Tag Archives: assassinations

What is suburban in the “Suburban Fury” of a woman who attempted to assassinate President Ford in 1975?

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I recently watched the 2024 documentary Suburban Fury. With “suburban” in the title and promising an interesting story, I wanted to see the documentary.

Vice President Gerald R. Ford by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC-BY-NC 2.0

Sara Jane Moore, the woman behind an assassination attempt, had a strange life. She changed names, worked for the FBI, was married multiple times, and tried to kill a president.

But I think the use of “suburban” may not mean what people expect. Moore lived in the suburbs. She had family life with children. She worked office jobs.

From what I saw in the documentary, this suburban life is not what prompted her to act. She does not explain that she was frustrated with a humdrum suburban existence.

Rather, the suburban in the title refers more to how people would not have suspected a suburban women to try to assassinate the president. As Moore recounts the steps in the day of her assassination attempt, she notes that she dressed like any suburban matron so as not to draw attention. She does not stand out in the crowd that gathers to see Ford.

There is some footage of the neighbor who sold her the gun she uses in the assassination attempt. He describes how Moore appeared to be in her right mind and he did not suspect any foul play. I have seen numerous similar news stories where neighbors can’t believe a community resident could commit such acts.

Is the “Suburban Fury” then that Americans would not expect a resident of the suburbs – places where the American Dream is to be found – to shoot a president? Moore’s story was convoluted but the suburbs are not supposed to produce violent criminals, let alone people who try to take out the leader of the free world.

A long history of violence in American society

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From the beginning, the story of the United States of America is a violent one. From violence against indigenous people to slavery to armed rebellion to colonial conquests to the Civil War to vigilante violence to violence-enforced residential segregation military intervention around the Western Hemisphere and then the globe to police brutality to gun violence to celebrating the military to assassinations.

Take vigilante violence as an example. I read Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism at the recommendation of a colleague and having read multiple works by sociologist James Loewen. He argues that a significant number of Northern towns and cities had informal sundown laws that prohibited minorities from being in the community after dark with violence implied if the norms were not followed.

Or, take the example of the role of violence in residential segregation. After violence at a South Shore beach set off moreviolence in Chicago in 1919, residential segregation was enforced not just with restrictive covenants and blockbusting and redlining: actions involved bombings and attacks. Historian Stephen Grant Meyer detailed some of this in his book As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods, a book I read for a class paper. In places like Cicero, Illinois and Levittown, Pennsylvania, violence accompanied attempts of blacks to move to the suburbs.

CiceroRiot1951ChicagoTribune

Photo by Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1951

Or, take the last in the list as an example. The book that really brought this to my attention as a student was Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary. This led me to read a lot about the Church Committee’s work in 1975-1976 as well as assassinations in the United States and ones in which the United States played a role abroad. In several papers, I worked with the idea of assassinations, discovered databases of political violence in countries around the world that political scientists have collected for decades, and found that the political violence rates in the United States are high.

All together, the United States is awash in violence. It is part of American history, it is regularly promoted, and it is often excused or justified. Thinking about some of the examples I noted above, I found out about these through reading and research because these stories are widely taught, known, or experienced by significant segments of the population. Yet, violence is antithetical to numerous aspects of American society and ideals, including the religious beliefs of many Americans, particularly when harnessed alongside other destructive ideologies such as white supremacy or colonialism.