John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Historical Narratives

THE GROUND WE STAND ON

THE HEAD AND HEART OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

THE MEN WHO MADE THE NATION

MR. WILSON’S WAR

Contemporary Chronicles

CHOSEN COUNTRY

THREE SOLDIERS

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

THE 42ND PARALLEL

NINETEEN NINETEEN

THE BIG MONEY

THE MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN

NUMBER ONE

THE GRAND DESIGN

THE GREAT DAYS

MIDCENTURY

ONE hot dusty afternoon in the first week of September 1901 President William McKinley, accompanied by Mrs. McKinley and his two nieces, arrived for his official visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Amid the screeching of whistles and the jangling of chimes and the booming of a twentyone gun salute, the President and Mrs. McKinley were driven slowly around the grounds in a carriage drawn by four well-matched bays.

The next day had been designated President’s Day. Mr. McKinley delivered an address from a platform decorated with the massed flags of all the American republics to a crowd which the newspapers described as “packed to suffocation” on the esplanade.

Mr. McKinley was a fine figure of a man, with a high broad brow and a roman nose flanked by searching gray eyes. Under the black neckcloth an ample piqué vest gleamed white between the folds of the long Prince Albert coat. As he stood looking down into the enthusiastic faces, with the cheers and handclapping resounding in his ears, he couldn’t help a feeling of confidence in his country’s destiny and his own which amounted perhaps to complacency.

With the help of his friend Mark Hanna and “the full dinner pail” he had won re-election over William Jennings Bryan, nominee of Populists and Free Silver Democrats, by a plurality of over a million votes.

A new century was opening. The Spanish-American War was won. Expanding westward to include Hawaii and the Philippines, and southward to dominate Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States had taken her place among the great powers in the world. After four years and a half of his administration, the nation rejoiced in unexampled prosperity.

“… This portion of the earth” said Mr. McKinley, and struck a responsive chord in the listening crowd, “has no cause for humiliation for the part it has played in the march of civilization. It has not accomplished everything, far from it. It has simply done its best, and without vanity or boastfulness, and recognizing the valid achievements of others, it invites the friendly rivalry of all the powers in the peaceful pursuits of trade and commerce and will co-operate with all in advancing the highest and best interests of humanity …”

He spoke of the effect of railroads and swift steamships and of the Atlantic cables in knitting the world together: “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, in all Christendom.”

He called for an increase in the merchant marine to spread the fruits of American prosperity — which he found so great as to be “almost appalling”—to less favored lands, and for increased intercourse with the Latin-American peoples to whom this exposition was dedicated. He demanded the immediate construction of an isthmian canal to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the laying of a cable out into the far Pacific. He spoke with enthusiasm of the development of arbitration treaties between nation and nation which hopeful men were looking for to eliminate forever the causes of war: “God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion there is for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for international disputes.”

After the speech the cheering crowd broke through the ropes and mobbed the stand. Smiling and dignified Mr. McKinley stepped forward and shook more than a hundred hands.

McKinley was a popular President. His enthusiastic reception wherever he met plain Americans man to man gave the lie to Bryan’s oratorical denunciations of the Republican Party as the party of the trusts and of the oppressors of the working man and the farmer; and to the Labor Day rabblerousers who had been reviving the issues of the campaign.

Labor Day parades, animated perhaps by the news of the strike in Pittsburgh of seventy thousand steel workers who didn’t seem to appreciate the fullness of their dinner pails, had drawn recordbreaking crowds.

In Kansas City, preaching to the text: “Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn” William Jennings Bryan had castigated the interests that “would crucify mankind on a cross of gold” and deny a living wage to the working man.

McKinley’s own Vice President, young Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at the opening of the Minnesota State Fair, with the glamor of his citations for bravery on San Juan Hill still about him, had, amid the whoops and yelps of his Rough Riders, called for “supervision and control” of the great corporations in the public interest.

Friday, September 6 was the last day of the President’s visit. In the morning Mr. McKinley, accompanied by the ambassadors of the friendly nations south of the Rio Grande, journeyed to Niagara Falls in a private car. Everyone was captivated by the view of the falls from the International Bridge. After an excellent lunch the party returned to the exposition grounds for a presidential reception, in the old tradition of handshaking democracy, scheduled for four in the afternoon in the Temple of Music.

Still wearing his long Prince Albert coat, with what the reporters described as “a smile of dignity and benevolence” on his face, Mr. McKinley stood under a bower of greenery and palms at the end of a corridor hung with purple bunting so arranged as to reduce the incoming throng to a single file. Detectives, secretservice men, reporters and members of the diplomatic corps stood in a group behind him. The President was seen to rub his hands in pleased anticipation. Instead of an ordeal it was a pleasure for him to meet the common man.

When the doors were opened and the people poured in, the enormous organ installed in the building was still blaring forth a Bach sonata which was part of the afternoon concert.

The secretservice agents carefully scrutinized the men who filed in with outstretched hands. The reporter for the Baltimore Sun thought that one foreignlooking man whom he described as having a bushy black mustache, bloodless lips and a glassy eye, attracted their suspicion. They were so busy watching him that they hardly noticed a tall, boyishlooking smoothfaced fellow who wore his arm in a sling. The organ music had reached a crescendo when Czolgosz, offering his left hand to the President, shoved a pistol at him out of the bandage that swathed his right and shot him in the belly.