Midafternoon on September 14, 1901, a grave Theodore Roosevelt welcomed a small gathering of journalists and members of McKinley’s cabinet to the Buffalo home of his longtime friend Ashley Wilcox. He looked exhausted. After a park ranger had delivered the news of McKinley’s sudden decline, Roosevelt had raced through a rainy night and slept little. He now wore a frock coat, waistcoat, and striped trousers borrowed from Wilcox. A neighbor loaned a top hat big enough for Roosevelt’s large head.
It was an incomprehensible moment for all present. What had begun as a working holiday for McKinley in Buffalo was now about to end with the swearing-in of a new president. Making their way to the home’s library, many in the group fought back tears as Roosevelt repeated the oath of office and offered the first clues about the direction of his administration. Roosevelt assured them: “In this hour of deep and terrible national bereavement I wish to state that it shall be in my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity and the honor of our beloved country.”1
Following another’s lead is not how the history books chronicle the life of the frenetic Roosevelt, hero of San Juan Hill, the president who walked softly and carried a big stick. Yet strangely there is much about the pledge he made that afternoon that would ring true for Roosevelt and indeed for presidents to follow. At home and abroad, McKinley was the first president of the twentieth century in more than chronology.
The physical empire that McKinley had created was not large—he had pulled in 138,187 square miles, nothing more than a forgotten back lot compared to the vast holdings of global rivals. By 1910, the American empire—counting Alaska—ranked seventh among the great powers and constituted only 6.4 percent of Britain’s massive overseas holdings.2 Yet it would be wrong to measure U.S. influence abroad solely by acreage. McKinley had sought to establish an American presence abroad that was based primarily on commerce, an approach that put a premium on establishing trading lanes, naval power, and stable, friendly markets.
All of this was still a work in progress at the time of McKinley’s death. Most immediately, a decision still had to be made on the future of Cuba and the Philippines. Dreams of a great Asian market had yet to be realized. The navy was growing quickly, yet did not rule the waves. American sea power, standing twelfth in the world in 1890, had climbed only to a barely respectable sixth position a decade later.3 Trade mirrored the navy. American exports had nearly doubled from $833 million in 1896 to $1.5 billion in 1901,4 yet were nowhere near a level that could rescue the economy from future crises. The country was also discovering both new friends and new enemies abroad. While the United States and Britain forged a “special relationship” built on similar trade and strategic interests, Washington would find itself increasingly at odds with Germany and, later, Japan.
THE CANAL
No undertaking more excited Roosevelt in those early days in office than forging the last link of McKinley’s trading empire—a canal that would join the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the eastern seaboard with the riches of the Pacific. Here was an opportunity to advance American naval power and display the nation’s industrial might and ingenuity, while—not coincidentally—leaving a monument to himself.
U.S. government commissions had studied the matter off and on since the 1870s, and it had long been assumed that Nicaragua, where the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua seemed to form a blueprint, was the best place to build. Then Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the chief mining engineer during the failed French attempt, and William Cromwell, a New York lobbyist, stepped into the picture. The French company behind the effort, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama, still owned considerable assets in the Colombian province of Panama—a railroad, hundreds of buildings, digging equipment, and the partially completed excavation—and was looking for a buyer.5 Together the pair worked the halls of Congress and plied newspaper editors with an intriguing argument. A canal through Panama would be only a third of the length of one through Nicaragua, with fewer curves and less digging, and therefore it would cost less.6 They also claimed it would be safer, owing to the absence of the volcanoes that lined the Nicaraguan canal path. As if on cue, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique erupted, and shortly thereafter one in Nicaragua began to rumble. Gleefully seizing on the timely acts of God, Bunau-Varilla secured a number of Nicaraguan stamps depicting volcanoes and placed them on desks during the Senate deliberation. In 1902, Congress agreed to buy out the French, and diplomatic preparations began for the “big dig” through Colombian territory.7
Negotiations with Tomás Herrán, Colombia’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, quickly appeared to have settled the matter: The United States agreed to pay $10 million, plus another $250,000 a year for the rights to a six-mile-wide zone. To Roosevelt’s utter disgust, however, the Colombian legislature rejected the deal, demanding more money for its depleted treasury.
