![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Fired up by Goldman’s words on social revolution and liberty-which in turn had emerged from a movement that Miller neatly traces from the work of Edmund Burke, William Godwin and the Transcendentalists-Czolgosz steeled himself for the “propaganda of the deed”-e.g., the kind of deadly terrorism that was rocking European capitals in the 1890s. He moves between the coffer-rich Republican election of the self-made man and Civil War hero McKinley against the populist William Jennings Bryan, to the meeting between the painfully shy working-class loner in Cleveland, Leon Czolgosz, and the charismatic anarchist speaker Emma Goldman. Wall Street Journal correspondent Miller harnesses several narratives successively. The growth of railroads, steel output, consumer goods, patents and sheer American ingenuity enriched the captains of industry, while the laborers, assembly-line workers, coal miners and armies of poor immigrants performed mind-numbing tasks for quarters and dimes per day. The era leading up to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 was defined by enormous expansion in American industry and muscle-flexing abroad as well as the potent rise of labor unrest and revolutionary ideas such as anarchy. A rich, rapacious America clashes with its downtrodden and idealistic in this ambitious, wide-ranging study. ![]()
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