Remembering Leon Czolgosz, the Assassin who made Teddy Roosevelt President

The July 13 assassination attempt against former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, is cause to recall another act of political violence against a New Yorker—the one that made Theodore Roosevelt, who grew up at 28 East 20th Street, the first Manhattanite to attain our nation’s highest office.

It happened at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in September 1901.

Having arrived in the city the night before, on Thursday September 5, President William F. McKinley delivered a speech before 50,000 people that was both a praise song (“Expositions are the timekeepers of progress...”) and a policy statement on international commerce and technology: “We must encourage our Merchant Marine... We must build the Isthmian Canal... The construction of a Pacific Cable can no longer be postponed.”

The next afternoon, McKinley attended a public reception at the Temple of Music, the Exposition’s concert hall. An organist was playing Robert Schumann’s Traumeri when just after 4 p.m., a long line of well-wishers began filing in to shake the President’s hand.

At approximately 4:07 PM, a dark-haired man with his right hand swathed in bandages stepped forward in the reception line and twice fired a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver at the President’s torso. One bullet struck a button on McKinley’s vest, causing little harm; the other shot tore through his guts.

James B. Parker, a black waiter in line behind the shooter, got to him first, knocking his gun away before he could fire again. His name was Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old Polish-American and self-proclaimed anarchist, lately of Cleveland, Ohio.

McKinley, still conscious, was rushed to the Exposition hospital, where he was given a morphine shot and ether before the doctors began to operate. The stomach wound was serious, and the bullet couldn’t be extracted.

For the next six days, the news from Buffalo, where the President lay recovering, was guardedly optimistic. On September 12, McKinley had his first solid food since the shooting—a breakfast of coffee, toast and chicken broth. Afterwards, he asked for a cigar, which he was politely denied.

Within hours, the President’s health dramatically worsened. As a soldier in the 23rd Ohio infantry, McKinley had seen the carnage of Antietam and other battles; and soon the gangrene that had killed so many men before him was going to claim him too. “Good-bye all, good-bye. It is God’s way; His will be done, not ours,” he said while fading and at 2:15 AM on Saturday September 14, the President was dead.

Later that afternoon in Buffalo, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt—who, believing McKinley’s heath had improved, had been hiking in the Adirondacks— stood before U.S. District Judge John R. Hazel in the Ansley Wilcox House at 641 Delaware Avenue and swore the Presidential oath of office.

The Exposition closed in mourning that day and the next before reopening on Monday, September 16, the same day McKinley’s funeral train departed for Washington D.C. and Leon Czolgosz was indicted for first degree murder.

The People of the State of New York versus Leon Czolgosz commenced in the Buffalo city courthouse a week later, lasted but two days, and was in many . Though Czolgosz had offered a confession shortly after his arrest— including the claim that his actions were inspired by the anarchist Emma Goldman, whom he’d seen lecture and briefly met the previous spring—the court refused to accept his guilty plea, since doing so would, according to New York state law, preclude the death penalty.

Seemingly resigned or indifferent to his fate, Czolgosz refused to converse with his two court appointed attorneys and with no defense besides the brief suggestion of insanity, his conviction was assured. On September 26, New York Supreme Court Justice Truman C. White announced his sentence: death by electricity at Auburn State Prison.