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Notes -
Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.
On a serious note, I would say that Leon Czolgosz got at least a piece of what he wanted in killing Bill McKinley. McKinley’s successor genuinely did make significant efforts to rein in some of the worst practices of large predatory corporations which were exacerbating the obscene levels of wealth inequality typical of the period. Sure, America never got full anarcho-socialism like Czolgosz and his comrades hoped - although it wasn’t for a significant lack of trying by the Wobblies and other major communist labor movements of the time - but I would say that at the very least taking out McKinley probably moved thing at least directionally toward his assassin’s goals.
I definitely had to look this up, you’re talking about William McKinley. I didn’t recognize the name from the list of presidents stuck in my head, I thought you were talking about some other politician.
Yes, there’s a bit in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins where people sing a patriotic campaign song calling him “Bill McKinley”.
I’ve tried to find out if during McKinley’s life, people actually did refer to him familiarly as “Bill”. The only concrete example I’ve found is that during the Battle of Antietam, McKinley drove a supply wagon carrying, among other things, coffee, and that this led to political opponents later in his career derisively referring to him as “Coffee Bill”.
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"rein in" is an equestrian term and has no G.
Yeah, that’s what I get for posting right before I go to sleep.
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I like.
I'm not convinced that Teddy changed the trajectory of the regulatory state. This is all speculative, of course, but both Democrats (stagnant in support, admittedly) and a meaningful and growing number of Republicans were anti-corporate in sympathies. Teddy may have been the particular executor of many anti-corporate policies, but had McKinley not been assassinated, would his vision have dominated for the next 20 years? I suspect eventually someone outside of it would have won a Presidential election (perhaps TR himself).
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