1 Jan 1901 Jahr - McKinley Assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt assumes presidency

Beschreibung:

On September 14, 1901, only six months after William McKinley won his second face-off against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the president was shot as he attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He died eight days later. The murderer, Leon Czolgosz, was influenced by anarchists who had carried out recent assassinations in Europe. Though Czolgosz was American-born, many feared that McKinley’s violent death was another warning of the threat posed by radical immigrants. As the nation mourned its third murdered president in less than four decades, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into office.

Roosevelt, from a prominent family, had chosen an unconventional path. After graduating from Harvard, he plunged into politics, winning a seat as a Republican New York assemblyman. Disillusioned by his party’s resistance to reform, he left politics in the mid-1880s and moved to a North Dakota ranch. But his cattle herd was wiped out in the blizzards of 1887. He returned east, winning appointments as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, head of the New York City Police Commission, and McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy. An energetic presence in all these jobs, Roosevelt gained broad knowledge of the problems America faced at the municipal, state, and federal levels.

After serving in the War of 1898 (see “The War of 1898” in Chapter 20), Roosevelt was elected as New York’s governor. In this job, he pushed through civil service reform and a tax on corporations. Seeking to neutralize this progressive and rather unpredictable rising star, Republican bosses chose Roosevelt as McKinley’s running mate in 1900, hoping the vice-presidency would be a political dead end. Instead, they found Roosevelt in the White House. The new president, who called for vigorous reform, represented a major shift for the Republicans.

Like the environmental laws enacted during his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt was full of contradictions. An unabashed believer in what he called “Anglo-Saxon” superiority, Roosevelt nonetheless incurred the wrath of white supremacists by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. Roosevelt called for elite “best men” to enter politics, but he also defended the dignity of labor.

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