Not to be put off by the “greedy little anthropoids”8 running Colombia, Roosevelt cast his lot with Panamanian separatists who had long wanted to gain their independence from Colombia. How far Roosevelt actually went in promoting revolution, what he said, and to whom, is a matter of considerable debate. But when the uprising occurred in early November 1903, Roosevelt immediately recognized the new republic and dispatched troops to Panama City to prevent Colombian soldiers from intervening.
As soon as patriotic Panamanians raised their new flag, they struck a deal giving the United States rights to begin work, including the extraordinary provision that Washington would guarantee and maintain the independence of the Republic of Panama. With American doctors subduing the malaria and yellow fever that had killed so many workers on the French attempt, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914. Roosevelt later called the project “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs.”9
CUBA
American policy in Cuba had always aimed to help the “better classes”—landowners and businesspeople almost exclusively of Spanish descent—achieve power. During the September 1900 elections to select delegates to write a Cuban constitution, General Wood warned that the United States would not withdraw its army if the wrong kind of people were elected and campaigned hard against them. Voting rolls were even limited to landowners who Wood thought would elect the people he wanted.
When the “wrong” people were elected anyway, Washington took bolder steps to keep Cuba in line. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Elihu Root, wrote legislation to replace the Teller Amendment and demanded that a new Cuban constitution grant the United States extensive control over the island, including authority over any treaties, limits on how much debt the Cuban government took on, prohibitions against Cuba ceding territory, and deals providing naval bases for the Americans. But, most important, Connecticut senator Orville Platt attached a rider to the Army Appropriations Act of 1901 stating “The government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.”10 Faced with the choice of limited sovereignty or none at all, Cuba’s constitutional convention adopted the Platt Amendment in June 1901 and on May 20, 1902, the United States formally ended its military occupation of the island.
Cuba quickly moved toward becoming an economic and military appendage of the United States. Under the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903, the United States slashed tariffs on Cuban agricultural imports by 20 percent in return for the Cubans making similar cuts in their own tariffs on vast swaths of goods. Armies of American farmers and colonists arrived, drawn by the cheap land producing a stunning variety of fruits and vegetables that could now be sold back home at favorable terms. By 1905, some 60 percent of all rural land was in the hands of foreigners.11 By 1910, nearly seven thousand North Americans lived in Cuba earning a living in every manner of occupation—farmers, clerks, copyists, merchants, engineers, surveyors, mechanics, and teachers.12
The Americans, be they businessmen, colonial authorities, or the military, brought their culture with them. Soon clubs sprang up, a YMCA, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Rotary and Lions, Knights of Columbus, and the American Legion. There was even a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.13 Cuba became a vacation destination; among the regulars were the du Pont family, which purchased a private home. American names began replacing Spanish ones: Charles replaced Carlos, Henry took the place of Enrique, and Frank edged out Francisco. New office buildings mirrored Manhattan.
Cubans looked on with a mixture of horror and admiration. In 1903, Cuban senator Manuel Sanguily observed, “Every day they leap ashore from the steamers coming from the North … these men of magnificent race, arrogant, their faces tanned by the cold north winds, with only a satchel but with wallets full of banknotes and their hearts aburst with impetuous blood, striding through our narrow streets with calculating eyes.”14
The combination of growing U.S. investment on the island and a weak government almost guaranteed that it would not be long before the United States would again feel compelled to take political control. When, in 1906, rebels assembled an army of twenty-four thousand men and drove President Estrada Palma into resigning, Roosevelt established a second provisional government in Cuba under the leadership of Charles Magoon, a Nebraska lawyer. Though the U.S.-backed government would last only three years, marines would pay repeated visits to Cuba to make sure things went America’s way—in 1912 to put down another revolt and again in 1917 to protect sugar interests, some staying through 1922.
PACIFIC COLONY
Despite Aguinaldo’s call for surrender, guerrilla forces scattered on outlying islands in the Philippines remained determined to fight on. In no place would the resistance be more infamous than in Samar, the third largest island in the archipelago and one of the most wild. In September 1901, American troops were preparing to attend a church service commemorating McKinley’s assassination when seventy-four American men and officers were ambushed in the village of Balangiga. The rebels, armed with bolos, caught the Americans unarmed and totally unprepared. They fought back with anything at hand, including baseball bats and, in the case of the doomed cook, by throwing cans of beans at the attackers. Only twenty of the seventy-four survived.
