HISTORY DOES'T REPEAT ITSELF, BUT HISTORIANS DO.

The president and the assassin A century ago, terrorists struck at the heart of America. Our leaders hit back hardand also began addressing the country's real problems. (Eric Rauchway, Boston Globe, 9/7/03)

In September 1901, a terrorist attack in Buffalo, N.Y., struck at the heart of a new American empire. It was the latest in a decades-long string of attacks on Western nations. But the response of American leadersabove all, Theodore Roosevelt established a plan for deflecting the hate that inspired such assaults. Even as Roosevelt denounced the evil of terrorism, he used it to invoke the better angels of American nature against the shortcomings of his own society. His methods were influential, though today, they might seem unfamiliar. . . .

As the violence continued, Oswald pointed out, a pattern appeared: The murderers hailed from countries in Eastern and Mediterranean Europe, where "the contrasts of wealth and poverty have reached their most cruel extreme." Many American pundits came to believe that anarchist terrorism was a social problem, a revolt of "misery against happiness," that, unlike insanity, required a political remedy. By the turn of the century none had appeared.

So on Sept. 6, 1901, when an anarchist assassin fatally shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, thus elevating Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, it was shocking but not exactly surprising. . . .

Among American statesmen only Theodore Roosevelt, who had long urged his peers to take radical threats seriously, appeared unembarrassed by the problems that terrorism posed.

"The time of the great social revolutions has arrived," Roosevelt wrote in 1894. "We are all peering into the future to try to forecast the action of the great dumb forces set in operation by the stupendous industrial revolution which has taken place during the present century. We do not know what to make of the vast displacements of population, the expansion of the towns, the unrest and discontent of the masses."

Like the anarchists, Roosevelt diagnosed a growing awareness among Americans of genuine injustice. He believed, as few other politicians did, that the comforts of middle-class life blinded many of his fellow countrymen to the hardships endured by the majority of humankindhardships whose effects might be lessened by political action.

And so, although Roosevelt opened his first address to Congress by pledging himself to fight the "evil" of anarchism, he moved immediately into a much longer section of his speech titled "Regulation of Corporations." He proposed to address the great "social problems" and the "antagonism" of the day the radicalism that threatened Americans' safety by trimming the excesses of unfettered capitalism. . . .

Instead of writing off terrorism as the work of foreigners and madmen, that is, Roosevelt turned the problem into a chance for American self-examination and self-improvement. In the wake of a national trauma, nobody seriously challenged him. His agenda of changing American capitalism, in part so that it would attract less animosity, ruled American politics thereafter. . . .

Czolgosz's evil deed put the country into the hands of a president who believed the business cycle needed regulating and mitigating, not least to prevent the emergence of radicals and to deflect their attention from American institutions. It was a conservative method of thwarting radical threats. Later leaders adopted it, and it kept American capitalism the envy of the world for almost a century afterward.

If, as the British philosopher John Gray claims, "Al Qaeda's closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late 19th-century Europe," then we may learn something from the strategy Roosevelt used to quell that radical threat. Let's hope so.

This is apparently how we are doomed to spend our Septembers for the rest of our lives: refighting the battles of September 12, 2001. We must reform ourselves, we must recognize our own responsibilities, they hate us for a reason, we must not be blinded by our own imperfections, rather we must fight the forces of international terrorism by reforming corporate governence, taming the business cycle (if we could, wouldn't we?) and regulating laissez-faire capitalism.

Let's pass quickly by the fact that the murder of one man, even the President, is somewhat different from 9/11. Let's pass by the fact that the assassin was American. Let's not focus on the fact that the international anarchism had no central organization, no ringleader and no subverted Afghanistan to attack. Let's note only in passing the idiocy of holding up Teddy Roosevelt as a stay-at-home, respect all cultures internationalist. Let's not try to imagine the reaction of those digging through the rubble at Ground Zero if President Bush had used his bullhorn to promise to "address the great 'social problems' and the 'antagonism' of the day . . . by trimming the excesses of unfettered capitalism."

Instead, I refute Rauchway thus. On June 28, 1914, the anarchist Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Ferdinand, leading directly to the First World War, in which 12 million people died and, by concatenation of events, to the Second World War, in which 55 million people died.

Posted by David Cohen at September 7, 2003 10:46 PM