The Assassination of President McKinleyby
Richard Wall
~ Dwight Macdonald, A Critique of the Warren Report, 1965
Kevin Phillips is a former Republican Party campaign manager, prolific author and chameleon-like political commentator. His latest book, American Theocracy (favorably reviewed here by Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University), sparked a much-reported question to President George W. Bush at his press conference in Cleveland, Ohio on March 20th as to whether he believed recent events are portents of the Apocalypse. In reply, the President embarked on a 4-minute long digression about the war on terrorism and eventually stated, "The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace; it's a threat, in essence, to a strong alliance. I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally, Israel." In 1898 the 25th president, William McKinley, had stated in his war message to Congress justifying US military intervention against Spain in Cuba, "It is no answer to say that this is all in another country, belonging to another nation, and is therefore none of our business. It is especially our duty, for it is right at our door. […] The present condition of affairs in Cuba is a constant menace to our peace."
True enough, but what's wrong with having a theory? And, as the fateful rise of Karl Rove shows, we need to pay attention to campaign strategists’ views of history, however much we may abhor them as persons. Men like Rove are the gurus, gray eminences, cardinals and kingmakers to the modern-day queens, and wield tremendous power and influence behind the scenes. It was that most original and celebrated of campaign strategists, Mark Hanna (1837–1904), who helped to put McKinley into the White House in 1897, but whose protests were passed over when it came to selecting a running mate for McKinley’s second election campaign in 1900. McKinley chose Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Navy Secretary at the start of his first administration, later Governor of New York and a war hero popular for having led his band of "Rough Riders" into battle in Cuba during the Spanish-American war of 1898. On being overruled in this matter, Hanna is reported to have exclaimed, "there's only a life between that madman and the Presidency."
(Mis)underestimating the President One of Phillips’ arguments is that much of Theodore Roosevelt’s policy in his first term, in which he retained McKinley’s cabinet team, had been foreshadowed and prepared by McKinley, and that this makes McKinley a neglected and underestimated progressive. Since policies take time to come to fruition across presidencies, and since the ruling classes devoted much effort in the 1890s to their attempts to understand, absorb and neutralize the energy of popular protest – including taking the country into a "splendid little war" in which Roosevelt enthusiastically participated, this in itself is no major insight. But it is important that it be stated, so that we may rescue some historical understanding of continuity and change from the mire of political deception, wishful thinking and jingoist victors’ histories of the period. Phillips’ argument applies as much to foreign as to domestic policy: for example, the idea of negotiating with Colombia to build a canal so that the US Navy could have faster access to the Far East was conceived under McKinley. Confronted by the Colombian Senate’s rejection of the proposal, action-man Roosevelt seized the necessary land to create the new state of Panama and build the Canal – at significant cost to the American taxpayer and riding roughshod over international law. Everything Does Not Change Overnight There is a popular misconception that events like the installation of a new president "change everything overnight." They did not then, and do not do so now, however much people may want or need change. The historically overlooked American pacification of the Philippines was not completed until July 1902, 10 months into Roosevelt's first term and after three years of bloody conflict. In our time, the Bush II administration’s post 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation was foreshadowed by anti-terrorism laws in the Clinton era following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. As Professor Brinkley says, Phillips has "a rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change, describing a series of major transformations, and demonstrating the relationships among them." To understand events, we should look at the seeds of those transformations and the links of continuity over the longer term. That long-term view shows that there are no real differences between the two main parties on issues such as "the war" (then and now) and that, come the election, things do not immediately change for the better. In fact, quite often they get worse, giving rise to that well-known saying that each US president, sooner or later, makes you long for the days of the one who went before. Unfortunately, political power players today are all too willing to exploit the laziness and cynical inertia of those who have seen through the false dichotomies but do not have the will to do anything about it. They do so, for example, by supplying to a sound-bite and game-obsessed culture the slick presentation of news and elections as passing and fast-moving competitive entertainments, in which the winner takes all – while fundamental political issues remain unresolved. George W. Bush said in that same Cleveland press conference that decisions on US withdrawal from Iraq will be "for the next President."
Even though McKinley, as the first president to use the phone intensively, was technologically innovative, in his America it was more a question of reinforcing the old political tradition of saying you’ll do one thing and doing something else altogether. That much is amply demonstrated by the stark contrast between what he stated in his inaugural addresses and the policies which were actually implemented under his rule. "You may be sure that there will be no jingo nonsense under my administration," he said to anti-imperialist former Civil War general and senator Carl Schurz in 1896, following it up in his first inaugural speech in March 1897 with these words:
Would you have guessed from the above that during McKinley’s first term the United States would go to war with Spain over Cuba just over a year later, launching the United States into a century of war and overseas intervention?
