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The Assassination of the President and the Aftermath
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The assassination of
President McKinley was a great tragedy, well calculated to arouse
sentiments of horror in every well-balanced mind. It was an outrage
unrelieved by extenuating circumstances, and, being committed against
the chosen head of the government, was a crime against the Republic;
while to the philosophic student of history the tragedy takes on
still darker hues when he contemplates its evil effect on the cause
of free government, wholesome liberty, and human progress, for it
is difficult to conceive of anything better calculated to aid and
reenforce those despotic and reactionary influences that for centuries
prior to the American Revolution had prevailed and resulted in civilization-wide
oppression and the virtual serfdom of the vast majority of lives
throughout the Christian world, while thwarting justice and barring
the path of progress and enlightenment.
If Emma Goldman had been the paid
emissary of Russian despotism, she could not better have aided the
cause of absolutism and oppression than by inciting the feverish,
ill-balanced brain of the assassin to commit the crime for which
he well knew his life must pay the penalty. They who preach or advocate
assassination are the most efficient allies of despotism. They afford
the reactionaries, and those who for selfish motives desire oppression
and subversive legislation, a justification for proposed laws that
would soon be used to bulwark tyranny, injustice, and class interests,
and which are in the nature of the case essentially destructive
to the spirit of free government. We not only hold that murder is
never justifiable, but such is our view of the sanctity of human
life that, while yielding to no one in our demand that society [532][533]
should be protected from its enemies, we believe that the State
itself is not justified in taking life. We would imprison or deport
the criminal, employing such means as would thoroughly protect the
public from his power to do it harm, but with Victor Hugo we hold
that “life belongs to God alone,” and that neither the individual
nor the State has the moral right to take life.
In the murder of President McKinley
the American people were robbed of the Executive of their choice,
and society beheld stricken down a man that in his private life
was a splendid illustration of the best side of Anglo-Saxon civilization—clean,
tender, thoughtful, and loving; such was the husband and father.
Indeed, the unfailing fidelity and unforgetting love that William
McKinley bore to his wife will ever be a priceless and helpful influence
among us, and we believe that this sweet and simple devotion more
than aught else touched the deepest and holiest emotions of our
people and awakened an intense affection for the Chief Magistrate.
His tragic death in the midst of a time of national prosperity and
victory has exalted his place in history and materially enhanced
his fame.
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There are several things
connected with the assassination of the President, quite apart from
the crime itself, that are well calculated to disquiet the sober-minded
lover of free government, not the least of which is the symptom
of degeneracy and widespread hysteria among men who assume to be
leaders of thought and molders of public opinion. It has long been
one of the chief glories of the Anglo-Saxon people that in trying
moments and periods of excitement they have been able to remain
sane, dispassionate, and for the most part just. They have never
permitted passion and prejudice to blind reason or lead them into
unseemly displays of hysteria and intemperance of speech unworthy
of enlightened minds. But unhappily the tragedy at Buffalo has called
forth from ministers and editors, and in a few instances from statesmen,
a number of foolish, irrational, and essentially lawless expressions
that must be deplored by all right-thinking individuals. In Concord,
New Hampshire, a clergyman, impiously assuming to speak for the
Almighty, claimed that the President’s death was punishment sent
by God because he had not suppressed the rum traffic in the Philippines.
One of the gravest offenses against truth, decency, and common sense
was perpetrated by certain promi- [533][534]
nent clergyman in New York and Boston, who chose the hour when even
politicians shrank from expressing partizan [sic] opinions
to assail the wise and well-considered utterances of such men as
Professor Charles Eliot Norton, of Harvard University, and ex-Governor
Boutwell, of Massachusetts. The intimation that the just and statesmanlike
criticisms of these great and revered patriots were in any way responsible
for the insane deed of Czolgosz was as wide of the truth as were
the ill-timed utterances of the reverend gentlemen unworthy of their
high calling. Other statements from the pulpit were scarcely less
amazing and even more lawless in spirit. Of these the following
extracts from a New York despatch to the Boston Herald of
September 4th are fair samples:
At the Westminster Presbyterian
Church the Rev. John Lloyd Lee said: “There is no standing room
in this country for such an assassin. Only a two-by-four cell
should hold him. There must be severe measures meted out, or
this will happen again and again. Until a better way is found
the only way now at hand is to lynch him on the spot.”
