Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (14 page)

Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln had been personally invited by McKinley to the Pan-American Exposition and was just arriving when the president was shot. He was later quoted as saying that he would no longer accept invitations from presidents, as “there is a certain fatality to presidential functions when I am present.”

McKinley was taken to the exposition hospital. There, a surgeon named Dr. Matthew Mann, who was considered a leading authority on gynecology, but who had little experience with gunshot wounds, operated on the president, suturing his perforated stomach, but was unable to find one of the two bullets.

Nonetheless, Mann was convinced McKinley would make a full recovery—so much so, that the next day he returned to the barbershop to finish getting a haircut that had been interrupted by the news that the president had been shot.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt told reporters, “I am absolutely sure the president will recover,” and then left with his family for a vacation in the Adirondack Mountains, not bothering to keep himself near telephone or telegraph lines for updates on the president’s condition.

Inventor Thomas Edison sent his latest, most advanced x-ray machine to Buffalo, hoping it could find the bullet still lodged inside McKinley. But when it arrived, it was missing a key part and, therefore, could not be used.

On September 13, things took a sudden turn for the worse. Unknown to the doctors caring for him, gangrene had set in on the president’s internal wounds. By day’s end, the fifty-eight-year-old president, aware that he was dying, said, “It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have prayer.”

First Lady Ida McKinley, who had been struggling with her own illness for years, sobbed over him, saying, “I want to go too. I want to go too.” The president replied, “We are all going. We are all going. God’s will be done, not ours.” He died in the early morning of September 14, the eighth day after having been shot.

At police headquarters, the twenty-eight-year-old Leon Czolgosz gave a full confession. “I am an anarchist,” he said. “I don’t believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them . . . I fully understood what I was doing when I shot the president . . . I don’t regret my act, because I was doing what I could for the great cause.”

Czolgosz further explained his motive: “McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man . . . I didn’t believe one man should have so much and another should have none.”

Born in 1873, near Detroit, Michigan, to a poor family of Prussian immigrants, Czolgosz began supplementing his family’s income at age six, shining shoes and delivering papers. His mother died in childbirth when he was ten years old.

At age fourteen, Czolgosz began working ten- and twelve-hour shifts at a glass factory, working in dangerous conditions with red hot glass. His position at that age was not unusual. By the turn of the century there were 284,000 children in the United States between the ages of ten and fifteen working in mills, factories, and mines.

The government-aided rise of national corporations saw vast wealth concentrated among a small number of captains of finance and industry, while by the end of the 1880s, 40 percent of the workforce lived below the poverty level. When unions were formed and strikes called, workers would be routinely fired en masse and put on blacklists to prevent them from being hired again.