Dead President and Progressive Reform

Eric Rauchway. Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xiv + 250 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

Is there a curious relationship between the assassination of American presidents and the course of national reform? The murders of Lincoln and Kennedy arguably cleared the way for Radical Reconstruction and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while Garfield's death was linked even more directly to the civil service reforms of 1882. In each of these cases, the fact of a president's assassination seemed to matter less than the meanings attached to it, as politicians, reformers, and moralists of different stripes vied for the chance to define the assassins, interpret the legacies of the fallen presidents, and make sense of the murders for a larger American audience. Eric Rauchway is alive to the interplay of fact and meaning in his immensely enjoyable and engagingly written study of the least well-known presidential assassination—the murder of William McKinley at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. In his hands, an event most have considered to be a mere anecdote, if they have considered it at all, emerges as a moment of broad historical significance.

Of all the presidential assassinations, Rauchway tells us on the very first page, "McKinley's had the most dangerously political motive"(p. ix). John Wilkes Booth, in shooting Lincoln, merely extended the aims of the Confederate war; Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, claimed divine inspiration and the righting of a personal snub; and Lee Harvey Oswald's motives for killing Kennedy are forever shrouded in mystery. Leon Czolgosz, the man who shot McKinley, explained his reasons for killing the president with sober clarity: he disagreed with the system of global, industrial capitalism that the president represented and did what he perceived to be his duty by shooting him dead. By declaring himself an anarchist, McKinley's assassin seemed to link his own act with a terrifying series of high-level assassinations throughout Europe. The United States was just then emerging as the "capital of capital," in Rauchway's words, a country that "extended its influence around the globe, . . . made millionaires of a few men and poor toilers of a multitude of others, . . . [and] uprooted and made wanderers out of peasant families who had for generations lived off the same land" (p. x). This fact lent Czolgosz's act a kind of cold, if disturbing, logic.

Rauchway also raises the historical stakes of McKinley's assassination by re-conceptualizing its consequences. The death of McKinley represented the "bloody birth" of Progressivism, he tells us, as the forty-two-year-old Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the highest office in the land and proceeded to transform the very meaning and purpose of government, boldly piloting the ship of state out from the foggy mist of the nineteenth century and into the bright sunlight of the twentieth. McKinley then really had two murderers, Rauchway claims: the "anarchist assassin" who "shot and destroyed his body" and the "progressive President" who "succeeded him and erased his legacy"(p. xii).

In Rauchway's richly detailed and deeply contextualized analysis, the assassination and subsequent trial become a flashpoint of the modern era, revealing national attitudes, often conflicted, toward a largely working-class immigrant population, the place of African-Americans in political life a full generation after Reconstruction, the role of government in addressing the ills of industrial society, and the very meaning of human nature in that industrial society. Along the way, Rauchway offers an astute analysis of Teddy Roosevelt (rescuing him from the cartoon of fetishized masculinity he has at times become) and dramatizes some of the conflicts and limitations inherent in progressivism. The book joins a spate of twenty-first-century works on national progressivism—including Alan Dawley's Changing the World (2003), Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent (2003) and Rauchway's own Refuge of Affections (2001)—that offer compelling new interpretations of the...