McKinley pursued federal anti-lynching law mainly to stop paying Italy indemnities.

Evidence

In his annual address to Congress on December 5, 1899, President William McKinley brought up the need for federal legislation to contain mob violence. He asked Congress to give the federal courts jurisdiction over the “class of international cases where the ultimate responsibility of the federal government may be involved” (under the international rule of Full Protection and Security) in order to prevent such lynchings from happening again in the future. At a time when black Americans were being lynched in far greater numbers, the president was more concerned about the federal government’s responsibility toward foreigners. Why? Because he didn’t want to keep writing checks to Italy. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 142

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the federal government’s first serious push for anti-lynching legislation was driven by a foreign-relations checkbook, not by the vastly larger Black death toll — an essay on what incentives actually move federal power.
• DEEPTHINKING: This inversion — protections secured through international status, for a white-adjacent group, while the far-larger Black victim class got nothing — is the precise mechanism Brown’s ‘white property in whiteness’ thesis rests on.