Download The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century AudioBook Free
In 1901, as America tallied its benefits from an interval of unprecedented imperial development, an assassin's bullet shattered the country's confidence. The stunning murder of Leader William McKinley threw into stark pain relief the emerging " new world " order of what would come to be known as the North american Century. The Leader and the Assassin is the storyplot of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different pathways that brought collectively two of the very most compelling results of the era: Leader William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him. The two men seemed to live in eerily parallel Americas. McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a chief executive whose conflicted feelings about imperialism mirrored the country's own. Under its popular Republican commander-in-chief, the United States was considering an uneasy transition from a straightforward agrarian society with an industrial powerhouse growing its influence overseas by pressure of arms. Czolgosz was on the burning off end of the financial changes taking place---a first-generation Polish immigrant and manufacturer worker sickened by way of a government that looked like focused exclusively on making the rich richer. Using a deft narrative side, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these two men, each seeking what he considered the right and honorable journey, collided in violence at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Along the way, listeners meet a veritable who's who of turn-of-the-century America: John Hay, McKinley's visionary secretary of condition, whose diplomatic initiatives paved the way for a 50 percent century of American exploitation of China; Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist whose incendiary rhetoric inspired Czolgosz to dare the unthinkable; and Theodore Roosevelt, the vainglorious vice chief executive whose 1898 charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba is but among the many thrilling military ventures recounted here.
