Throughout May 1927, many Americans turned on their radios and opened their newspapers expecting to find triumphant news about one of the American aviation teams vying for the Orteig Prize, offered for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. But the news they received in the days after May 18 disrupted their hopes for a confirmation of American ingenuity, replacing them with shock and horror amidst the reporting of an unfathomable manmade tragedy involving the murder of defenseless children. At a school in bucolic Bath, Michigan, a man named Andrew Kehoe had detonated several explosive charges, ultimately killing forty-five people, including himself. It was, and it remains, the worst school massacre in American history.

Although Andrew Kehoe trained as an electrical engineer at Michigan State University, he farmed land in rural Bath, Michigan, twenty miles outside of Lansing. In 1923, like many contemporary rural communities, Bath voted to create a modern consolidated school district and to build a new school that would be funded by increased property taxes. Residents’ tax rates were nearly doubled under the plan, and a disgruntled Kehoe became politically active in response, embarking on a campaign to get the tax increase lowered, reversed, or nullified. In 1924, he was elected as a school board trustee, and even served as its treasurer.

Over the course of his three-year tenure on the school board, Kehoe carried out an obstructionist and single-minded anti-tax crusade. He was intractable and uncooperative, repeatedly clashing with his fellow board members. He refused to vote for any expenditure of any kind. He stubbornly made motions to adjourn meetings when other members disagreed with him, and he repeatedly charged the school superintendent, Emory E. Huyck, and others with financial mismanagement. In 1925, Kehoe was appointed to finish the term of the deceased township clerk, but was defeated when the position came up for election in 1926, probably due to public disapproval of his behavior on the school board.

In addition to being a school board member, Kehoe served as the de facto caretaker of the Bath Consolidated School, volunteering to perform free electrical, custodial, and repair work on the facility, specifically during school vacations. In 1926, he began legally accumulating both dynamite and the agricultural explosive pyrotol. Throughout the 1926-1927 school year, Kehoe methodically rigged the school with these explosives, wires, and timer devices as he performed maintenance work on the school’s boilers and generators. He also began systematically sabotaging his farm and property, girdling trees and cutting his grape vines.

May 18, 1927, was a bright sunny day and the last day of classes at the Bath Consolidated School. Kehoe began the day by murdering his wife and detonating explosives at his home, starting a fire that engulfed his farmstead buildings, where he had placed his wife’s body and bound his farm animals. When his neighbors responded and discovered unexploded dynamite on the property, Kehoe instructed them to move on so that they would not be injured. Shortly afterwards, at approximately 8:45AM, an explosion rocked the Bath school. Townspeople rushed to the scene, only to find the north wing of the school wholly collapsed. Kehoe drove to the school in his truck, which he had packed with explosives and metal debris. As Superintendent Huyck approached the truck hoping to receive rescue assistance, Kehoe detonated the explosives with a rifleshot, instantly killing Hucyk, a student, two adult bystanders, and himself. In total, thirty-eight school children (more than 12% of the school population), two teachers, three other adults, and both Kehoes died. The damage could actually have been considerably worse, as more than five hundred pounds of explosives failed to detonate and several canisters of gasoline failed to ignite.

Following the Bath tragedy, as often happens after today’s school shootings, people sought insight into the killer’s mind. Vainly engaging in what essayist Ron Rosenbaum calls “the lost safe-deposit box syndrome,” they searched for the essential clue that would provide instant explanation for such a heinous act. Especially baffling at the time was that Andrew Kehoe did not fit the profile of an expected bomber, which was that of a wild-eyed, loquacious, foreign-born political radical bent on wreaking havoc. Rather, he was a white, native-born, fiscally conservative elected official and farmer who attacked children instead of bankers, capitalists, or the government.

Nonetheless, the Michigan Ku Klux Klan blanketed the state with five million leaflets blaming the massacre solely on Kehoe’s Catholic upbringing. Contemporary papers advanced the simple answer that Andrew Kehoe was mentally ill and preternaturally mean and stubborn, citing his school board behavior, as well as his cruel treatment of animals and the mysterious death of his stepmother. The New York Times dubbed him “the Michigan Maniac” and called him a “madman.” There were rumors of brain damage from electrical accidents. However, a coroner’s inquest found that Kehoe was of “rational mind and sane,” else he would not have been able to execute such a devious plan or coolly deceive so many people for so long. Furthermore, on the morning of the bombings, the ever frugal, diligent, and rational Kehoe had neatly mailed the school’s accounting books to the insurance agent responsible for the school’s surety bond, enclosing a handwritten letter explaining a possible discrepancy of twenty-three cents.

Kehoe did not leave a suicide note. Instead, he left a stenciled sign on his farm fence that read “Criminals are made, not born,” suggesting that he believed himself to have been forced to commit the bombing. He was in arrears on his mortgage and on his homeowners’ insurance. He claimed that the school tax was ruining him and that his property was overvalued. His wife had been deathly ill with what appeared to be incurable tuberculosis, and the medical bills had been mounting. Moreover, Kehoe was not a particularly successful farmer, and in that respect, he may be said to belong to the unfortunate American tradition of desperate acts of violence carried out by financially exhausted farmers, seen during the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression, and the 1980s farm crisis. Kehoe may also have been upset about losing the election for town clerk.

More than 100,000 passenger vehicles visited Bath in the tragedy’s aftermath, either to pay respects or to gawk. Given that there were only approximately twenty-three million motor vehicles registered in the entire United States at the time, this was an astronomical show of support. Roughly 0.4% of all American vehicles in 1927 passed through Bath, just in the week following the bombing. Yet the Bath massacre quickly disappeared from the cultural radar. It was almost immediately overshadowed by the achievement of transatlantic flight a scant three days later, and the media circus left town in pursuit of stories about Charles Lindbergh. By the time Lindbergh was feted by four million people in a New York City ticker-tape parade a few weeks later, Bath was all but forgotten. The patriotic euphoria following Lucky Lindy’s accomplishment seemingly erased this tragedy from the American consciousness for good.