On this day May 18 in the year of 1927, a schoolhouse in Bath, Michigan,
was
blown up with explosives planted there by a local farmer Andrew Kehoe. Who
had earlier murdered his wife. After blowing up the school, he set off a
dynamite laden automobile that killed 38 children and 6 adults.
Andrew Kehoe was also killed in the car bomb blast.
I first found out about this when I wondered a bit about the language
used in some reports of the Virginia shootings, and did a bit of
googling to find out if that was, indeed, the worse mass murder in US
history. I noticed later that most reports I saw (a very small an
unrepresentative sample to be sure) called the Virginia tragedy the
worst mass shooting, which seems to be accurate, but I don't know if
the media chose 'shooting' because they knew (or had found out) that
'worst mass murder' or 'worst mass killing' wasn't accurate, or simply
because 'shooting' has (as we mentioned in another thread) become the
most common noun to use when the killings were carried out by gunfire.
Anyway, the Kehoe story is a bit of a corrective to the idea that all
this violence is something peculiar to modern life; in the Good Old
Days no one ever even thought of mass murder, much less mass murder of
children.