learned a lot about robbery from his fellow inmates, and soon he broke several of them out of prison and began a yearlong crime spree, first robbing police armories for weapons, then picking off over a score of small-town banks across the Midwest. Along the way, a dozen citizens lost their lives.