Hot with disappointment because the pistol he was carrying had never come out of his pocket, Leon left the fairgrounds and stalked back to the boarding house. He had a room there above the saloon.
This was in Buffalo, N.Y. This was 100 years ago tonight. Leon had had clear shot at the man he intended to murder. Why hadn't he fired? He'd hesitated, and his field of vision fast grew cluttered. The crowd at the Pan American Exposition had jostled him.
"Tomorrow (Sept. 6)," Leon thought while he waited for sleep to take him, "will be a better day, for me and for America, whether she realizes it or not."
This was Leon Czolgosz, pronounced Chol-gosh, and history, through the tortured media prism, has managed to paste upon him several standard labels over one elapsed century: inarticulate loner, neurotic young anarchist, self-proclaimed anarchist and immigrant anarchist, even though he was born in Detroit.
Had he instead been, you know, leggy supermodel Leon Czolgosz or philandering Congressman Leon Czolgosz, perhaps his infamy would not have been so fleeting. But there was an unforgivable simplicity about Leon.
He had a blunt and virtually unpronounceable name that lacked the relatively lyrical historical resonance of John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald or even Sarah Jane Moore.
He'd quit his job at the wire mill three years before and done nothing much but knock around Northeastern Ohio since. In May 1901, in Cleveland, he attended a speech given by the anarchist Emma Goldman, which, he would say later, "set me on fire."
When he awoke the next morning, the man Leon was stalking, William McKinley, a Civil War veteran, a lawyer, a former Ohio governor, and the 25th president of the United States, exited Buffalo for a day trip to Niagara Falls. McKinley, the first president ever to ride in a car, went by train that day. Against his security detail's better instincts, he returned to the Pan-American Expo for a 4 p.m. reception at the Temple of Music just to shake a few more hands.
Leon had not lost patience. Despite the two columns of soldiers and the police and several of McKinley's personal security detail who'd helped orchestrate this fateful meet and greet, Leon made his way into the receiving line. The gun, no longer pocketed, was beneath a handkerchief in his right hand. Perhaps because it was hot, and men commonly carried handkerchiefs to wipe their brows, security thought little of it.
When McKinley reached to shake Leon's hand, the aspiring anarchist fired twice. The first bullet deflected off a button on the president's vest, the second ripped into his presidential stomach. While McKinley's enraged, defeated bodyguards beat Leon within an inch of his life, the president was rushed to an inadequately staffed Expo hospital, where entrance and exit wounds to his stomach were sewn up by a local gynecologist. Subsequent infections killed him eight days later.
Along with Lincoln and James Garfield, he'd become the third U.S. president assassinated within 36 years. Four days after McKinley died, Leon went to trial. Four days. One day after that, the trial ended. One day. Thirty-four minutes after that, the jury found him guilty.
Barely a month later, Oct. 29, 1901, Leon was executed via that brand-new, more humane method, the electric chair. Leon had done it and said so. He said McKinley was the enemy of the good people, the good working people. He said he was not sorry. It was all too neat for history.
More than a half-century later, when state civil rights commissions tried to get labor unions to integrate, some unions merely ditched their "Caucasian only" clauses in favor of an admissions test it gave African-American candidates. A sample question: Who shot McKinley?
In Stephen Sondheim's somewhat demented little play, "Assassins," in which we find all of presidential history's infamous slayers and conspirators gathered in the Texas School Book Depository cheering on Oswald, Leon emerges as the killer with the simplest motive, the only sane person on stage, and therefore the most terminably uninteresting.
In 1982, near the occasion of her 98th birthday, a Michigan woman named Jessie Ryan told The New York Times that she remembered being in the receiving line ahead of Leon.
"The president had just smiled at me and patted me on the head and said, 'What a nice little girl.' Then the man next to me shot him in the stomach."
Would McKinley say that to a 17-year-old? Sounds like Jessie was trying to horn in Leon's celebrity. Poor girl. Leon had none.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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