America's history with violence can light a better path now

In many corners of our country, social cohesion is threadbare. The lessons of history can light our path forward. Guest columnist

It was a week before Thanksgiving Day in 1963. I was halfway through my shift at the punch press at Waterloo Register. A manager came up to me on the assembly line and said, “JFK was shot.”

I was 30 years old, moonlighting at the furnace factory to make ends meet between my other jobs as a state legislator and family farmer. Five years later, I was finishing hog chores on the farm late in the day. I heard the news about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on the radio. Just two months after that, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California.

The murders of these political leaders call to mind the words of Abraham Lincoln in his address to Congress in J