The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

Using a fast-paced narration, Miller recounts how the affable and agreeable McKinley embodied the emerging traits of the Americanism. The reactions of both society and government established the pattern of red scares that would be repeated time and time again, even now in the aftermath of the attacks by Islamic radicals. The specter of revolutionary terrorism alarmed a nation secure in its belief of American exceptionalism. Of the three movements, anarchism is now the least understood, yet it may have had the most lasting influence on the nation’s latter conduct.

Thus, for a brief time radicals took center stage in American life with mass rallies, strikes, and - at times - bombs and assassinations. Socialism, communism, and anarchism were like siren calls to the oppressed, promising in resonating Christian terms that the downtrodden were the rightful heirs to the richness of the land. This seemingly intractable industrial serfdom was fertile soil for radical solutions. “For every tycoon smoking cigars wrapped in hundred-dollar bills, for every society woman who strapped a diamond-encrusted collar on her dog, for every playboy who spent the summer sailing Daddy’s yacht, there were tens of thousands of seamstresses, coal miners, and assembly line workers for whom life was simply a battle for existence,” writes Miller. The metamorphosis was hailed as progress by those on top and viewed as a horror for those on the bottom. Rather, the shooting grew from the seismic changes occurring as the industrial revolution woke the nation from a bucolic agrarian slumber and transformed it into an economic and military giant that would dominate the world in the new century. In short, this book delivers on its subtitle.įor Miller, William McKinley’s lethal encounter with the handgun belonging to Leon Czolgosz was not merely an unlucky confrontation with a distressed demented laborer.

In The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century, Scott Miller deftly uses the twentieth century’s first presidential assassination as a literary device to paint an engaging, entertaining, and revealing portrait of America at a crucial turning point in its history.

The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller