In the twenty years between Garfield's assassination and William McKinley's ill-fated reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the Western world changed rapidly. A time of rapid industrailization that fed all segments of the society  greatly expanded the middle class.  In the meantime, the growing working class demanded its fair share. Industry ruled, but the radical philosophy of Karl Marx was increasingly labor's reaction.

Economically, politically, and socially, the country was in transition. Immigration was causing a change in the social fabric of America, as workers from foreign countries came to work in America's factories.  Economic unrest, and the uncertainty it caused,  loosed strikes, riots and assassinations. Along with the unrest was the growing conviction among radicals that if the captains of industry and the government could not assist the working class men and women who made prosperity possible to better their  lives, then the country would be better off without them. As early as Garfield's assassination, Ulysses Grant proposed a remedy for the fear that hung over America and the world between 1881 and 1901: "If this is the outgrowth of nihilism, I am in favor of crushing it out immediately by the prompt execution of the would-be assassins and their followers."

Leon Czolgosz, the self-styled anarchist who killed McKinley, would suffer just that. But the actions of this determined but troubled factory worker were as much a natural outgrowth of his times as a product of his own distorted way of thinking, for the times were violent and seemed to many to need violent remedy.

Like John Wilkes Booth and Charles Julius Guiteau, the men who attacked McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt thought they were saving the Republic's best traditions. For Czolgosz in 1901, the popular McKinley symbolized "prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.". . .

Czolgosz' melancholy adventure began in Detroit in 1873, the year of the nineteenth century's Great Depression. Ironically, after conceiving Leon in Poland, his parents had emigrated in search of prosperity only to arrive in a country seriously disturbed by unemployment and consequent efforts by workers to unionize. In Detroit, his father worked for the city sewer system, and his mother did laundry. Times were hard everywhere. Violence ignited as the International Workers of the World (or "Wobblies"), the Knights of Labor and numerous nihilist and anarchist movements led strikes against railroads, mine operators, steel-makers. They won some, but the unions mostly lost as the strikes were broken by militia, police, scabs and Pinkertons, frequently in bloody battles. Yet the unions persisted. On May 1, 1886, a national demonstration for the eight-hour work day was called, and almost 300,000 workers complied. Two days later in Chicago--then a center of agitation for the "short" day--a bomb was thrown at police from a crowd of workers assembled in Haymarket Square to listen to anarchist speakers and to protest police brutality (the police had the day before fired into workers striking the McCormick Harvester Plant). Seventy police were wounded (seven died) and the enraged cops charged the crowd, shooting as they came. After the dead and wounded had been gathered up, eight anarchists were arrested and tried for murder. They were found guilty, though no proof connected the defendants with the bomb. Four were hanged, one committed suicide in prison and three were given life imprisonment. The incident focused national attention on the anarchists and generated public mistrust of them, labor unions and worker violence. Unions were blackened, to the employers' delight, and the anarchists reacted with more strident rhetoric.

Leon Czolgosz heard it all, and was especially prone to listen. For one reason, the year before the Haymarket riot, when he was twelve, Czolgosz' mother had died, soon after the birth of her eighth child. It seemed tumult, violence, dispossession totally enveloped him. The family then lived in Michigan, in Polish settlement, where Leon learned to speak Polish and finished five and a half years of schooling. He was the studious one of the family. He read and grew up shy, quiet and solitary. Occasional displays of anger broke his calm. When he was sixteen, the family moved to Natrona, a Polish town chose to Pittsburgh. Leon went to work in a bottle factory for seventy five cents a day. The next stop was Cleveland, where he found a job in a wire mill for ten dollars a week. He worked there until he was twenty-five, when the dreary tenor of his existence broken by a strike in 1893, which set him thinking and reading about capitalism, anarchism and the validity of the Roman Catholic faith in which he'd been raised. After the strike was settled, he returned to work as Fred C. Nieman (literally, Fred No-man), using an alias, he stated, because he feared official retaliation for his participation in the strike. He continued reading and joined a socialist discussion group.

Czolgosz's intellectual life revolved around the discussions, his sociological and utopian reading and his later commitment to anarchism. Although his work was menial, he and his family were industrious and ambitious.  Although they hadn't yet madethe American dream come true, they were not destitute. They'd all saved and chipped in to buy 55 acres twelve miles from Cleveland, and Leon liked it on the farm, walking in the woods, doing chores. But he still worked in the mill, and in Cleveland his life was as straight, hard and uniform as the wire he made. As with most factory workers, he hung around saloons, drank an occasional whiskey, smoked, played cards. In 1895, when he was twenty-two, his father facilitated these activities by buying a saloon. The socialists arranged to meet upstairs and Leon often sat in with them.

Then, in 1898, he had a nervous breakdown. He just seemed to have "gone to pieces like," said his brother. Nor would he seek hospital treatment for what was characterized as "shortness of breath, fatigue, heart palpitations, stomach discomfort, and loss of appetite"--in short, the well known symptoms of acute depression. He had no reason to trust doctors since the death of his mother. "There is no place in the hospital for poor people; only if you have lots of money you will get well taken care of," he stated.  A healthy, normal factory worker vanished, and in his place stood a pale, agitated potential killer. He quit his job in August 1898 and took to spending days at the farm, reading an anarchist newspaper published in Chicago. He went in to Cleveland occasionally to see a doctor, and he took medicine, but it didn't help. The assassination of King Humbert I of Italy in July 1900 raised his interest, and he clipped a newspaper account of the act. Media contagion seemed to set in--a phenomenon more marked in our time---and he took the clipping to bed with him for weeks.

