The New York Journal and the Assassination of William McKinley

THE NEW YORK JOURNAL AND THE ASSASSINATION OF WILLIAM MCKINLEY

Hatred of the Trusts

The most volatile political issue at the turn of the century was the growing power of enormous corporations. Prominent publishers, including Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, used their papers to campaign against the trusts as the enemy of their readers, the common people. The reelection in 1900 of Republican president William McKinley meant that little would be accomplished to curb the centralization of economic power that came, the trusts' opponents argued, at the expense of the industrial worker and the farmer.

The Journal Cartoonists Get Rough

Hearst's New York Journal had an outstanding staff of political cartoonists, an art form just then coming into its own. Homer Davenport began in 1900 to draw President Mc-Kinley as the stooge of the millionaire industrialist Mark Hanna, drawn wearing a suit of dollar signs. McKinley and his longtime patron were portrayed as the bullying, criminal, scornful agents of the trusts. Davenport's new colleague, Frederick Burr Opper, started a series called "Willie and his Papa," with McKinley depicted as a small son to the trusts, attended by a nursemaid resembling Hanna. McKinley's vice-presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, was shown as a show-off playmate stealing Willie's limelight and making him cry. Respected Journal editor Arthur Brisbane pronounced McKinley "the most hated creature on the American continent."

An Incendiary Rhyme and a Provocative Editorial

On 4 February 1900 the governor-elect of Kentucky, William Goebel, was shot dead in an election dispute. Famous story writer Ambrose Bierce of the Journal penned a harsh quatrain:

The bullet that pierced Goebel's breast Can not be found in all the West; Good reason, it is speeding here To lay McKinley on his bier.

Hearst began to regret the virulence of his papers' assaults on the president and sent his associate James Creelman to Washington to apologize for the personal nature of the attacks. But on 10 April 1901 the Journal again became vicious. An editorial against McKinley, probably written by Brisbane, ended with the shocking sentiment "If bad institutions and bad men must be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done." When this line came to Hearst's attention, he called an immediate stop to the presses. It did not appear in later editions, but Hearst's enemies filed it away.

Shots in Buffalo

Public sentiment against the trusts grew so volatile that even McKinley had begun to consider some limited moves against them. On 5 September 1901 he stopped at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo to give a speech. The next day he graciously held a reception to shake the hands of hundreds of citizens. One half-mad twenty-eight-year old, Leon Czolgosz, concealed a pistol under a handkerchief and shot the president twice. McKinley lived nine days before he died on 14 September. Vice President Roosevelt, vacationing at a remote spot in the Adirondacks, could not be reached for several hours.

Hearst Burned in Effigy

The publisher learned of the shooting in Chicago and said quietly to editor Charles Edward Russell of the American, "Things are going to be very bad." All of his papers took a sorrowful, solicitous, hopeful stance while waiting for news of McKinley's fate. When the president died, Hearst's enemies reprinted the cartoons, the poem, and the editorial that seemed to incite assassination. It was widely believed that Czolgosz was carrying a copy of the Journal in his pocket when he shot the president, but that story is apocryphal. Nonetheless, the Hearst papers were widely boycotted, and their publisher was burned in effigy along with anarchist Emma Goldman, whose lecture Czolgosz cited as his true inspiration for the assassination. Hearst punished none of the writers or cartoonists but soon changed the name of the Journal to the American. A cloud hovered over his empire for about a year, but by 1902 he was popular enough to win election to the House of Representatives from New York.

BROWNIE CAMERAS

With the introduction of the Brownie Box camera in 1900, popular photography received its greatest boost. The camera cost one dollar, and a roll of film with six shots cost ten to fifteen cents. Previously, photography had been the province of professionals, who needed expensive equipment and elaborate studios. Now everyone could experiment. The cameras sold well, and the Eastman Kodak Company continued to manufacture them until the mid 1960s, when they were superseded by the popular Instamatic line of cameras.

Sources:

Edwin and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, fourth edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978);

. W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribners, 1961).