Murdering McKinley

"President McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, a self-confessed anarchist, who approached McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, with his hand wrapped in a handkerchief that concealed a gun. He was immediately apprehended and would have been beaten to death by the crowd had the police not intervened. As he was strapped into the electric chair he made a dramatic, 11th hour statement: ‘I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people, the working men of all countries!’ This book looks at how the subsequent administration of Theodore Roosevelt responded to the assassination and the questions it raised about the working classes and immigrant labour, questions that had never been addressed before. Of course, the assassination also fed into and exacerbated the fear of European anarchists and led to a clampdown on all potentially radical activity. But Rauchway also examines how the McKinley assassination forced opinion makers to confront the question of nature versus nurture, and question whether an increasingly urbanised society contributes to creating troubled citizens. Intriguingly, too, Rauchway looks at how this fed into the anarchists’ idea that capitalism was damaging to the common labourer while benefiting the wealthy few."