The Assassination of President William McKinley
On the 6th of September, 1901, President William McKinley, while attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, was standing in a receiving line greeting the public. The previous day he had given a speech at the Exposition, remarking how good Expositions were and their import in society.
Another attendee of the Pan-American Exposition was Leon Czolgosz. An anarchist and self-proclaimed disciple of Emma Goldman, Czolgosz had come to the Exposition with only one end in mind: to assassinate the President.
Czolgosz had brought with him that day a small pistol, which he carried in his right hand. He concealed the pistol in a handkerchief so that it appeared he merely had a bandaged hand. He approached the President, who extended his left hand in greeting upon seeing Czolgosz’s supposedly damaged right. Czolgosz fired twice at point blank range. McKinley would die just over a week later from his wounds. The assassination would rock the nation, a bloody opening to the 20th Century.
Anarchist as Assassin: Leon Czolgosz
Leon Czolgosz was born in Detroit, Michigan. When exactly is unclear, although some have given the date of birth as January 1st, 1873. He was one of seven children born to Russian-Polish immigrant parents.
For the majority of his adult life Czolgosz was a registered Republican. After being fired from his factory job during a strike he became a recluse, and began reading socialist and anarchist newspapers. Both were growing movements at the time, both in the United States and in the rest of the industrialized world.
Czolgosz was most affected after hearing a speech by one of the most famous Anarchists of the day, Emma Goldman. He traveled to New York City to talk to her, which he did, but he did not become an accepted member of the anarchist groups there. Many thought him strange and quite possibly a government agent, and he remained isolated from the rest of the anarchists of the time.
Unsure of what to do with his life, Czolgosz finally found inspiration in 1900. King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated in that year by avowed Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci. Here Czolgosz found his idol: a man who had taken matters in his own hands and acted on behalf of the common man against the oppressive authority. On that fateful September day in 1901, Czolgosz would follow in Bresci’s footsteps with the assassination of McKinley.
As he had known that he would, Czolgosz was quickly arrested. He did not care: he had accomplished his mission. It was a suicide mission, a sacrifice for the common man. He was executed on October 29th, 1901, less than two months after the assassination.
Although Emma Goldman had never been fond of Czolgosz, and did not support the assassination, she never brought herself to criticize the action and in fact defended Czolgosz. This led to a lessening of her popularity with the American public, and of the anarchist movement at large. Goldman herself would ultimately be deported in 1917, where she would move to Russia.
The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
With the death of William McKinley, a new President was sworn into office: Theodore Roosevelt. Although it was unknown at the time, Roosevelt would come to be one of the most important Presidents in American history.
Although a Republican like McKinley, Roosevelt began to move the United States in a new direction. McKinley had been a staunch big business conservative. Roosevelt was a strong advocate for reform, and can be seen as the first reform President of the early 20th century progressive movement in America.
Roosevelt’s power came even after his second term, when he chose his successor to be William Howard Taft (Roosevelt’s Secretary of War). Roosevelt would ultimately break with Taft, however, and would run for election again in 1912, creating the Progressive Party in the progress. This would lead to an assassination attempt on his life, unsuccessful.
Birth of the Modern Secret Service
When McKinley died of his wounds on September 14th, 1901, he became the third president in less than 40 years to be assassinated. (Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865 and James A. Garfield had been assassinated in 1881) The fact became immediately clear to the American people: the President of the United States needed protecting.
Congress made an informal request to the Secret Service that they take on the role of defending the President. The Secret Service had been created after the Civil War as a part of the Department of the Treasury in order to combat the legions of counterfeiters who were threatening to destroy the American monetary system. By 1901, however, their efforts had largely been successful and counterfeiting had been greatly curbed.
The Secret Service gladly took on the task of protecting the President, and it quickly became their primary function, as it still is today. Their anti-counterfeiting roots were shown by the fact that they were a part of the Department of the Treasury until 2003, when they were officially placed under the jurisdiction of the new Department of Homeland Security. Since the assassination of McKinley and the refashioning of the Secret Service as an agency designed to protect the President there has been only one successful Presidential assassination: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1960.
