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Preface
The meaning of a murderer's madness depends on who makes the diagnosis. Lawyers asserting a client's insanity mean to get him off the hook, because by law a madman cannot be held responsible for his actions. Politicians calling murder an act of madness mean they cannot imagine a motive for such horror -- and if they can, they prefer not to discuss it; mad motives can be safely ignored. Doctors finding a murderer mad believe him irresponsible for his actions, but also (in the spirit of scientific inquiry) seek to explain how someone could have grown so alienated from civilization that he became a killer. But in all cases -- and especially when confronting political, symbolic violence -- we need murder to mean something so we know what to do about it. If we believe mad killers are born, we resolve to identify and stop them. If we believe they are made, we determine to stop the process of their manufacture, even if it means shouldering some share of the blame for their actions. Most often we act on bits of both beliefs, because in our humble uncertainty of the causes of evil, we hope to prevent further hurt any way we can.
Among the presidential assassinations, William McKinley's had the most dangerously political motive. Abraham Lincoln's murderer was waging the Civil War by other means; James Garfield's assassin claimed divine inspiration. Whatever motives may have spurred John F. Kennedy's killer remain murky. The would-be regicides who fired on Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan suffered from varying degrees of delusion and ambition for attention. Only Harry Truman's attackers had similarly clear political motives -- but their cause (Puerto Rican independence) had few supporters. By contrast, McKinley's assassin said plainly that he shot the President of the United States because he hated the politics of state-supported capitalism that the President and his party represented, and in so doing he echoed hosts of critics in the United States and around the world. Because industrial civilization extended its influence over the globe, because it made millionaires of a few men and poor toilers of a multitude of others, because it turned traditional farming and hunting into primitive and untenable occupations, because it uprooted and made wanderers out of peasant families who had for generations lived off the same land -- and because the United States was the richest and most powerful industrial country, the center of civilization and the capital of capital -- he wanted to strike at the American leader to prove the nation vulnerable, and to shatter its illusions of safety. He knew what he was doing, and he knew he would die if he succeeded. His reasoning was cruel, even inhuman; but however bereft of sympathy and decency his motive was, it did not lack logic. Nor was he mistaken as to its consequences. Killing the President did terrify the leaders of the country. They began treating the immigrant working classes differently. They tried the assassin, executed him, dropped him in a grave, and poured sulfuric acid over his body, but they could not forget the brutal lesson he had taught. Neither could they admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate.
Their fear was greater because the killer identified himself as an anarchist, a member of a shadowy international network who shared abstract theories about an earthly utopia displacing modern society, and who also shared concrete advice on how to make weapons to wage war against any society that stood in utopia's way. Ever since the anarchists' 1881 meeting in Paris praised the murder of the Russian tsar, Alexander II, the threat of terrorist violence hung over the citizens of the Western world. Nobody knew when a bomb or a gunshot might burst from a crowd.
The anarchist murder of William McKinley in September 1901 forced American opinion makers to confront a terrible problem. As society became more urban and more complex, and individuals had less control over their own fates, people grew surer that the only way to keep a populace sane and healthy was to keep the social environment sane and healthy -- to have good schools, clean streets, green parks. Social movements to create and sustain all of these benefits grew to fruition during the Roosevelt presidency in the years following the assassination, giving shape to the liberal political ideology Americans came to call progressivism. At the same time, the more emphasis they placed on environmental influence -- on nurture, rather than on innate moral character -- the closer Americans came to the anarchist critique of modern society, in which a sick environment developed sick inhabitants. And as far as Americans of that era would go -- as far as Theodore Roosevelt would lead them -- they could not go that far. McKinley's specter loomed over and limited the very progressive movement to which the President's unhappy end had given so bloody a birth.
