Читать книгу WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME - Lise Pearlman - Страница 9

That’s all a man can hope for during his lifetime – to set an example – and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history.

– WILLIAM MCKINLEY¹

Like Rupert Murdoch today, publishing giant William Randolph Hearst wielded enormous power shaping public perception of newsworthy events in the first several decades of the 20th century. One tactic that backfired was his editorial attacks on President McKinley early in the formation of Hearst’s publishing empire.

Before moving to Manhattan in 1896 to pursue his political ambitions, Hearst had developed a winning formula transforming his father’s San Francisco Examiner into the top-selling local newspaper. Hearst filled its pages with wildly entertaining stories, comics, and pictures – the print world equivalent of a P. T. Barnum circus. On political issues, Hearst courted the working class: he railed against vested interests like the powerful railroads and utilities, and championed the eight-hour day and the income tax. Hearst could count on the popularity of taking such stances. Over 30,000 strikes had taken place in the past three decades throughout the nation, with the eight-hour day as the primary objective.

Flushed with success in the Bay Area, in 1895 Hearst bought the New York Journal to start a cut-throat readership battle with his role model and mentor, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Neither publisher viewed truth as an essential ingredient so long as attention-grabbing stories sped from the hands of corner newsies. Staid competing papers invented the put-down “yellow journalism” to describe how the two-penny tabloids hawked colored cartoon supplements and ran oversized banner headlines to vie for the loyalty of the city’s teeming numbers of immigrant workers, many of whom learned English reading the tabloids.

In the hotly-contested 1896 presidential election Hearst was the only publisher in the financial heart of the nation to support populist William Jennings Bryan against Republican William McKinley. This was the campaign in which Bryan made his famous “cross of gold” speech. The debate centered on how best to recover from the nation’s then worst-ever depression, which had hit three years before. Like the subprime mortgage bubble that burst into an economic crisis in 2008, overbuilding of railroads on shaky financing precipitated large-scale bankruptcies and job loss in the panic of 1893.

The question in 1896 was whether the United States would remain on the gold standard – as favored by banks, investors and industrialists – or whether the nation would return to coining silver as well. Farmers, workers and small business owners favored the silver standard, which would lower the value of the dollar, but pump far more money into the economy. Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech fired his audiences up to a fever pitch: “If they dare to . . . defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”²

Hearst’s papers focused on the role of huge campaign donations in this pivotal election. Political boss Mark Hanna raised an unparalleled $3.5 million (about $93 million today) to elect the Republican Civil War veteran – five times the amount raised by his Democratic opponent. McKinley won by more than half a million votes. (For good or ill, Hanna has been credited with launching the modern role of money in politics.) Though Bryan lost, Hearst’s formula proved hugely successful in his new headquarters in the nation’s largest metropolis, ten times the population of his San Francisco home base.

Source: Wikipedia article on yellow journalism, reproducing cartoon in the collection of the Independence Seaport Museum

Source of both pictures: “The American Notion of Privacy, The First Wave of Assault on American Privacy: Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.”

Top: contemporary political cartoon lampooning publishers Joseph Pulitzer (pictured lower left) and William Randolph Hearst (pictured lower right) for the “yellow” of their papers filled with sensational headlines and colorful cartoons. The pair were credited with creating public fervor to push President McKinley to wage the 1898 Spanish-American War. Hearst had his own presidential ambitions. Hearst political cartoons caricatured President McKinley as a tool of the money-hungry trusts. One editor called the president “the most hated creature on the American continent” and another Hearst columnist suggested that the president deserved killing.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

William Jennings Bryan first ran for president in 1896 as a populist advocating the silver standard instead of gold so that money would become more widely available. He became famous for his fiery “cross of gold” speech given at the 1896 Democratic Convention, arguing the nation would be “crucified” on the gold standard. Political boss Mark Hanna raised an unparalleled $3.5 million in 1896 (about $93 million today) to elect Bryan’s opponent, Republican Civil War veteran William McKinley –- five times the amount raised by Bryan -– launching the modern role of money in politics.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org_Administration%27s_Promises_Have_Be/wiki/File:Theen_Kept.jpg

Campaign poster for McKinley’s reelection in 1900, running with Spanish-American War hero Teddy Roosevelt. McKinley handily defeated Bryan for a second time. Note the disavowal of foreign aggression in that war, which ended with the United States annexing the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, and denial of empire-building in annexing Hawaii as a territory – “The AMERICAN FLAG has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for HUMANITY’S SAKE.”

