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The Lieutenant Governor Who Shot a Journalist: The Narciso Gonzalez Assassination
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In 1903, South Carolina’s most powerful journalist is gunned down in broad daylight, and the shooter is the lieutenant governor. Narciso Gonzalez, editor of The State newspaper in Columbia, spent years attacking the Tillman machine: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the architect of South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction political order, and Ben’s volatile nephew James Tillman, a rising politician with a reputation for drinking, gambling, and vendettas. On January 19, 1903, that feud turns into a street-corner assassination outside the State House. From Red Shirts intimidation and the Hamburg massacre, to Ben Tillman’s state-run liquor “dispensary” system and the riots it sparked, to a murder trial…