Traditionally, historians see McKinley's death as finally making way for political modernization, a terrible but effective way of clearing the decks. Students of American history take guilty pleasure in McKinley's end: at the dawn of the twentieth century in the United States, all forces sloshed aimlessly at a grim doldrums. The Spanish-American War was the only excitement in a presidential Administration dourly concentrated upon that perennial bore of old American politics, the tariff. At the center of this dull debate over exclusion and reciprocity was the substantial, respectable figure of the godly McKinley himself, who could not even be bothered to leave his front porch to run for president against William Jennings Bryan. Suddenly a wild-eyed anarchist bearing an unpronounceable name chockablock with consonants looms out of a crowd and strikes McKinley down. Theodore Roosevelt takes the helm and off shoots the ship of state in five directions at once, leaving the nineteenth century far astern, and it is not till 1921 that Harding Republicans can begin to restore normalcy (and, not incidentally, the importance of the tariff with it). In a sense, therefore, William McKinley had two killers: the man who shot him and destroyed his body, and the man who succeeded him and erased his legacy. This book tells the story of how both earned their historical roles -- anarchist assassin, progressive President -- through an act people preferred to regard as mad.
The law does not require a prosecutor to prove motive in a murder trial, because unlike corpus delicti and the cause of death, motive is not an element of the crime. But as any prosecutor will tell you, a jury always requires what the law does not: a reason for killing. Thus the prosecution puts tremendous energy into accumulating evidence for motive. So does the defense, in an effort to disprove the prosecution's theory of motive. And in a sensational case like a presidential murder, the press, the politicians, and other professional opinion-shapers try to explain motivation as well.
In the pages that follow, I present the evidence supporting both the prosecution's theory and the defense's theory of motive. The district attorney sought to prove that the weak-minded defendant sanely and unforgivably succumbed to the temptations of radicalism out of anger at his social position. The court-appointed defense argued that a man made mad by social conditions acted out of delusion and deserved mercy. And though at trial the jury had to decide between these explanations, many ordinary Americans tended afterward to hold elements of both theories. Indeed, their ability to believe bits of both shaped Theodore Roosevelt's response to the assassination and social policy generally.
Theodore Roosevelt plays a central part in the story of his predecessor's assassination. Of all the early interpreters, he did the most to make the murder meaningful to Americans. When he argued strenuously that the assassin was a sane anarchist who threatened social order, the progressive President played on his constituents' legitimate fears so that they would support him in his efforts to stamp out radical dissent. When he argued with equal energy that the assassin was a man made mad by society, Roosevelt played on his constituents' legitimate hopes so that they would support him in his efforts to render American industrialism more humane. That he made both arguments points to what I regard as the essential fact of his personality: Theodore Roosevelt acutely understood that stories were a means to political ends. He was, as his friend Rudyard Kipling remarked, a master "spinner" -- someone who made his career by controlling stories.* Contrary to biographers and historians who describe Roosevelt as a boyish, romantic, immature, or impulsive creature, I present him here as I find him in the moment of his ascent to power: a man energetically and conscientiously struggling to control the stories told about him among his peers and in the press. If by presenting a canny and manipulative Roosevelt I contradict the tales told by his admirers and detractors alike, I am only corroborating the opinions of his contemporaries -- not only Kipling, but the reporters who regularly covered him, and also the politicians, like Booker T. Washington, who assessed him as a role model: "What he did was not a matter of impulse, but of carefully matured plans," Washington wrote. Roosevelt himself agreed: "[Observers who] think me indiscreet and overimpulsive," he wrote, "cannot understand what it is that makes me act."*
This portrait of the means and meaning of Theodore Roosevelt's ascent to power sharpens our understanding of the Progressive Era over which he presided. The elements that gave the United States its peculiar industrial politics were all present in the episode that made Roosevelt President: the murder of William McKinley pressed Americans to give voice and clarity to their opinions of a working class that was largely immigrant in its composition, to the place of race in a developing democracy, to the position of the government with respect to social ills. Most important, the question of whether McKinley's assassin was a sane radical or a deranged victim of society hinged on key assumptions about human nature in the age of industry. The notion that he was sane and responsible appealed to those keen to discipline the unruly elements of society and keep the tools of mischief -- including, not least, citizenship and the ballot -- away from them. The idea that the cruelties of global industry made a madman of someone ground by the teeth of modern machinery appealed to those hoping to improve living conditions and nurture society's wounded to health.
