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Assassination of President McKinley by T. Dart Walker, c. 1905 Library of Congress |
In Buffalo, New York, this week, I felt obliged by recent events to seek out the place where Leon Czolgosz fatally shot President William McKinley in 1901.
Contemplating Thomas Crooks's still unknown motive for shooting President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13, I thought about something Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last week: that every U.S. presidential assassin has been mentally ill.
I wasn't sure about that. After some looking into it, I suppose the accuracy of the assertion depends on what one means by mentally ill.
One could argue that anyone with ambiguous motive to murder a President is mentally unwell. Indeed, an "insanity" argument was made in the criminal defense of Czolgosz for the 1901 shooting of McKinley. The defense hardly slowed the conviction. Inside of two months from the shooting, Czolgosz was executed.
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Site of President McKinley assassination, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024 RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
Czolgosz was attracted to radical socialism and then anarchism because he lost his job in an economic crash when he was 20—the same age as Crooks when his life ended. Czolgosz couldn't find consistent work amid the labor turmoil of the ensuing depression in the 1890s. Born into a Polish-immigrant family, he became convinced that the American economic system was rigged to favor the establishment over the working class. Hm.
Czolgosz learned that socialists and anarchists in Europe were struggling with similarly entrenched economic inequality as royals endeavored to maintain their traditional grip on social order. European anarchists had resorted to assassination as a means to express their displeasure and spark reform. However, bolstering O'Reilly's theory on Czolgosz's mental state, even American socialists and anarchists raised, no metaphorical pun intended, red flags over Czolgosz.
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Pan-American Exposition, by Oscar A. Simon & Bro., 1901 Library of Congress |
McKinley was keen to attend the exposition, because he saw political promise in associating himself with American prosperity and invention. The 342-acre exposition featured the latest engines, the hydroelectric power of nearby Niagara Falls, and an "Electric Tower" framed by the newly proliferating magic of light bulbs.
No doubt McKinley's exposition strategy galled Czolgosz. In a morbid irony, when Czolgosz was executed in October 1901, it was by electric chair.
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Reenactment in Porter's Execution of Czolgosz (1901). Library of Congress |
Like Crooks, Czolgosz intended to shoot the President while he was giving a speech, the day before the Temple of Music event. But the crowd at the speech was too dense, and Czolgosz didn't think he could make the shot. So instead, he approached the President in a receiving line at the Temple of Music and shot him at close range. Czolgosz's first shot only grazed the President. The second struck McKinley in the abdomen and resulted in death two days later.
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Fordham Drive, Buffalo, N.Y., 2024 RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
Many Americans no doubt saw the assassination of McKinley as signaling a tragic inevitability of the times. President Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865, and President Garfield in 1881. Director Edwin S. Porter made a creepy, one-minute silent film for the Thomas Edison company in 1901 about the assassinations; The Martyred Presidents is available online at the Library of Congress. Present in Buffalo to film the exposition and yet early in his prolific career, Porter also made a four-minute film featuring a reenactment of Czolgosz's execution.
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President Roosevelt at the Wilcox House, 2024. RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
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Me'n'T.R. meet inside the Wilcox House. RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
The Pan-American Exposition is long gone. The land where the incident occurred became a residential development. A small plaque and garden, and a flagpole and flag in the roadway median of Fordham Drive in Buffalo mark the approximate location of the fatal shooting in 1901.
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A nearby high school is named for McKinley. Buffalo, N.Y., 2024. RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
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