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The President And The Assassin
Scott Miller
McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century
Random House
June 2011
On Sale: June 14, 2011
432 pages
ISBN: 1400067529
EAN: 9781400067527
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A SWEEPING TALE OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA AND THE
IRRESISTIBLE FORCES THAT BROUGHT TWO MEN TOGETHER ONE
FATEFUL DAY
In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of
unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin’s bullet
shattered the nation’s confidence. The shocking murder of
President William McKinley threw into stark relief the
emerging new world order of what would come to be known as
the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the
story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and
of the very different paths that brought together two of the
most compelling figures of the era: President William
McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him. The two men seemed to live in eerily parallel Americas.
McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a president
whose conflicted feelings about imperialism reflected the
country’s own. Under its popular Republican
commander-in-chief, the United States was undergoing an
uneasy transition from a simple agrarian society to an
industrial powerhouse spreading its influence overseas by
force of arms. Czolgosz was on the losing end of the
economic changes taking place—a first-generation Polish
immigrant and factory worker sickened by a government that
seemed focused solely on making the rich richer. With a deft
narrative hand, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these
two men, each pursuing what he considered the right and
honorable path, collided in violence at the 1901
Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Along the way, readers meet a veritable who’s who of
turn-of-the-century America: John Hay, McKinley’s visionary
secretary of state, whose diplomatic efforts paved the way
for a half century of Western exploitation of China; Emma
Goldman, the radical anarchist whose incendiary rhetoric
inspired Czolgosz to dare the unthinkable; and Theodore
Roosevelt, the vainglorious vice president whose 1898 charge
up San Juan Hill in Cuba is but one of many thrilling
military adventures recounted here. Rich with relevance to our own era, The President and the
Assassin holds a mirror up to a fascinating period of
upheaval when the titans of industry grew fat, speculators
sought fortune abroad, and desperate souls turned to
terrorism in a vain attempt to thwart the juggernaut of change.
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