Review of The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

In The President and the Assassin, Scott Miller tells the tales of two Americans, one well-known and the other mostly forgotten, whose stories intersected in a moment that drastically altered American history.  Miller, a former journalist, narrates the lives and careers of President William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the man who ultimately assassinated him. Far from being a traditional biography, Miller’s work devotes very little space to McKinley’s early life and pre-presidential career.  Miller instead chooses to focus on McKinley’s presidency, while also relating the story of Czolgosz and the economic, social, and political forces that helped mold him into an anarchist and an assassin.

The President and the Assassin is written in an engaging, almost gripping style; at times, it is very difficult to put down.  The one significant flaw of the book is the time gap between the chapters on McKinley and those on Czolgosz; often one reads of McKinley’s actions in the 1890s in one chapter and then about events in the life of Czolgosz or other anarchists that occurred twenty years earlier. This constant going back and forth in time might prove confusing to a reader who knows little about Gilded Age America.  Despite this, the book is well worth reading.  Readers who seek an in-depth biography of McKinley will need to look elsewhere.  But for those seeking to learn about the major events of late nineteenth-century America, particularly the labor and anarchist movements, major strikes, and the Spanish-American War, Miller has presented an outstanding introduction.