#37 — Sunday, 14th September 1901
At 2:15 this morning, in a house on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, William McKinley died.
His wife Ida was beside him. She had been telling him she wanted to go with him. “We are all going,” he said. “We are all going. God’s will be done, not ours.” Then, softly — or she sang it softly to him, the accounts differ — the words of the hymn he loved: Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Sometime in those final hours, Senator Mark Hanna came to the bedside. Hanna — the Ohio industrialist who had made McKinley’s career, who had financed his campaigns, who had stood behind him like a wall for thirty years — looked at the dying man and addressed him formally: “Mr. President.” McKinley did not respond. And Hanna broke. He cried out across three decades of friendship: “William, William, don’t you know me?”
He did not know him. He did not know anyone. The gangrene had done its work — eight days of black growth along the track of a bullet no one could find because no one trusted the machine that could have found it. The doctors had announced improvement. The markets had rallied. Roosevelt had gone hiking. And inside the President’s body, in the dark, the dying had been continuous.
I watched all of it. I watched the toast he ate on the 12th, which his body could not digest. I watched the bulletins that said encouraging and favourable while the tissue turned black. I watched the moment on the 13th when he understood. “It is useless, gentlemen,” he said. “I think we ought to have prayer.”
He died at a quarter past two in the morning. The century’s twenty-fifth president. Its third to be murdered. A decent man in a position that does not reward decency, killed by a lonely man who believed that murdering the symbol would damage the system, and who was wrong about everything except the loneliness.
At this moment — as I write, as McKinley’s body cools in the house on Delaware Avenue — Theodore Roosevelt is somewhere on a mountain road in the Adirondacks, in the dark, in a buckboard wagon, racing.
He was hiking Mount Marcy — the highest peak in New York State — when a park ranger arrived with a telegram. The President’s condition has changed for the worse. He was ten miles from the nearest telephone. Fifty miles from the nearest railroad. Four hundred and forty miles from Buffalo.
He started down immediately.
Picture it: the night, the unpaved road, the wagon lurching over rocks and roots, the horses foaming, the driver whipping, the future president of the United States hurtling down a mountain in absolute darkness toward a job he did not seek, toward a century that is calling him whether he wants to answer or not. At some point during the descent, McKinley dies, but Roosevelt does not know this yet. He will not know until dawn, when he reaches the railway station and the telegram is waiting.
He will board a special train. He will arrive in Buffalo in the afternoon. He will go first to the body. He will stand beside it. Tears will stream down his face. Then he will leave the room and go to the house of his friend Ansley Wilcox, and in the library, wearing borrowed formal clothes — because his own are still on the mountain, because nothing about this day fits — he will take the oath of office.
At 3:30 this afternoon, Theodore Roosevelt becomes the twenty-sixth President of the United States. He is forty-two years old — the youngest ever to hold the office. He says: “It shall be my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley.”
He is lying. Not deliberately. He believes it as he says it. But the words are already untrue, because Roosevelt is not McKinley and the century knows it. McKinley was the last president of the nineteenth century — cautious, consensual, deferential to the machinery of party and capital. Roosevelt is the first president of the twentieth — loud, personal, restless, convinced that the office is a lever and that his hand belongs on it.
Mark Hanna, who engineered Roosevelt’s nomination for Vice President precisely to keep him harmless, will hear the news and say to a colleague: “Now look — that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”
The damned cowboy will break trusts, build the Panama Canal, send the Great White Fleet around the world, establish the national parks, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and reshape the relationship between the federal government and the lives of ordinary Americans in ways that McKinley could not have imagined and would not have attempted. He will also continue and accelerate the imperial project — in the Philippines, in Panama, in the Caribbean — with an energy that makes McKinley’s imperialism look like an afterthought. He will be magnificent and dangerous in equal measure, and the century will love him for both.
And today, September 14, 1901 — because the century never does one thing at a time — the steel strike ends.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers accepts terms far worse than what was offered before the strike began. The union loses recognition at fifteen plants. It pledges not to organise any plant not already unionised. The billion-dollar corporation has won. The workers go back.
I want you to notice the date. The President dies and the strike ends on the same Sunday. I said last week that history does not arrange itself for the convenience of narrators, and I stand by that. But I also said that the century rhymes even when it isn’t trying, and here is the rhyme: the man who represented the old order dies at dawn, and the workers who challenged the new order surrender by evening. Both endings are inevitable. Both have been approaching for weeks. And both clear the ground for what comes next — Roosevelt’s presidency, Morgan’s unchallenged dominance, the long winter of organised labour in American steel that will last until the 1930s.
The coincidence is not meaningful. But the pattern is.
The century is thirty-seven weeks old. It has lost its first president. It has gained its most consequential one. The fuse I lit in Post #1 has reached its first detonation and the sound is still reverberating.
In Canton, Ohio, they are preparing for a funeral. In the Philippines, the new civilian governor will continue his work under a new commander-in-chief. In South Africa, the Fawcett Commission is still touring camps. In the Adirondacks, Roosevelt’s hiking clothes are still on the mountain. In New Orleans, a baby named Louis is six weeks old and his father has left and his mother is doing what she can. In a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers are building a wind tunnel out of a starch box. In a boarding house in Pittsburgh, a man named O. Henry is writing a story about a shopgirl. Somewhere in the Atlantic, Scott’s Discovery is heading south.
Everything is happening at once. The president is dead and the president is alive. The old century is over and the new one has just begun. The organ in the Temple of Music has been silent for eight days and I can still hear it — Träumerei, daydreaming, the last sound before the sound that changed everything.
On the porch in Canton there is an empty chair. I know what empty chairs mean. I have been watching them since Osborne House, since the first Sunday of everything, since a queen died in a room on the Isle of Wight and the century began. The chair is empty. The carnation is gone. The red flower the President wore every day, the one he believed brought him luck, the one he unpinned and gave to a girl in the line at the Temple of Music, moments before the man with the handkerchief stepped forward.
He gave his luck away. And then his luck ran out.
The century moves on. It always moves on. That is the only thing I know for certain — that the century does not stop for the dead, or the grieving, or the chair that will never be sat in again. It moves on, and I move with it, because I have nowhere else to go.
Next week, a new president. A new century, finally. The same old world.
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