'Illustrious Life of William McKinley - Our Martyred President'' by Murat Halstead. Lansing, MI: P. A. Stone: 1901. Hardcover. Illustrated book, bound in brown cloth boards with photographic McKinley cover, measures 7'' x 9.5'' and runs 472pp. Chapter ...

by Murat Halstead

Basically in good shape, the photo on the front is torn, the inside is fine with age yellowing of pages.

Genres: Presidents

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Murat Halstead was a nineteenth century American journalist, editor and author.

In his youth, Halstead worked on his family's farm during the spring and summer months and attended school during the late fall and winter. His mother taught Halstead how to read before he was four years old. It is said that as a boy he read such books as Plutarch’s Lives, Josephus, and Rollin’s Ancient History. Halstead enrolled in the Farmers' College near Cincinnati, Ohio in 1848 and graduated four years later.

At the age of eighteen, Halstead began providing articles to various newspapers in Cincinnati. In 1853, he became a reporter with the Cincinnati Commercial. Within a year, Halstead became a partial owner of the paper. By 1865, he was the editor of the Commercial. It later merged with the Cincinnati Gazette and the new paper was then called the Commercial Gazette. Halstead served as its editor.

Halstead was present at the execution of John Brown, in 1859. He personally reported several battles during Civil War, and was a correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War, where he sided emphatically with the Germans.

As an editor, Halstead routinely criticized politicians for their corrupt actions. He especially disliked the fact that United States Senate seats were usually given to the wealthiest men in a state. He also strongly supported the Republican Party's platform.

In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison nominated Halstead to be the United States ambassador to Germany. The United States Senate refused to approve the appointment, probably because he had raised the ire of some Senators alleging in editorials that they had purchased their seats.

Halstead later moved to New York City, where he published stories in the Cosmopolitan Monthly and served as editor of the Brooklyn Standard Union. At the start of the Spanish–American War, he once again became a war correspondent and went to the Philippines. His later years he spent writing books, mainly biographies, and contributing articles to magazines.

Halstead died at his home in Cincinnati from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1908.
—from Wikipedia, obituary in the New York Times and Ohio History Central (http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/M...)

Reviews

[Davy Bennett]

An older neighbor showed me a copy of this 1901 book, and it blew me away.
I just found this used hardback on Amazon for $12 and $4.99 shipping. Looks like the same original book I looked at nearly a decade ago.

This book came out just after the McKinley Assassination in 1900-1901. A recent immigrant and anarchist shot him, so various anarchist groups around the country were being investigated by the government. The FBI wasn't created until 1924.

On page 82, there is a blurb about government investigators going to my Moms birthplace near my hometown. Several Sicilians had been imported to elevate a railroad line down to Indianapolis (55 miles or so). In Hartford City, Indiana, they interviewed some of these immigrants and found McKinley had been on a list of those doomed. One of those Sicilians shot and killed my great grandads brother in the 1920's, a bar fight over the same barmaid. Funny thing is, a married-in Aunt to that same family had a full Sicilian mother. I knew her well growing up, didn't snap to the fact she was half Italian. I just knew she made the best lasagna I had ever eaten, actually the first I ever had also.

Also, on the same page, a United Brethern minister named Joseph A. Wildman, in nearby Huntington Indiana, was tarred and feathered for saying that he wanted to give McKinley his fair due, but that he was nothing but a political demagogue while living. My maternal grandad had a 40 acre farm in Huntington in his later years, it is the hometown of Dan Quayle. My Moms family were all Democrats, so probably weren't all in on McKinley either. Lots of copperheads in that area during the Civil War, not sure about my people. I know one was a farrier in the Union Army out of the Columbus Ohio area, he later brought his family across the line into Indiana.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know why Halstead’s ‘The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President’ hit me the way it did. Perhaps it was the way he writes with that old-world certainty, that late-Victorian faith that history is a straight line leading inevitably upward, guided by the steady hand of Providence and the clean conscience of progress. Or perhaps it was the photograph of McKinley himself — that calm, paternal face, half-stern, half-kind, the face of a man who lived inside his duty the way others live inside marriages.

But as I sank into Halstead’s pages, so heavy with their earnestness, I felt as if I were being ushered into an American mausoleum, a shrine built too hastily after a death too sudden to comprehend. And I moved through that shrine quietly, reverently, yet with the unsettling awareness that all myth, no matter how luminous, casts a shadow.

McKinley enters Halstead’s narrative like a Shakespearean king born without the king’s appetite for splendour. There’s something of Henry VI about him — gentle, conscientious, almost overly virtuous, the sort of man the world admires but history devours. And yet there’s also a streak of Henry V in his resolve, a sense of destiny that flickers through even when he appears mild.

