Publication information
view printer-friendly version
Source: The Challenge of Pittsburgh
Source type: book
Document type: book chapter
Document title: “Two Supreme Foes of the People, and One Supreme Privilege” [chapter 5]
Author(s): Marsh, Daniel L.
Publisher: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada
Place of publication: New York, New York
Year of publication: 1917
Pagination: 145-83 (excerpt below includes only pages 164-65)

 
Citation
Marsh, Daniel L. “Two Supreme Foes of the People, and One Supreme Privilege” [chapter 5]. The Challenge of Pittsburgh. New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1917: pp. 145-83.
 
Transcription
excerpt of chapter
 
Keywords
McKinley assassination (religious response); McKinley assassination (personal response: prohibitionists, temperance advocates, etc.); liquor and liquor traffic; presidential assassinations (comparison); crime (dealing with).
 
Named persons
Leon Czolgosz; James A. Garfield; Charles J. Guiteau; Andrew Johnson; Abraham Lincoln; William McKinley; Mary Surratt.
 
Notes
The excerpt below comes from section II of the chapter, subtitled “The Liquor Traffic.”

From title page: By Daniel L. Marsh, Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church Union of Pittsburgh, and Pastor of Smithfield Street Church.
 
Document

 

Two Supreme Foes of the People, and One Supreme Privilege [excerpt]

 

The Saloon and Crime

     Are we interested in abolishing crime? All the persons implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were drunkards, and had been drinking the night that the great President was killed. The reason which Andrew Johnson gave for refusing executive clemency to Mrs. Surratt was: “The whole plot to murder Lincoln was hatched in Mrs. Surratt’s saloon.” President [164][165] Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a drunkard. The man who killed President McKinley was the direct spawn of the saloon. Czolgosz was an ex-bartender, was reared in a saloon, and was at a saloon just before the assassination, and confessed before his execution that it was the talk he had heard in his father’s saloon that determined him to murder President McKinley. I have recalled the murder of these illustrious men only for the sake of emphatic illustration. Eighty-five per cent. of all the murders committed in Philadelphia last year were due to drink.
     Divorce the evil of commercialized vice from the liquor business, and you have cut its tap-root.

 

 


top of page