What the rebels hoped to accomplish is hard to understand as the United States clearly was not going to withdraw from the Philippines, and the horrific butchering only drove American generals to even greater displays of brutality. In early 1902 American forces would resolutely sweep through stretches of the countryside, razing villages and killing anybody they suspected of supporting the rebels. Orders were given to execute rebels older than ten on the spot. In an ironic commentary on what the war had done to American values, U.S. military forces under the command of Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell rounded up villagers and moved them to “protected zones” in an effort to cut rebels off from any means of support—exactly what the Spanish had done in Cuba.15
As bloody as the fighting had become, Filipino resistance was running out of gas. Deprived of their support among civilians in the field and losing out in the big cities where William Howard Taft was providing plenty of rewards in the form of jobs and government appointments to those who signed on to the American program, resistance steadily faded. On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt, anxious to end the fighting for political reasons, formally declared the war over. The cost to the United States had been 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded. By American accounts, 16,000 native soldiers had been killed. Up to 200,000 civilians were thought to have died from famine and disease as well as by gunfire from both sides.16
As governor of the Philippines from 1901 to 1903, Taft began a period where America’s better intentions began to reveal themselves. The portly Ohio lawyer negotiated a deal with the Vatican to acquire land that had once belonged to priests; he redistributed it to ordinary citizens. Dams were built, roads were laid, and a fair judiciary was established with native judges. Taxes were collected and spent on areas such as public health, dramatically slashing disease. An overhaul of the educational system, aided by thousands of American volunteer teachers, boosted the literacy rate to 50 percent from 20 percent within a generation.17
In the decades that followed, the United States would gradually ease the Philippines toward democracy. In 1907, the country was allowed to establish a national legislature, though the United States would maintain veto power. And to give the Filipinos a firsthand chance to see how a real democracy worked, two were allowed to join the House of Representatives, as observers. As in Cuba, the United States made no bones about taking sides in local elections, openly favoring the Federalistas party, which, in the words of a later governor, consisted of the “most conservative, best educated and talented Filipinos in the islands.” To further tilt the political landscape toward the American view, voting was limited to taxpayers and landowners, a screening that reduced turnout to a scant 3 percent of the population.18
As in Cuba, the administration tried to create a reflection of America. English was taught as the primary language, and stretches of Manila were rebuilt according to the designs of an American architect in a Romanesque style reminiscent of Washington, D.C. As Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” quipped, “We’ll larn ye our language, because tis easier to larn ye ours thin to larn ousilves ye’ers.”19 Products from the Philippines were given duty-free admission to the United States and, to the irritation of many Filipinos, American products were given similar access to the Filipinos, thereby giving the United States a virtual monopoly among foreign producers.
Just as American generals had forecast, however, the path toward independence would be a slow one. Despite steady pressure from the Filipinos, the movement did not gain serious attention in Washington until the early 1930s. Only in March 1934 did Congress pass a real timetable for Philippine independence, the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which offered the Filipinos their country back at the end of a ten-year period during which it would be given commonwealth status. That timetable would be delayed by World War II, but, finally, with the Treaty of Manila in 1946, the United States relinquished sovereignty over the islands.
CHINA TRADE
In the peace talks following the end of the Boxer Rebellion, McKinley largely secured the agreement among the allies that he had hoped for when he first committed troops in the summer of 1901. Under the leadership of William Rockhill, U.S. negotiators steered debate away from dismembering China (although McKinley bizarrely flirted with the idea of snatching a Chinese port) and toward reestablishing China as a market. The empress dowager was allowed to remain on her throne to help stabilize the country. And the United States won favorable concessions on Chinese tariffs, ones that allowed easy importation of its agricultural goods. Only on the issue of indemnities was Rockhill unable to enforce American thinking. The final peace protocol required China to make considerable payments to the allies for decades.
China, however, proved to be an elusive market. Exports climbed from seven million in 1896 to fifteen million in 190020—but they never attained levels that had been hoped for and never made a difference in economic growth at home.
