Murdering McKinley

by Eric Rauchway

Of all the US presidential assassinations (there have been four, and every president since Kennedy to George W Bush has had an assassination attempt), Rauchway describes the 1901 assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz as being the most dangerously politically motivated. Czolgosz was the son of Polish-Russian immigrants and a self-avowed anarchist. Declared insane and executed, Czolgosz’s crime introduced a wave of fear and suspicion of the immigrant working-class in the United States, but at the same time, as Rauchway argues, forced US policy makers to confront some home truths.