The summer of 1900 was far more active for President William McKinley. He'd been renominated in June, the sign that his Administration had done well by the Republican Party and America. With Theodore Roosevelt as his Vice President, he could well expect to defeat, as he had in 1896, William Jennings Bryan and his free-silver, anti-imperialist running mate, Adlai E. Stevenson. President McKinley looked back with pleasure on his life. He was descended from Scotch-Irish and English who'd come to America in the early eighteenth century--no recent immigrant, he. His grandfather James had been manager of a charcoal furnace in Ohio, and William had reaped the benefits, the dream's rewards. These rewards had included a term of college, the heroism for the Union in the Civil War, then a law practice, election to Congress and a long, powerful political career.  At 58, his only sorrow was his invalid wife, Ida.

Czolgosz was twenty-eight, 140 pounds on a 5'7" frame. After a long period of listlessness during the election furor that resulted in a landslide for the Republican party, he went to the family farm and asked for the money he'd put into it. The family promised it, perhaps partly because Leon hinted that he might soon be dead. On May 5, 1901, he attended a lecture in Cleveland by Emma Goldman, the thirty-one-year-old Russian anarchist who was then one of the foremost anarchist thinkers. Soon afterward, Czolgosz contacted an anarchist club in Cleveland, introducing himself as Fred Nieman and inquired whether its members might be "plotting something like Bresci [King Humbert's assassin]." The implied terrorism seems to have put them off.  Five days before Czolgosz shot McKinley, an anarchist paper ran a warning that a spy, noticed in Chicago and Cleveland, might be trying to infiltrate them--the description matched that of Czolgosz.

Leon did go to Chicago, early in July, traveling on his farm money. He called on Goldman, who hurried away to catch a train for her home in Rochester, New York.   Not many days later, Leon turned up in West Seneca, a town near Buffalo (and not far from Rochester).  He later told police he went there to find work, which was both uncharacteristic of his recent behavior and puzzling. Was there more work near Buffalo than in Chicago or Cleveland? Perhaps he was fascinated by the aura of the Pan-American Exposition, a show of dazzling technological progress (including the X ray) that had opened May. Whatever, he stayed in West Seneca, passing time, until August 29, when he left, exchanging a broken revolver for part of his bill, and took a boat from Buffalo Across Lake Erie to Cleveland. He stayed only a day, then returned to Buffalo. On August 31, he rented a room above a saloon, registering as John Doe. By then he knew what was to come.

On September 5,  McKinley spoke before fifty thousand persons, telling them he now favored reciprocal trade and lower tariffs. Everyone cheered. Czolgosz watched and was disgusted with the panoply, the honors accorded the President. "It wasn't right," he later said.  He had decided on the murder some time before, since he'd bought, on September 2, a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver for $4.50, decorated with an owl's head on the grip and in good condition. It was hardly a devastating weapon, but it would serve for what it was intended to do.

On September 6 the public reception for McKinley opened at 4 p.m. The President had returned from a visit to Niagara Falls, as had Czolgosz. After a tour of the fair grounds, the President would shake hands for ten minutes, an obligatory gesture for the leader of a democracy, which exposed him to danger from the crowd. McKinley was guarded by soldiers, police detectives and the Secret Service--about fifty in all--as the line advanced. It was a hot day and no one paid attention to the small man, neat in a gray suit--a workingman come to see his President--who shuffled in line, his right hand swathed in a handkerchief. After all, many were mopping their brows. When he reached the President, a Secret Service man shoved him gently ahead. He extended his left hand, the President his right. Czolgosz slapped McKinley's hand aside and fired the Iver Johnson twice through the handkerchief, setting it afire. The first slug ricocheted off the President's breastbone (later, like the "magic bullet" of the JFK murder, it fell out of McKinley's clothes). The second burrowed through his body, traversed the stomach, the pancreas and a kidney and came to rest near McKinley's back muscle wall.

So it was done. Vengeful guards jumped Czolgosz and nearly killed him.

"Don't let them hurt him," McKinley called.

"I done my duty," Leon muttered.

McKinley was taken to the home of John Milburn--president of the exposition--after emergency surgery in the fair's hospital. Doctors were hopeful, so much that they refused the aid of the X ray Thomas Edison sent them. But John Hay--who had been Lincoln's secretary, a friend of Garfield and now McKinley's Secretary of State--shook his head and said the President would die. McKinley agreed. Though he rallied at first, like Garfield, gangrenous blood poisoning consumed him bit by bit. He told his doctors, "It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have prayer." He sighed, "His will, not ours, be done," mumbled the last verse of "Nearer, My God, to Thee," and died about 2:15 a.m. on September 14.

His funeral, like those of other slain Presidents, was grand. "Nearer, My God, to Thee" became more popular. The national mourning was loud and prolonged. Mrs. McKinley understood "her dearest's death but not much else," and she retired to her home at Canton, Ohio, uncertain of what had happened.

The most immediate effects were the swearing in of Roosevelt as President and the trial of Czolgosz. There wasn't much to the latter. For one thing, Leon kept uttering outrageous anarchist things: "I don't believe one man should have so much. . . . I thought it would be a good thing for the country to kill the President," and so on. For another, he refused the aid of his lawyers, who weren't anxious to assist him, anyway. The trial lasted eight hours and twenty-six minutes. The jury was our thirty-four minutes before it declared Czolgosz guilty. He had been, the jury thought, just as a panel of five experts had said, "the product of anarchy, sane and responsible." Czolgosz was electrocuted at 7:12 a.m. on October 29, 1901--fifty-three days after shooting McKinley. As they strapped him into the chair, he said, "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people--the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime." The autopsy revealed no cerebral abnormalities. In a remarkable display of haste and hatred, sulphuric acid was poured into the coffin.
 

Source: McKinley, James. Assassination in America. NY:Harper and Roe, 1977

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