Assassination of William McKinley. Czolgosz shoots President McKinley with a concealed revolver, at Pan-American Exposition reception, Sept. 6th, 1901.


A note to readers: this is an old post on the archive website for Promethean PAC. It was written when we were known as LaRouche PAC, before changing our name to Promethean PAC in April 2024. You can find the latest daily news and updates on www.PrometheanAction.com. Additionally, Promethean PAC has a new website at www.PrometheanPAC.com.


View and Download a print / PDF version here

Part 1—The British Empire is America’s Historic Enemy

Part 2—The British Threat to Donald Trump

Part 3—The British Kill Abraham Lincoln

Part 5—The British Kill John F. Kennedy


Part 4—The British Kill William McKinley

Before proceeding to the subject of the British assassination of William McKinley, given how little people know of McKinley today, a brief introduction is required.

McKinley was the last Lincoln Republican and the last Civil War veteran to serve as President of the United States, having fought at the Second Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Antietam. Throughout his long career, McKinley was devoted to the memory and intentions of Abraham Lincoln, and on February 12, 1895, McKinley delivered a eulogy in Albany, New York on the eighty-sixth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. In the Eulogy for Lincoln, McKinley says:

“The greatest names in American history are Washington and Lincoln. One is forever associated with the independence of the States and formation of the Federal Union, the other with universal freedom and the preservation of the Union. Washington enforced the Declaration of Independence as against England; Lincoln proclaimed its fulfillment not only to a downtrodden race in America, but to all people for all time who may seek the protection of our flag. These illustrious men achieved grander results for mankind within a single century, from 1775 to 1865, than any other men ever accomplished in all the years since first the flight of time began. . ..

“The present generation knows Washington only from history, and by that alone can judge him. Lincoln, we know by history also, but thousands are still living who participated in the great events in which he was leader and master. Many of his contemporaries survived him; some are here yet in almost every locality. So, Lincoln is not far removed from us; he may be said to be still known to the millions—not surrounded by the mist of antiquity, nor a halo of idolatry that is impenetrable.”

Today, McKinley is most remembered as the champion of Protectionism, and his 1890 Protective Tariff remains as the apex of the protectionist system. Speaking of that Tariff, McKinley said, “The law of 1890 gave work and wages to all such as they had never had before. It did it by establishing great industries in this country. . .. It had no friends in Europe.”  In 1897, McKinley’s first act as President was to push through a law heavily taxing British imports, so as “to preserve the home market. . . to our own producers; to revive and increase manufactures.”

But McKinley was more than just a proponent of narrow “protectionism.”  Beginning as early as his years in Congress, and as a central feature of his Presidency, McKinley increasingly put forward a policy then known by the name of “Reciprocity.”  Under McKinley, this idea of Reciprocity became the guidepost for all of U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward the nations of Latin America. As the word implies, this was a policy of partnership among nations, particularly in the areas of mutually beneficial economic, scientific, and industrial development.

McKinley’s Anti-Imperial Vision

On September 6, 1901, William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist revolutionary in Buffalo, New York. Twenty-four hours earlier, the President had delivered the major address to the Pan-American Exposition, a conference of nations from the Americas, devoted to science, industry, trade, and economics. This speech outlined a policy which was intended to define his second term as President. Here are a few excerpts from that speech:

“The Pan-American exposition has done its work thoroughly, presenting in its exhibits evidence of the highest skill and illustrating the progress of the human family in the western hemisphere. This portion of the earth has no cause for humiliation for the part it has performed in the march of civilization. . .. The wisdom and energy of all the nations are none too great for the world’s work. The success of art, science, industry, and invention is an international asset and a common glory. . .  Modern inventions have brought into close relations widely separated peoples and made them better acquainted. Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced. . .

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe. Now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and seas. God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. . .

“The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of goodwill and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals. . .  Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.

“Who can tell the new thoughts that have been awakened, the ambitions fired, and the high achievements that will be wrought through this exposition? Gentlemen, let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict, and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war. We hope that all who are represented here may be moved to higher and nobler effort for their own and the world’s good, and that out of this city may come, not only greater commerce and trade, but more essential than these, relations of mutual respect, confidence and friendship which will deepen and endure.  Our earnest prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness, and peace to all our neighbors and like blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth. . .