There were a number of reasons for the disappointing trade flows. With a few exceptions—such as Standard Oil, American cotton producers, and the British American Tobacco Company—companies failed to tailor products for the Chinese market. At the same time, American business leaders came to the startling realization that for all the eye-popping reports of China’s vast size, the average consumer there actually could not consume. According to one 1898 estimate that few had taken notice of at the time, the average Chinese laborer made all of 5 to 7.5 cents a day. For such people, even a bar of soap was “an article of luxury.”21 And that was assuming that there existed roads and rail tracks to reach them. There weren’t. What’s more, many Chinese refused to buy American goods after they learned of insulting laws in California and other states that limited the number of immigrants from their country. Tremendously successful boycotts were launched. The British American Tobacco Company, which by 1902 was selling one billion cigarettes a year in China, was a popular target. Angry students fixed posters around major towns showing a dog smoking cigarettes with the slogan “Those who smoke American cigarettes are of my species.”
Despite the setbacks, there was no shaking America’s conviction that China offered a unique economic bonanza. As Roosevelt put it, the United States must “command the terminus of Asia—if we fail in this we shall break down.” In 1903 he added, “We must do our best to prevent the shuttering to us of Asian markets. In order to keep the roads to these terminals we must see that they are managed primarily in the interest of the country.”22
The persistent conviction that riches awaited in China, and that the Open Door was the best means to achieve them, would ultimately put the United States on a collision course with another Pacific empire in the making—Japan.
JAPAN AND THE OPEN DOOR
Few would have believed in the early years of the twentieth century that Japan would become America’s greatest nemesis in the Pacific. America and Japan seemed to be united by the common threat of Russia. Both nations looked on in horror when Russia, rather than withdrawing from Manchuria after the Boxer Rebellion as they had promised, built a railway through northern Manchuria to Vladivostok, their major port in the North Pacific. Equally alarming were Russian plans to build another railroad in the region and to fortify a harbor at Port Arthur.23 They were advances the Japanese could not countenance. With U.S. blessing—and financing from American Jewish bankers who held little love for the anti-Semitic Russian nobility—Japan in 1904 attacked Russian forces in Manchuria and Korea and easily rolled over just about every Russian military unit they encountered in what would become a fairly one-sided, one-year war over control of northern Asia.
The war initially seemed to bring a measure of stability to China, and Roosevelt eagerly volunteered to oversee peace talks held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the late summer of 1905. In the peace treaty that followed—Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for brokering it—Japan and Russia agreed to leave Manchuria and respect Chinese territorial integrity.
But the deal also began what would become a long, slow drip of Japanese encroachments into China, often enabled by naïve and weak replies to Japanese aggressiveness. In lieu of indemnity, the Portsmouth peace pact awarded to the Japanese important Chinese ports that had belonged to Russia, including the main railway station in south Manchuria, half of Sakhalin Island, and a free hand in Korea. Still feeling undercompensated by the peace treaty, Japan went even further and soon made Korea a protectorate. Rather than coming to Korea’s aid, Roosevelt struck a secret pact with the Japanese—the Taft-Katsura Agreement—whereby the United States recognized Japanese domination of Korea in exchange for Japan’s promise not to interfere with the United States in the Philippines.24
Soon Tokyo closed Korea to American business and began expanding into Manchuria—directly challenging the Open Door. Roosevelt responded with as much bluster as a nation who refused to countenance a war would allow, assembling the entire fleet of sixteen battleships for a round-the-world tour. Painted in peacetime white, the force was quickly dubbed the Great White Fleet and made a high-profile stop in Yokohama, where it was hoped the Japanese would be so impressed they would leave China alone. The Japanese offered the visiting fleet all the politeness for which they are known and then quickly resumed their expansion plans.
As Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, President Taft began his term with the full expectation that he would follow Roosevelt’s policies—the press joked that Taft stood for “Takes Advice From Theodore.” Under Taft, however, there would be less cozying up to the Japanese and a greater effort to put economic power to use in defending China. The result, however, was the same. Attempting to stem Russia and Japan, Taft proposed a consortium of English, French, German, and U.S. interests either to loan money to China to buy railroads owned by the Japanese and Russians or to build its own competing railways that could drive them out of business. The suggestion was roundly rejected by investors who feared for China’s stability and only served to bring the Japanese and Russians into alliance against the United States.25
By the time World War I began in 1914, the Open Door and American willingness to defend it were rapidly crumbling. With the European powers busy fighting for their lives, Tokyo issued the secret Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese government. Taken in total, they would have reduced the Middle Kingdom to a Japanese protectorate. After the demands were quickly leaked to the United States, which sharply rebuked Tokyo’s aggressiveness, the most heinous ones were eliminated. Yet two years later, with the United States fighting in Europe, Japan saw opportunity again, and made further inroads into China. Under an agreement signed by new secretary of state Robert Lansing, Washington acknowledged Japan’s “special interests” in China in return for a Japanese pledge to support China’s “territorial sovereignty”—a largely empty term by now.
In 1931, the United States watched almost helplessly as Japan, inventing several flimsy excuses, formally seized all of Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo, and went on to invade and station troops in Shanghai, for decades the home to thousands of foreign residents. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would continue to apply diplomatic and economic pressure on the Japanese but without effect. Japan would remain in China until forced to surrender to Allied powers in 1945.
CZOLGOSZ’S LEGACY
With the benefit of one hundred years of hindsight, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Czolgosz’s attack accomplished little more than to waste his life and to set the cause of anarchism back for years. Rather than inspiring a new generation of social radicals, Czolgosz managed to turn much of the nation, other anarchists included, against him. Around the country, calls were made for new laws to purge anarchist thought from American society—some patently absurd. One suggestion, for instance, was that anarchists be shipped to a remote island in the Pacific.26 Others were more realistic, if constitutionally dubious. New York State passed a law banning anarchist writings and speeches; New Jersey and Wisconsin enacted similar legislation.27 In his December 3, 1901, State of the Union address, Theodore Roosevelt expressed the feelings of many: “Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offense against the law of nations, like piracy and that form of man-stealing known as the slave trade; for it is of far blacker infamy than either.”
In Washington, the Fifty-seventh Congress made defeating anarchism its main focus, pursuing essentially two avenues to deal with the menace: leveling especially harsh sentences against those convicted of attacks on elected officials, and barring immigrants with known anarchist backgrounds from entering the country. Although there was considerable support along both lines, petty differences between the House and the Senate in the closing hours of the congressional session limited what would finally be accomplished, and only legislation banning anarchists from entering the country was put into law. What became known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act was passed on the final day of the session, March 3, 1903.28
Further legislative steps would have to be taken, however, before the United States could rid itself of its most notorious anarchist—Emma Goldman.
GOLDMAN FIGHTS ON
In the weeks after her arrest in Chicago, Goldman was transferred from one jail to another, including the very one where Parsons and the other Chicago “martyrs” had spent their final weeks. Try as prosecutors might to build a case linking her with the assassination, nothing could be proven, other than that she had delivered an inflammatory speech attended by Czolgosz. She was released on the same day Czolgosz was convicted.
