In a nutshell --from your link re: McKinley's assassination:
[Author] RAUCHWAY: Well, I originally got into it for sort of academic and scholarly reasons. As time wore on, I discovered personal reasons to be interested in it, as well. Let me start with the sort of the serious reasons first. I mean, this assassination, the assassination of William McKinley, is, in my opinion, one of the most important political events of the 20th century, for obvious reasons and for less obvious reasons.
The obvious reasons are that pretty much no assassination, no Roosevelt, no Roosevelt as president, anyway, no Theodore Roosevelt as president, no Franklin Roosevelt as president, in all likelihood. And you can see where this sort of goes with American politics. [Theodore] Roosevelt was far too eccentric, far too independent-minded, possibly far too entertaining a person ever to be nominated as a presidential candidate for the Republican Party in the normal way of things. So it took some kind of extraordinary event to put him in the White House.
That being said, you know, you don`t need an assassination. It could be a streetcar hit William McKinley or he ate a bad clam or something like that. But the fact that it was a political assassination is really the more important thing, and it was this particular kind of assassination, an anarchist assassination, a radical political assassination that gave Roosevelt an opportunity that he wasted no time in seizing.
And in coming to the presidency, he said, Well, now, we must, on the one hand, condemn anarchists and radicals as evil. They`re criminals. They don`t understand our American way of life. On the other hand, Roosevelt said, there`s something to these complaints that the radicals have about American society, and we really ought to regulate corporations, look a little bit more favorably on labor unions, address the circumstances of workers in factories, regulate the railroads, that sort of thing. And it was this "on the one hand, on the other hand" way of speaking and of doing things that made him such an effective president. And it was the assassination that gave him the avenue into that strategy.
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booknotes.org
Doesn't it look like the blueprint for LBJ's Great Society scheme? |
