Publication information

Source:
Liberator
Source type: newspaper
Document type: editorial
Document title: “The President a Victim of the Mob Spirit”
Author(s): anonymous
City of publication: Los Angeles, California
Date of publication: September 1901
Volume number: 3
Issue number: 2
Pagination: 4

 
Citation
“The President a Victim of the Mob Spirit.” Liberator Sept. 1901 v3n2: p. 4.
 
Transcription
full text
 
Keywords
McKinley assassination (African American response); anarchism (compared with lynching); lawlessness (mob rule); McKinley assassination (personal response); law; society (criticism).
 
Named persons
Leon Czolgosz; Benjamin R. Tillman [misspelled below].
 
Document


The President a Victim of the Mob Spirit

     Since the cold-blooded shooting of our good president by the anarchist Czolgosz has aroused the people as nothing else could against anarchy and anarchists and a demand will be made for laws for the suppression of this band of cold-blooded murderers of innocent people [sic]. When the people set to work to rid the country of anarchy no species of this dangerous disease should be overlooked. The mobs that have been murdering and burning American citizens without the slightest hindrance for the past twelve months have done as much to bring about the fiendish attempt upon the president’s life as the assassin himself by setting the law at defiance and bringing our civiliaztion [sic] into contempt. The anarchist must go, whether he be a cowardly Czolgosz or a Ben Tilman in the federal senate. Upon this subject the Times comments strongly as follows:
     “Finally, this desperate action of a degraded man should fill us with a determination to insist more strictly upon the enforcement of law and order. There has been altogether too much laxity in this direction of late. The liberty of which we boast is rapidly degenerating into license. The courts are becoming lax in their methods and justice too frequently halts, or stumbles. Let us have a revulsion of public sentiment on this subject. Let a strict line be drawn between law-breaking and law-abiding citizens. Let it be clearly realized that, in this country, where the people are sovereign, there is absolutely no excuse for any contempt or defiance of the laws that have been made by the people themselves.”