Rather than distance herself from Czolgosz, as nearly all other anarchists were busy doing, Goldman lionized McKinley’s killer as a hero who had made the ultimate sacrifice for his beliefs. In an article published in the October 6, 1901, issue of Free Society, Goldman wrote of Czolgosz that his was a “soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul ‘impractical,’ inexpedient, lacking in caution … but daring just the same, and I cannot help but bow in reverenced silence before the power of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and taken a daring leap into the unknown.”29
Goldman would pay a high price for her support of Czolgosz. Hounded by the media and hassled by the police, she came, as she put it, to feel “spiritually dead” and even adopted a false name, Miss E. G. Smith. For a time, she gave up speaking and turned to private nursing jobs, sharing a series of apartments with her brother, a medical student.30
Yet by 1903, Goldman seemed to have regained her old form and eagerly took up the cause of John Turner, a British trade unionist who had recently arrived in New York. Attracting the attention of police for his labor speeches, Turner was arrested when it was discovered he possessed a copy of Free Society and that he planned to give speeches commemorating Johann Most and the Haymarket Eight. While Turner was held on Ellis Island in a six-by-nine-foot cage normally used for insane immigrants, Goldman launched a spirited and very public effort to secure his release, albeit one that would ultimately fail. Turner was eventually deported.31
By 1906, Goldman had reclaimed her position at the center of a revived anarchist moment, founding Mother Earth magazine from her apartment in 210 East Thirteenth Street in New York, and had begun speaking again. From 1908 until 1917, and now putting on more than a few extra pounds, she lived like a vagabond, spending half the year on the road, staying with fellow anarchists or in lonesome hotel rooms. From Portland, Oregon, to Rochester, New York, she delivered a startlingly wide variety of lectures on topics such as “The Intermediate Sex,” “Woman’s Inhumanity to Man,” and the “Psychology of War.”32 With the coming of World War I and the growing peace movement in the United States, her popularity surged and her lectures were routinely standing-room only. One night in New York in 1917 she drew eight thousand enthusiastic listeners.33
She was, however, walking an increasingly narrow line. Fears of leftist radicals were at an all-time high following the revolution in Russia in early 1917. In June that year, Goldman finally pushed the government too far and was arrested for speaking against the new selective service law. She would be sentenced to prison for twenty months and when released in September 1919 was quickly arrested again—this time for violating a new law giving the government the right to deport unnaturalized immigrants for transgressions such as belonging to organizations advocating revolution. Neither Berkman nor Goldman, as it turned out, had ever bothered to become American citizens despite their long years living in the United States.34
On December 21, 1919, Goldman, Berkman, and more than two hundred other immigrant radicals were loaded aboard a dilapidated U.S. army transport, the SS Buford. Under the watchful eyes of 250 armed guards, the “red ark”—as the newspapers called it—sailed into the icy North Atlantic for Russia. Goldman, who had written hopeful articles about the new government, was shocked to learn upon her arrival in Petrograd that civil liberties such as free speech, which she had depended on in the United States, were considered of little importance. She soon left, living for a time in Germany, London, and Canada, now not only preaching against capitalism but against the Bolshevik government as well. She would be allowed to reenter the United States only briefly on a lecture tour. She died May 14, 1940, in Toronto.
With or without Goldman, however, anarchists remained active in the United States, including those practicing violence.
ANARCHISM’S BLOODY COMEBACK
In the latter half of the 1910s, a series of bombing attacks rocked the United States, most in one way or another linked to an Italian immigrant by the name of Luigi Galleani, the spiritual heir of Johann Most who was committed to the propaganda of the deed. His genius, like Most’s, lay more in inspiring others than in actually blowing anything up himself. Popularly known as Galleanists and almost exclusively Italian-American immigrants, his followers remained at their core very much committed to fighting what they considered an oppressive government. And now they had found new reasons for anger: the U.S. entry into World War I and draconian new laws meant to stifle radicals.
The first in a string of anarchist attacks occurred in New York in 1914 when bombs were placed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the St. Alphonsus Church, and on November 11, the anniversary of the Haymarket executions, at the Bronx Courthouse. All failed to cause damage or were defused, but the city and the country had been put on notice that a violent strain of anarchists and radicals was on the loose.35
In 1916, Galleanist Nestor Dondoglio, a chef by profession, poisoned some two hundred guests at a banquet to honor Archbishop George Mundelein in Chicago. That attack failed when Dondoglio put too much arsenic in the food, causing the diners to throw up their meals—poison included—in what must have still been a gruesome event. A year later, in November 1917, Mario Buda, chief bomb maker of the Galleanists, was thought to have masterminded a deadly bombing in Milwaukee aimed at a rally hosted by Reverend Augusto Giuliani. Hoping to avenge several radicals who had been killed by police, Buda placed a bomb in the basement of Giuliani’s church. Before it went off, the device was discovered and brought to a local police station. There, while police were studying it, the bomb exploded, killing ten officers and one civilian.36
