Sunday, August 17, 2003

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

Twenty years separate the killings of Presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley but, as two new books show, the assassinations posed far different implications for American history.

At 49, Garfield was a strong and handsome man who had survived the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga to lead the Republican Party to victory in 1880, taking both the White House and the House.

	"Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield" By Kenneth D. Ackerman Carroll & Graf ($28) "Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America" By Eric Rauchway Hill & Wang ($25)

Shot in the stomach July 2, 1881, by a delusional misfit four months after taking office, Garfield suffered for nearly two months under poor medical care and died without accomplishing anything.

The stouter McKinley had completed a significant first term during which he strengthened Republican connections to big business by passing the highest tariff in history and launched America's first step to empire building with the Spanish-American War.

At 58, he was looking forward to a second term of prosperity when an avowed anarchist shot him, also in the stomach, Sept 6, 1901. Originally treated by a gynecologist, he died eight days later of infection.

Garfield was succeeded by Chester A. Arthur, a dapper political hack enriched by his tenure as head of the Customs House in New York. He completed the term with few significant accomplishments.

McKinley's successor was another New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt, who made the most of his accidental presidency by widening the role of the federal government in economic and social areas.

In 1881, however, the issues were not about the course of government, but its political control. Charles Guiteau killed Garfield because he wanted Arthur in the White House.

Garfield had picked Arthur as his running mate to form a "fusion" ticket of Republican factions, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds. Stalwart Guiteau was convinced that Garfield was undercutting Arthur's cronies, particularly U.S. Sen. Roscoe Conkling, his friend and patron.

	Related article Garfield's Lawnfield leads pack of Ohio's presidential sites

As painstakingly detailed by Kenneth Ackerman, Garfield's assassination is portrayed as a partisan political act. It's a complicated story, perhaps a bit too musty for most us, involving back-room political jockeying by forgotten personalities such as Conkling and James G. Blaine.

Ackerman argues that these politicians were important "larger-than-life figures" who captured the attention of Americans then much as celebrities do now. But he fails to move the political events from the back rooms of 1880 to the larger canvas of modern America.

Eric Rauchway, using half as many pages, tells a more fascinating story of America at a crossroads. The stodgy McKinley and his wealthy backers were content to maintain the status quo in 1901, despite powerful forces that were changing American society.

As the 20th century began, the country was struggling to accommodate the waves of Eastern European immigrants, with their strange languages, customs and names, into its traditional Anglo-Saxon culture.

These "dagoes," as Roosevelt called them, were seen as a threat not only to American job seekers but as a destabilizing political force of trade unionism and, at the most extreme, anarchism.

Anarchism, then, was another word for political terrorism; in the late 19th century, leaders had been assassinated across Europe. In Chicago, the Haymarket bombing of 1886 led to the execution of four probably innocent men.

Alexander Berkman, lover of anarchist leader Emma Goldman, both immigrants, tried to kill Henry Clay Frick after the Battle of Homestead in 1892.

Following that startling episode of a gun battle between labor and management came the violent Pullman strike of 1894 and a serious economic depression. The nation was riven by a populist political movement intent on breaking Wall Street's control of money and government.

It resulted in the historic 1896 presidential nomination of William Jennings Bryan, the "Pied Piper of the Platte," who ran against McKinley. Although Bryan won most of the Western and all of the Southern states, McKinley won handily by taking the populous Northeast.

Aided by better economic conditions and an easy military victory against Spain -- a war that was instigated by fabricated intelligence and false claims of Spanish aggression -- the serene McKinley overlooked the social turmoil and poverty which produced the despair of his assassin, Leon Czolgosz.

Drawing on a profile of the killer by pioneering psychiatrist Lloyd Briggs, Rauchway paints a telling picture of working-class life in the 1890s, conditions that forced such reformers as Jane Addams and eventually Roosevelt himself to act.

"The story of Leon Czolgosz lent poignancy and urgency to this progressive project," writes Rauchway "and brought Roosevelt together with Addams, [Jacob] Riis and other social reformers."

The killing of McKinley proved to be a "troubling bell," signaling that perhaps the anarchists were correct in charging that the overstuffed Ohio politician did represent an "oppressive system." The new president heard it loud and clear.

This book is as much about the sorry life of Czolgosz as it is the transformation of Roosevelt into the crusading progressive reformer he became by 1912, when he sought the presidency as a progressive, not a Republican.

Standing before a shocked audience that same year in Milwaukee and displaying his blood-soaked shirt after he, too, was the target of a gunman on Oct. 14 (his folded 50-page speech in his coat pocket blunted the bullet), Roosevelt proved he was ready to sacrifice himself to the cause of social betterment.

It's an American political drama -- or melodrama -- unequaled in history.

In this era of phony "history books" by cable TV entertainers, "Murdering McKinley" stands out as a well-reasoned and well-told chronicle about the dawn of modern America.

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