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Posted on 08/10/2005 10:00:34 PM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Anarchist Leon Czolgosz came to Buffalo, New York, with a mission. He believed that government was evil, and he planned to stamp out that evil, beginning at the top.  Leon Czolgosz stood in line and counted the people between him and the president of the United States. Nondescript, dressed in a dark suit, and wearing an innocent expression, Czolgosz (pronounced chôlgôsh) looked younger than his 28 years. He had waited for more than two hours in 82-degree heat on September 6, 1901, for his turn to shake hands with President William McKinley, who was visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. It was the first year of the new century, a perfect time to reflect on the nation’s rise in world prominence and to speculate on the future. The exposition, a world’s fair that celebrated the Americas’ industrial progress and achievement, had attracted visitors from around the world. The event was more than halfway through its six-month run when President McKinley, the most popular chief executive since Abraham Lincoln, arrived.  Leon Czolgosz (1873—1901) McKinley’s final public appearance in Buffalo was an afternoon reception in the Temple of Music, an ornate red-brick hall on the exposition grounds. Since being elected president in 1896, McKinley had been notorious for discounting his own personal safety at public appearances, and he had repeatedly resisted attempts by his personal secretary, George Cortelyou, to cancel this event. Cortelyou had argued that it wasn’t worth the risk to greet such a small number of people, but the 58-year-old president refused to change his mind. "Why should I?" he asked. "Who would want to hurt me?" Cortelyou, always nervous about public receptions, tightened security as best he could. The people who wished to greet the president at the Temple had to file down a narrow aisle under the scrutiny of a special guard provided for the occasion. Outside, mounted police and soldiers controlled the massive crowd seeking entrance. Just months into his second presidential term, McKinley -- who had easily won reelection in 1900 -- had made the most significant speech of his presidency the day before, announcing a policy of reciprocal trade agreements with foreign nations to encourage improved markets for American goods. It marked the culmination of a decade-long evolution in thinking for the long-time isolationist and exemplified his statesmanship in recognition of changing times.  President McKinley seated at his desk, 1900. McKinley’s star first rose on the national scene some 10 years earlier as the Republican Party’s staunchest advocate of protectionism. He believed that high tariffs discouraged the importation of foreign goods, thereby helping keep prices high for American goods and producing profits for industries and high wages for workers. Using protectionism as his platform for election to the U.S. House of Representatives and the Ohio statehouse, where he served two terms as governor, McKinley established himself as his party’s standard-bearer. According to biographer Margaret Leech, McKinley "carried to Congress an emotional conviction that the solution for all the country’s economic ills was to make the already high tariff rates higher still." By 1900, however, he saw reciprocity as a means for commercial expansion and a way to promote world peace. McKinley was a veteran of the Civil War and retained vivid memories of the bloody conflict. As president, he was reluctantly drawn into the Spanish-American War of 1898. At first he downplayed stories of Spanish atrocities against Cuban nationals. But the yellow journalism of competing newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fired passions after the battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana’s harbor. Big business, looking to expand markets, added to the inexorable forces pushing the president toward war.  Temple of Music Building. President William McKinley was shot twice outside there by a deranged anarchist, Leon Czolgosz and died eight days later. Spain proved little challenge though, as American forces easily defeated the outnumbered and out-gunned army and navy of the Old World power. As the victor, the United States gained Puerto Rico, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines. The Pacific Islands were particularly significant as they established an American presence in a new hemisphere. Moreover, the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands that summer. American business concerns became ecstatic over the prospects for expanded influence overseas. But not everyone supported the president. Hearst in particular continued to publicly criticize him. The condemnation reached a low point on April 10, 1901, when the publisher’s Journal printed an editorial that declared, "If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done." Although Hearst had been responsible for many attacks on McKinley, he maintained that the editorial had been published without his knowledge. He ordered the presses stopped, but a number of newspapers were already on the streets. On September 5 an estimated 50,000 people, including Leon Czolgosz, had listened to the president’s speech. "Isolation is no longer possible or desirable," McKinley said. "The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good-will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals." The New York Times, remarking on the president’s about-face, wrote, "Unquestionably the President has learned much in the last few years."  