President McKinley’s Assassination

Dad is home.

I’m temporarily back for a quick visit this afternoon.

I have to feed the animals, work on the house, help my oldest son with his homework and check on my youngest son who is staying with his grandparents before returning to the hospital.

My daughter Willow is healthy and doing great. There were no issues with the delivery. There were no complications or need for a C section. She is just small. She was supposed to be born around April 19th, but was induced early due to a placenta issue. I was worried about having a newborn at 37 weeks. If she had trouble breathing, it was possible that she might have had to stay in the NICU unit, but fortunately that isn’t an issue. We should all be back home after the discharge tomorrow morning.

I’ve spent the last two nights finishing reading the McKinley biography. The following excerpt comes from Robert W. Merry’s book President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

“As the president enjoyed his summer interlude at Canton, Leon Czolgosz made plans to travel to Buffalo to kill him during his visit to the Pan-American Exposition. Born in Detroit twenty-eight years before, the son of Polish immigrants, he was educated in Detroit public schools, then traveled to Cleveland to pursue factory jobs. He hung out in a working-class saloon called Dryers on Third Avenue and Tod, ate his meals there, slept intermittently in his chair, read the newspapers, kept to himself. Slight of build and sallow of skin, with a bland face accentuated by pale blue eyes, he struck others at the pub as bitter and jittery. “I never had much luck at anything,” he would recall, “and this preyed upon me. It made me morose and envious.” He fell in with a group of anarchists.

Then he went to hear a lecture by Emma Goldman, the well-known and brutal-minded writer, thinker, and lecturer, dubbed by Murat Halstead “the queen of anarchy,” advocate of the assassination of all rulers everywhere. “She set me on fire,” recalled Czolgosz, “Miss Goldman’s words went right through me, and when I left the lecture I had made up my mind that I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved.”

William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 and the attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick by the Jewish anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892 during the Homestead Strike could be properly classified as Chapter 1 in a book on the Jewish Question in the United States.

As I have already explained, Jews had lived in America for centuries as a tiny minority and for the most part had assimilated, especially in the South. There is a qualitative difference between Jews like Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and Jewish revolutionaries like, say, Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman. The former had assimilated into the American mainstream. Benjamin was part of the antebellum Southern establishment. The latter were radicals trying to topple the social order.

Leon Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants, but he had been radicalized by Emma Goldman. President McKinley’s life was cut short as a direct result of our loose Gilded Age immigration policy which later caused us so many problems in the 20th century. Along with the thoughtless emancipation of millions of slaves and Reconstruction, it was the Original Sin of the victorious North.

“Good-bye – good-bye, all,” said the president in a weak voice. Moments later he whispered in Ida’s ear. “It is God’s way. His will, not ours, be done.”

“I want to go with you,” she whispered back.

“We are all going, my dear,” he said, then slipped back into a stupor as he whispered the words to a favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Ida was escorted back to her room for the rest that her doctors deemed imperative to her fragile health. She later returned for a brief visit as the president faded into oblivion.

He died at 2:15 on the morning of September 14, 1901.”

One more thing.

If we zoom out from the focus on McKinley, Goldman and Czolgosz, we can see a larger problem. President James Garfield had been assassinated in 1881 by the crank Charles Guiteau. President Theodore Roosevelt had his own brush with death in 1912 when was nearly assassinated by the crank John Schrank. The term “crank” itself was popularized in the Gilded Age. It was an age of violent cranks.

Several generations earlier, George Fitzhugh had written at length in the 1850s about what he saw as this tendency of “Free Society” in the North and Europe to produce violent fanatics. Fitzhugh believed that the South had been spared this fate and was culturally conservative because of slavery. He saw Europe and our Northern states as being full of radicals. He lived to see the Paris Commune of 1871. There was no equivalent of this subculture of leftwing radicalism in the American South.