“Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong…”
“Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong. / He rode on down to Buffalo, but he didn’t stay too long. . . .”
--“White House Blues”
When the crash of 1893 closed the Cleveland Rolling Mill where Detroit-born Leon Czolgosz worked, he became a socialist, then an anarchist. So fervent was his interest in anarchism, and so insistent his questions, that he alarmed eminent anarchist writer and speaker Emma Goldman (1869-1940), and anarchist groups issued warnings that he was a spy. Late in the summer of 1901, Czolgosz [CHOLE-ghosh] moved to Buffalo.
On 3 September 1901, he bought a .32 Iver Johnson revolver at a hardware store. The following day the train of President William McKinley and his wife, Ida, who were on an extended tour, arrived in Buffalo. Cannon announcing his arrival had been positioned too close to the train, and their blasts blew out several train windows. “Anarchists!” cried many in the crowd on the station platform.
Buffalo was the site of the Pan-American Exposition, which McKinley would visit several times. His visits there would culminate on 6 September, when he would greet members of the public at the Temple of Music.
People approaching the President were usually required to show empty hands to security. Given the heat of this day, though, many people carried handkerchiefs to wipe away perspiration, and the empty-hands precaution was ignored. When the President extended his hand toward Czolgosz at that event, Czolgosz slapped it away, and then fired two shots at McKinley, the pistol concealed in Czolgosz’s hand by a handkerchief. One bullet, deflected by hitting a button, grazed McKinley. In the ambulance, McKinley felt something in his clothing, extracted it, and said, “I believe that is a bullet”.
But the second bullet had entered McKinley’s stomach and transverse colon; it had then penetrated the left kidney, also damaging the adrenal glands and pancreas. Doctors believed the bullet lodged in the back muscles, but it was never located.
A Black man named James Benjamin Parker, standing behind Czolgosz in line, had prevented a third shot. Parker punched Czolgosz in the neck, broke his nose, and tackled him to the floor. (Parker (1857-1907) was initially lauded for his actions, and embarked upon a profitable speaking tour. By 1907, though, he was deemed a “vagrant”, apparently severely mentally ill. When he died at 49 in a Philadelphia psychiatric hospital, his body was not claimed. His cadaver was dissected by medical students at the Jefferson Medical College).
For days, some attending doctors believed McKinley, 58, would recover, but the prognosis from such abdominal wounds at that time was generally dire. The modern medical consensus is that McKinley died from pancreatic necrosis (acute pancreatitis).
McKinley died at 2:15 a.m. on 14 September. Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt, advised of the shooting, had nevertheless proceeded on to his hunting camp, Tahawus, in the Adirondacks. He had just hiked to the summit of Mount Marcy (the highest peak in New York, at 5343.1’) when he learned of McKinley’s deteriorating condition. Roosevelt and his party then hiked ten miles down the southwest face of Marcy to Newcomb, New York, where he hired a stagecoach to take him to the nearest train station, at North Creek. There, or shortly before reaching that station, Roosevelt learned he was the 26th President of the United States—at age 42, he remains the youngest person to hold that office.
The reaction to anarchists generally was rapid. Buffalo police assumed a conspiracy, and arrested several anarchists based on nothing but their being anarchists. One was Emma Goldman, with whom Czolgosz told police he was acquainted. After police pressured her family, Goldman turned herself in on 10 September, and was held in custody for almost three weeks before she, as with the other anarchist arrestees, was released without charge.
Czolgosz was of course charged with first-degree murder. He refused to cooperate with his counsel. His trial came astonishingly quickly: it began on 23 September, 11 days after McKinley had died. The state’s case took two days. The defense offered nothing. Czolgosz’s counsel advised the jury of Czolgosz’s intransigence, and in closing argument effusively praised McKinley, neither of which tacks could have been helpful. Czolgosz declined to appeal the all-but-inevitable guilty verdict. He was 28 when he was electrocuted on 29 October 1901 at Auburn State Prison by three jolts of 1,800 volts. McKinley had been dead only a month and a half.
Prison authorities, determined to obliterate any earthly trace of the despised anarchist Czolgosz, had initially decided to hasten the decomposition of his body by burying him in quicklime, but experiments with meat convinced them to abandon that technique. (The belief that quicklime accelerates decomposition is ill-founded). Instead, they poured sulfuric acid into his coffin, which, according to the prison warden, disintegrated Czolgosz’s body in 12 hours. All Czolgosz’s clothing and possessions were burned.
Assassination of President William McKinley by Achille Beltrame (1871 - 1945)