Leon Czolgosz

He was the first of eight children born on this side of the ocean. Leon Czolgosz arrived in Detroit on May 5, 1873 to Polish immigrant parents who kept moving — to Alpena, then to Posen, where his mother died six weeks after a birth when he was about 10, then to Natrona, Pennsylvania and a glass factory. At 17 the family reached Cleveland and he took a job at the Cleveland Rolling Mill. The Panic of 1893 closed it and cut wages, the workers struck, and he came out convinced that the arrangement of wealth was a matter of government design. He left the church, joined a socialist club and then a harder one. In 1898 he withdrew to his father's farm at Warrensville and stopped speaking to people.

On September 6, 1901 he joined a receiving line at the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, an Iver Johnson .32 wrapped in a handkerchief. It was the model an Italian anarchist had used on King Umberto I the year before, and he carried a newspaper clipping about it. At 4:07 in the afternoon McKinley put out his hand. Czolgosz knocked it aside and fired twice. One bullet glanced off a coat button, the second went through the stomach. A waiter named James Parker struck him before he could fire a third time, and the guards beat him until the wounded president told them to go easy. McKinley died of the spreading infection eight days later. Theodore Roosevelt became president at 42, and within two years Congress had made anarchist belief a bar to entering the country.

The movement he thought he was serving had already denounced him. Five days before Buffalo, the Chicago anarchist paper Free Society warned comrades about a well-dressed blond man of about 25 who asked too many questions about secret societies — they had him marked as a police spy. Emma Goldman, whose Cleveland lecture he had attended that May, was arrested in Chicago anyway and released without charge. His trial opened on September 23. The judge refused his guilty plea and entered one of not guilty for him. His court-appointed lawyers were two retired judges he would not speak to, the defense called no witnesses, and the jury took under half an hour. On October 29 the state electrocuted him at Auburn Prison and then poured sulfuric acid into the coffin so that nothing of him would remain within a day.

His last words were that he had killed the president because McKinley was the enemy of the good working people, that he was not sorry for the crime, and that he was sorry he could not see his father. Edward Anthony Spitzka dissected his brain looking for the defect that would explain him and found an ordinary organ. His clothes went into the prison incinerator. He lies at Soule Cemetery in Cayuga County, New York, moved there from a prison plot marked only Fort Hill Remains. What outlasted him was procedure: the Secret Service, until then a currency-fraud bureau, took on full-time protection of the president in 1902, and Congress funded the duty outright four years later.

Leon Czolgosz's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The assassination of William McKinley other
  Two shots at the Temple of Music, Buffalo, September 6, 1901 1901
• Statement to the Buffalo police other
  He claimed sole responsibility and named no one else, then and at the end 1901
• Final statement at Auburn Prison speech
  I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people — the good working people 1901

• May 5, 1873 aged 0 Born in Detroit, the first of his Polish parents' children born in America
• 1893 aged ~20 The Cleveland Rolling Mill closes and cuts wages in the Panic of 1893 The strike that followed pushed him out of the church and into radical clubs.
• 1898 aged ~25 Withdraws to his father's farm at Warrensville, Ohio He became increasingly reclusive over the next three years.
• May 1901 aged 27 Hears Emma Goldman lecture in Cleveland and asks her what to read
• July 12, 1901 aged 28 Calls on Goldman in Chicago under the name Fred Nieman Nieman is close to the German for nobody.
• September 1, 1901 aged 28 Free Society warns anarchists that he is a spy A well dressed man of medium height, narrow shoulders, blond, about 25.
• September 6, 1901 aged 28 Shoots William McKinley twice at the Pan-American Exposition McKinley died of infection on September 14 and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in the same day.
• September 24, 1901 aged 28 Convicted of first-degree murder after a two-day trial The defense called no witnesses. The jury deliberated less than half an hour.
• October 29, 1901 aged 28 Electrocuted at Auburn Prison, 45 days after McKinley died Sulfuric acid was poured into the coffin and his possessions burned.

• William McKinley 1843–1901
  Twenty-fifth president who led the Spanish-American War and overseas expansion before being assassinated. assassinated
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. put in office
• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. blamed for him
• John Wilkes Booth 1838–1865
  Actor who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865 — altering the course of Reconstruction. predecessor in the act