The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

This book subtitled McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century tells the tale of the assasination of President William McKinley and the events leading up to it.

Leon Czolgosz a young Polish immigrant who very impressionable gets caught up in the vibrant anarchist movement of the late eighteen hundreds. The book tells of McKinley's Presidency, his firm belief that trade follows the flag and his firm belief in trade and commerce. We learn about the Spanish American War, how it started and how once started as a war of liberation for others soon became a war of acquisition for the United States.

With a parallel track, alternating chapters, we also read about the anarchist movement in the United States and the world and various leaders of it. We follow Emma Goldman as she meets and inspires young Leon and see how he is led by the killing of King Umberto in Italy to follow McKinley to Buffalo and to kill him when walking through a greeting line.

This is a good book offering a vivid place and time. I am struck by how McKinley would qualify as a Republican today with his belief in little to no restraint of trade and American foreign policy while benefiting businesses was benign as it helped bring foreign people's standard of living higher. Still one also reads that this was a decent man, a man who was kind and generous and believed in himself and his actions to be good for the country.

The state of the money barons and the huge disparity between wealth and the poor could certainly be drawn as a parallel to today. I would not suspect much in today's world would lead to anarchy, anarchists think too many big picture thoughts and the eventual betterment of society. I do not think there are enough people who think outside of themselves to have a real energy to a different thought process on how to govern.

Nor should they, ours is still the best. Naive it would be though to think that our system is not being flooded with cash and corrupted in a grotesque way. When Republicans want to cut Medicare but go to the mat to keep subsidies for oil companies we know where there heart lies.

This is a good book. I enjoyed it a great deal.