President William McKinley: Assassinated by an Anarchist

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As doctors had removed the president to John Milburn’s house after surgery, another spectacle was playing out across town at police headquarters, where the anarchist’s life was in as great a peril as McKinley’s had been. Police brandishing rifles and soldiers with bayonets transported the assailant through an angry mob of thousands who called for Czolgosz’s head. Now an estimated crowd of 30,000 stood ready to rush the station to drag the prisoner from his cell. ‘Kill him! Lynch him!’ they demanded. One observer commented that the ‘roar of the crowd was never to be forgotten by anyone who heard it.’ Buffalo Police Superintendent William Bull’s quick action probably saved the prisoner’s life. Bull and his men, some of them mounted, used nightsticks to beat back the surging crowd and eventually managed to cordon off the street and surround the police station three deep, a daunting presence that discouraged mob action.

District Attorney Thomas Penney interrogated the would-be assassin inside the station. Czolgosz readily confessed. A self-described anarchist and disciple of Emma Goldman, Czolgosz said he had acted alone. ‘I killed President McKinley because I done my duty,’ he explained without emotion. ‘I didn’t believe one man should have so much service and another man should have none.’

From his cell across the street from city hall, Czolgosz must have heard the caisson carrying McKinley’s remains roll slowly through the streets of Buffalo on September 16 on its way to the train station for its journey to Washington, D.C. There the president’s body was placed under the Capitol dome in the same chamber that once housed the remains of Lincoln and Garfield, before completing its trip for burial in McKinley’s hometown of Canton, Ohio.

Czolgosz was indicted and arraigned on September 16, and the trial commenced one week later in Buffalo’s city hall. The accused, resigned and unrepentant, pled guilty, but Judge Truman C. White, one of the most experienced of New York’s supreme court justices, instructed the court clerk to enter a plea of not guilty in accordance with New York state law. Loran L. Lewis and Robert C. Titus, the two retired justices of the state supreme court appointed to serve as defense counsel, didn’t hide their disgust at having been handed the assignment.

District Attorney Penney focused on the medical aspects of the president’s wound and death. During cross-examination, Dr. Herman Mynter, one of the attending physicians, discussed why the doctors did not find the second bullet. He explained that given McKinley’s weakened condition, further search risked killing him on the operating table. Doctors did not find the bullet during the autopsy, he noted, because the McKinley family did not want the body mutilated.

The prosecution then established beyond any doubt that the defendant had committed the crime. Czolgosz’s signed confession and interrogation immediately after the shooting confirmed his guilt. The only hope for a not-guilty verdict remained with the question of the defendant’s mental state, a matter of much newspaper speculation in the weeks preceding the trial. The prosecution and the defense had engaged six psychiatrists to examine Czolgosz, but the alienists, as they were then known, found no evidence of insanity. Defense counsel never even raised the issue until closing arguments, and then only weakly. In fact, defense counsel called no witnesses on Czolgosz’s behalf. In fairness, though, the defendant refused to discuss the matter with either attorney, leaving them little on which to base a defense.

The state rested its case after just one and a half days, and the judge issued his instructions to the jury. In 30 minutes they returned with the expected verdict — guilty in the first degree. The trial had been a model of expediency, but it hardly represented an example of a strong defense. By today’s standards it would likely result in a mistrial on appeal. But in 1901, given the crime’s dastardly nature and a public calling for blood, defense counsel did not file an appeal.

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