America in 1901 was a country undergoing a metamorphosis, shedding its skin of provincial innocence and stretching into a new imperial musculature. McKinley stood at the hinge of that transformation, and Halstead positions him as the moral centre of a nation trying to convince itself that expansion can be benevolent, conquest can be compassionate, and empire can be godly.

I lingered over Halstead’s descriptions of McKinley’s early life — the modest Ohio boy, the soldier shaped by the Civil War, the earnest lawyer, the congressman who carried the weight of tariffs and prosperity in his briefcase like sacred documents. Halstead adores him too much to see him clearly, but I feel the paradox nonetheless.

McKinley was the product of an America hungry for righteousness yet increasingly drawn toward power. Halstead paints him as a saint of duty, but duty itself is a dangerous muse. Shakespeare’s Brutus would nod in recognition — how easy it is to mistake one’s own moral certainty for the nation’s moral necessity.

What captivates me most is Halstead’s attempt to portray McKinley’s political innocence as political wisdom. Every compromise becomes a noble act, every hesitation a sign of his moral depth. And yet, beneath that burnished prose, I hear the soft groan of America’s imperial apparatus beginning to turn. The Spanish–American War hovers like a ghost. Halstead writes about it with the kind of bright fervour that borders on religious ecstasy, as if the liberation of Cuba and the annexation of the Philippines were chapters in a new Book of Exodus. But I feel something else — I feel the pulse of tragedy, the moment when a republic looks into the mirror and sees, faintly but unmistakably, the outline of an empire.

McKinley’s role in the war is written like a coronation. Halstead casts him as a reluctant warrior, as though the very heavens had to nudge him gently into conflict. But when I close my eyes, I see instead the Macbeth who still wants to believe he is a good man even as the crown beckons with its poisoned sweetness. “We but teach bloody instructions,”

Macbeth warns, “which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” And I wonder how many of those instructions were taught in Manila, in Havana, in the silent mathematics of sugar, tobacco, naval bases, and markets. Halstead does not ask this. He cannot. His grief for McKinley is too fresh, his admiration too absolute.

Still, even within his reverence, the contradictions seep through. McKinley the gentle statesman presided over a war that changed the shape of the world. McKinley the apostle of moral uplift oversaw the acquisition of territories that did not ask to be uplifted. McKinley the champion of peace became the president who ushered America into global conflict. And yet I do not judge him harshly. How could I? He was trapped within the logic of his time, a time when nations believed expansion was kindness and commerce a form of salvation. Shakespeare said, “The time is out of joint.” And McKinley, like every tragic figure, was born into his dislocation.

When Halstead reaches the assassination, the prose trembles. I feel him trembling. Those pages are soaked in a grief that has not yet settled into history. Leon Czolgosz enters the narrative like a serpent slithering into Eden, though the Eden Halstead mourns never truly existed. The exposition hall in Buffalo turns into a stage Shakespeare himself would have designed — a place where candles flicker, where destiny whispers in the shadows, where a kindly king meets his end not in battle, not in outrage, but in the hands of a lone anarchist whose motives dissolve into abstraction the moment the trigger is pulled.

McKinley’s final hours read like the death of Julius Caesar rewritten for the Gilded Age. There is confusion, there is loyalty, there is denial, there is the terrible stillness of a nation holding its breath. Halstead’s grief is almost tactile. He describes McKinley’s composure, the way the President reassured those around him, the way he whispered to his wife with the gentleness of a man preparing her for a life he would no longer be part of. It is impossible not to feel the tragedy. Yet even here, I sense something larger than personal loss. I sense a civilisation crying not just for a man but for the version of itself it believed he represented.

Because McKinley, for all his constraints and compromises, embodied a transition that America wanted to believe was moral. He was the bridge between the humble republic and the ambitious empire. And his assassination allowed the nation to sanctify that transition. A martyr makes a better myth than a monarch. The halo Halstead paints around him is not merely a tribute; it is a national absolution.

Reading Halstead, I feel the ache of the turn-of-the-century world — the faith in progress, the sanctification of prosperity, the certainty that destiny was on America’s side. It’s a faith that seems almost naïve now, but I find myself drawn to it nevertheless. Perhaps because it reminds me of another age, another civilisation, when nations believed deeply in the righteousness of their mission. Savarkar, too, wrote with that kind of burning certainty — though his fire was born of resistance rather than conquest.

McKinley’s America believed its expansion was benevolence; Savarkar believed ours must be survival. And somehow, standing between these two men, these two epochs, I feel again how thin the line is between idealism and ideology.

