Food for Anarchy

     This is no time to mince words. There is abundant reason for charging that yellow journalism and partisan malignity, which knows no abatement, but on the contrary becomes daily more reckless, more false and more cruel, has done much to engender a sentiment in certain minds of which the murder of the president is but a natural outcome.
     The miscreant who shot the chief executive on Friday says he listened to the rantings of a woman anarchist named Emma Goldman, from whose envenomed mouth came words that made him the murderer of one of the gentlest, noblest, bravest men on all the earth. Who has not seen in the yellow newspapers of New York coarser abuse, viler falsehoods, more damnable libels about that same president than any woman anarchist could ever utter or conceive? Who knows how many other men who read and believed that stuff, who listen to demagogue harangues or anarchist mouthings, all of the same stamp and purpose—who knows how many other men were lurking in Buffalo to do the deed that Czolgosz committed and with the same motives and under similar advice? Is there any crime that a president may commit in violation of his oath that the yellow press has not charged against President McKinley, and have not the foul infamies been repeated and indorsed [sic], and, in some cases, amplified by partisan imitators all over the land? Who can blame ignorant and often vicious foreigners coming here for asylum or freedom or other purpose—who can blame them for believing the base calumnies of the yellow press against the authorities at Washington [if?] our own people encourage the vile sheets that give them origin and currency? The tirades of Emma Goldman may have incited the attempted murder of McKinley, but those of the yellow press may incite the murder of the next president should a successor be necessary. If there is any difference in the character of the fulminations of the woman Goldman and those of the yellow press, it is in favor of this unsexed virago, who is at least ignorant of moral law and frank in her contempt of moral responsibility. Besides, she can plead American authority for her incendiary diatribes, while the yellow press is wholly without example, authority or excuse for its policy and its writers notoriously without basis of fact for its wicked, heartless, conscienceless fabrications. It has not the justification of pending political strife, or public menace or official scandal. It has simply pursued a policy of dastardly pandering to the wost [sic] instincts of the worst people it can reach, exalting crime by making heroes of criminals, denying a semblance of honor to every man able to pay his bills, picturing the great captains of industry who find employment and wages for the people as designing knaves and unconvicted plotters against the human race, alleging poverty and slavery where abundance and independence are widespread and undeniable. Is it strange that weak and vicious minds of foreign cranks are impressed by such sentiments and that murder of those in high places sometimes results?