Assassination Vacation
Another milestone in the history of how the party of Lincoln became the party of, say, late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, was a Spanish-American War victory speech McKinley delivered to the citizens of Atlanta, praising the Cuban campaign’s “magic healing, which has closed ancient wounds and effaced their scars.” Later on, McKinley then boiled down the story of the Civil War — on both sides — to merely the story of “American valor” (i.e., doesn’t matter which side you were on or what you thought you were fighting for, the point is, you put up a fight). It might be easy to laud these forgiving sentiments as almost Lincolnesque calls for peaceful coexistence, but Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, was able to ask for reconciliation without lying about what was at stake, without demeaning one of the grisliest moral conflicts in all of history as some silly rite of passage that turned boys into men. Though McKinley and Hanna’s ploy was morally questionable, it was nevertheless political genius.
At the Pan-American Exposition, one of the exhibits embodied this revisionist history zeitgeist. It was called the Old Plantation, a celebration of the Old South complete with slave cabins and cotton fields, and featuring a black man billed as “Old Laughing Ben from Dublin, Georgia.” Because slavery: fun!
Though McKinley hesitated to go to war in the first place, he nevertheless warmed up to the idea of empire. After the U.S. Navy, under the command of Admiral George Dewey, had defeated the Spanish ships in Manila Bay in August of 1898 (with the help of the Filipino rebels who had been attacking the Spanish for years), McKinley debated whether or not to give our Filipino allies their independence or take over the archipelago as an American territory. Addressing some Methodist ministers after the fact, McKinley recalled his decision-making process this way:
I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way — I don’t know how it was, but it came…that we could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was…that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
Never mind that the Philippines were already largely Christianized, thanks to the Spanish missionaries who arrived in 1565 to convert the Filipinos to Catholicism. Still, these God-made-me presidential war rationales apparently never go out of fashion. In the 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush — who back when he was governor of Texas confided in a televangelist friend, “I believe God wants me to run for president” — foreshadowed the coming Iraqi war by claiming, “We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone.” If you think he is referring to the United Nations, guess again. “We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence,” he continued, “yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history.”
When President McKinley delivered the last speech of his life, at the Pan-Am on September 5, 1901, he said, “Expositions are the time keepers of progress.” He was alluding to the exhibits devoted to technological advancement — cash registers and mining and hot air balloons, a peculiar building full of infant incubators in which tourists stared at low-birthweight babies as lightbulbs warmed them to health. But it’s just as true to see the exposition as a fly trapped in amber, an accounting of American racial attitudes as seen in the ethnological displays — the aforementioned Old Plantation, “Darkest Africa.” There were also fake battles between American Indians and U.S. cavalry staged in the sports arena. (Guess who always won?)
An inscription on the Department of Agriculture Building at the exposition read: “To the ancient races of America, for whom the New World was the Old, that their love of freedom and of nature, their hardy courage, their monuments, arts, legends and strange songs may not perish from the earth.” I would imagine that if you were one of the Filipinos employed at the exposition to tend the water buffalo in the Philippine village and you read this slogan, which can be summarized as we might exterminate you but we’ll be sure and put your pottery in our museums, you might get nervous about current events back home.
The Spanish-American War is often cited as the United States’ first interventionist attack on foreign soil. That’s only true if you’re not counting U.S. wars against the nations of the Sioux, the Nez Percé, the Apaches, the Blackfoot, the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and so on. After God told McKinley to “annex” the Philippines, our former allies the Filipino rebels fought back in a nasty guerrilla war that dragged on for years in which both sides committed torture (the famous “water cure” in which dirty water is poured down a person’s throat until he drowns) and atrocities (such as setting buildings on fire with people asleep inside).
Many of the American soldiers and officers who were torturing Philippine rebels (who then tortured them right back) were veterans of the Indian Wars on this continent. On the island of Samar, for example, American troops fought under the command of Wounded Knee alumnus Jacob Smith, who applied skills in the Pacific he had learned slaughtering the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota. After a cunning but brutal ambush by the Filipino guerrillas, Smith ordered his troops to retaliate by shooting to kill every Filipino capable of bearing arms. When asked to pin down a minimum age for the murderees, Smith decided on ten. If it seems distasteful and condescending to read that then-governor of the Philippines William Howard Taft referred to the local citizenry as his “little brown brothers,” that’s downright sweet compared to what the soldiers called them — “niggers.” As one U.S. soldier stationed in the Philippines put it, “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians.”
