Click the image to access an article in the NYTimes that discusses church reaction in McKinley's post-shooting atmosphere. The catholics present a unified prayer across the city (and world) that denounces the "dastardly crime," and asks all congregation members to pray for a speedy recovery. My personal favorite prayer comes from Rev. Dr. Pierson of the First Baptist Church - then at 79th st. and Broadway - who writes:
We are on the mouth of a volcano. Capital and labor seem to be at war, and I do not know what the consequences will be. It is a most deplorable situation. Under the present system of government it seems as though the poor man was repelled even from the house of worship. There are monopolies now in groups of small numbers of autocrats. They seem to control everything. I think the time will come in a short period when all this will be changed. We must do it, however, with the ballot, and not with the bullet.
The Rev is clearly a smart man to some extent and sees a latent problem in both American and global politics that boiled over soon enough with communist revolutions in Russia and a few socialist evolutions that actually came "with the ballot." Of course, this is the kind of prayer or speech that would be called unpatriotic nowadays. The followers of Milton Friedman roll their eyes (or in their graves) at statements like this.
The Rev rightly points out how the debate between capital and labor has played out through U.S. history, but he's still too idealistic - read: naive - to understand that bullets are always more effective. The president DID end up dying. Chile, Argentina, Poland, etc. as free market nations - read: disasters - could have never happened without bullets. Even in the cases like Poland where the ballots clearly mandated a labor favoritism, a few backroom deals and more than a few bullets corrected that in favor of capital.
McKinley's assassination sure didn't move the U.S. any closer to anarchy, but it was a (disgustingly) effective way to create terror and place emphasis on extreme leftist politics. I doubt a few votes in the ballot box would have accomplished the same thing. My next post will be an editorial that came the day after the shooting which rips Emma Goldman apart. It's interesting how Goldman's policies are outlined in detail through the venom.
