Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 29, 1990 TAG: 9006290870
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The New York Herald, in editions published one week after John Wilkes Booth fatally wounded Lincoln on April 14, 1865, carried a dispatch from Louisville, Ky., headlined "Insanity in the Booth Family."
The accounts of the presidential assassinations appear in the Henry H. Wiss Newspaper Collection recently donated to Virginia Tech.
Wiss, a professor of architecture at Tech from 1947 to 1983, inherited the papers from his uncles, who had a keen interest in American history.
"We have no doubt that John Wilkes Booth, though a man of great histrionic genius, has a broad streak of insanity in his nature," The New York Herald story said. "But the evidences of his long-contemplated, deliberately-considered and terribly-executed crime exclude and make impossible all considerations or thoughts of mercy.
"Oh that he had 20 million necks - one for the private thought and feeling of every loyal man in the United States. We would gladly have him hung so high that our people could see him by telescopes from all parts of the continent."
The same day, the paper ascribed "unappeased curiosity" to Americans who wanted to know "what manner of man he is whose treasonous and bloody purpose consigned to death one for whom millions mourn to-day."
The story, credited to the now-defunct Cincinnati Commercial, predicted Booth would "be more heartily detested and execrated than any villain since the days of Judas Iscariot."
The newspapers are part of a larger gift from Wiss and his wife, Dorothy, that includes some 500 books and periodicals on art and architecture, several old magazines and a small collection of newspapers from the Civil War era - including one reporting Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
An afternoon spent perusing the papers and their accounts of the crimes highlights the evolution of American journalism over a 100-year span - from a clarion of conscience and revenge to a more careful rendering of the facts as they appeared at the time.
"These newspapers are important from a journalistic and historical perspective," said Glenn McMullen, head of special collections at Tech. "Through them, you can see how the same kind of event is treated over time."
By the time Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 - nearly 100 years after Lincoln died - The Associated Press reported the tragedy and its aftermath in painstaking detail but with measured restraint.
The following day's Roanoke Times, the only newspaper in the collection reporting the Kennedy assassination, carried the now-famous photograph of Vice President Johnson raising his right hand to take the oath of office. Headlines such as "Funeral Monday at Noon," "Murder Charge Lodged," and "Johnson Takes Reins" graced the page.
An editorial in the same edition talked of a nation "numbed by an act of incredible madness" and The New York Herald Tribune said that while some Americans may have wanted to see Kennedy leave the White House, "what demented handful could have wished to see him leave it this way?"
But the dispatches neither called for Oswald's head, nor rendered him guilty before he could face trial.
It's worth comparing with an editorial in The Cleveland Voice six days after President Garfield died on Sept. 19, 1881:
"Mr. [Charles] Guiteau will be hanged - that much is settled. The people are not in a temper to submit to any other disposition of his case, and the quicker he is put through the legal forms and the quicker his neck's legally broken, the better."
by CNB