[On April 26th,
1865, John
Wilkes Booth was killed after a nearly two-week manhunt following his assassination of Abraham
Lincoln. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of different assassinations
and their contexts!]
On the still
highly relevant but tricky question raised by our third presidential
assassination.
First, it’d be
disgenuous of me not to share this
earlier post on William McKinley’s 1901 assassination,
in which I argued for a couple reasons why (despite the killing’s obvious
horror and tragedy) I couldn’t entirely mourn McKinley’s death. I can’t say
that my position on that has evolved in the last couple years; while certain
orange current commanders in chief have pushed most everybody further down the list
of worst US presidents, I would still say that McKinley likely and comfortably
occupies a spot in the top ten. To be honest, McKinley’s inaction in response
to the 1898
Wilmington coup and massacre—and, more exactly, in response to the most
heart-rending letter from an American citizen
to her president I’ve ever encountered—would be enough all by itself to
merit his inclusion on the worst-of list, and it’s far from the only black
mark on the McKinley administration. Obviously McKinley did not deserve to
die and his assassination was a national tragedy, but his was far from a good
presidency and I won’t pretend otherwise.
When it comes to
the specific details of his assassination, I think they reflect a particularly
clear version of a question that has become part of many contemporary
conversations about terrorists or mass shooters: where
was he radicalized? Unlike the obviously Confederate or strikingly personal
motivations of the Lincoln and Garfield assassins, the factors that pushed
former steel worker Leon
Czolgosz to shoot President McKinley at the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901 were far less
immediately apparent. Historians have generally boiled those factors
down to anarchism, one of the late 19th century’s most
consistent boogeymen and often a short-hand for cultural fears of various
groups (Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Jews, communists and
socialists, labor activists, and intellectuals, among others). Czolgosz had
attended a speech by the
radical activist Emma Goldman on May 6th, 1901 in Cleveland, and
the moment has become a particularly clear touchstone for arguments that he was
radicalized into an anarchist perspective by the experience and saw
assassinating the president as his way to contribute to the cause.
That may well be
the case—but at the same time, it’s difficult for me to believe that Czolgosz
went from having no radical opinions on May 5th to assassinating the
president on September 6th, and so attributing the change solely or
even mostly to Goldman feels like both a simplistic answer and a way to further
demonize such socialist activists. I’ve seen some historians make the case that
it was the violent suppression
of an 1897 strike by Slavic miners at Pennsylvania’s Lattimer
Mines that truly angered Czolgosz and set him on the path toward political
violence, and to my mind that narrative makes a great deal of sense, both in
terms of the longer arc of an individual’s radicalization and as a event
sufficiently egregious (it came to be known as the Lattimer
Mines Massacre) to engender political violence. Yet even then, I’m
highlighting a single event or moment as the source of Czolgosz’s
radicalization, when the likeliest explanation is both multi-faceted and
gradual, a lifelong series of stages that led him to the Exposition grounds
with a pistol hidden beneath his handkerchief. We would do well to remember the
long arc when we consider the radicalization of today’s politically violent
actors as well.
Next assassination
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other assassination contexts or connections you’d highlight?
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