Assassination Vacation

With her sister Amy and nephew Owen, Vowell visits Garfield’s mausoleum at Lakeview Cemetery in Ohio. Also at the cemetery is the grave of Mark Hanna, who was an Ohio senator and the campaign manager of William McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign. At the nearby city of Canton, Vowel visits the McKinley National Memorial and McKinley’s presidential library and museum.

Next, Vowel goes to the city of Buffalo, New York, where McKinley was shot in 1901. The site of McKinley’s assassination is just a “simple marker” (193). While meeting with the public and shaking hands at a building for the Pan-American Expedition, McKinley was stabbed by Leon Czogloz. McKinley was supposed to inaugurate the Expedition earlier, but it was delayed by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Vowell describes the war as one that resulted in “the United States” becoming “a world power overnight” (196). McKinley himself was responsible for seizing the Philippines, Cuba, and Guam from Spain and annexing Hawaii. The Pan-American Exhibition showed two women, each representing North and South America, embracing in friendship, which Vowell deems, “the best possible picture not just of the exposition and its aims of hemispheric friendship, but of the McKinley administration itself” (196).

At first, McKinley was reluctant to go to war. However, the bombing of a US battleship, the Maine off the coast of Cuba, was blamed (perhaps falsely) on Spain, giving the US media a pretext to demand war. The future president Theodore Roosevelt, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley, led a cavalry of volunteers called the Rough Riders who fought in Cuba.

Besides McKinley’s administration being pivotal in the history of US foreign interventionism, Vowell also sees the McKinley presidency as a “milestone in the history of how the party of Lincoln became the party of, say, late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond” (201). McKinley claimed the Spanish-American War healed the wounds from the Civil War and “boiled down the story of the Civil War—on both sides—to merely the story of ‘American valor’ (i.e., doesn’t matter which side you were on or what you thought you were fighting for, the point is, you put up a fight)” (201).

Vowell compares McKinley to President George W. Bush. She especially highlights McKinley’s claim that God sanctioned his decision to keep control over the Philippines rather than help them become an independent nation to Bush’s references to God. Vowell notes that, while the United States’ conquest of the Philippines is often seen as “the United States’ first interventionist attack on foreign soil” (204), this assessment does not count the wars the United States carried out against Indigenous Americans. This is an especially relevant point, Vowell argues, because the US soldiers who fought the Filipino resistance were “veterans of the Indian Wars on this continent” (204). Both sides of the war in the Philippines “committed torture […] and atrocities” (204).This leads Vowell to telling a friend that, through the George W. Bush presidency, “We seem to be reliving” (206) the McKinley era.

Vowell compares McKinley’s invasions of Cuba and the Philippines to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. The US invasion of Cuba resulted in the establishment of the United States’ naval base in Cuba, Guantánamo Bay, where prisoners captured during George W. Bush’s War on Terror were held. Further, both the war in the Philippines and the war in Iraq led to allegations of torture levied against US soldiers. Even Cuba was subjected to a five-year occupation by the US. The Platt Amendment passed by the US Congress “gave” the United States “the right to intervene in Cuban affairs” (207), which eventually led the US to install the dictator Batista, whose tyranny provoked the revolution that brought the communist leader Fidel Castro to power.

Vowell is not alone in her assessment of McKinley. A statue of McKinley is in the “‘radical little college town’” (209) of Arcata, California. The statue has been the subject of little acts like stuffing its ears with cheese or putting a protest sign in its hands and debates over whether or not the statue should be moved to somewhere less conspicuous or torn down.

Like other victims of political assassinations in the history of the United States, McKinley got “one last good day” (211). McKinley’s good day was spent touring Niagara Falls, which “delighted” (211) him and his wife, before he went to the Pan-American Exhibition at nearby Buffalo. Vowell notes that the Pan-American Exhibition was filmed by Thomas Edison’s company. Edison’s company would also film a reenactment of Czolgosz’s execution by electrocution.

Vowell describes Czolgosz as a “sad pathetic figure” (214), which is how he is depicted even in the musical Assassins. He was only 12 when he had to quit school and start working “ten or twelve hours a day […] in a glass factory” (214). His mother died and his father remarried a woman who despised him. After Czolgosz stabbed McKinley, he was nearly killed by an angry mob and was probably only saved by McKinley himself, who “commanded, ‘Go easy on him, boys’” (215).

Czolgosz claimed he killed McKinley on behalf of the working class. He had “suffered some sort of mysterious breakdown” (215), after which he became an anarchist. He was also inspired by a speech by Emma Goldman, to the point he met her. However, Goldman’s friend, the “editor of the anarchist paper Free Society” (217), had thought that Czolgosz was an undercover police officer trying to infiltrate anarchist organizations through Goldman.

Vowell goes to “retrace” Goldman’s “steps” (218) through New York City. She describes how Goldman was jailed and harassed “under suspicion of being Czolgosz’s accomplice” (219-220). The anti-anarchist backlash led to the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, which allowed the US to bar immigrants from the country based on their political views. As for Goldman, in 1919, she was deported to the Soviet Union because of her opposition to World War I.

McKinley was replaced by his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. While he supported the crackdown on anarchists, he also supported reforms that improved the lives of the American working class, but his policies were still supportive of capital.

Leaving New York, Vowell goes to Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks mountain range with her friend Matt. Roosevelt had been hiking up Mount Marcy when he received a telegram that McKinley was about to die. The railroad depot Roosevelt stopped at was converted into a museum commemorating Roosevelt’s “‘night ride to the presidency’” (229). Roosevelt took the oath of office in Buffalo at the mansion of Ansley Wilcox, which became the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site. Roosevelt was displeased that he only got the presidency through McKinley’s assassination, but he would be elected himself in 1904. When Roosevelt was sworn in the second time, he wore a ring that “contained the hair of Abraham Lincoln” (235).