Assassination Vacation (23 page)

W
hen I told a friend I was writing about the McKinley administration, he turned up his nose and asked, “Why the hell would anyone want to read about that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe because we seem to be reliving it?”

In 2003 and 2004, as I was traveling around in the footsteps of McKinley, thinking about his interventionist wars in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States started up an interventionist war in Iraq. It was to be a “preemptive war” whose purpose was to disarm Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, weapons which, as I write this, have yet to be found, and which, like the nonexistent evidence of wrongdoing on the
Maine,
most likely never will be. At the outset of the war, President Bush proclaimed that “our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure,” just as President McKinley stated, regarding Cuba, “It is not a trust we sought; it is a trust from which we will not flinch.” I downloaded the Platt Amendment’s provisions toward Cuba from the National Archives’ Web site, saw the provision requiring the Cubans to lease land to the United States for a naval base, and then thought about the several hundred Taliban and other prisoners of the War on Terror being held there at Guantánamo Bay. I read a history book describing how McKinley’s secretary of war Elihu Root finally — after press uproar sparked Senate hearings — got around to ordering courts-martial for U.S. officers accused of committing the “water cure” in the Philippines, and, closing the book, turned on a televised Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was grilled about photographs of giddy U.S. soldiers proudly pointing at Iraqi prisoners of war they had just tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison. I went to NYU to hear former vice president Al Gore deliver a speech calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation; Gore asked of the administration’s imploding Iraq policy in general and the Abu Ghraib torture photos in particular, “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?” Then I walked home through Washington Square Park, where Mark Twain used to hang out on the benches in his white flannel suit when he lived around the corner, and sat down in my living room to reread Twain’s accusation that McKinley’s deadly Philippines policy has “debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world.”

Looking at the long-term effects of the McKinley administration’s occupation of the former Spanish colonies, I can’t say I’m particularly optimistic about the coming decades in Iraq. The very fact that we call it the Spanish-American War hints that Cuban sovereignty was a fairly low priority for the McKinley administration. As the Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí worried, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?”

After the United States signed a treaty with Spain in 1898, we occupied Cuba for the next five years. Cuba became nominally independent thanks to an American act of Congress signed into law by McKinley in 1901. It was called the Platt Amendment, but a better name for it might have been “Buenos Dias, Fidel.” It kept Cuba under U.S. protection and gave us the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. Which we did for the next half century, reoccupying the country every few years and propping up a series of dictators, crooks, and boobs. The last one, a sergeant named Batista, was one of the monsters created in part by American military aid. When the revolution came in 1959, all American businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. Yankee, said Castro, go home. And, oh, by the way, how do you like them missiles?

Which is to say: Our failed postwar policy after the Spanish-American War actually led the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1962. And over a century later, Cuba still isn’t free.

In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the Northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

I
happened to be conducting an Internet search for “imperialism and McKinley” when I stumbled onto an editorial in the
Arcata Journal
from the California coastal town of Arcata calling for the local McKinley statue to be torn down because it “represents this nation’s dawning season of global militarism, empire-building and corporate-funded, political victories of capitalist classes over working classes, and of racists over reformers.” Not only was McKinley getting blamed for the Spanish-American War. In California, they were blaming him for the current one.

After McKinley’s assassination, an Arcata resident who had witnessed the president’s 1901 speech in San Jose commissioned a San Francisco artist to sculpt McKinley’s likeness. The bronze statue survived a foundry fire during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and has stood in the town plaza ever since.

In Arcata, President McKinley is the town mascot. At Christmas, the dead president has been known to wear a Santa’s hat. Last year, someone broke off his thumb and stole it. According to a report in the weekly
Arcata Eye,
the mayor complained of the theft, “It was a mean, punk-ass thing to do.” (The thumb was subsequently recovered and welded back in place.)

I spoke to the
Eye
’s editor, Kevin L. Hoover, who says he moved to Arcata in the first place because of an item in a 1986 issue of the
National Lampoon
reporting that a citizen had stuffed the McKinley statue’s nose and ears with cheese.

“I had a pretty horrible job at the time,” Hoover recalls. “I said to my best friend, ‘Let’s go somewhere weird.’ I wasn’t in journalism at the time, but I came to Arcata and asked around about the cheesing of McKinley. I talked to the actual guy,” he says of the fellow who stuffed the cheese. That’s when he decided to move there: “It was a place where people stuffed cheese in statues’ noses.”

I don’t know what surprised me more about this town and its statue — that McKinley could be “fun” or that anyone alive was thinking about him at all.

