Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America

From Assassination to the Oval Office

On September 6, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was on vacation — on a camping trip in the Adirondacks in New York State. News that President McKinley had been shot in Buffalo reached the vice president, and he rushed to Buffalo and took the oath of office there on September 14 after McKinley died (Benedetto).

According to Richard Cavendish writing in History Today, McKinley was "killed as much by botched surgery as by the bullet, which the surgeons said they were unable to locate in the president's abdomen because he was so fat."

No matter how McKinley actually died, he passed on the presidency to Roosevelt — an active presidency that those who knew "Teddy" Roosevelt were not at all surprised to witness as it unfolded. According to Richard Lacayo writing in Time magazine, "Roosevelt not only remade America," but "he charmed the pants off everybody while he did it."

Domestic Reforms and the Roosevelt Legacy

Lacayo explains that after McKinley died, Roosevelt found himself faced with "the explosion of industrial power" and "the ineluctable impulse to expand." He confronted fundamental questions: "How much influence should the government have over the economy?" and "How much power should the U.S. exert in the wider world?" A third question, less well known, was, according to Lacayo, "What should we do to protect the environment?"

When Roosevelt moved into the White House, the United States was emerging as a powerful economic force in the world. Lacayo notes that the U.S. was "first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron," and that since 1860 the American population had "doubled" and exports had "tripled." Yet serious problems demanded attention: "poverty, child labor," and "dreadful factory conditions."

Unlike the lumbering, indecisive McKinley, Roosevelt rolled up his sleeves and made things happen. Lacayo writes that Roosevelt helped "break up the monopolies"; he passed the Pure Food and Drug Act; he pushed "meat-inspection and industrial-safety" legislation through Congress; and he worked to make Americans understand that "their new global prominence was a long-term proposition."

Conservation and the Environment

The Roosevelt legacy that many outdoors-minded Americans appreciate most today is his environmental record. He created "150 national forests," 51 national wildlife refuges, and "five national parks," and he "became the first President to make environmentalism a political issue" (Lacayo).

Roosevelt listened to powerful naturalists such as John Muir, "who convinced Teddy that the Federal Government would be a better protector of parkland than the states." He also heeded the advice of his U.S. Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot, who counseled that "strict controls over commercial use of woodlands" was the best policy (Lacayo).

After leaving the presidency, Roosevelt addressed a gathering in Kansas and declared that he felt it was "the duty" of his generation to wisely preserve the nation's natural resources. "But I do not recognize the right to waste them," Roosevelt said, "or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us" (Lacayo).

Conclusion: A Transformative Presidency

In terms of the real effect of the assassination of McKinley, Roosevelt entered the White House after "three decades during which Congress had consistently had the upper hand over the President" (Lacayo). He lost no time in making it plain that he was a different breed. Among his many accomplishments, the Panama Canal stands out as especially significant; and although Congress was not always on his side, Roosevelt used his charm, his intelligence, and his presidential authority to push it through. The assassination of McKinley, tragic as it was, ultimately delivered to the United States a president whose energy, vision, and force of will transformed the nation at home and abroad.