There are Holocaust Deniers. There are Climate Change Deniers. And there are anti-McKinley Denali-ists.
President Obama, with the support of Alaska’s GOP Congressional delegation (mostly Climate Change Deniers), has changed the name of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak, to Mount Denali, “the High One,” the name of Alaska’s Native American tribe of Koyukon Athabascans for the mountain.
The Congressional delegation from Ohio, President William McKinley’s home state, is aghast.
Some historical background: McKinley in 1896 defeated Democratic William Jennings Bryan whom some historians for his “Cross of Gold” Speech accuse of inflaming anti-Semitism. He presided over U.S. victory in 1898’s Spanish American War, and was responsible for the elevation to the vice presidency and then presidency of Theodore Roosevelt whose brand of “Bull Moose” reform ultimately made regular Republicans nostalgic for McKinley.
McKinley was assassinated at 1901’s Buffalo Exposition by Leon Czolgosz, the Polish American anarchist, who claimed that his “inspiration” for the assassination was Emma Goldman who passionately defended Czolgosz.
In 1919, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer—known derisively as “The Fighting Quaker” for leading an antiradical crusade after an anarchist bomb blew up his front porch—deported Goldman on the so-called “Red Ark”—as the Beatles would have put it, “Back to the USSR”—where she developed no fondness for Lenin, much less Stalin, after observing them up close.
Please note, despite my embarrassing youthful enthusiasms, I am not now nor have even been an anarchist. Nonetheless, “Mount Goldman” sounds good to me, although she was too much a contrarian and opponent of “the cult of personality” ever to have accepted the honor.