In April 1919, Galleanists are thought to have sent thirty dynamite bombs through the regular mail to an eclectic assortment of judges, politicians, and financiers, John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer among them. The ineptitude of the bombers, however, rendered the mass attack mostly harmless. Many of the packages lacked proper postage and were not delivered. Others were easily deemed suspicious because of their unusual markings—they were wrapped in brown paper and marked “Gimbel Brothers,” “Novelty,” and “Samples.” The only casualty was a servant of Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick, whose hands were blown off when she tried to open one package.37 Despite a painstaking investigation, police were never able to catch the bombers.38
A little more than a month later, on June 2, 1919, yet another wave of bombings shook the country. Within an hour of midnight, large explosive devices, each containing up to twenty pounds of dynamite, detonated in seven cities, all on the doorsteps of their targets—judges, businessmen, and immigration officials. Again, none of the intended victims were hurt, though a night watchman and a passerby were killed. At the site of each bombing, leaflets proclaiming the right of workers to defend themselves were found that were signed “The Anarchist Fighters.” One of the bombers, Carlo Valdinoci, a former editor of the newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva and a close friend of Galleani, demonstrated how dangerous the bombings were—for the attackers more than the targets. Valdinoci had apparently been attempting to place his bomb on the front porch of U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer when he accidentally detonated the device. Police investigators collected bits and pieces of Valdinoci’s body throughout the neighborhood.39
Police were largely unable to determine who was behind the attacks, but that didn’t mean that those suspected went unpunished. Galleani was deported along with eight supporters. Andrea Salsedo, a typesetter who admitted to being an anarchist and who had printed a flyer found with many of the bombs, either jumped, was pushed, or fell from a fourteen-story window at the FBI office on Park Row in New York where he was being questioned.40 And two avowed anarchists and known followers of Galleani, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested in May 1920 for killing two men and stealing the payroll of the Slater & Morrill shoe company. In the highly charged trial and series of appeals that followed, the two were sentenced to death and executed in August 1927.41
Finally, radicals who some now believe were tied to Galleani undertook the most destructive attack on U.S. soil for the next eight decades. Near noon on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon pulled to a stop at 23 Wall Street across the street from the headquarters of J. P. Morgan. The driver quickly alighted and disappeared into the thick lunchtime crowds, leaving behind a cargo that contained one hundred pounds of dynamite and some five hundred pounds of cast-iron sash weights. At slightly past noon, a delayed timer ignited the explosives, blowing the wagon and the horse to bits. The casting balls, strong enough to leave large divots in the stone walls of surrounding buildings that are still visible, ripped and tore into the flesh of the clerks, brokers, and messengers who were beginning their lunch breaks. Some thirty-eight people were killed. Despite a massive police investigation, no one was ever convicted of the crime.
CZOLGOSZ
One of the enduring controversies surrounding the assassination of William McKinley was the mental state of Leon Czolgosz. Anyone who kills a president, knowing that he will likely be executed for the deed, can’t be seen as emotionally fit. Two alienists, Dr. Walter Channing and Dr. L. Vernon Briggs, came to this conclusion after Czolgosz was executed. Conducting a thorough examination of his life, the pair attempted to establish a pattern of mental instability, the crux of their argument centering on the mysterious sickness that led him to quit his job and to exhibit strange behavior thereafter.
Briggs and Channing had, however, never met Czolgosz, and their assessment runs against the conclusions of nearly every other study conducted by those who had. One group, Dr. Floyd Crego, Dr. Joseph Fowler, and Dr. James W. Putnam, met with Czolgosz no fewer than four times, on each occasion for two hours, applying every test of sanity known at the time. Two other experts called by Czolgosz’s attorneys—Drs. Carlos F. MacDonald and Arthur Hurd—met with Czolgosz three times and, like the previous trio, concluded that Czolgosz was sane. Despite their repeated attempts to trip him up, Czolgosz consistently elaborated on his reasons for killing the president and likewise seemed to have a solid command of the current economic and political situation in the country. In their report to District Attorney Thomas Penny on November 2, 1901 (dated September 28, 1901), Crego, Fowler, and Putnam wrote, “The most careful questioning failed to discover any hallucinations of sight or hearing. He had received no special command; he did not believe he had been specially chosen to do the deed. He always spoke of his motive for the crime as duty; he always referred to the Anarchists’ belief that the killing of rulers was a duty.… He is the product of anarchy, sane and responsible.”42
A study of Czolgosz’s brain, which was removed in the hours after he was executed, did not reveal any deformities that were associated with insanity.
