"Robber Baron Tactics and Imperial Belligerence"

"Mainstream political coverage has largely overlooked the deep affinities between the McKinley and Trump models of governance, thanks in no small part to the American press's inattention to the basics of political economy, not to mention its endemic historical illiteracy. More than that, though, Trump's cultish regard for McKinley gives the lie to the corporate media's central narrative about Trump and the MAGA movement—that it's a populist insurgency aimed at toppling sinister networks of elite influence."

Chris Lehman at The Nation compares Donald Trump to William McKinley.

And Michael Tomasky at The New Republic calls Trump an 1870s Redemptionist.

"Tariffs Are Rigged Against Them"

"In the 1920s, Republicans returned to power and resumed their protectionist agenda, but when crop prices fell, Midwesterners again turned on the party. Chastened by Taft's experience, President Herbert Hoover promised to aid farmers by raising agricultural tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 did protect crops, but it also radically increased the duties on manufactured goods, provoking a trade war with Europe at the worst possible time. As the Great Depression spread misery across the country, voters blamed Hoover's tariff. In 1932, they elected FDR in a landslide and pummeled the GOP.
"Reduced to a perennial minority, Republicans finally abandoned their protectionist doctrine and embraced free trade. The ferocious tariff debate that had dominated American politics since the nation's founding slipped into the shadows, remembered only by historians and economists.
"Until Donald Trump."

At The Atlantic, Michael Wolraich discusses taxes on imported goods, past and present.

"Complex, Unstandardized, and Vulnerable to Corruption"

"In the 19^th-century viva voce system, people went to local polling places and swore an oath that they were voting in good faith. Then, out loud and in front of anyone who cared to cluster around observing, the voter told the election judges his choices. The counting took place by hand; judges entered voter choices in poll books, keeping running totals of numbers of votes for each candidate. There were no paper ballots to tally.

"In other locations, 19^th-century voters used paper ballots issued by parties—a practice that became increasingly common as the century went on. Voters brought their own ballots to the polls, and although they could write their choices on pieces of paper, parties found that providing printed ballots with the names of their candidates was a convenience that nudged voters toward voting 'straight ticket.' Parties printed their tickets on colored paper, and the ballots went into glass boxes, so that anyone observing a vote could clearly see which party a voter had chosen. The atmosphere at the polls was raucous, and party members lobbied for voters’ favor right up to the moment when they arrived at the ballot box."

Rebecca Onion in Slate looks at the changing voting processes in the nineteenth century.

And she notes that the "first congratulatory telegram" between candidates was in 1896.

"Their Welfare Is Our Welfare"

"The author doesn't emphasize his book's contemporary resonances, but he doesn't need to. They're evident when he summarizes public support for the roundup of anarchists: 'This … was no time for civil liberties. The very fabric of their society was at risk.' Miller's depiction of national liberation movements supported only when they served the United States' commercial and strategic interests doesn't seem outdated as we consider our government's various responses to the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East. The argument that business works best when left to its own unregulated devices has not gone out of fashion. Terrorism remains the weapon of the furious and powerless."

In the Los Angeles Times, Wendy Smith reviews Scott Miller's The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century.

"Mutual Cooperation Among Enlightened Individuals Free of Constraining Hierarchies"

"Kropotkin and such comrades as Errico Malatesta and Paris Commune veteran Elisée Reclus, who had all served jail terms, knew that authorities would defend the status quo with every weapon at their disposal. The 1887 execution of four anarchists dubiously connected to a bombing in Chicago's Haymarket Square grimly reinforced their belief that the capitalist democracies were also owned by the ruling class. They stood by, unable to distance themselves from a series of increasingly lunatic attacks in the 1890s that culminated, in 1900-1, with the assassinations of Italy's Umberto I and U.S. President William McKinley. Propaganda by deed had become, in Butterworth's cogent summary, 'no more than envious arbitrary retribution; the last resort of the hopeless, the damaged and the dispossessed.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Wendy Smith reviews Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents.