One hundred and fifteen years ago this week, President William McKinley was shot while attending a reception at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. His assailant, an anarchist son of Polish immigrants named Leon Czolgosz, had stood in a receiving line to shake McKinley’s hand and, concealing a revolver under a handkerchief, shot him twice. One of the bullets was deflected by a button; the other penetrated McKinley’s abdomen.
The president was 58 years old, a Civil War combat veteran, and in good health. But while the president appeared initially to recover—indeed, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, summoned to McKinley’s bedside, had returned to a family vacation—doctors were unable to locate the bullet, the wound became septic, and McKinley died eight days later.
Anyone tempted to suggest that some epoch in the American past was a “simpler,” or “better,” or “more innocent” time than the present might usefully reflect on an interesting statistic: When McKinley was murdered in 1901, he became the third president within a 36-year span to have been shot to death by an assassin. It is as if, in our own time, three presidents since 1980 had been shot and killed.
One president (James Garfield, 1881) had been assassinated by a gunman (Charles Guiteau) who was manifestly insane. But the other two, McKinley and Abraham Lincoln in 1865, were shot by men with political intent: John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate sympathizer, and Czolgosz was an anarchist who, when subdued, muttered “I done my duty.” The turn of the previous century was an anarchist age, particularly in Europe, and anarchists believed in political assassination. Not long before McKinley, King Umberto I of Italy had been shot and killed, and his murder was said to have inspired Czolgosz.
Nowadays, of course, if three presidents had been shot and killed in a three-decade span, the subject uppermost in public discourse would not be ends but means: Namely, gun control. That has certainly been the main reaction to comparable modern incidents, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963) and his brother Robert (1968), as well as the shooting and wounding of Ronald Reagan (1981) and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (2011). Indeed, to the extent that there was any political interpretation of President Kennedy’s assassination, it was curiously antithetical: Kennedy was murdered by a left-wing political activist and onetime Soviet defector (Lee Harvey Oswald), but blame was attached, in the press and elsewhere, to right-wing public opinion in Dallas.
It’s instructive to compare this with press reflections, in 1901, on the political implications of President McKinley’s killing. The principal topics were not gun control or domestic politics but anarchism, a mysterious ideology to most Americans, and, to a lesser extent, immigration. Under the circumstances, both were perceived by the press and public as immediate and long-term threats to the social order. The status of Czolgosz’s revolver was irrelevant. Or, put another way: There was little interest in the weapon that killed McKinley but considerable concern about why he had been shot.
A century’s difference is reflected in other ways. Here and in Europe we have witnessed innumerable incidents of violence, sometimes mass murder, committed in the name of radical Islam. But the mainstream press, in general, and the Obama administration, in particular, have been curiously reluctant to identify the cause of the violence—preferring instead to concentrate on weaponry, and how to regulate it. This logic would have seemed incomprehensible, even dangerous, to Americans in the age of McKinley. In that sense, while the world of 1901 might not have been “simpler,” it was manifestly a wiser time.
