The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America

This book jumped at me when I was perusing titles of American history at a used book store a while back. I was in the middle of Theodore Rex (by Edmund Morris) at the time, so I shelved it for later reading. I wondered: how would a book about assassin Leon Czolgosz (CHOL-gosh) inform my understanding of Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency? Would I learn more about America “at a crossroads” at the turn of the 20th Century? Would it be half as good as the blurbs suggest?

The story begins en media res, the surprise assailant shooting President William McKinley twice in the torso as he greets the crowd at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901. Fred C. Nieman, as the shooter called himself, was wrestled to the ground and immediately spirited away for questioning. McKinley, whom his agents had rushed to the hospital, was still alive and coherent. Within three days he showed himself on the mend, but after seven days, he was dead. By this time, Nieman had admitted that his true name was Czolgosz, and after failing to convince the cops that he was insane, fully and proudly admitted that he had done precisely what he had set out to do, kill the President of the United States.

Although Czolgosz was quickly indicted, convicted, and executed (and his body summarily destroyed with acid), the question remained whether he truly was insane when he murdered the President, or whether he instead was a lucid and ugly finger of the dangerous Anarchist movement, a true product of his environment. As Teddy Roosevelt moved into office and began his seven-year presidency of reform, his Progressive Liberalism depended upon the reality that within American society existed this unseen enemy of the people, and it required effective and sometimes violent response. With a clinically sane Czolgosz, Teddy could push the reforms he knew America required, reforms in immigration, race relations, unionization, etc.

Rauchway’s book follows the investigations of Dr. Vernon Briggs, as he traverses the country in search of insights into Czolgosz’s upbringing, experiences, and supposed indoctrinations. His interviews and research centered on that single question of the assassin’s sanity, but through this, it also pieces together a number of elements that give us a clear picture of America at the time: “The murder of William McKinley pressed Americans to give voice and clarity to their opinions of a working class that was largely immigrant in its composition, to the place of race in developing democracy, to the position of government with respect to social ills” (xiii). It describes the working and living conditions of the time period, the political infightings of Washington, and movements led by such players as Jane Addams (“social science”) and Emma Goldman (Anarchist).

While this book is not “a rip-roaring tale” that entertains to the final period, it certainly is readable and immensely informative, at least to someone interested in American history from this period. Rachway attempts to inform from both points of view, that Czolgosz was merely a madman completely detached from all reality, or that he was instead a true Anarchist doing the Devil’s work. But he also includes a third opinion (perhaps his own?) that Czolgosz was in fact a sane person forced into an act of insanity by the inhuman conditions in which he as a working-class immigrant was forced to live.

One tidbit that I found interesting was Czolgosz’s fascination with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and its images of an American Utopia through the death of Capitalism. We all know how JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald devoured The Catcher in the Rye, so I find it interesting how one’s over-infatuation with a particular book can give them delusions of how things could be or should be. I wonder what books have driven other killers to their twisted ends?

I enjoyed the book. It’s not really one I’d recommend to someone for general enjoyment, but is definitely an important book for anyone trying to understand the politics and way of life in turn-of-the-century America.

©2020 E.T.