Exhume! Exhume! Or, Who Put the Arsenic in Rough-n-Ready’s Cherries?

This file is a short, single-author political-historical polemic: an August 1991 essay by Murray N. Rothbard. Its occasion is the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor, prompted by Clara Rising’s suspicion that Taylor’s sudden 1850 death after eating cherries and milk might have been poisoning. Rothbard’s opening joke announces the essay’s mixture of satire, revisionist suspicion, and methodological provocation:

So what if it didn’t work out? It was a great theory.

The thesis is not simply that Taylor was murdered; indeed, Rothbard concedes that the exhumation found only normal trace arsenic. The deeper claim is that official history treats presidential deaths as closed cases too quickly, especially when the alternative would require thinking politically about succession, interest, and conspiracy. He presents this as an “Establishment” rule of interpretation:

The invariable rule has been: if a president is not visibly shot, then his death, though sudden, must have been by natural causes.

Taylor’s case gives Rothbard his template. Why, he asks, did no one else at the picnic suffer the same fatal illness? Why should poisoning be dismissed in advance? The question is framed in deliberately simple forensic language:

In short, was he poisoned?

Rothbard’s central conceptual move is to import ordinary murder-investigation logic into presidential history. Against Professor Roger Brown’s objection that assassination theory requires a beneficiary, Rothbard argues that such a beneficiary is always immediately available: the vice president. This does not prove guilt, but it should trigger inquiry rather than taboo. His point is procedural and polemical: official historians do not apply to rulers the suspicions they would apply to private deaths involving inheritance or advantage.

Look, Professor Brown: In any death of a president, there is always one person who clearly stands to gain: the vice president, in this case Millard Fillmore, who, because of these possibly lethal cherries vaulted to the august office of the presidency.

The essay then broadens from Taylor into a brisk counter-history of presidents who died in office. Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy are each reconsidered through the questions of beneficiary, factional interest, and suppressed inquiry. The catalogue is less an evidentiary demonstration than a revisionist heuristic. Rothbard repeatedly contrasts official “lone nut” or “natural causes” accounts with possible political uses: civil service reform after Garfield, anti-anarchist repression after McKinley, Morgan-versus-Rockefeller factional struggle in the deaths of McKinley and Harding, Cold War realignment after FDR, and “Yankee” versus “Cowboy” power blocs after Kennedy.

Taylor’s failed arsenic result becomes, paradoxically, the occasion for a broader “exhumation movement.” Rothbard treats exhumation as both literal forensic practice and metaphor for historical skepticism: open the graves, reopen the files, and refuse the sanctity surrounding state succession.

Let's follow the path blazed by the courageous Miss Rising; let's exhume the body of every president who died in office, and let's take another more scientific look.

The Kennedy section is the essay’s most emphatic example. Rothbard invokes disputed autopsy evidence, the missing brain, Oswald and Ruby, and the suspicious deaths of witnesses as signs that the official account is especially fragile. Here his insistence shifts from speculative suspicion to the demand for institutional power adequate to reinvestigation:

Here the case for a new investigation with subpoena power is overwhelming.

The essay’s relevance lies in its concentrated display of Rothbard’s anti-Establishment historiography. He is not writing neutral presidential biography; he is attacking the epistemic etiquette that brands conspiracy inquiry as disreputable while protecting state narratives. His style is comic, combative, and deliberately outrageous, but the underlying argument is consistent: where political power changes hands through sudden death, motive and institutional benefit must be examined rather than piously ignored.

Rothbard ends by turning historical curiosity into civic posture. The point of revisiting past deaths is preparation for future ones: citizens should cultivate suspicion toward official closure when the stakes are sovereignty, succession, and state power.

What we need to adopt is a mind-set that, if and when such an event occurs, we better be prepared to cast a cold eye and ask all the right and the upsetting questions.