Excerpt
Preface The meaning of a murderer's madness depends on who makes the diagnosis. Lawyers asserting a client's insanity mean to get him off the hook, because by law a madman cannot be held responsible for his actions. Politicians calling murder an act of madness mean they cannot imagine a
motive for such horror -- and if they can, they prefer not to discuss it; mad motives can be safely ignored. Doctors finding a murderer mad believe him irresponsible for his actions, but also (in the spirit of scientific inquiry) seek to explain how someone could have grown so alienated from civilization that he became a killer. But in all cases -- and especially when confronting political, symbolic violence -- we need murder to mean something so we know what to do about it. If we believe mad killers are born, we resolve to identify and stop them. If we believe they are made, we determine to stop the process of their manufacture, even if it means shouldering some share of the blame for their actions. Most often we act on bits of both beliefs, because in our humble uncertainty of the causes of evil, we hope to prevent further hurt any way we can.
Among the presidential assassinations, William McKinley's had the most dangerously political motive. Abraham Lincoln's murderer was waging the Civil War by other means; James Garfield's assassin claimed divine inspiration. Whatever motives may have spurred John F. Kennedy's killer
remain murky. The would-be regicides who fired on Andrew Jackson, Theodore
Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan suffered from varying degrees of delusion and ambition for attention. Only Harry Truman's attackers had similarly clear political motives -- but their cause (Puerto Rican independence) had few supporters. By contrast, McKinley's assassin said plainly that he shot the President of the United States because he hated the politics of state-supported capitalism that the President and his party represented, and in so doing he echoed hosts of critics in the United States and around the world. Because industrial civilization extended its influence over the globe, because it made millionaires of a few men and poor toilers of a multitude of others,
because it turned traditional farming and hunting into primitive and untenable occupations, because it uprooted and made wanderers out of peasant families who had for generations lived off the same land -- and because the United States was the richest and most powerful industrial country, the center of civilization and the capital of capital -- he wanted to strike at the American leader to prove the nation vulnerable, and to shatter its illusions of safety. He knew what he was doing, and he knew he would die if he succeeded. His reasoning was cruel, even inhuman; but however bereft of sympathy and decency his motive was, it did not lack logic. Nor was he mistaken as to its consequences. Killing the President did terrify the leaders of the country. They began treating the immigrant working classes differently. They tried the assassin, executed him, dropped him in a grave, and poured sulfuric acid over his body, but they could not forget the brutal lesson he had taught. Neither could they admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate.
Their fear was greater because the killer identified himself as an anarchist, a member of a shadowy international network who shared abstract theories about an earthly utopia displacing modern society, and who also shared concrete advice on how to make weapons to wage war against any society that stood in utopia's way. Ever since the anarchists' 1881 meeting in Paris praised the murder of the Russian tsar, Alexander II, the threat of terrorist violence hung over the citizens of the Western world. Nobody knew when a bomb or a gunshot might burst from a crowd.
The anarchist murder of William McKinley in September 1901 forced American opinion makers to confront a terrible problem. As society became more urban and more complex, and individuals had less control over their own fates, people grew surer that the only way to keep a populace sane and healthy was to keep the social environment sane and healthy -- to have
good schools, clean streets, green parks. Social movements to create and sustain all of these benefits grew to fruition during the Roosevelt presidency in the years following the assassination, giving shape to the liberal political ideology Americans came to call progressivism. At the same time, the more emphasis they placed on environmental influence -- on nurture, rather than on innate moral character -- the closer Americans came to the anarchist critique of modern society, in which a sick environment developed sick inhabitants. And as far as Americans of that era would go -- as far as Theodore Roosevelt would lead them -- they could not go that far. McKinley's specter loomed over and limited the very progressive movement to which the President's unhappy end had given so
bloody a birth.
