A Sociological Analysis of Oklahoma City:
Anomie and Alienation and Timothy McVeigh
The Oklahoma City terrorist bombing on April 19, 1995, represents a seminal event in recent American history; together with the earlier bombing of New York's World Trace center, Oklahoma City demonstrated to Americans that as a people, we are not exempt from terrorist attacks. The purpose of this essay is to examine the activities and attitudes of Timothy McVeigh, the man found guilty of planning and executing the Oklahoma City attack, from the perspective of sociological theory. McVeigh's life and his behavior lend themselves to such an analysis, particularly with regard to the theory of anomie as described by, among others, Robert Merton (1957). McVeigh has been characterized by reporters, criminologists, and others as having live a life of solitude, obsession, and anger (Jones, 1998; McFadden, 1995; Serrano, 1998; Stickney, 1996) -- conditions and attitudes closely associated with Merton's (1957) attribution of traits associated with alienated individuals and groups.
Anomie, according to Merton (1957), holds that groups lacking legitimate means to success or perceiving institutional and social barriers to their success, will have higher rates of deviance than other groups. Deviance is constructed as an adaptation to strain. Merton (1957) posited the existence of five modes of individual adaptation: conformity, ritualism, innovation, retreatism, and rebellion. Of the three types of adaptation, deviance occurs when innovation or the use of illegitimate means to achieve cultural goals is selected or when an individual retreats by rejecting institutionalized goals and the means to them. Rebellion, says Merton (1957), is the rejection of existing goals and means with endorsement of them in principle. People who respond to stress by rejection of goals and means -- a category of anomie that appears to apply to McVeigh -- tend to isol...