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We’re hearing a lot in the aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination about over-the-top rhetoric and its consequences – including rhetoric prompting the mentally unhinged to grab a gun and shoot those with differing opinions and views.
The problem is serious. It’s real. And it’s nothing new.
In fact, a now-forgotten killing 125 years ago is worth revisiting.
There are nasty political campaigns – and then there was the 1899 race for governor of Kentucky. Even in the free-wheeling style of the late 1800s electioneering – where the words were red hot and the truth was incidental – that one was especially ugly.
The contest between Democratic state Sen. William Justus Goebel and Republican Attorney General William S. Taylor was more a verbal slugfest than a campaign.
Kentucky chose its gubernatorial nominees at state conventions back then, and the Democrats fractured at their gathering. In a time when back slapping, joke telling, and baby kissing were in fashion (think Henry McMaster with a mint julep), Goebel was cold, aloof, and calculating. Unmarried and with few friends, he lived, breathed, ate, and slept politics. And that rubbed lots of folk the wrong way.
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A reform faction left the Democrats and formed the Fair Elections Party. A strong Free Silver Party candidate also drew votes away from Goebel. Given that Kentucky Democrats enjoyed the same kind of statewide super majority status that South Carolina Republicans have today, it was still Goebel’s race to lose.
So when the votes were counted on election night, Kentuckians were stunned when Republican Taylor eked out a win with a paper-thin 2,383 votes out of nearly 400,000 ballots cast.
There were the expected claims of voter fraud. But things took a twist when the state Board of Elections, created by a law Goebel had sponsored and stacked with his supporters, upheld Taylor’s victory.
Think the 2000 Bush–Gore recount was nasty? It had nothing on what came next.
As January 1900 began, the Democrats who controlled Kentucky’s legislature created a special committee to investigate the matter. That enraged mountaineers from the Appalachians in the eastern and overwhelmingly Republican part of the commonwealth. They flooded into the state capital in droves to make sure everything was on the up and up. And since this was Kentucky, after all, the barrels of bourbon whiskey everyone consumed kept tensions on the razor’s edge.
Until the morning of Thursday, January 30, 1900 – when those tensions erupted…
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As Goebel was walking toward the capitol building, gunshots echoed through downtown Frankfort. He was seriously wounded in the chest.
Republican Taylor, who was now serving as governor pending the investigation, called out the state militia. He also called the legislature into emergency session and ordered it to meet in London, a GOP area in southeast Kentucky. Infuriated Democrats gathered instead in Dem-dominant Louisville. Each group convened. But the Republicans couldn’t muster enough votes for a quorum. The Democrats did – and promptly declared Goebel to be governor.
He took the oath of office in the hotel bed where he had been carried, forgave his assailant – and died four days later.
“Tell my friends to be brave, fearless, and loyal to the common people,” were his last words, according to journalists.
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RELATED | CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATED AT UTAH UNIVERSITY EVENT
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To this day. William Goebel remains the only sitting governor to die by assassination in American history – and that might have been the end of it had Ambrose Bierce not picked up his pen.
The Civil War veteran-turned-reporter was a towering figure in early journalism. His classic “The Devil’s Dictionary” was ranked among “The 100 Masterpieces of American Literature” by the U.S. Bicentennial Commission. He went on to write for Hearst Newspapers, and in that age of Yellow Journalism, few were more yellow than he.
His was an inflammatory take-no-prisoners style garnished with biting wit and searing sarcasm. In today’s terminology, it was snarky on steroids.
He loved writing biting doggerel that delighted readers by ridiculing issues and events of the day. But many were aghast when this bit of verse appeared in print:
“The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast,
cannot be found in all the West.
Good reason, it is speeding here,
to stretch McKinley on his bier.”
(A bier, pronounced “beer,” is the frame on which a casket rests during a funeral.)
Many Americans were outraged. But with president William McKinley busy seeking reelection – a race he would win months later – it was soon forgotten. Forgotten, that is, until an anarchist shot McKinley at a World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901.
Suddenly, Bierce’s words came back to life…
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McKinley was extremely popular, and a good many grieving Americans believed the little poem had incited the assassin to act. It should be noted that his killer, Leon Czolgosz, was found mentally competent, tried, and electrocuted — all within 43 days after McKinley’s death. He was so vilified that when he died, prison staffers poured sulfuric acid on the body to hasten its disintegration. Yet despite all that, Czolgosz wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards. He told investigators he acted because he heard voices in the night telling him to kill “Czar McKinley.”
Bierce, meanwhile, was pilloried for his popular poem – and went into damage control mode. He explained that the work was a protest against political violence and even a prophecy of worse things to come, not a call to action. Many folks didn’t buy it.
The national uproar also hurt his boss, William Randolph Hearst, costing him both his membership in the prestigious Bohemian Club and, some say, even a shot at the presidency himself.
Bierce survived the controversy, though he was never quite as popular afterward. He later disappeared while covering a revolution in Mexico in 1913.
The moral of the story? Words matter, people – especially when the lives of others are at stake.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
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