Ragtime in the White House

History played a trick on McKinley. He has been consigned to the shadows between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, vilified or ignored by historians . . . It is a richly undeserved fate. As Eliot Vestner demonstrates in this narrative of the political life of William McKinley, there was much more to the twenty-fifth president’s tenure in office than history books allow. He was a popular president, winning a second term with ease. But only nine months into it, he was assassinated by a self-describe