Mark Twain had supported the 1898 invasion of Cuba because “it is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s.” But he called the Philippines situation a “quagmire,” writing an editorial in the February 1901 issue of North American Review called “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He wrote, “We have stabbed an ally in the back,” going on to suggest that a new American flag should be sewn especially for the province “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”
Leon Czolgosz, confiding in a fellow anarchist not long before he shot McKinley, said of the war in the Philippines, “It does not harmonize with the teachings in our public schools about our flag.”
When I told a friend I was writing about the McKinley administration, he turned up his nose and asked, “Why the hell would anyone want to read about that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe because we seem to be reliving it?”
In 2003 and 2004, as I was traveling around in the footsteps of McKinley, thinking about his interventionist wars in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States started up an interventionist war in Iraq. It was to be a “preemptive war” whose purpose was to disarm Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, weapons which, as I write this, have yet to be found, and which, like the nonexistent evidence of wrongdoing on the Maine, most likely never will be. At the outset of the war, President Bush proclaimed that “our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure,” just as President McKinley stated, regarding Cuba, “It is not a trust we sought; it is a trust from which we will not flinch.” I downloaded the Platt Amendment’s provisions toward Cuba from the National Archives’ Web site, saw the provision requiring the Cubans to lease land to the United States for a naval base, and then thought about the several hundred Taliban and other prisoners of the War on Terror being held there at Guantánamo Bay. I read a history book describing how McKinley’s secretary of war Elihu Root finally — after press uproar sparked Senate hearings — got around t
o ordering courts-martial for U.S. officers accused of committing the “water cure” in the Philippines, and, closing the book, turned on a televised Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was grilled about photographs of giddy U.S. soldiers proudly pointing at Iraqi prisoners of war they had just tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison. I went to NYU to hear former vice president Al Gore deliver a speech calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation; Gore asked of the administration’s imploding Iraq policy in general and the Abu Ghraib torture photos in particular, “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?” Then I walked home through Washington Square Park, where Mark Twain used to hang out on the benches in his white flannel suit when he lived around the corner, and sat down in my living room to reread Twain’s accusation that McKinley’s deadly Philippines policy has “debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world.”
Looking at the long-term effects of the McKinley administration’s occupation of the former Spanish colonies, I can’t say I’m particularly optimistic about the coming decades in Iraq. The very fact that we call it the Spanish-American War hints that Cuban sovereignty was a fairly low priority for the McKinley administration. As the Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí worried, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?”
After the United States signed a treaty with Spain in 1898, we occupied Cuba for the next five years. Cuba became nominally independent thanks to an American act of Congress signed into law by McKinley in 1901. It was called the Platt Amendment, but a better name for it might have been “Buenos Dias, Fidel.” It kept Cuba under U.S. protection and gave us the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. Which we did for the next half century, reoccupying the country every few years and propping up a series of dictators, crooks, and boobs. The last one, a sergeant named Batista, was one of the monsters created in part by American military aid. When the revolution came in 1959, all American businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. Yankee, said Castro, go home. And, oh, by the way, how do you like them missiles?
Which is to say: Our failed postwar policy after the Spanish-American War actually led the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1962. And over a century later, Cuba still isn’t free.
In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the Northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”
I happened to be conducting an Internet search for “imperialism and McKinley” when I stumbled onto an editorial in the Arcata Journal from the California coastal town of Arcata calling for the local McKinley statue to be torn down because it “represents this nation’s dawning season of global militarism, empire-building and corporate-funded, political victories of capitalist classes over working classes, and of racists over reformers.” Not only was McKinley getting blamed for the Spanish-American War. In California, they were blaming him for the current one.
After McKinley’s assassination, an Arcata resident who had witnessed the president’s 1901 speech in San Jose commissioned a San Francisco artist to sculpt McKinley’s likeness. The bronze statue survived a foundry fire during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and has stood in the town plaza ever since.
In Arcata, President McKinley is the town mascot. At Christmas, the dead president has been known to wear a Santa’s hat. Last year, someone broke off his thumb and stole it. According to a report in the weekly Arcata Eye, the mayor complained of the theft, “It was a mean, punk-ass thing to do.” (The thumb was subsequently recovered and welded back in place.)
I spoke to the Eye’s editor, Kevin L. Hoover, who says he moved to Arcata in the first place because of an item in a 1986 issue of the National Lampoon reporting that a citizen had stuffed the McKinley statue’s nose and ears with cheese.