Leon Czolgosz Unfortunately, America’s move toward imperialism had done little for the common workingman. Already frustrated by years of economic depression that began with the Panic of 1893, and by the lack of progress toward more humane working conditions, American workers wondered why some of the vast wealth of the industrial boom wasn’t trickling down to them. Millionaires like railroad king Cornelius Vanderbilt, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and banker J.P. Morgan had accumulated unprecedented private wealth and were known to spend more on an evening’s entertainment than a coal miner or tradesman could earn in a lifetime. Such ostentatious displays bred discontent. Rubbing salt in the wound, the industrialists routinely relied on the government to help squelch worker uprisings. Employee unions had progressively become a more dominant force in American life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century as they sought to improve working conditions. Strikers had clashed violently with police and the military in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886 and again in the Pullman strike eight years later, leaving scores of people dead in the streets. In 1892, Pinkerton detectives in Homestead, Pennsylvania, suppressed a steel strike and protected scab laborers. The government had sided with management against workers in each instance.  Emma Goldman A more dangerous element -- anarchism -- exacerbated the situation when it arrived from Europe. Anarchists brought a more radical philosophy to the scene, maintaining that any form of government exploited and oppressed the people. They believed that one way to combat government was to eliminate those in power. Since 1894, anarchists had assassinated four European leaders -- President Sadi Carnot of France, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, King Humbert of Italy, and Spanish statesman Cánovas del Castillo. In the United States, an anarchist had attacked industrialist Henry Clay Frick, in part for his role in the failed Homestead strike. For some individuals with little or no formal education, few skills, and no hope of improvement, anarchism offered a natural outlet for their frustration. Cleveland resident Leon Czolgosz fit the profile perfectly. Poor, reclusive, and often unemployed, he had been born in Detroit to Polish parents in 1873. He left school after five and a half years and worked at various jobs and later drifted to Chicago and became interested in the socialist movement. The interest continued in Cleveland, where he took a job in the city’s wire mills. Two weeks before he traveled to Buffalo, Czolgosz attended a lecture given by the nation’s most notorious anarchist leader, Emma Goldman. She spoke of the struggle between the classes and why the time had come for action against government.
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You were up late. Partying again 'eh?
I think you're right. Good morning DD.
We'll have to remind the 'natives' that the mountain is ours now, we'll keep the American name.
Thanks for falling in at the Foxhole. We don't hear from many Alaskans.
A truly unforgettable moment.
Good morning feather.
Good morning PE. Any news yet?
So this is why you were up late. Ping me next week if you are watching and I'll try to stay up and watch it.
A bit off topic
Al-Qaeda, Victorian style
The Times of London ^ | 8/5/05 | Graham Stewart
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1457618/posts
A bomb on the Underground was only one of the anarchist outrages that shook Europe a century ago
AL-QAEDA’S international terror network is not unrivalled in history. A little over a century ago, anarchist cells, operating throughout the Western world, caused havoc. In the space of nine years between 1892 and 1901, anarchists assassinated the President of the United States, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria and the King of Italy. As scalp hunting goes, this was an impressive collection. In London, post offices were blown up and public figures were targeted. A bomb went off on an Underground train as it was passing from Farringdon into what was then the Aldersgate Tube station. The carriage was shredded. Miraculously only one man was killed. Bombs were lobbed from upper galleries on to the floors of the Paris stock exchange and the French Chamber of Deputies. Army barracks were attacked. A bomb was detonated in a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Another device was tossed into a Madrid theatre, killing 20 people.
These indiscriminate acts caused widespread alarm. Dark and shadowy bearded figures, with capes concealing orb-shaped bombs with fizzing fuses, stalked the popular imagination. The Times warned its readers of the “anarchist epidemic” and told the Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith, to quit his “masterly inactivity” and get a grip on the problem. For a brief moment in the mid-1890s, the Western world shook before this new enemy within. And yet, where is the anarchist terror network now? Are there lessons in its rise and fall for today’s war on terror?
The militant atheists of late 19th- century Europe would have found little common intellectual ground with 21st-century Islamists. Yet, both were ascetic movements whose followers were repelled by the decadence and thoughtless exploitation they believed inherent in Western bourgeois society. Both movements turned away from the world as it was in favour of an idealised world as it might be. Like the Islamists, the anarchists rejected the political compromises of the democratic process. The more desperate among them put their point across with dynamite instead.
