American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [67]
LEON CZOL GOSZ.
It was not a name that rolled off the tongues of native-born Americans. With great authority, the Journal of the American Medical Association informed its learned readers that the man who fired two shots into President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, “bears a name that can not be mistaken for that of an American.”
To make matters worse, the press reported that Czolgosz was an anarchist. To many Americans already unsettled by large numbers of immigrants from strange lands, the shooting reinforced the connection between foreignness, criminality, and radicalism.
Yet there was one problem: Leon Czolgosz was an American citizen, native-born in Michigan to Polish Catholic parents who had fled Prussia. Despite this inconvenient fact, McKinley’s assassination again stoked America’s fear of immigrants. Yet Congress took its time in reacting to the tragedy, waiting almost two years before it added anarchism to the list of offenses for which immigrants could be excluded. While it was at it, Congress also added prostitutes, epileptics, and professional beggars.
Theodore Roosevelt had little use for anarchists, calling them treasonous criminals who “prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order” and arguing that their philosophy was “no more an expression of ‘social discontent’ than picking pockets or wife beating.” Yet for Roosevelt, out of the tragic murder of William McKinley came the fulfillment of his own ambition as he was now catapulted into the White House. Within three short years, Roosevelt had gone from war hero to governor to vice president to president.
The bullets that ended McKinley’s life also put a close to nineteenthcentury America. Roosevelt seemed different from his predecessors in almost every way. He approached the presidency with the vim and vigor he had approached everything else in his life. He possessed a restless and curious mind. His speeches pulsed with energy, with little of the florid and flabby rhetoric of his predecessors. Instead, he spoke the language of action, urging Americans toward the strenuous life. He wrote in 1894: “We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, the courage, and the virtue to do them.” And by 1901 Roosevelt saw that there was still much to do.
In the previous decade or so, the pieces had been put in place for a strong national government at home and abroad. Roosevelt wanted to use that national government for solving problems and fighting evils. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”
Roosevelt is often associated with trust busting and conservation, but he was just as interested in immigration. If Washington was the father of the country and Lincoln the savior of the union, then Theodore Roosevelt was the philosopher of the modern nation. He believed that immigration was central to the question of American identity.
Roosevelt was no newcomer to the issue. Back in 1887, he delivered a blistering, red-meat political speech in front of the cream of New York’s elite gathered for a feast at Delmonico’s, in which he lashed into Governor Grover Cleveland for allowing the admission of “moral paupers and lunatics” at Castle Garden. In 1897, while serving as New York police commissioner, Roosevelt expressed his horror that a local newspaper had said he was opposed to immigration restriction. Roosevelt had the paper quickly correct the error. When President Cleveland later vetoed the literacy bill, Roosevelt “took a kind of grim satisfaction in Cleveland’s winding up his career by this action, so that his last stroke was given to injure the country as much as he possibly could.”
Roosevelt worried about the negative effects of unrestricted immigration. The young patrician criticized businessmen who demanded cheap immigrant labor, saying they were “committing