“The good work will go on. It cannot be stopped. These buildings will disappear, this creation of art and beauty and industry will perish from sight, but their influence will remain to “Make it live beyond its too short living with praises and thanksgiving.”

Crisis for the British Empire

British imperial power had reached its zenith with victories in both the Crimean War (1856) and the Second Opium War (1860). However, Britain’s 1861-1865 plot to dismember and subjugate the United States (see Part 3 - The British Kill Abraham Lincoln) had not only failed but resulted in an explosion of manufacturing, new technologies and scientific breakthroughs in America. In the decades following the Lincoln Presidency, the United States leapt forward as the greatest industrial power in human history. Even worse for the British, other nations began to adopt American System economic methods. The Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, the 1879 decision by Otto von Bismarck in Germany to adopt protectionism, the Russian decision to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1891, and similar developments in China and elsewhere, taken as a whole, posed a mortal danger to British Imperial rule. During these decades, Russia and Germany were America’s two most important partners on the world stage, and this shared anti-imperial future is precisely what McKinley outlined in his final public speech at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.

London Unleashes Murder, Inc.

On March 13, 1881, the great reformer, and the defender of the United States from 1862 to 1865, the Czar of Russia Alexander II, was assassinated. Nine years later the pro-American German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was removed from office in a political coup d’état. Both men had held extensive discussions with Ulysses Grant during his 1878-1879 World Tour, and both were in complete concord with the policy orientation of the Lincoln and Grant Presidencies.

Then, between 1894 and 1900, the President of France Sadi Carnot (1894), the Spanish Premier (1897), the Empress of Austria (1898), and the King of Italy (1900) were all assassinated, all of them by British-steered “anarchists.”   The anarchist and nihilist terrorists who carried out these assassinations are best described as “Generation 2” of the Palmerston/Mazzini British Intelligence apparatus from the 1850s and 60s. Many of these groups were based in the “safe haven” of London, were financed and protected by oligarchical forces within the British elite, and operated, like Mazzini, as an unofficial branch of the British Foreign Office. Those assassinated were all deemed a threat to British imperial interests.

In her autobiography, the Russian/American anarchist Emma Goldman wrote, “Anarchist activities (flourished) in London. . .  England was the haven for refugees from all lands, who carried on their work without hindrance.”   In London, Goldman published the anarchist journal Torch, which advocated political assassinations as the means for revolutionary change. Rather than prosecuting or deporting her, Goldman was befriended by many British aristocrats. When she was deported from the United States in 1919, it was the British aristocrat Bertrand Russell who sponsored her return to England. Russell’s grandfather Lord John Russell, twice Britain’s Prime Minister, had been one of the most rabid British backers of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, and the Russell family had operated at the highest level of the British Empire for generations. Goldman’s London headquarters was at the home of William Michael Rossetti, the brother of the degenerate British aristocrat, the “Pre-Raphaelite” poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Goldman, herself, did more than just talk and agitate. In 1892, she planned and helped her lover Alexander Berkman carry out an assassination attempt against Henry Clay Frick, the Chairman of Carnegie Steel. Frick was shot twice and stabbed four times by Berkman but survived the attack.

1901—the Assassins Strike

On September 6, 1901, one day after his historic address at the Pan-American Exposition, President William McKinley was shot twice by the “anarchist” Leon Czolgosz. Eight days later McKinley died from his wounds. Czolgosz was a disciple of Emma Goldman, having met with her at her home in Cleveland in June 1901, and attending a lecture by her on the “destruction of government” a bare two weeks before he killed the President. There are reports, likely, but unconfirmed, of other additional meetings between Goldman and Czolgosz during the summer of 1901. During Czolgosz’s trial, Goldman authored an article titled “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” wherein she defended Czolgosz's killing of McKinley and compared it to the assassination of Julius Caesar by Marcus Junius Brutus.