“Arcata is kind of a radical little college town,” he continues. (The Green Party has the majority on the city council, for instance.) “Some people here would like to replace the statue with something more politically correct. Every two or three years, a big debate flares up. For some, it’s kind of a comic icon. Some people are loyal to it simply because it’s always been here. Others just hate it.”

One local who would like to tear McKinley down is Hoover’s colleague Mark Tide, editor of the
Arcata Journal.
Tide told me he proposes “moving the statue to the deep, right-field corner of our downtown baseball field. There is some logic to such a plan, for McKinley was the first president invited to throw out the first ball of the season.” Tide would like to rebuild the gazebo that was in the town square before being displaced by “this bleak, century-long occupation of McKinley.”

The
Eye
’s Kevin Hoover admits, “By contemporary standards, McKinley was quite the imperialist bastard. I don’t think he was much of a leader. He was a functionary. I like the statue only because he’s so irrelevant to Arcata. Why McKinley? Why not Chester A. Arthur instead? Sometimes, there will be some flaming political demonstration with Food Not Bombs and someone will put a picket sign in McKinley’s hand.”

Even though Hoover is disinclined to ditch the statue that changed his life, I ask him if he finds the opposition to the statue endearing. “Of course,” he answers. “There are some very good, principled reasons to get rid of McKinley. The people who want to get rid of the statue think it’s an obscenity. We have a real, vigorous diversity of views in our town.”

T
here is one thing that the assassinated Americans have in common. Fate seems to grant each man one last good day, some moment of grace and whimsy before he bleeds. (Except, surprisingly, the notoriously good-time JFK, Dallas offering little by way of whimsy.) Lincoln, of course, was giggling at the moment of impact; Booth, knowing the play Lincoln was watching by heart, chose a laugh line on purpose to dampen the noise of his derringer’s report. Garfield was jauntily leaving on vacation. Before Robert Kennedy went to the Ambassador Hotel, he spent his last day at the beach with his wife and children at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, director of
The Manchurian Candidate.
My favorite, though, is Martin Luther King Jr., who had a pillow fight with his brother and his friends at the Lorraine Motel. I very much enjoy picturing that, and when I do, I see it in slow motion, in black and white. A room full of men in neckties horse around laughing, bonking heads, feathers floating in the air. For William McKinley, it was a day trip to Niagara Falls.

The “Rainbow City” that was the Pan-American Exposition would, come nightfall, turn into the “City of Light.” Hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs — forty thousand on the Electric Tower alone — were powered by hydroelectricity generated by nearby Niagara Falls.

So, on the morning of September 6, President and Mrs. McKinley made an excursion to tour the power plant and watch the falls fall. They were delighted. Anyone would be. Amy, Owen, and I went there, took a wet boat ride up close on the
Maid of the Mist
— it was the good kind of terrifying. I would try to describe my awe for the place, but even Steinbeck couldn’t think of anything more specific than “Niagara Falls is very nice.” My family and I went to the Canadian side for the better view, a vantage point that was denied President McKinley. In fact, he was very careful not to walk too far across the bridge into Canada because no sitting American president had ever left the country, and he didn’t want to stir up a diplomatic hullabaloo. Especially since after the Spanish-American War exposed our lust for sugar, the Canucks might have suspected McKinley was invading to steal their maple syrup.

Thomas Edison’s company filmed the Pan-American Exposition. Some of the reels are in the collection of the Library of Congress. In the night scenes of the City of Light, the buildings glow white, as if Buffalo were a town built out of birthday cakes and the whole world showed up to make a wish. People cried the light was so lovely. And all that beauty was made possible because George Westinghouse of Buffalo harnessed Niagara Falls into his alternating current, the same current that would soon be used to fry Leon Czolgosz in the electric chair.

Edison filmed a reenactment of the Czolgosz execution too, but then he would. As Westinghouse’s alternating current became more popular than Edison’s direct current, Edison launched a smear campaign against Westinghouse in which, attempting to prove the danger of AC, he staged demonstrations electrocuting horses and dogs that caught the eye of New York prison reformers looking for humane methods to carry out capital punishment. Hence the electric chair, first used at the state prison in Auburn in 1890, where Czolgosz would sit in “Old Sparky” eleven years later. Before the verb “to electrocute” came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.

Edwin S. Porter, the cinematographer of the Pan-American Exposition, was the Edison Company’s film director. Before going on to direct the cinematic landmark
The Great Train Robbery
in 1903, Porter filmed a reenactment of the execution of Leon Czolgosz at New York’s Auburn Prison. The company was denied access to film the actual electrocution by Auburn’s warden, a man who was so concerned that Czolgosz might turn into a martyred object of outlaw romance that he ordered acid poured on the assassin’s corpse so that no one would be tempted to steal then venerate the dead man’s clothes or bones.