The Rev. T. De Witt Talmage said
at Ocean Grove auditorium: “I wish with all my heart that the
policeman who arrested Czolgosz had with the butt end of that
pistol dashed his life out.”
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The sensational press
indulged in many wild and intemperate utterances, well calculated
to inflame the passions and blind the reason of its readers—utterances
that all sane people in cooler moments must regard as discreditable
to one of the noblest professions of our time. A labored effort
has been made to prove that the assassin was the instrument of an
organization which acted in furthering a gigantic plot. On this
and other baseless assumptions labored arguments against the fundamental
principles and the uninterrupted policy of the Republic have been
advanced in the interest of methods that prevail in Russia and Spain.
We have been assured that the President’s assassination demonstrated
the necessity of our country employing European Continental methods
for the suppression of anarchy, and great stress has been laid upon
the fact that three President have been assassinated, from which
the reader has been led to understand that anarchy is more dangerous
in a free republic than in an Old-World despotism, and consequently
the methods of absolutism are not only justifiable but demanded.
Yet in point of truth the facts involved [534][535]
prove precisely the reverse of what has been so persistently claimed,
as will be obvious from a glance at recent history.
The assassination of President Lincoln
was the deed of a highly-wrought man, at a time of unprecedented
excitement—a time when the passions of men had risen to white heat,
and when man had become all too familiar with the slaughter of his
fellow-men. The assassin knew nothing of the political or economic
theories of nihilism or revolutionary anarchy, nor was his deed
the result of any Old-World philosophy. The assassin of President
Garfield was a disgruntled office-seeker who belonged to the President’s
own party. He was by affiliation a Republican and not an anarchist.
To class John Wilkes Booth and Charles Guiteau as anarchists, or
to try to liken their motives to those that in recent years have
led to the political assassinations of European rulers, or to the
recent murder of President McKinley, is either absurd or dishonest.
But one assassination has had anything to do with foreign social
and economic theories that are the legitimate products of despotic
oppression and injustice.
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In England, Australia,
New Zealand, and the United States we find the greatest freedom
and the widest liberty of press, speech, and thought. Now, in all
these lands during the last century and a quarter—or since the birth
of our Republic—there has been but one ruler killed as a result
of the false theories and the dangerous doctrines of the revolutionary
anarchists; while in France, where there exists an elaborate and
in many ways exceedingly objectionable police system, which is the
legacy of imperialism but which certain reactionaries and monarchists
in our own land are advocating as a model for this country, we find
President Carnot assassinated. There an irksome police system, only
second to that of Russia in its power, was as futile as was the
body-guard of secret service men in our own country to stay the
murderous intent of the assassin.
In Spain, where anarchy is a crime
and where anarchists had previously been horribly tortured—tortured
in such a way as to remind one of the most bloody days of the Inquisition—we
find the great prime minister (the real head of the government)
assassinated; and furthermore, it is said that to-day Spain is literally
honeycombed with anarchy, the savage perse- [535][536]
cution only resulting, as is usually the case with persecution,
in a rapid spread of the banned theories.
In Italy, where the most stringent
methods had been taken to crush anarchy, and when the hand of government
had fallen heavily even upon the starving ones who had headed the
bread riots, the king, in spite of soldiers, detectives, police,
and bodyguard, was assassinated.