McKinley is said to have embarked on his second term in March 1901 intending to focus on domestic policy, but again, you wouldn’t have known it from his second inaugural, filled with echoes of "enduring freedom," invocations of overriding imperial destiny – past and future, and pre-Wilsonian zeal to spread the dream:
When he came to talk about the independence movement in the Philippines, he said:
At a time when George Orwell was not even in his cradle, McKinley had earlier given a nicely Orwellian designation to his policy towards those he called his "little brown brothers" in the Philippines: he called it "benevolent assimilation." "We come, not as invaders or conquerors," he had told them, "but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights." When the insurrection was eventually suppressed in 1902, this literally devastating policy had cost the lives of an estimated 25,000 rebels, 200,000 civilians, and 4,000 American soldiers. It is significant that in his own time, and far beyond it into the twentieth century, not many saw through McKinley’s mask of austere, self-effacing affability to the brazen deceptions and shrewd control underneath. He was generally thought of as being "amiably weak." But future Secretary of State John Hay was one who did so: after a visit to McKinley during the 1896 election campaign, he wrote to Henry Adams, "I was more struck than ever by his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the fifteenth century. And there are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him." Adams, himself a tortured spirit of those unsettled times, was to remark perceptively that McKinley was "easily first in genius for manipulation" and described him as "an uncommonly dangerous politician" even before the ruling Republican Party had begun to agitate for war with Spain in the immediate aftermath of McKinley’s electoral victory over William Jennings Bryan. New American Frontiers
As Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out in 1893, the reality and the idea of the frontier had always provided the mythology and the escape valve for American expansion. But in 1890, at Wounded Knee, the United States had reached its Western physical limit. This had produced a form of psychological-existential crisis in the American mind:
~ Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 1893 What Karp demonstrates is that, while from 1895 onwards there was undoubtedly some genuine and comprehensible public concern at conditions in Spanish Cuba, the ‘large policy,’ of effectively expanding the frontier by taking it overseas, was a convenient way of absorbing the severe domestic discontent arising out of the prolonged economic, social and cultural crisis of the 1890s. To this end, Cuba was conveniently close to hand. Added to which, it had long been a ‘desirable object of conquest’ for the American empire: as early as the time of the war with Britain in 1812, members of Congress had agitated for American territorial expansion into (British) Canada, and (Spanish) Florida and Cuba, primarily to secure export markets. But was the large policy, which has its successors today in preventive war and the goal of securing the frontier of outer space against all possible comers, sufficient to channel and disperse the profound economic and cultural discontent of that troubled end of the century? That is a much larger issue, in which the question of the anarchist assassin's motivation comes into play: already in 1901 it exercised the minds of those who were debating the state of mind of Leon Czolgosz and deciding his fate. The Anarchist unmakes what the Kingmaker has made
McKinley, who like many of his successors liked to press the flesh of ‘ordinary people,’ was unfortunate to have been president at a time when some in the anarchist movement saw men and women in positions of executive power, whether elected or not, as symbols of oppressive regal and faceless government, to be removed by force. In Europe, the idea of ‘propaganda by the deed’ – especially bombing – had penetrated anarchist circles and displaced less violent forms of dissent. Prominent European figures, including King Umberto of Italy and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, had been assassinated by anarchists of this type. In the US, the fact that those who subscribed to these views were usually immigrants – or the children of immigrants – created a fear of dangerous aliens in the American mind. In 1903, 2 years after McKinley's assassination, and in the time-honored bureaucratic tradition of devising legislation today to deal with yesterday’s problem, US immigration legislation was revised to provide for the exclusion (and deportation if they were already in the country) of any person "who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining or teaching such disbelief in or opposition to all governments." Czolgosz, when asked to explain himself at his trial, justified his crime on the grounds that he had done his duty: he did not feel "that one man should have so much service, and another man should have none." This sparked a debate about individual moral responsibility. Was the anarchist solely responsible for his actions, or had he been (de)formed by the social, economic and cultural evils of the society in which he lived? Had Czolgosz been driven insane by the inhuman, listless, frustrating conditions of his life? Emma Goldman, who was briefly arrested and quite harshly treated in the aftermath of the McKinley assassination because she was claimed by Czolgosz to have been an inspiration to him, certainly thought so, as her October 1901 article, ‘The Tragedy of Buffalo,’ demonstrated:
Leon Czolgosz was put to death in the electric chair at Auburn state prison on October 29, 1901. In a gesture heavy with the symbolic desire to purge evil from society absolutely, sulfuric acid was poured over his body to dissolve it. The issues of personal moral responsibility, societal degradation and distribution of wealth and privilege remain as pressing today as they were on that sad day at the turn of the last century. References Books Diner, Steven J. (1998), A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York, Hill and Wang) Joll, James (1980, 1964), The Anarchists (Harvard University Press) Johns, A. Wesley (1970), The Man Who Shot McKinley (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.) Karp, Walter (2003, 1979), The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic 1890–1920 (New York: Franklin Square Press) Kolko, Gabriel (1995), A Century of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co) Lears, T.J. Jackson (1981), No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books) Morgan, H. Wayne (2004, 1970), William McKinley and His America (Kent State University Press) Phillips, Kevin R. (2003) William McKinley (Times Books – American Presidents Series) Phillips, Kevin R. (2006) American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking Books) Rauchway, Eric (2003), Murdering McKinley : The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America, (New York, Hill and Wang) Rosenberg, Emily S. (1982), Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang) Williams, William A. (1966, 1961), The Contours of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks) Williams, William A. (1972, 1959), The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) Articles Mark Gado, The Assassination of William McKinley Lewis L. Gould, William McKinley (Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia) Wyatt Kingseed, The Assassination of William McKinley Other Links Legacies of the Spanish-American War Mark Trexler, The McKinley Assassination site University of Buffalo Libraries, The Legal Aftermath of the McKinley Assassination University of Buffalo Libraries, Anarchy at the Turn of the Century
April 1, 2006 Richard Wall (send him mail) is currently reading for a PhD in American History at the University of Birmingham, England. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
As
indeed it turned out, when on September 6, 1901 Leon Czolgosz (pronounced
"Cholgosh"), an American-born child of Polish immigrants
and a self-confessed anarchist, fired two bullets at point-blank
range into the 58-year old McKinley as he was receiving visitors
in a line at the 
Read
My Lips – The Original Master
The
Man in the Mask
White
House,