Czolgosz also attended lectures at Goldman’s political headquarters during those years, the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City. Only weeks before McKinley’s assassination, the New York City Police Commissioner had publicly warned that the Henry Street Settlement House was at the center of assassination threats to President McKinley. The Settlement House was itself created by the highest echelon of the London and Wall Street elite. It was built in 1893 with funds provided by Wall Street’s Jacob Schiff, Chairman of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and his partner Sir Ernst Cassell, personal banker and friend to Britain’s King Edward VII and a member of the King’s Privy Council.

The attack on President McKinley had been fully expected. In 1900 McKinley’s chief of staff, Senator Hanna, had requested “that proper safeguards be thrown around the person of the President,” and he stated that “anarchists or Socialists through their various organizations resolved to rid the earth of a number of its rulers, [starting with] the Empress Eugenie of Austria. . .  the King of Italy. . .  and then the President of the United States. . .  and the first two calls have come to pass as predicted.”

This was the London-centered apparatus, funded and protected by the highest levels of the British Empire, which carried out the murder of the American President.

The Turning Point

McKinley’s Vice-President during his first term was former New Jersey Senator Garret Hobart, but Hobart had died in office in 1899. In 1900 the question was who would replace Hobart on the electoral ticket. McKinley despised Teddy Roosevelt and fiercely opposed his nomination as Vice President. At that time Roosevelt was the darling of the London/Wall Street imperial war party, whose intrigues had dragged the reluctant President McKinley into the 1898 war against Spain. Throughout 1900, American newspapers, together with the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party applied enormous pressure on McKinley to accept Roosevelt as Vice President. Eventually, McKinley acquiesced.

Teddy Roosevelt was a fanatical Anglophile, and politically a lineal descendent of the southern Confederacy. He often referred to James D. Bulloch, his mother’s brother, as his “favorite uncle.”  This is the same James Bulloch who had been the financier of John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln assassination. Roosevelt publicly praised Bulloch on many occasions, e.g., in 1905:

“My mother’s two brothers, James Dunwoody Bulloch, and Irvine Bulloch came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty. ‘Uncle Jimmy’ Bulloch was a dear old, retired sea-captain, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived. . .  Men and women, don't you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty.”

It is not possible to believe that Teddy Roosevelt was unaware of his uncle’s true activities, since in 1883 Bulloch had authored and published his infamous anti-American work, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe.

Stepping into the Oval Office over the bloody body of McKinley, Roosevelt proceeded to reverse every one of McKinley’s policies. He abrogated our traditional alliances with Japan, Russia, and Germany, and immediately brought America into a global partnership with the British Empire. In the western hemisphere, McKinley’s policy of Reciprocity, based on American republican ideals, was jettisoned, and replaced by the policy of “Big Stick” colonialism. Roosevelt blatantly attacked and intimidated Latin American nations, blackening the name of the American republic.

He closed the American West to settlement, locked up western lands from development and cancelled all of Lincoln’s economic development measures. He turned over national financial power to the British banking cartel of Rothschild and Morgan. During the financial Panic of 1907, Roosevelt established the National Monetary Commission, a group charged with “reforming” America’s banking and financial system. It was the work of that Commission which led directly to the infamous 1910 Jekyll Island tryst, whose product was the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1913. It was Teddy Roosevelt who gave us the Federal Reserve—a privately owned Central Bank—not Woodrow Wilson.

Also, in 1908 Roosevelt established America’s first national police force, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the forerunner of today’s FBI. Congress refused to allocate funds for what they charged was a nationwide “secret police,” so Roosevelt instructed Attorney General Charles Bonaparte to establish the agency under Presidential authority.

1901 was a devastating turning point for the American Republic, one from which we have never fully recovered. Cui Bono? Who benefitted from this? Well, by 1915 the Lincoln-Grant-McKinley tradition was dead, America was closely aligned with the British Empire, a London/Wall Street money-centered power was in control of the nation’s economy, Woodrow Wilson, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan was in the White House, and America was preparing to enter World War I on the side of its historic enemy and the assassin of our Presidents.