In Russia the most frightful and oppressive
of despotisms was powerless to save the Czar. All history proves
that it is in the land of despotism that the child of oppression—anarchy—best
flourishes. Neither the suppression of free speech, with the blighting
curse of despotism that always follows in its wake, nor a land filled
with spies and paid informers, bristling with soldiers and burdened
by an enormous police force, has been able to save Russia, Austria,
Spain, France, or Italy from the hands of anarchistic assassins.
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One great vital fact
has been entirely overlooked by the short-sighted and essentially
superficial advocates of the extension of police power and the introduction
into our land of the ancient governmental despotic censorship, such
as still prevails in Russia and Spain; and this ignored fact, which
is as fundamental to the issue as is a premise to an argument, is
that all the anarchistic and nihilistic assassins, whether in France,
Austria, Spain, Italy, Russia, or the United States, are the result
of generations of crushing oppression and of the very restrictions
that certain editors, politicians, and reactionaries are advocating
for our own country. In every instance the assassin has been the
product of generations of despotism. Even Czolgosz, American born
though he be, is of a Russian or Polish family who have come so
little under the American spirit that it is stated that the parents
have never learned to speak our language. Behind the hand that held
the fatal pistol were centuries of injustice and oppression.
For America to turn her back upon
the great principle of freedom which is to-day the crowning glory
of the Anglo-Saxon world, and to imitate Continental despotisms,
under the mistaken belief that freedom is more dangerous than despotism,
would be not only to display ignorance of the history of the past
and of the facts involved, but to stultify herself and [536][537]
to commit a crime of measureless proportions. No doubt some measures
will be passed with a view to guarding against political assassinations
in the future, but it is to be hoped that the drafting of such measures
will be intrusted to the wisest, most thoughtful, and most truly
democratic among our statesmen, in order that they may be so framed
as to render it impossible for the laws to be made instruments of
oppression in the hands of officialism, or that they should be so
drafted as to prevent that publicity and free discussion which are
all-important for the preservation of free institutions and the
crushing of corruption.
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It is reassuring to
find that, while many clergymen vied with sensational newspapers
in advocating the introduction of Old-World despotic measures and
in inflaming the public mind, there were many notable and conspicuous
exceptions to the rule, among the most noteworthy of which were
the utterances of the eminent head of the Episcopal Church in America,
Bishop Henry C. Potter, and Dr. Washburn, who is Mrs. Roosevelt’s
pastor. These great divines struck the key-note when they declared
that education, embracing moral culture, was the true remedy for
anarchy. Dr. Potter said:
“Men and brethren, in this solemn
and august moment we should remember that we cannot have the freedom
of Republic without the responsibilities of Republic. We must have
a great system of free education, a system that will reach and enlighten
the perverted minds so as to give them true comprehension of the
principles underlying our Government. And we must represent in our
lives an example of sincere manhood and enlightened citizenship,
and refrain from sinking into lying Pharisaism which, ever ready
to denounce the wrong, will not lift its smallest finger to remove
it and its causes. What St. Paul wrote to his followers in the corrupt
Roman Empire applies to our life to-day. What is the summing up
of the whole law? Love. And when we shall have lifted up our brothers
from their ignorance we shall exercise that love which is the keystone
to the brotherhood of man.”
In the course of his remarks, Dr.
Washburn uttered these noble words:
“Neither a free press nor free speech
is responsible for an- [537][538] archy
nor the crimes committed in its name. Anarchy does not exist because
of a free press and free speech. It did not have its origin here,
but it grew up in the poverty, ignorance, and lack of moral education
of other countries. If it has been transferred here, neither a free
press nor free speech is to blame for it. The policy which should
be adopted to suppress it must be moral training for our young,
which will do more to obliterate it than all the laws that may be
enacted. People must be educated, so that they can reason and think.
That this is essential no one will deny, yet we are told that in
New York City there are 50,000 children without school accommodations.”
No utterances of the hour are more
worthy of the thoughtful consideration of statesmen than are the
above words of Dr. Washburn.
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