The President and the Murderer: McKinley, Terror, and Empire on the Daybreak of the American Century

A SWEEPING TALE OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA AND THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCES THAT BROUGHT TWO MEN TOGETHER ONE FATEFUL DAY

 

In 1901, as America tallied its positive aspects from a interval of unprecedented imperial enlargement, an murderer’s bullet shattered the nation’s confidence. The stunning homicide of President William McKinley threw into stark aid the rising new world order of what would come to be often called the American Century.
The President and the Murderer is the story of the momentous years main as much as that occasion, and of the very totally different paths that introduced collectively two of essentially the most compelling figures of the period: President William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him.

The 2 males appeared to reside in eerily parallel Americas. McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a president whose conflicted emotions about imperialism mirrored the nation’s personal. Beneath its common Republican commander-in-chief, the USA was present process an uneasy transition from a easy agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse spreading its affect abroad by power of arms. Czolgosz was on the shedding finish of the financial adjustments happening—a first-generation Polish immigrant and manufacturing facility employee sickened by a authorities that appeared targeted solely on making the wealthy richer. With a deft narrative hand, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these two males, every pursuing what he thought of the appropriate and honorable path, collided in violence on the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

Alongside the way in which, readers meet a veritable who’s who of turn-of-the-century America: John Hay, McKinley’s visionary secretary of state, whose diplomatic efforts paved the way in which for a half century of Western exploitation of China; Emma Goldman, the unconventional anarchist whose incendiary rhetoric impressed Czolgosz to dare the unthinkable; and Theodore Roosevelt, the vainglorious vice chairman whose 1898 cost up San Juan Hill in Cuba is however considered one of many thrilling army adventures recounted right here.

Wealthy with relevance to our personal period,
The President and the Murderer holds a mirror as much as an interesting interval of upheaval when the titans of business grew fats, speculators sought fortune overseas, and determined souls turned to terrorism in a useless try to thwart the juggernaut of change.

Reward for The President and the Murderer

 

“[A] panoramic tour de power . . . Miller has a superb eye, skilled by years of journalism, for telling particulars and enriching anecdotes.”—The Washington Impartial Evaluate of Books

 

“Even with out the intrinsic draw of the 1901 presidential assassination that shapes its pages, Scott Miller’s
The President and the Murderer [is] absorbing studying. . . . What makes the ebook compelling is [that] so many circumstances and occasions of the sooner time have parallels in our personal.”—
The Oregonian

 

“A wonderful work of historical past, splendidly written.”—Fareed Zakaria, creator of
The Submit-American World

 

“An actual triumph.”—
BookPage

 

“Quick-moving and richly detailed.”—
The Buffalo Information


 

“[A] compelling learn.”—
The Boston Globe


 


One among Newsweek’s 10 Should-Learn Summer time Books