In the second year of McKinley’s presidency, rivalry with Pulitzer motivated Hearst to exploit the sinking of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, as a secret enemy attack. No proof of the charge would ever surface. With his repeated war-mongering headlines, Hearst induced Pulitzer’s paper to do the same, urging readers to “Remember the Maine!” Together they created such public clamor they helped pressure President McKinley into precipitating the Spanish-American War. What Hearst cared most about was that circulation for the Journal rose fifty percent.

By the war’s end, the United States had emerged as a world power acquiring the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from the Spanish Empire as well as control of Cuba. At home, rapid industrialization and consolidation of power in trusts fueled the economy; new waves of Eastern and Southern European immigrants provided a cheap, renewable source of labor. American workers felt increasingly exploited. In editorial cartoons, Hearst’s New York Journal characterized McKinley as a tool of the money-hungry trusts. One of his editors called the president “the most hated creature on the American continent” and another Hearst journalist suggested that the president deserved killing.³

On September 5, 1901, few people were genuinely surprised to learn of an attempt on the president’s life by an unemployed worker among the crowd greeting McKinley at an international exposition in Buffalo, New York. Two political assassinations had made headlines the year before. In February of 1900, the new governor of Kentucky had been killed; five months later, on July 29, 1900, King Umberto of Italy was shot in retaliation for brutally suppressing a workers strike. Indeed, in the United States, many older citizens had searing memories of two presidents who had been assassinated – Lincoln in 1865 and Garfield in 1881. Since President Garfield’s death, political assassins overseas had also felled Russian Czar Alexander II, French President Sadi Carnot, Spanish Premier Antonio Canovas del Castillo and Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

The disaffected Polish-American who fired his mail-order Sears Roebuck hand gun at President McKinley had been inspired by the recent assassination of King Umberto in Italy. Leon Czolgosz grew up in the Midwest and once worked in the steel industry. His politics were strongly influenced by the revolutionary speeches of Russian emigrant Emma Goldman. Historian Eric Rauchway suggests that Czolgosz also believed he was dying of untreatable syphilis when he decided to exchange his life for President McKinley’s.⁴ At first, President McKinley appeared to be recovering from his two wounds. But he took a sudden turn for the worse a week later and died of gangrene resulting from botched emergency medical care. Much ridiculed during his tenure, McKinley instantly became a martyr about whom few were willing to speak ill. Prohibition crusader Carrie Nation was an exception, claiming “he got what he deserved.”⁵ Goldman also voiced her dissent. She publicly praised Czolgosz as a modern-day Brutus for killing a 20th century Caesar, the “president of the money kings and trust magnates.”⁶ But these two outspoken women proved rare exceptions.

Source: Oakland Public Library

The nation reacted in shock to the attempted assassination of the president.

Pioneering social worker Jane Addams captured the mood of most Americans: “It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a crime against government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens.”⁷ Many shocked readers blamed newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst for the attack on President McKinley. Effigies of Hearst were set afire. The New York Journal was boycotted for months.

President McKinley had arrived at The Pan-American Exposition in the thriving city of Buffalo to celebrate the nation’s emergence as a world power at the dawn of the new century. The huge fair showcased innovations like electricity and the x-ray machine and featured exotic exhibits from around the globe. The president’s visit had been postponed from the opening of the festival in May 1901 to the week of Labor Day – a national holiday established just seven years before to honor the working class.

The Secret Service agents guarding the president had scarcely noticed the innocuous-looking Czolgosz in the long queue of well-wishers on September 5 until after Czolgosz fired a gun camouflaged under his handkerchief. At the time, the agents had their eyes on a suspicious-looking six-foot-six “colored man” with a black moustache who was next in line.⁸ James Benjamin “Big Ben” Parker reacted quickly. The 41-year-old former slave knocked the weapon from Czolgosz’s hand before he could fire again and tackled him as others joined in the fracas. Parker enjoyed national publicity for a short while as a quick-thinking hero credited with saving the president’s life. But soon the government supplanted stories of Parker’s heroism with a new version of the shooting incident giving an Irish Secret Service agent complete credit for capturing Czolgosz.

While Czolgosz remained in pretrial custody, locals from the Buffalo area stormed the jail twice looking to lynch him for his attempt on the president’s life. Whites were not alone in thirsting for immediate vengeance. Big Ben Parker had already bragged to the newspapers that, when he tackled Czolgosz, he was bent on cutting the assailant’s throat on the spot like the vigilante justice Parker had witnessed when he was growing up in Georgia. Just the week before, an angry lynch mob of African-Americans in a Kentucky town had made headlines. White jailers stepped aside to let the mob rush the jail and hang several black men arrested for the murder of one of their community’s respected elders. In Parker’s view, Czolgosz deserved no better.

