Murdering McKinley

I. William McKinley  (1843-1901)

A. The Last Veteran--McKinley was the last veteran of the Civil War to serve as president, ending the string that began 28 years earlier with U.S. Grant

B. McKinley and the Tariff Issue--the tariff issue is one that most students today find excruciatingly boring, but animate politically active people during the 1890s. McKinley was a devote believer in the power of the tariff--so much so that although his sponsorship of legislation increasing tariffs on a number of goods cost him his Congressional seat in 1890 (a result of the so-called McKinley Tariff Act--and gerrymandering of congressional  districts in Ohio), he remained committed to a high tariff when he returned to the national scene politically in 1896.

1. Business-Friendly--McKinley's committment to maintaining the tariff was business-friendly--protecting the home market for manufactured goods in the United States--but much of that was a result of his world-view--a world-view shared by many of his contemporaries. McKinley was not an advocate of free trade, because he believed that economic prosperity for the country lie in producing goods, rather than purchasing cheap goods from other countries.

2. Hard Money--the belief that by maintaining the United States on the gold standard, inflation could be kept low, and trade exporting goods would be facilitated.

C. Prosperity--for some--The confidence business men felt in McKinley because of his actions helped to facilitate an economic recover from the Depression of 1893. This depression had been so severe that some  veterans of the Civil War joined with an Ohio businessman named Jacob  Coxey to march on Washington to ask the government to form program to put  unemployed men  to work. Coxey's Army, as the group was called did make it to Washington, D.C., but then members were driven from the Capitol, and Coxey himself was arrested for trespassing when he tried to read a speech from the steps of the Capitol.

II. Leon F. Czolgosz (1873-1901)

A. The Immigrant experience--Czolgosz was born in Detroit, Michigan to Polish/Belarusian parents. The family later moved to Rogers City, and later to Alpena, where family patriarch Paul Czolgosz found work and the promise of a better life. Loading lumber (his work in Alpena) held little of this promise, however, and as the children reached the reasonable age of ten or so, they were placed in jobs  to supplement the family income. This remained a pattern for the family, as it was for most immigrant families. Leon Czolgosz himself found work at the advanced age of 16 in a glass factory near Pittsburgh; he later worked at a wire factory in the Newburgh neighborhood of Cleveland, and  supplied a portion of his earnings to maintain the family farm in Warrensville as well as his fathers saloon near the wire works.

B. Depression--Leon Czolgosz lost his job at the wire works in the depression of 1893. While he found other jobs, this experience led him to begin to explore the pantheon of socialist though--Bellemyites, socialists, and anarchists.

C. Czolgosz and the Anarchists--in reality, there was little connection between connection between Czolgosz and the anarchist movement, largely because his pursuit of the anarchists was so clumsy and and ill-informed about anarchist thought that many within the movement were convinced that he was an agent for the police.

D.  Shooting McKinley--Czolgosz simply stood  in the receiving line to shake hands with the President, the pistol he purchased hidden in a dirty handkerchief he had bound to this hand. Luckily, he was standing in front of an African American man in line, who received the  lion's share of attention from the Secret Service agents. As McKinley reached out to shake his hand, Czolgosz shot him twice, before the African American man knocked him down, and others in the crowd jumped on him and started beating him.

E. McKinley's death--the first shot was nonlethal, and the second may have been if doctors had used the x-ray machine, on display at the Pan-American Exhibition that McKinley was attending in Buffalo when shot, to find the bullet. After seeming on the way to recovery, and after being declared so by a specialist brought in from New York City, McKinley took a sudden turn for the worse, and died  a week after being shot.

F. "I Done My Duty"--Czolgosz made no pretense of innocence. After an extremely swift trial, he was found guilty, sent to Auburn Prison, executed by the electric chair. After a cursory autopsy, he was buried on the prison grounds (his family was told it was not safe to take the body outside of the prison, because it would be attacked by an enraged crowd), the body covered in lime to speed decompositon. After the grave was closed, a large amount of sulfuric acid was introduced  to  hurry things along even more