Scott Miller

The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century

Scott Miller

Random House: 432 pp., $28

Veteran journalist Scott Miller has done something very interesting in his first book: He has conjoined two kinds of histories to create a portrait of the United States at the turn of the 20th century as a country divided between worldviews so radically dissimilar that they hardly seemed to be describing the same reality. Was America a booming nation whose rapidly growing industries were creating wealth on an unprecedented scale? Or was it a place of misery for working people who labored in horrific conditions that would never...