Halstead closes the book with a tone that reminds me of ‘Hamlet’: “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” And I, reading a century later, feel both the beauty and the burden of that farewell. For McKinley was sweet — earnest, gentle, dutiful — but he was also a prince of an emerging empire, a man whose moral tenderness could not negate the engines of expansion he set into motion.

Yet Halstead’s devotion forces me to confront my own cynicism. It’s easy to dismiss hagiography as naïve. It’s easy to judge the past with the cold precision of hindsight. But Halstead loved his subject. Truly, deeply, almost painfully.

And in that love, there is something human, something I cannot mock or dismiss. Grief renders even flawed men sacred, at least for a moment. And McKinley, whatever his contradictions, died believing he had served his country with honour.

Shakespeare said, “His life was gentle; and the elements so mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” And though Halstead would never invoke Mark Antony’s irony, I feel the line nonetheless — both its sincerity and its shadow.

As I moved deeper into the book, I found myself lingering on the idea of martyrdom itself. The word hangs uneasily on McKinley. He was not a martyr in the religious sense, nor in the ideological sense. But he was a martyr to the age — the age of anarchism, the age of industrial discontent, the age of imperial tension.

His death was not the result of a grand conspiracy; it was the flicker of chaos in a world struggling to define its new gods. And perhaps that is why his life feels so Shakespearean to me. Not because he was Caesar or Henry or Richard, but because he stood at the centre of forces larger than himself, forces he could neither fully control nor entirely comprehend.

And that is where Halstead’s pages begin to tremble, as if he too sensed that the man he was canonizing had already slipped into myth before the ink had dried. I can almost see his hand shaking as he writes, the sentimental fervor thickening into a kind of devotional fog, as though he believed that if he mourned hard enough, history itself might reverse its verdict.

But history does not reverse; it only deepens, calcifies, gathers its shadows. And McKinley, poor earnest William, disappears deeper into that shadow the more Halstead tries to emboss him in gold leaf. It’s the paradox of hagiography: the brighter the halo, the more you see the darkness around it.

Sometimes, as I read Halstead, I feel like I’m watching a man desperately casting flowers into a chasm to measure its depth. He throws one description after another — “noble,” “pure,” “gentle,” “devout,” “beloved” — but nothing touches the bottom. Because the tragedy of McKinley was not that he failed, but that he succeeded in all the wrong ways.

That he became exactly what his era demanded of him: a kindly executor of an unkind empire. A man who whispered sweet nothings to destiny while destiny sharpened its claws behind his back.

Shakespeare would’ve understood this instantly. “‘‘O gentle villain!’’” cries Juliet, and I hear the same bewilderment drifting through the American century’s first act. The villainy was never in McKinley himself — that’s too simple, too cheap. It was the villainy of circumstances, of momentum, of industrial titans and imperial fantasies swirling around him like Macbeth’s witches whispering ‘“Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor… thou shalt be king hereafter.”‘

And like Macbeth, he was not wicked; he was impressionable. A man of soft eyes and softer speech, swallowed by storms.

Halstead refuses these complexities; he builds monuments out of sentiment. But I — reading him through all my scars, my cynicism, my postmodern nausea — I cannot ignore the fault lines. His reverence breaks open vistas of silence.

The chapters on the Spanish-American War rise like hymns, but if you listen closely, you hear the quiet shuffle of bodies moved offstage. It’s as though he is staging a national drama with the ghosts politely muted, as if martyrdom requires clean lines and spotless floors.

Yet even as I critique him, I feel his grief tug at me. The man was writing with his heart cracked wide open. He had watched a president die before the entire nation could process love or blame. His book is a wake disguised as biography.

And I — wandering through the wake more than a century later — feel like the interloper who walks into the banquet long after the body has been carried out, and someone has forgotten to blow out the candles. The air still smells of sorrow, and I am suddenly ashamed for wanting nuance where grief wanted clarity.

But clarity is the one thing McKinley’s life refuses to give. His goodness, that “grand old-fashioned goodness,” as some contemporaries called it, becomes a kind of trap. Goodness can be manipulated.

Goodness can be weaponized by men who are not good at all. When Mark Hanna whispers strategy, when corporate interests whisper necessity, when the nation whispers destiny, McKinley listens because listening is his virtue. And so, like a Greek tragic hero, his greatest virtue becomes the pivot of his downfall.

In the ‘Oresteia’, Aeschylus reminds us that innocence is not a shield. “‘‘The gods demand their due, whether the hand is clean or stained.’’” And America, newly drunk on global power at the turn of the century, demanded its due from McKinley. Someone had to pull the United States across the threshold into empire, and fate — or the gods, or Wall Street, or blind historical friction — chose him. He did not stride; he was escorted.

