William McKinley (1843-1901) once wrote that “the march of events rules and overrules human action.” In the case of his presidency, and its untimely end, those words were prophetic.
Our 25th president was inaugurated in 1897 with modest ambitions, but the currents of history transformed him into (in Walter Lord’s words) the “apostle” of America’s increasingly prominent place on the world stage at the dawn of the 20th century. When McKinley arrived in Buffalo on September 5, 1901, to speak at the lavish Pan-American Exposition, the nation’s economy hummed and its flag waved over exotic lands previously the possession of powerful empires. Less than 24 hours later, a young anarchist stepped forward from a receiving line and fired two shots from his Iver Johnson revolver into the president.
A week later, McKinley was dead, overruled by the march of events—or so says the former Wall Street Journal and Reuters reporter Scott Miller in this new chronicle of McKinley’s murder. The book is only partially about the actual event; the majority of its pages document the tectonic shifts that led to that tragic afternoon inside the Temple of Music.
In Miller’s telling, the Pan-American Exposition was an intersection where two ideologies—faith in the righteousness of America’s growing prosperity and international engagement, and the radical resentment it generated—collided head-on. McKinley, of course, symbolized the former; his assassin, Leon Czolgosz, the latter. Opening and closing the narrative in Buffalo, Miller fills the space between with alternating explanations of how the president and his assassin literally, and figuratively, met. Each chapter chronicling America’s rising ambitions is followed by one dedicated to the desperate resentment they created among the country’s laborers, political radicals, and newly arrived immigrants.
The result is brisk but sprawling in scope. In addition to the assassination, Miller details and draws a connecting line through (among other events) the elections of 1896 and 1900, the Haymarket Riot, the destruction of the USS Maine and America’s resultant war with Spain and subsequent occupation of Cuba and the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Homestead Strike. A cast of Rough Riders, Filipino and Cuban rebels, American statesmen, anarchist philosophers, and captains of industry wander in and out. The era’s most intriguing figures, ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Emma Goldman, from Henry Clay Frick to Albert Parsons, from George Dewey to Emilio Aguinaldo, are profiled with reporterly detail.
Yet, despite this ambitious reach, the book, at its best, belongs to McKinley and Czolgosz. Here the president, in a thoughtful portrait, emerges as a sensitive, contemplative, and kind man, independent from the political kingmaker Mark Hanna but devoted to his chronically ill wife Ida and, upon his assumption of the presidency, to reviving America’s economy, still stagnant from the aftershocks of the Panic of 1893. A veteran of the Civil War, McKinley, who served at Antietam, was all too familiar with the bloody costs of battle. Asserting from the outset that there would be “no jingo nonsense” in his administration, he promised to avoid any entanglement that could cost American lives. Domestic affairs would be his forte.
Or so he hoped. Shortly into his term, national sentiment, inflamed by sensational reporting in the (Joseph) Pulitzer and (William Randolph) Hearst newspapers, forced McKinley to intervene in a boiling rebellion in Cuba. This, in turn, led to the mysterious destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor and the president’s agonized decision to declare war on Spain.
Events quickly overwhelmed his modest objectives: Colonel Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill, Commodore Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, America demolished the last vestiges of the Spanish Empire, and in the process, opened up myriad new markets to its commerce. Seemingly overnight, the nation flowered into an economic and military power. But in Miller’s telling, while America rose, so did an underclass of disaffected immigrants and laborers. Packed into sweltering tenements, subject to brutal conditions in factories or mines, and left untouched by the new prosperity, these men and women were both vulnerable to, and in some cases the source of, a contagion of violent radicalism.