IDA
It had been generally assumed that the shock of the president’s death would be strong enough to kill Ida as well. The night before McKinley died, family friend Frank B. Baird had said as much, telling reporters that if the president passed away, they should be prepared for a double funeral.43Aides eased the First Lady into the news with sedatives and kept her away from the memorial services for the president that were held in Washington, believing that she needed to conserve all her energy for the funeral to be held in Canton. They were right. Arriving with her husband’s body in Ohio, Ida practically had to be carried from the train to her carriage and later was unable to even attend a private service for the family held in her own home, instead listening at the door to the minister.44 She would not visit the cemetery until September 20, 1901—after the funeral.
Yet predictions that she would soon follow her husband to the grave were incorrect. She would live on, her existence a melancholy ordeal dominated by a longing for her husband. At home she created something of a shrine to him, arranging a photo, a small bronze bust, and three vases upon an American flag that was draped over a small table. Visitors said the only topic on her mind was her lost spouse. The president’s close friend Charles Dawes visited Ida in 1903: “Mrs. McKinley greeted us in tears and was depressed in spirits which is always the case with her now,” he wrote.45 She would idle away the time, waiting for death and to rejoin her husband in heaven, until she finally passed on May 26, 1907, at age fifty-nine.
THE MAINE
One of the greatest mysteries of American naval history is what actually sank the Maine. Despite the naval board of inquiry’s finding that an external explosion had destroyed the ship, doubts immediately surfaced. It would have been extremely difficult, it was pointed out, for anybody to place a bomb the size of the one needed to sink the ship without being observed. Nor, in the short amount of time between when the Maine was ordered to Havana and when it arrived, could someone have prepared a waterproof bomb and placed it near the area where the Maine was tied up. Other skeptics pointed out that since the Maine had sunk, there had not even been the whiff of a rumor as to who had committed the deed. What’s more, there were doubts that a Spanish mine could have blown up any ship so spectacularly. During the war itself, two American naval ships near Guantánamo had struck Spanish mines and neither had sunk.46
The debate gained fresh energy in 1910 when an opportunity arose to investigate the Maine. It was decided that for navigational reasons—the wreck still jutted above the surface and was creating an artificial shoal—the ship had to be refloated, dragged out to sea, and sunk in deeper waters. Raising the ship, it was obvious to all, would also provide valuable new insights into the explosion.
The extensive photographs and measurements taken when the Maine was exhumed led a second naval board, under the leadership of Rear Admiral Charles E. Vreeland, to two important findings. The first regarded the famous “inverted V” that the 1898 investigational group had assumed was the site of the external explosion. Now, the board found, there was no reason to believe that the blast had occurred there. But that didn’t kill the external explosion theory, for the Vreeland board found that closer to the rear of the ship were signs of an explosion from outside the hull that, they believed, had ignited the contents of the six-inch reserve magazine and touched off the massive explosion. The details were different, but the result was the same as that of the 1898 naval board of inquiry. Somebody had deliberately blown up the Maine.
In the mid-1970s, however, probably the greatest challenge to the external explosion theory was advanced by a naval engineer, Ib S. Hansen, and an explosives expert, David W. Taylor. Working at the request of legendary admiral H. G. Rickover, the pair again pored over photos taken of the Maine in 1911, applying more modern analysis to the wreckage. They concluded that the original explosion occurred within the ship around the six-inch reserve magazine, which, in turn, caused partial detonation of the forward magazines. The inverted V, they concluded, had been caused by the twisting of the ship as compartments flooded, not as a result of a bomb. Although there did exist a small indentation and displacement of plating on the bottom of the ship under the six-inch reserve magazine, the two men concluded that the damage could have been caused by an internal explosion or as the ship sank. They found no scarring around that area that suggested there had actually been an explosion from outside the hull. The Maine, they concluded, had been sunk when its bituminous coal stores had spontaneously combusted, a not uncommon occurrence on ships of the day. Coal fires often smoldered for some time, creating no smoke nor raising temperatures that an alarm could have detected. The whole trigger for the Spanish-American War, and all that had happened in the years that followed, had been an accident.47