“I had a pretty horrible job at the time,” Hoover recalls. “I said to my best friend, ‘Let’s go somewhere weird.’ I wasn’t in journalism at the time, but I came to Arcata and asked around about the cheesing of McKinley. I talked to the actual guy,” he says of the fellow who stuffed the cheese. That’s when he decided to move there: “It was a place where people stuffed cheese in statues’ noses.”
I don’t know what surprised me more about this town and its statue — that McKinley could be “fun” or that anyone alive was thinking about him at all.
“Arcata is kind of a radical little college town,” he continues. (The Green Party has the majority on the city council, for instance.) “Some people here would like to replace the statue with something more politically correct. Every two or three years, a big debate flares up. For some, it’s kind of a comic icon. Some people are loyal to it simply because it’s always been here. Others just hate it.”
One local who would like to tear McKinley down is Hoover’s colleague Mark Tide, editor of the Arcata Journal. Tide told me he proposes “moving the statue to the deep, right-field corner of our downtown baseball field. There is some logic to such a plan, for McKinley was the first president invited to throw out the first ball of the season.” Tide would like to rebuild the gazebo that was in the town square before being displaced by “this bleak, century-long occupation of McKinley.”
The Eye’s Kevin Hoover admits, “By contemporary standards, McKinley was quite the imperialist bastard. I don’t think he was much of a leader. He was a functionary. I like the statue only because he’s so irrelevant to Arcata. Why McKinley? Why not Chester A. Arthur instead? Sometimes, there will be some flaming political demonstration with Food Not Bombs and someone will put a picket sign in McKinley’s hand.”
Even though Hoover is disinclined to ditch the statue that changed his life, I ask him if he finds the opposition to the statue endearing. “Of course,” he answers. “There are some very good, principled reasons to get rid of McKinley. The people who want to get rid of the statue think it’s an obscenity. We have a real, vigorous diversity of views in our town.”
There is one thing that the assassinated Americans have in common. Fate seems to grant each man one last good day, some moment of grace and whimsy before he bleeds. (Except, surprisingly, the notoriously good-time JFK, Dallas offering little by way of whimsy.) Lincoln, of course, was giggling at the moment of impact; Booth, knowing the play Lincoln was watching by heart, chose a laugh line on purpose to dampen the noise of his derringer’s report. Garfield was jauntily leaving on vacation. Before Robert Kennedy went to the Ambassador Hotel, he spent his last day at the beach with his wife and children at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate. My favorite, though, is Martin Luther King Jr., who had a pillow fight with his brother and his friends at the Lorraine Motel. I very much enjoy picturing that, and when I do, I see it in slow motion, in black and white. A room full of men in neckties horse around laughing, bonking heads, feathers floating in the air. For William McKinley, it was a day trip to Niagara Falls.
The “Rainbow City” that was the Pan-American Exposition would, come nightfall, turn into the “City of Light.” Hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs — forty thousand on the Electric Tower alone — were powered by hydroelectricity generated by nearby Niagara Falls.
So, on the morning of September 6, President and Mrs. McKinley made an excursion to tour the power plant and watch the falls fall. They were delighted. Anyone would be. Amy, Owen, and I
went there, took a wet boat ride up close on the Maid of the Mist — it was the good kind of terrifying. I would try to describe my awe for the place, but even Steinbeck couldn’t think of anything more specific than “Niagara Falls is very nice.” My family and I went to the Canadian side for the better view, a vantage point that was denied President McKinley. In fact, he was very careful not to walk too far across the bridge into Canada because no sitting American president had ever left the country, and he didn’t want to stir up a diplomatic hullabaloo. Especially since after the Spanish-American War exposed our lust for sugar, the Canucks might have suspected McKinley was invading to steal their maple syrup.
Thomas Edison’s company filmed the Pan-American Exposition. Some of the reels are in the collection of the Library of Congress. In the night scenes of the City of Light, the buildings glow white, as if Buffalo were a town built out of birthday cakes and the whole world showed up to make a wish. People cried the light was so lovely. And all that beauty was made possible because George Westinghouse of Buffalo harnessed Niagara Falls into his alternating current, the same current that would soon be used to fry Leon Czolgosz in the electric chair.
Edison filmed a reenactment of the Czolgosz execution too, but then he would. As Westinghouse’s alternating current became more popular than Edison’s direct current, Edison launched a smear campaign against Westinghouse in which, attempting to prove the danger of AC, he staged demonstrations electrocuting horses and dogs that caught the eye of New York prison reformers looking for humane methods to carry out capital punishment. Hence the electric chair, first used at the state prison in Auburn in 1890, where Czolgosz would sit in “Old Sparky” eleven years later. Before the verb “to electrocute” came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.