Educator and orator Booker T. Washington read with great alarm the accounts of mobs storming Buffalo’s police headquarters bent on lynching the anarchist. In early 1901, Washington had published his best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery. A pragmatist, Washington drew support from both African-Americans and Progressive whites by accepting segregation as the best path forward to economic prosperity for his race. For the last twenty years, Washington had headed the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, attracting generous support from philanthropists to turn the Tennessee campus into a prestigious industrial college. By the turn of the century, Washington was recognized as the most influential African-American in the country.

Washington seized upon the frenzied response to the attack on the president as a teaching moment. In a widely-published opinion letter to a Montgomery newspaper, he compared self-proclaimed anarchists like Czolgosz to the ubiquity of lynch mobs in America. Washington asked his readers to consider: “Is Czolgosz alone guilty? Has not the entire nation had a part in this greatest crime of the century?”⁹ At the time, a black man was lynched somewhere in the South every few days. Washington made a point of tracking grim statistics gathered by the Chicago Tribune recording more than 2500 lynchings in the past sixteen years. He estimated that on average fifty people participated in each lynching during that period totaling “nearly 125,000 persons.” Washington concluded: “We cannot sow disorder and reap order . . . One criminal put to death through the majesty of the law does more . . . to prevent crime than ten put to death by lynching anarchists.”¹⁰

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Czolgosz

Leon Czolgoz

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Benjamin_Parker

James Benjamin Parker

Source of photo: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96521677/

Top left: Leon Czolgosz, the unemployed anarchist who shot President McKinley. Top right: “Big Ben” Parker, the former slave who wrestled Czolgosz to the ground as depicted (above) in this 1905 drawing by T. Dart Walker reconstructing the scene of the shooting at the Pan-American Exposition on Sept.6, 1901. Parker’s heroism was soon obscured by the government crediting a Secret Service agent with tackling Czolgosz instead.

Editorials in other African-American newspapers echoed Washington’s plea. But it was more likely the eyes of the world on Buffalo that ensured a jury trial for Czolgosz. Desire for quick revenge remained intense. The district attorney put the despised social outcast on trial for his life just nine days after President McKinley died. The judge rejected Czolgosz’s attempt to plead guilty. Czolgosz refused to cooperate with the lawyers appointed to represent him. The prosecution presented all of its testimony in two days, and Czolgosz’s defense lawyers called no witnesses to back up a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. One of Czolgosz’s court-appointed lawyers told the jury that even though anarchists did “not believe in any law” they still merited “the form of a trial.”¹¹ Half an hour later, the jury came back with the expected verdict of first degree murder.

Within a month after the jury voted for the death penalty Czolgosz was electrocuted. Cameras focused on the outside of the prison as background for a ghoulish filmed reenactment of his death distributed widely a few weeks later. Czolgosz had not made any statement at his trial, but he had told the arresting officer, “I done my duty,” and admitted he was an anarchist.¹² As he was about to be placed in the chair he elaborated: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”¹³

His only regret was not being able to say good-bye to his father. After his electrocution, his body was dissolved in acid to prevent medical experts from seeking to reexamine his brain and to dissuade souvenir hunters from digging up his remains.

A doctor who analyzed the case in 1902 had serious doubts about Czolgosz’s sanity. In a later era, a jury determined that John Hinckley, Jr., was insane when he attempted to assassinate President Reagan. In the first decade of the century, national outrage against Czolgosz would permit no such dispassionate analysis even had evidence been offered to support the insanity plea his court-appointed lawyers had raised at trial. Defendants without status or resources commonly received short shrift in the courts. In this instance, the lawyers were prominent members of the bar, but given no time to prepare. Czolgosz got as little due process as the system could then pass off for justice –- a rush to the electric chair Booker T. Washington recognized as an instance of “legal lynching.” He was familiar with many municipalities that used the trappings of the law to make preordained hangings less seemingly barbaric.¹⁴

Less than three weeks after Czolgosz was sentenced, but before his execution, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine with the first family at the White House. Washington had been a trusted advisor of Roosevelt back when T. R. had been Governor of New York. The President now welcomed Washington’s advice on prospective appointees in the South. When news of the private dinner leaked out, blacks and Progressives applauded Roosevelt’s egalitarian gesture. Southern Democrats exploded in rage.

On occasion, Presidents had welcomed black leaders to the White House before. Lincoln had opened that door by warmly greeting abolitionist Frederick Douglass at a reception late in the Civil War. But no president had ever sat down at the first family’s dinner table with a black man. Roosevelt’s violation of strict segregation spawned angry opinion letters and vulgar political cartoons. A Memphis paper called it “the most damnable outrage ever perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.”¹⁵ As far as most Southern whites were concerned, President Roosevelt might just as well have signaled his approval of intermarriage of the races, which some states had prohibited since colonial days and still prosecuted as a felony.