Traditionally, historians see McKinley's death as finally making way for political modernization, a terrible but effective way of clearing the decks. Students of American history take guilty pleasure in McKinley's end: at the dawn of the twentieth century in the United States, all forces sloshed aimlessly at a grim doldrums. The Spanish-American War was the only excitement in a presidential Administration dourly concentrated upon that perennial bore of old American politics, the tariff. At the center of this dull debate over exclusion and reciprocity was the substantial, respectable figure of the godly McKinley himself, who could not even be bothered to leave his front porch to run for president against William Jennings Bryan. Suddenly a wild-eyed anarchist bearing an unpronounceable name chockablock with consonants looms out of a crowd and strikes McKinley down. Theodore Roosevelt takes the helm and off shoots the ship of state in five directions at once, leaving the nineteenth century far astern, and it is not till 1921 that Harding Republicans can begin to restore normalcy (and, not incidentally, the importance of the tariff with it). In a sense, therefore, William McKinley had two killers: the man who shot him and destroyed his body, and the man who succeeded him and erased his legacy.
This book tells the story of how both earned their historical roles -- anarchist assassin, progressive President -- through an act people preferred to regard as mad.
The law does not require a prosecutor to prove motive in a murder trial, because unlike corpus delicti and the cause of death, motive is not an element of the crime. But as any prosecutor will tell you, a jury always requires what the law does not: a reason for killing. Thus the prosecution puts tremendous energy into accumulating evidence for motive. So does the defense, in an effort to disprove the prosecution's theory of motive. And in a sensational case like a presidential murder, the press, the politicians, and other professional opinion-shapers try to explain motivation as well.
In the pages that follow, I present the evidence supporting both the prosecution's theory and the defense's theory of motive. The district attorney sought to prove that the weak-minded defendant sanely and unforgivably succumbed to the temptations of radicalism out of anger at his social position. The court-appointed defense argued that a man made mad by social conditions acted out of delusion and deserved mercy. And though at trial the jury had to decide between these explanations, many ordinary Americans tended afterward to hold elements of both theories. Indeed, their ability to believe bits of both shaped Theodore Roosevelt's response to the assassination and social policy generally.
Theodore Roosevelt plays a central part in the story of his predecessor's assassination. Of all the early interpreters, he did the most to make the murder meaningful to Americans. When he argued strenuously that the assassin was a sane anarchist who threatened social order, the progressive President played on his constituents' legitimate fears so that they would support him in his efforts to stamp out radical dissent. When he argued
with equal energy that the assassin was a man made mad by society, Roosevelt played on his constituents' legitimate hopes so that they would support him in his efforts to render American industrialism more humane. That he made both arguments points to what I regard as the essential fact of his personality: Theodore Roosevelt acutely understood that stories were a means to political ends. He was, as his friend Rudyard Kipling remarked, a master "spinner" -- someone who made his career by controlling stories.* Contrary to biographers and historians who describe Roosevelt as a boyish, romantic, immature, or impulsive creature, I present him here as I find him in the moment of his ascent to power: a man energetically and conscientiously struggling to control the stories told about him among his peers and in the press. If by presenting a canny and manipulative Roosevelt I contradict the tales told by his admirers and detractors alike, I am only corroborating the opinions of his contemporaries --
not only Kipling, but the reporters who regularly covered him, and also the politicians, like Booker T. Washington, who assessed him as a role model: "What he did was not a matter of impulse, but of carefully matured plans," Washington wrote. Roosevelt himself agreed: "[Observers who] think me indiscreet and overimpulsive," he wrote, "cannot understand what it is that makes me act."*
This portrait of the means and meaning of Theodore Roosevelt's ascent to power sharpens our understanding of the Progressive Era over which he presided. The elements that gave the United States its peculiar industrial politics were all present in the episode that made Roosevelt President: the murder of William McKinley pressed Americans to give voice and clarity to their opinions of a working class that was largely immigrant in its composition, to the place of race in a developing democracy, to the position of the government with respect to social ills. Most important, the question of whether McKinley's assassin was a sane radical or a deranged victim of society hinged on key assumptions about human nature in the age of industry. The notion that he was sane and responsible appealed to those keen to discipline the unruly elements of society and keep the tools of mischief -- including, not least, citizenship and the ballot -- away from them. The idea that the cruelties of global industry made a madman of someone ground by the teeth of modern machinery appealed to those hoping to improve living conditions and nurture society's wounded to health.
*endnotes have been omitted
Copyright © 2003 Eric Rauchway