McKinley Survives Assassination
* In September 1901, only seven months after the start of his second term, McKinley was assassinated. Leon Czolgolz was out of work, an immigrant, and an anarchist. His actions and later conviction led to a greater wave of hostility for all three groups. Czolgolz fired three times, hitting McKinley twice. One shot only grazed him, the second buried itself deep in the obese president's body. Doctors were unable to find it and McKinley died of gangrene. An experimental X-ray machine was nearby, but never used to locate the bullet.
* McKinley's Vice President Teddy Roosevelt became president. Political boss Mark Hanna originally pushed for Roosevelt to become Vice President, hoping it would keep the reform minded young New York Governor out of the way. Had McKinley lived to finish his term, he would have done some things quite differently from Roosevelt.
* Today Roosevelt is well known for many of firsts, the first president to take on corporate power, to recognize unions, to push for conservation and environmentalism. McKinley was for none of those. He was elected as the most pro-business president ever, supported by elites that feared both the Populist Party and small p populists such as his opponent, William Jennings Bryant. (See Section Eight.)
* Overseas, one of Roosevelt's most important actions was to declare the US-Philippines War over, offer amnesty to Filipino nationalists, and push for Filipino independence, however slowly. McKinley would not have done any of this. (See Section Three.) He remained convinced to the end of his life that Filipinos were too inferior to govern themselves. McKinley's arrogant and racist actions caused the unnecessary war in the Philippines in the first place, people he theoretically had launched a war to liberate. McKinley did nothing to halt the many atrocities carried out by General Otis and others. A surviving McKinley means a Philippines much worse off, one that has to wait until the end of his term for possible changes. The additional Filipino death toll from three more years war and disease would be at least tens of thousands, possibly more.
* Within the US one could point to additional deaths as well. Teddy Roosevelt's reforms included the Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the Food and Drug Administration. Before this, there were no guarantees one's food or medicine was safe. The most notorious case was the poisoning of thousands of US soldiers given canned beef preserved with formaldehyde, the same chemical used to preserve corpses.
* Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle also shocked the US public. Roosevelt sent a committee to investigate. They confirmed the novel's accuracy. He agreed to keep their report secret as long as Congress passed his act. McKinley would have never done anything similar. Activists had been trying and failing to pass the act for 27 years. Many Americans would continue to die from tainted products until such a law was finally passed, perhaps under Wilson in 1912.