*endnotes have been omitted
Copyright © 2003 Eric Rauchway
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MURDERING McKINLEY
THE MAKING OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S AMERICA
By ERIC RAUCHWAY HILL and WANG
Copyright © 2003 Eric Rauchway
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-8090-7170-3
Chapter One
A WEEK AT THE FAIR
At or about four o'clock in the afternoon of September 6, 1901, President William McKinley arrived in an open carriage outside the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He walked inside and to the head of a receiving line, where he began shaking the hands of Exposition visitors. His handlers expected him to remain only a short while, and about ten minutes later, one of them pulled out his pocket watch and made a show of looking at the time, signaling the Secret Service that the appearance was coming to an end. Just then, the man next in line stepped forward and raised his right hand. Instead of opening it to meet McKinley's grasp, he revealed that it was covered in a clean white bandage. Underneath the bandage he held an Iver Johnson .32-caliber pistol, which he fired twice into the President, hitting him in the chest and stomach.
McKinley straightened up, staggered from one potted plant to another, and collapsed, blood seeping into his pale shirt. Secret Service agents and other bystanders tackled the shooter. A fairgoer grabbed him by the throat and tried to choke him. Through this mayhem the assailant insisted stubbornly, "I done my duty," while the President implored his avengers to have mercy, crying, "Be easy with him, boys."
In the instant before he was shot, William McKinley stood at the peak of his power. In November 1900 he had won reelection by a strong majority, carrying 52 percent of the popular vote against the same opponent he had trounced in 1896, the oratorical marvel William Jennings Bryan. Now, six months into his second term, in this late, lazy summer of the first year of the twentieth century, it looked as though the McKinley Administration would continue peaceably unbroken for another four years, going on as it had begun, a government devoted to prosperity and standing firm against demands that it become an engine for social betterment.
In 1896, McKinley had presented himself to the voters as the embodiment of conservatism, and he looked the part. His stem, square features, topped by the level lintel of a dark brow, had all the expression of a closed door. He was known to turn on the charm principally when trying to tell someone, graciously but firmly, no. He wore a carnation in his lapel, and when he wanted to turn a petitioner away, he would pluck it from his coat as his granite face cleaved into a smile, and hand over the flower as consolation.
His steadfastness made him a comforting President in an age of crisis. The early 1890s brought economic depression to the United States, and in the crash of 1893 great fortunes melted within weeks. Armies of the unemployed straggled across the roads between towns whose factory chimneys rose mute and unsmoking into the kind of clear sky that, in the age of coal-fueled industry, only bad times could bring. The U.S. Treasury, depleted of gold, shamefacedly had to sell bonds at rates advantageous to J. P. Morgan and the other barons of Wall Street. In reply to this terrible trouble there arose from the debt-pinched farmers and unemployed workers of the country a cry of protest, demanding relief: that the government should coin silver, and inflate the currency; that the government should tax incomes, rather than imports; that the means of electing U.S. senators should change so that the people could wrest control of their leaders away from the vote-buying millionaires. This howl raised Bryan to the candidacy of the combined Democratic and Populist Parties in I896. From the platform of farmers and laborers, Bryan thundered against the conservative economic policies of the government, railing that to keep the currency on the gold standard would be to "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
Seeking to thwart this protest, the Republicans wanted a candidate who could dam the tide of revolution. McKinley, an experienced congressman and governor of Ohio, was their man. The businessmen of America-who over their morning coffee read with increasing alarm each day's report of riots, strikes, and proposed new schemes of taxation-paid for his campaign, which he organized around the theme of immobility. Nothing would budge-not the monetary policy, not the fiscal policy, not the taxation schedule. Indeed, not even the candidate: for the duration of the campaign, McKinley himself would not move. Instead of following Bryan through the heartland, McKinley stayed on his front porch in Canton, Ohio, and let reporters and citizens come to him. And he promised them that even though he would not change the policies of the government, prosperity would return to the nation.
The voters chose McKinley in November of 1896. In March of 1897 he took office, and then as if by magic his promises came true. Factories opened their gates, workers returned to the mills, and once more smoke poured cheerfully from the chimneys into sooty American skies. Though the recovery owed more to an incidental increase in the world's supply of gold than to the policies of William McKinley, the President received the credit.
