I can see Andrew Phillip Kehoe (above) clearly, as if he was standing next to me at this moment. And yet his image remains hazy. According to his drivers' license, he was five feet, nine inches tall, weighed 150 pounds and had gray hair. He was also described as “ ...a slight, hollow-chested man”, of 46, with thin lips. And yet he remains an enigma. A neighbor, when shown several photographs of him, said, “ "I knew him well and he never looked like that.” And he was not just a physical enigma.
Howard Kittle, the Clinton County agent and Farm Bureau manager, received a letter from Andrew, and admitted that if anyone else had written it “I would have thought sure he was insane.'” But that was before - when he was a community leader, a trusted guardian of the township's wealth and its future. Afterward the local newspaper - the Clinton County Republican-News - was forced to wonder, “Is the building of a modern institution which equips children to meet the problems of the world a burden - or is it a privilege?” You see, the man at issue was a anti-tax warrior and an American narcissist who murdered 34 children and 8 adults.
Bath in 1927 was a little farm town of about 300 people 10 miles northeast of Lansing, Michigan. “(It) had a ( grain) elevator, a little drugstore, and you knew everybody within 20 miles” said a life long resident. Which means pretty much everyone knew Phillip Kehoe.
In 1922 rural Clinton County closed its scattered one room school houses. They used $8,000 of their own hard earned money to buy five acres of ground just south of Bath. They borrowed $35,000 to build a two story Consolidated School building.
Here, classes would be divided by age, to protect the younger, smaller children from older bullies. With fewer teachers, higher standards could be required of the instructors - even a college teaching degree. And amenities such as a library, lunch programs, athletics, music and art were added. Buses now picked children up at their front doors and returned them safely home each night. It was the foundation for a secure world that future generations would grown up in. And it was not cheap for the older generations.
The future always costs. You either invest in it now, or it proves much more expensive. In 1922 property taxes in Clinton county were $12.26 per thousand dollars of valuation ($160 today, or over $16%). In 1923 those taxes had gone up by half to $18.80 ($235 today). This was not the decision of a few liberals. This was debated for years within the community. And over time the decision was made to invest in the future of Clinton County, in the counties' children, and to spend the money on their future.
Three years later, eager to eliminate the debt quickly, the elected leaders of Clinton County paid off $7,200 of their obligation, and taxes topped out at one dollar higher (to $240 per thousand of valuation in today's dollars). It was expected taxes would now start to drop, but that did not take into account the rising inflation of the 1920's, and the selfishness of one egomaniac who chose - chose - not to have a future, and to steal the counties'.
Let me tell you about Andrew Phillip Kehoe, the way most Americans learned of him by sharing a headline from the New York Times, dated Wednesday, 18 May, 1927; “Maniac blows up school, kills 42, mostly children; Had protested high taxes...Children Pinned in Debris. Others hurled against walls or out windows – Searchers still hunt for missing. Agonizing scenes in yard. Distraught parents find little ones dead beneath blankets...”.
The early numbers were wrong, of course. The maniac killed eight adults and 34 children at the school, that day. The last little victim, nine year old Richard Fitz (above), would die of an infection caused by his injuries, a week short of a year after the explosion that killed him.
Just before he murdered 34 children, the maniac had bludgeoned his wife one last time - this time to death.
He had tired his two horses' legs together and left them in the barn stacked with all his farming equipment. Then he set the barn on fire. Before that he had poisoned and killed every fruit tree on his farm. Interestingly, it was figured by the cleanup crews, that he could have paid off his mortgage and his property taxes by selling most of his well maintained farm equipment, which, according to his neighbors, he rarely used.
Neighbor M.J. “Monty” Ellsworth wrote later, “He was at the height of his glory when fixing machinery or tinkering...He spent so much time tinkering that he didn't prosper.” The maniac also stood out, as a farmer, for his meticulous appearance. He changed his shirt quickly should a spot of dirt appear on it and was often seen sitting on his front porch (above), in a smoking jacket, puffing on a cigar. But his primary interest, his obsession, was in reducing his taxes.
The maniac had been elected to the school board in 1924, two years after the new school had opened and the first election after the new higher tax rate had been announced. His platform was to cut the cost of the new school. In 1925, after the death of Maude Detluff, the school board's treasurer, he had been appointed to fill that position. His book keeping was, like his appearance, meticulous. After his suicide, his books showed “a long and detailed explanation” of a 22 cent discrepancy. But in the spring of 1926, when he ran for election to officially take on that job, the voters had rejected him. Once again, the majority approved investment in the future He stopped paying his mortgage and the insurance on his farm. Eventually, the previous owners - his wife's relatives - began foreclosure proceedings.
Decades earlier, Phillip's promising career as an electrical engineer in St. Louis had been cut short by a fall and a serious head injury. So farming was the his second career choice. He married and moved to Clinton county, Michigan, right after the First World War. He might have over paid for his farm, because land prices were inflated at time. And his wife was afflicted with tuberculosis, a wasting disease before antibiotics. But he still assaulted her, every time he felt the need to feel superior.
The Klu Klux Klan paid for and staged a funeral for Phillip. They expected to garner support by blaming his Catholicism for encouraging him to destroy the school because it was not a Catholic school. But even if all of that were true, none of it would justify the cold blooded murder of 34 innocent children, and nine adults, and the farm animals. He was probably a racist by modern standards, but all Phillip Kehoe could focus on was HIS taxes.
Before the school was built, he had opposed it. Once it was decided to build it, he insisted it should be a 10 grade institution, instead of 12 grades. He opposed the inclusion of a library, or athletic programs or a music department. And he lost every argument.
Once the building was constructed, the tax increase gave him enough supporters to win election to the school board, where his obstinacy continued. He even opposed giving the superintendent a paid vacation each year, and then argued it should only be one week, not two. And as he lost each of these arguments, his obsession grew, day by day.
Words used to describe him during this time were “surly”, “obstinate”, “impatient” and “arrogant”. Eventually he began to invest his money not in his farm, or his wife, but in World War surplus explosives. He slipped the explosives into the basement of the new school, and rigged them with a timer and set them to explode early on a Wednesday morning, just after classes had begun. And just before that bomb went off, Kehoe set off the last bomb, packed into his car, killing himself , the school principle and others.
The day after the bombing, while still in shock and grief, the Clinton Country Republican ran an editorial, which explains, far better than I ever could, the connection between the maniac's crime and his anti-tax fever. “That he was insane there is little doubt", wrote the editors of the paper. " But he was not always insane. To start with he was merely antagonistic. Then he became radical.. He was the victim of the progress of his own lack of balance...
"What a terrible price to pay for narrow-mindedness", continued the editorial. "What an awful calamity for one peaceful little community to bear for one man's lack of ordinary American ideals...Never before have we known of aversion of the cost of education taking such terrible form. There are, however, many people who unthinkingly hamper and discourage the progress of good schools and other institutions for the welfare and happiness of the public. What are we going to do about it?”
It is almost a century later, and the question begs to be asked again, this time of a nation which elected an admitted rapist as President, supported by the power hungry unChristian unRight, - those who object to investing in the future because they choose not to believe we have one. And what are the majority of us going to do about it? The answer after the 6 January 2021 U.S. Capital assault and the poison of the Trump Presidency is...not yet answered,
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