Source of photo: http://www.philosophersguild.com/blog/?p=2003 Library of Congress / Contributor Editorial #: 640486723 Collection: Corbis Historical

Artist portrayal of Booker T. Washington dining with new President Theodore Roosevelt in October 1901 -- first African-American ever invited to join the First Family for dinner in the White House. The backlash was so powerful that no president invited another black person to dine at the White House for another three decades.

Source: Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division digital ID cph.3c04434

Benjamin Tillman 1845–1918

South Carolina Sen. “Pitchfork Ben” Till-man boasted of terrorizing freedmen as a member of the “Red Shirts” in the late 19th century, whose exploits included a violent racial confrontation in 1876 known as the Hamburg Massacre. An unabashed white supremacist, he won election as governor in 1890 and engineered the adoption of the state’s 1895 constitution that stripped the right to vote from most blacks and poor whites for more than two-thirds of a century. Enraged by Booker T. Washington’s dinner with President Roosevelt, Sen. Tillman rallied his followers with calls for a thousand retaliatory lynchings. Southern politicians continued to encourage lynching as a power ploy for decades. A statue in Tillman’s honor remains at the South Carolina Capitol in Charleston to this day.

Source: This reprint is from the Kentucky New Era, March 13, 1903. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggers_in_the_White_House

How much have times changed? Written in 1901, this inflammatory poem was published following news that President Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to join the First Family for dinner at the White House earlier that fall. The poem recirculated in a number of Southern newspapers in 1903 and again in the 1920s. A copy has been preserved in the Library of Congress. Those who today disparage the Obamas as having “embarrassed” the country by their tenure in the White House have recently been called out for harboring the exact same racist sentiment. See John Pavlovitz, “No, White Friend -- You Weren’t ‘Embarrassed’ by Barack Obama,” May 26, 2017, http://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/05/26/no-white-friend-you-werent-embarrassed-by-barack-Obama/.

Mississippi Senator James Vardaman complained that “the odor of the nigger” at the White House forced the rats to take “refuge in the stable.” In a speech to Congress, South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, another leading white supremacist, characterized the invitation as a grave insult to 7,000,000 Southerners and two-thirds of Northerners. Back home addressing his constituents, Tillman explicitly called for renewed terrorism like that he had engaged in as a youth during the Reconstruction Era: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”¹⁶ Credible death threats were made against Booker T. Washington. The backlash felt by the White House was so powerful that no president invited another black person to dine at the White House for another three decades. All the while, Southern politicians encouraged lynching as a power ploy for more than half a century after Senator Tillman’s blood-thirsty appeal.

When anger at Hearst had subsided following McKinley’s assassination, the ambitious publisher again tapped into labor’s ongoing resentment of corporate power. Denouncing members of his own class, Hearst won a seat in Congress as a populist Democrat. Yet the maverick millionaire’s personal life differed little from the decadent circle of wealthy degenerates his readers loved to hate. In New York, the handsome transplanted Californian cultivated the backing of Tammany Hall’s new top man, political fixer “Big Tim” Sullivan of the Lower East Side.

Hearst had helped himself get elected to Congress in 1902 by offering free trips to Coney Island Amusement Park to every resident, recognizing that workers did not resent the wealthy when they shared their bounty with the public. He then celebrated with an extravaganza at Madison Square Garden, including fireworks that exploded prematurely and killed eighteen supporters. In 1903, the playboy forty-year-old bachelor married a twenty-one-year-old chorus girl, whose mother ran a brothel protected by Big Tim Sullivan. In 1905, Hearst took on Tammany Hall incumbent Mayor George McClellan (the Civil War General’s son) and almost beat him.

Hearst now had his eye on becoming Governor of New York and ultimately President of the United States. The setback over the McKinley assassination had not dampened Hearst’s enthusiasm for using his newspapers to expose the excesses of his own privileged class. So it was not surprising in 1906 when newsies hawked the very first “trial of the century” – a spectacular shooting death that featured wealthy degenerates, drugs, sex with Broadway chorus girls and defense of traditional moral values by an outraged husband. Hearst instantly realized that a murder trial focused on the dark secrets of New York’s elite social circle was a gold mine. Other papers followed suit. No matter their class or occupation eager readers of daily papers focused on the same question: Would murder charges stick when one tuxedoed vulture killed another in full view of a large crowd?