And even when, the following summer, the President led the nation into one of its greatest changes ever, he invoked a comfortably Christian justification so as to preserve a sense of safe familiarity. For it was under McKinley that, in I898, the United States stopped being a mere continental republic and became an international colonial empire. After a short war with Spain, sparked by conflict in Cuba, the U.S. Army and Navy occupied the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the distant Philippine Islands, across the Pacific, off the China coast. The President had not wanted colonies, and wished fervently that his generals and admirals could have left the islands in peace-but to do that meant letting some rapacious European power (probably Germany) take and despoil them. Yet William McKinley did not want to make himself the first emperor of a free people, so in the troubled hours after the war ended he petitioned God for guidance, praying on his knees in the nighttime White House for divine advice. And the Lord complied, as the President testified: "And one night late it came to me this way-I don't know how it was, but it came ... There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly."
The presence and approval of God let the President rest peacefully, and his fellow citizens shared in the soundness of his slumber. When he ran for election again, he found it even easier to present himself as the picture of calm stillness; his new running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, had more than enough energy for both of them. And though Bryan returned in the election season to trouble the people with visions of the problems that empire would bring, McKinley defeated him a second time.
So it was that the President found himself in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition, celebrating the mighty United States he had helped to build. The Exposition paid tribute to the international reach of American power, glorying in its links throughout the hemisphere and across the seas. Its buildings fit loosely into a Spanish mission style, assimilated and Americanized, coated liberally with gilt-edged European baroque decorations. Throughout the grounds stood evidence of power, both figurative and literal; drawing current from the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, the new electrical circuits of the fair gave the Exposition a glow unknown before, culminating in the Tower of Light that the Edison Company had put up not far from the Temple of Music, which housed the Exposition's largest reception space.
On September 5, the President spoke in an open-air pavilion to a crowd eager to hear him rhapsodize on the theme of what lay before the modern nation: a greater fleet of ships to ply the seas with the commerce of empire; a trans-Isthmian canal through the center of the Americas that would give those ships free passage from ocean to ocean; and a trans-Pacific undersea cable that would carry to the further shore of the western sea the most precious American cargo of all: information, ideas, and culture. On a stage decked with bunting, leaning lightly on the rail before him, holding a single small sheet of notepaper in his left hand, McKinley painted this picture of global glory to come while promising that, even so, the familiar America would not change. Specifically, though Bryan and his supporters might clamor for a federal income tax, McKinley reaffirmed his faith in that hoary standby, the tariff, which shielded American industry from overseas competition (albeit at the expense of the American consumer). The crowd, which included a slight listening man with a gun in his pocket, heard from McKinley what it had come to expect: a confidently stated platform of conservative policies meant to aid the growth of American economic might. That evening the President towered benevolently over his constituents, and the next afternoon he lay in the dust, felled by twin bullets fired from that still, slight listening man's gun.
The report of gunshots drifted out of the Temple of Music and over the crowd waiting to see the President. Men in stiff collars and bowler hats, women in bonnets, boys in straw boaters, and girls in fine dresses jostled each other in front of the Temple, anxiously pressing forward to find out what had happened behind its scarlet façade. At the front of the tightly packed throng, helmeted Exposition guards scurried back and forth, keeping would-be vigilantes at bay. Above and behind the crowd, a cameraman of the Thomas A. Edison Company cranked away, recording the scene on film.
Today, at a century's distance, we can still watch. In a darkened, silent room we can see the flickering images of onlookers, most with no hope of getting through the mass of their fellows, standing horrified and still. Faces in the crowd, turned one-quarter profile to the camera, reveal little of thoughts or emotions. Here and there, someone somehow aware of being filmed glances back at the panning camera. One man, thoroughly respectable in his pince-nez, bowler, and brush mustache, turns idly, catches sight of the camera, looks directly into the lens-and suddenly smiles before turning away.
In our time we know too well the emotions that rippled through that crowd. We know how it feels to believe that not only news but history has just happened. We know how an icon of an epoch can crumple. We can imagine reacting almost any way at all-except, perhaps, smiling. Whether it was a reflex to the camera lens, bloodlust, political cynicism, or nerves, that smile-that overwhelmingly inappropriate, incomprehensible smile-had a meaning that remains inaccessible to us now. The strange smile shares two important characteristics with the assassination itself: we know that it happened, and that it was the product of a mind now closed to us. And for us, a troubled century later, the smile matters as much as the murder. Because it, along with the millions of other reactions to the killing, gave the assassination a meaning that the killer alone was powerless to provide. Those meanings of the McKinley assassination, to Americans then and now, tell us how we make sense-or fail to make sense-of the madness that history visits upon us.
