We continue to pore through history to find good solid conspiracies involving each of the Presidents of the United States. To recap, we need a story about a president which involves him in some deep plot, or one that seemed deep at the time. We prefer theories which are more or less contemporary with the man himself (I could make up better ones than some of these myself, but that’s cheating) AND it must be a conspiracy which is largely discounted by most Mainstream Historians. (Since it is the nature of politics to make back office deals, some conspiracy stories turn out to be true, which takes them out of conspiracy theory and into History.)
The reason this series has been on hiatus is that Benjamin Harrison, unfortunately, was apparently too dull for conspiracies. The best I can do for you is technically a Grover Cleveland conspiracy theory, put about through the workings of Harrison’s campaign folks. One of their operatives, pretending to be a British expatriot living in California, wrote to the British ambassador to the United States to ask whom he should vote for. The ambassador replied that Cleveland would be the best bet, as he would be lowering the tariffs. Which would have been true. What makes it bogus is that the campaign’s REAL intent was to make it look as if Grover would be doing whatever the British wanted. This was not especially true, but DID convince the Irish voters to turn their support to Harrison, since anything the English government favored had to be evil. This isn’t much, but will have to do for a placeholder until we can show Harrison knew Marilyn Monroe, or something.
William McKinley was assassinated so we are on firmer ground. Like Garfield’s shooting, this should not have been fatal. The doctors guessed wrong about where the bullet was, and just as the President seemed ot be recovering, he died of gangrene. His assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist, which set off a wave of action. All the leading anarchists in New York were arrested on suspicion of being in on it, including the entire family of “Red Emma” Goldman, whom Czolgosz had mentioned meeting, to force her to turn herself in. She denied any connection to the crime, saying that if she HAD wanted to kill McKinley, she wouldn’t have picked an idiot like Czolgosz for the job. The Secret Service was accused of being part of the conspiracy for not protecting the president (though this was still just an unofficial part of their job). Despite this, and a demand by some people that protecting the President should be the Army’s job, the Secret Service was made an official protection agency for the NEXT President. The idea that Czolgosz had Not Acted Alone (remember this phrase; it’ll be coming back) led to the establishment of groups dedicated to investigating anarchists, some of which were consolidated into the Department of Investigation, which in the fulness of time became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Czolgosz accomplished a lot, actually, for someone who basically accidentally killed the President
As for the next president, known to some supporters as “That Goddamned Cowboy”, we have to save him for next time.
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