Halstead, bless his earnest heart, cannot admit any of this. To him, McKinley is pure marble. But marble cracks under pressure, and I see the fissures even when he refuses to name them. I see the tension between McKinley’s soft-spoken pastoral Christianity and the iron logic of expansion that marched beneath him. I see the conflict between the private man who adored peace and the public symbol that ushered in a century of interventions. I see the tragedy of a man who wanted to be a healer but was drafted as a herald.

Maybe that is why his death feels so mythic. Halstead lingers on the assassin, the bullet, the bedside scene — but what moves me most is McKinley’s whispered forgiveness. It feels less like Christian virtue and more like the surrender of someone who finally recognizes that history was never his to command. “‘‘It is God’s way; His will, not ours, be done.’’” His last words are so gentle they almost erase him. They float above the page like a white flag.

“No,” I find myself whispering back at him, “it wasn’t God’s will. It was the will of a world too complicated for the man you were.” And suddenly I feel protective of him, this soft-spoken statesman thrust into a monstrous century. He is not the architect of America’s global turn; he is its offering.

I think of Priam kneeling before Achilles in the ‘Iliad’, begging for the body of his son: “‘‘I do what no man before me has done — I kiss the hands of the man who killed my child.’’” And something in me imagines the American people kneeling before history itself, asking for the return of the gentle president they lost — even though the machinery of empire that rose during his tenure devoured far more lives than any assassin ever could.

Halstead wants to give that America a hero. I want to give that America a human being.

I want to imagine McKinley walking alone at dusk, long before the crowds, long before the presidency, just a young veteran with war still rattling in his bones.

A man who saved lives in the Civil War, not by killing but by carrying the wounded through fire.

A man whose courage was quiet, domestic, untheatrical. The kind of courage that Shakespeare gives to his noblest characters — the ones who die early because the play cannot accommodate their goodness.

Think of Banquo. Think of Ophelia. Think of Cordelia — ‘‘O you kind gods, cure this great breach in his abused nature!’’

Halstead would never say it, but McKinley was a Cordelia in a world ruled by King Lears.

And that thought nearly breaks me.

Because what do we do with a man who is too gentle for his century? We elevate him, we sanctify him, we wrap him in patriotic silk — and then we forget the contradictions that made him real. That is what Halstead’s book does: it embalms him in reverence. But I, moving through the embalming fluid, want the pulse. I want the confusion, the hesitation, the heartbreak of a president who believed in peace yet allowed war, who believed in humility yet presided over expansion, who believed in service yet became a symbol.

He is not a martyr-president because he was assassinated; he is a martyr because he bore the weight of a world shifting beneath his feet. Because he stepped onto a stage too large for any one man’s conscience. Because he died at the exact moment America outgrew its innocence — and so he became the last offering to the old order.

Halstead’s book, for all its sentimental trimming, accidentally reveals this. Not in what it says, but in what it hides. In the silences between its effusive praises. In the hurried transitions. In the way he cannot bring himself to examine the imperial question too closely. The omissions are where the truth hums.

And the truth is this: McKinley did not shape his era; his era shaped him.

And then it crushed him.

When the assassin’s bullet entered his body, it was not just metal; it was the century announcing itself. The American Century, brash and unstoppable, declaring that the age of gentle presidents was over. After McKinley came Theodore Roosevelt — all swagger and teeth. The old pastoral innocence died with that man on that day in Buffalo, and Halstead’s biography is the funeral oration, whether it knows it or not.

I cannot read the book without imagining Antony over Caesar’s corpse: “Here was a Caesar! When comes such another?”

Except McKinley was no Caesar, and that is precisely the tragedy.

He was the last man who tried to rule the new world with the ethics of the old.

When Halstead writes of his “martyrdom,” he means the assassination.

I read it differently.

McKinley was martyred long before that — martyred on the altar of history’s transition, the point where American gentility died and American ambition was born.

And maybe that is why, as I close the book, I want to weep for him.

Not because he was perfect.

Not because Halstead’s devotion convinces me.

But because I finally understand the shape of his tragedy: a good man dissolving into a century that had no place for goodness.

America wanted a prophet. It demanded an emperor. It inherited a martyr.

And in that unbearable trinity, McKinley lingers — tender, bewildered, soft-spoken — a Shakespearean ghost haunting a nation that outgrew him before it understood him.

I shut the book. And in the silence that follows, he feels closer to me than Halstead ever intended.