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Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Killer by Harold Schechter

2022; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mhr.2022.0017

2327-9672

Jeffrey S. Adler,

Gun Ownership and Violence Research

Reviewed by: Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Killer by Harold Schechter Jeffrey S. Adler Harold Schechter. Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Killer. New York, Little A, 2021. Pp. 237. Books Consulted. Index. Notes. Hardcover: $24.95. Most Americans probably believe that domestic terrorism and school massacres are new phenomena, disturbing effects of recent social instability. But such nightmares have a long history, and one of the worst such mass murders occurred in Michigan nearly a century ago. On May 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe, a Bath farmer, filled the town's schoolhouse with explosives and detonated them, killing forty-five people. The most deadly act of domestic terrorism at the time, the bombing soon became largely forgotten. Schechter recounts this episode in Maniac, suggesting that Kehoe's deadly act constituted the "birth of the modern killer." From outward appearances, the bomber seemed like a respectable member of the tight-knit Midwestern farming community. Though stern and sometimes sullen, Kehoe was an engaged resident and even held public office. Schechter, however, has discovered that he had a darker side. Newspaper articles after the bombing exposed a series of personal disputes that, in retrospect, revealed evidence of Kehoe's paranoia. In his early years, he killed the family cat and likely rigged a stove to explode, murdering his stepmother, a death dismissed as a tragic accident. A collector of grievances, Kehoe later killed a neighbor's dog and harbored unabating grudges against residents who disagreed with him about town affairs. When post-World War I economic fluctuations disrupted the American agricultural market, Kehoe's world began to unravel. Facing foreclosure [End Page 155] on his farm and losing a local election, the purportedly respectable farmer blamed a school tax for his woes. As the school year drew to a close, Kehoe stockpiled five hundred pounds of military-surplus explosives, crates of dynamite, and two hundred pounds of gasoline. At night, he sneaked into the town's school and wired it to explode. On May 18, the final day of the school year, he bludgeoned his wife to death and detonated homemade bombs on his farm, in his truck, and throughout the school. For an undetermined reason, only the north wing of the school exploded, but the blast reduced it to rumble, killing more than three dozen children. Writing in the true-crime genre, Schechter crafts a rough-hewn psychological profile of the killer and offers copious accounts of mangled young bodies, dying children, charred corpses, frantic rescuers, and devastated parents. Schechter provides a judicious reconstruction of Kehoe's rampage. His effort to place the Bath bombing in historical perspective, however, is not entirely convincing. Schechter casts Kehoe as the first mass bomber and overlooks earlier acts of domestic terrorism, most notably the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building, which claimed twenty victims, and the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, which killed thirty-nine people. Nor does he link Kehoe's actions to the bevy of so-called "crimes of the century" during the 1920s, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1920; Nathaniel Leopold and Nathan Loeb's 1924 "thrill killing" of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks; Edward Hickman's kidnapping, dismembering, and murder of twelve-year-old Frances Marion Parker in 1927; or the St. Valentine Day's massacre in 1929. But even if Schechter's attempt to connect Kehoe's murders to Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's Columbine shootings in 1999, or Adam Lanza's Newtown slaughter of young children in 2012 is not persuasive, Maniac is nonetheless absorbing and provides a chilling reminder that domestic terrorism and school murders have a deep history in Michigan and the United States. Jeffrey S. Adler University of Florida Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan