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The History of Violent Attacks on the U.S. Capitol

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On Wednesday, far-right insurrectionists stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The mob forced lawmakers to flee for safety, smashed windows, vandalized offices and posed for photos in the House chambers. One woman died after being shot by law enforcement, an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police died from injuries sustained during the fighting,And while the attack on the Capitol shocked many, it was also predictable: Plans to invade the Capitol building have been for weeks, as Sheera Frenkel and Dan Barry report for the .Since President George Washington of the U.S. Capitol in 1793, assailants with a range of motives have launched attacks on the building with varying levels of success. Most notably, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on , 2001, a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was likely intended for the Capitol Building, per the . A group of passengers overtook the hijackers and crashed the aircraft into an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, killing all 44 people onboard.A number of “lone wolf” attackers have also thwarted Capitol security: in 1835, Richard Lawrence President Andrew Jackson as he exited the building’s . In 1915, a former Harvard professor successfully exploded three sticks of dynamite in the Senate Reception room, and an shot and killed two Capitol police officers.But Wednesday’s mob joined the ranks of just a handful of groups with political motivations that successfully carried through with their plans. Here, Smithsonian takes a closer look at three instances of coordinated political violence against the U.S. Capitol.Flames leapt from unfinished wreckage of the U.S. Capitol on August 24, 1814. British forces set fire to this building, the White House and much of Washington in retaliation for Americans’ of the Canadian capital at York the year prior. Britain and its young former colony were embroiled in the War of 1812, a conflict that ignited over the Royal Navy’s practice of “impressing” American soldiers into British service by wrongly accusing them of being British subjects, among other causes, reports Joel Achenbach for the .At the time, the Capitol building housed the House, Senate, Supreme Court and Library of Congress, per the . British forces burned the 3,000 or so books in the collection in the Library of Congress and piled furniture together in the Supreme Court Chamber to create a huge bonfire. The Capitol building was still under construction and did not yet have its famous dome, reports Gillian Brockwell for the .Nature happened to save the day. A huge storm, , struck Washington and put out the fires, sending British forces packing earlier than planned. Some interior structures and much of the Capitol’s exterior survived the blaze, and after some debate, officials the federal government’s building where it stood. As Cassandra Good reported for magazine in 2016, just one casualty was reported from the fires: John Lewis, the grandnephew of George Washington himself.Around 2:30 p.m., Lebrón shouted her support for Puerto Rican independence, and the group shot indiscriminately at lawmakers from the gallery. They managed to wound five Congressmen before being overtaken by visitors and police officers, per a House of Representatives of the event.The group designed their violent attack to draw attention to the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Their grievance dated back to the Spanish-American War, when in 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico and established it as an “organized territory.” At the time, this meant that Puerto Ricans were subject to American imperial rule but were not considered full citizens. Even after Puerto Ricans , the territory still has no voting representation in Congress and . More than a century of U.S. imperialism and its adverse effect have led some Puerto Ricans, such as these nationalists, to argue that their territory should be completely independent of American rule.“Bullets whistled through the chamber in the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress,” Speaker Joseph W. Martin, who was presiding that day, would . According to the of the House of Representatives, the police had sealed off the Capitol within minutes of the shooting and conducted a thorough search of the grounds until they captured Rodriguez, who had narrowly managed to slip away in the mayhem. The four attackers were tried and sentenced to federal prison with sentences ranging from 16 to 75 years. They remained imprisoned until President Jimmy Carter, responding to international pressure, in 1979.PostBut the most serious terrorist attack took place a decade later, when a group of women split from the group to form the . Just before 11 p.m. on November 7, 1983, a member called the Capitol switchboard to announce that a bomb was about to explode.Minutes later, M19 detonated a bomb in the Capitol’s north wing, blowing a hole through a wall and knocking the off its hinges. Luckily, the area was already deserted and nobody was harmed, but the attack resulted in $250,000 worth of damage and shredded a portrait of Daniel Webster, per the .Members of M19—named for civil rights icon Malcolm X and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh—coordinated the attack to protest U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon. Broadly, the group argued that violence was a necessary ingredient in the fight for “revolutionary anti-imperialism,” and its members would go on to bomb other high-profile buildings such as an FBI office. Some of the women involved were later and charged with lengthy sentences, Brockwell writes for the Post.National historian security expert and historian William Rosenau, who wrote a book on the , told ’s Lila Thulin last year that the group is the only documented terrorist group run entirely by women. They were “a group of essentially middle-class, well educated, white people who made a journey essentially from anti-war and civil rights protest to terrorism,” he says.Rosenau added that in his view, people should tread cautiously when comparing militant leftist organizations of the 1970s to extremism of all political stripes today.“Historical context is absolutely paramount,” he says. “We kind of lump terrorism together, like groups as disparate as Students for a Democratic Society, Al Qaeda, Red Army Faction, Aum Shinrikyo, but these are all products of particular times and particular places.Rosenau continues, “The important thing is just to realize that there are some similarities, but these are very different periods in time and each period of time is unique.”Recommended VideosPost a CommentMost Popular

On Wednesday, far-right insurrectionists stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The mob forced lawmakers to flee for safety, smashed windows, vandalized offices and posed for photos in the House chambers. One woman died after being shot by law enforcement, an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police died from injuries sustained during the fighting,And while the attack on the Capitol shocked many, it was also predictable: Plans to invade the Capitol building have been for weeks, as Sheera Frenkel and Dan Barry report for...

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Nora McGreevy

Smithsonian Magazine

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The History of Violent Attacks on the U.S. Capitol

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