The assault on McKinley dropped an uncertain mantle on the shoulders of the Vice President, who could not know and would not hope that he would soon become President. The assailant had accomplished the astounding: he reduced Theodore Roosevelt, however briefly, to dithering inactivity. Suddenly irresolute and unable to see his way forward, Roosevelt felt strangely like an ordinary, helpless citizen.
Despite his low opinion of the vice presidency, Roosevelt could not have aimed more unerringly for the office if he meant to. He had become inescapably popular during the Spanish-American War of 1898, resigning his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to lead a cavalry group of Rough Riders in Cuba. As a Manhattanite who could credibly don a cowboy hat, he proved irresistible to reporters, who found in turn that the amateur naturalist, historian, and full-time politician could endlessly produce quotable copy. Moreover, with his flashing spectacles and clacking, oversized teeth, his brushy mustache and ready grin, he presented an image already so near to caricature that he endeared himself to cartoonists. The Republican Party dared not leave idle a politician so beloved of the press. Yet Roosevelt kept making trouble; except during election season, when he remained scrupulously loyal, he trained a harsh fire on the corruption among his fellow Republicans. There was only one safe place for a party's most popular troublemaker: the visible, and powerless, vice presidency.
Roosevelt's war record made him a choice candidate for governor of New York in 1898, and he won the election that autumn. He immediately became a headache for the state Republican boss, Tom Platt, most significantly by supporting a tax on corporation franchises. As the governor's two-year term drew to a close in 1900, rumors surfaced that Platt might prevent Roosevelt's renomination. The two men were lining up for an ugly fight when the sitting Vice President, Garret Hobart, died. This vacancy on the national ticket gave Platt the upper hand. He could withhold renomination from Roosevelt by making him an offer he could not refuse. The Rough Rider would ascend from the governorship to serve party and country gloriously and impotently at the President's right hand. When Platt put this case to him, Roosevelt realized he had been outmaneuvered, and he glumly accepted the job. When McKinley won reelection, Platt and his fellow party stalwarts believed they had finally neutered Roosevelt. On the eve of the inauguration, Platt told his friends he was "going to Washington to see Theodore Roosevelt take the veil."
The vice presidency was every bit as dull as Roosevelt feared. The constitutional limits on him were bad enough. The Vice President was, on paper, a "functionless official," as Roosevelt wrote, "who possesses so little real power," that, regrettably, "his political weight ... is almost nil." But the attentions of the press made his situation even worse. McKinley was, as one reporter complained, habitually "silent," and a terrible chore to a press that wanted ballyhoo. Roosevelt presented no such obstacle to coverage. But if the Vice President spent too much time in the headlines, he risked, as Roosevelt feared, making the President "jealous."
Continues...
Excerpted from MURDERING McKINLEY by ERIC RAUCHWAY Copyright ©2003 by Eric Rauchway. Excerpted by permission.
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When President McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the Commander-in-Chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant
Murdering McKinley re-creates Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America as Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist, sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his President. While uncovering the answer that eluded Briggs and setting the historical record straight about Czolgosz, Rauchway also provides the finest portrait yet of Theodore Roosevelt at the moment of his sudden ascension to the White House.
For Czolgosz was neither a foreigner nor much of an anarchist. Born in Detroit, he was an American-made assassin of such inchoate political beliefs that Emma Goldman dismissed him as a police informant. Indeed, Brigg's search for answers---in the records of the Auburn New York State penitentiary where Czolgosz was electrocuted, in Cleveland where Leon's remaining family lived---only increased the mystery. Roosevelt, however, cared most for the meanings he could fix to this "crime against free government all over the world." For Roosevelt was every inch the calculating politician, his supposed boyish impulsiveness more feint than fact. At one moment encouraging the belief that Czolgosz's was a political crime, at the next that it was a deranged one, Roosevelt used the specter of McKinley's death to usher in Progressive Era America.
So why did Czolgosz do it? Only Rauchway's careful sifting of long-ignored evidence provides an answer:heart-broken, recently radicalized, and thinking he had only months to live, Leon decided to take the most powerful man in America with him.
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