Some Things Never Change

  I found this  book last week at the antique store.  I'm familiar with the time period, but not the President.  It's been quite interesting. I learned that after being shot by an anarchist, doctors tried to keep him alive by feeding him beef juice through his rectum. (??) He died a week later.
  As with nearly all history books, this one, too, contains truths, half-truths, and just plain lies. The author claims the assassin suffered from the worst of foreignism (except that  he was born in the US) and that it was "a small dispensation that we can't even pronounce his name!" (Czolgosz)  The author is correct that McKinley did not want the Philippines when he aquired it along with the other islands after the war with Spain. He claimed the President spent several sleepless nights trying to decide what to do, then God told him to keep the Philippines, while making the savages moral Christians.  I don't think the people there got the same message from God, because when they decided to fight for independence, McKinley sent 70,000 soldiers and slaughtered a couple hundred thousand of them, with a large percentage being  women and children.
  After researching this a bit more, I learned that McKinley's election (the first one) campaign was the very first in US history to be financed by corporations. So really, things haven't changed much at all. Rename the countries here- and  I think the quote from Mark Twain in 1900 sums it up perfectly--"I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Mancheria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pockets full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies."   Amen.