Anarchists justified terrorism with the euphemism “propaganda by the deed”. The argument was lucidly expressed by Emile Henry when he stood in the dock during his trial for bombing the Parisian station café: “I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.”
These sentiments are reminiscent of those believers in American hubris who applauded when the mighty twin towers came tumbling down. Like al-Qaeda’s operatives, anarchists thrived on the cult of death. The 30,000 killed in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the hanging of four anarchists on flimsy evidence for a Chicago bomb explosion and even the death of three protesters at the hands of the police trying to prevent an illegal demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1887 (the original “Bloody Sunday”): all were co-opted as martyrs to the cause whose deaths should be avenged.
Unlike nationalist terrorist groups, such as the IRA or ETA, the gripe of anarchists and al-Qaeda was not confined to a specific grievance against a single country and its government. Rather, the grievance was international in reach and fundamental in ideology. Many of the anarchist outrages were committed by terrorists who were not of the same nationality as their target. A high proportion came from immigrant communities, often those who had arrived as political asylum-seekers through Victorian Britain’s open door.
It was widely assumed in Europe that there was a tacit understanding that the anarchist cells could remain unmolested in Britain so long as they carried out their attacks abroad. In an echo of today’s scathing criticism of “Londonistan”, such tolerance infuriated European neighbours who believed London was becoming a base for terrorist strikes on the Continent. When the terror came to London, the foreign press could scarcely conceal its relief.
In 1898 the Italian Government called an international conference to address the anarchist threat. The intention was to reach agreement for each country to frame laws that banned anarchist publications and publicity of anarchist trials and that all anarchists should be repatriated to their country of origin. This proved too sweeping at the time, although the US Congress responded to the assassination of President McKinley with a law banning entry to the country to anyone “who disbelieves in or is opposed to all organised governments”. In Britain, the 1905 Aliens Act allowed for the deportation of undesirable immigrants.
By then, the anarchist terror threat had already abated. Partly, it was because the forces of law and order made life so difficult for the terrorists and their sympathisers. This was not easy. The decentralised nature of anarchism meant that its terrorist cells were small. It could not be decapitated merely by rounding up the ringleaders. Indeed, many of the atrocities were committed by adherents acting on their own initiative.
However, this was not an excuse for doing nothing. Suspected anarchists were watched, their meetings monitored, their clubs closed down. Groups remaining unmolested feared that they had been infiltrated by police informers. This had a corrosive effect on the bonds of trust that underground movements depend upon. Those sent to prison became suspicious on release of those who remained at liberty. Suspicion bred disintegration.
The principal cause, though, was the realisation that while other socialist movements were making gains, the anarchists, by refusing to engage and cooperate, were not. Potential converts joined the radical causes that were succeeding instead. This is the problem for “all-or-nothing” fundamentalism: it usually ends with nothing.
Terrorists with specific goals and the nous to make tactical compromises can end up in power. But this imperfect world is not good enough for al-Qaeda. And that profound weakness may yet confine it to the same historical irrelevance as the 1890s anarchists.
I recall when he said this the media came down with a darn near terminal case of the vapors.
Would love to discuss this series with you! It comes on at 10PM PST on FX. It's so obvious they shoot in the high desert areas around Acton and Palmdale, CA. I know from what I've read that the inaccuracies are big enough to drive a truck through but as a former actor they have cast an excellent ensemble and you really grow to love the characters/soldiers they portray. If I were still in the "biz" (barf), I'd be tempted to push my former agent to get me a part.
[That's probably more than I needed to say]
Sounds like a typical politician. He ran on one issue, and then went the other way on it as soon as he was in power.
But if you were still in the biz you would be too high and mighty to be here so I'm glad you're not. :-)
I'll try to catch it next Wednesday night.
The MSM have no sense of humor.
It's hard to have a sense of humor when you're busy saving the world.
Back tonight.
HOWDY!
Well said . . . it was the "High and Mighty" Himself that led me away from the biz.
I'll try to remember (challenging lately) to remind you next Weds.
Hi miss Feather
Howdy ma'am
No news til Monday
I never where we're gonna meet anymore. ;-)
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