Leon Czolgosz: May His Memory Be a Blessing
In Paris on December 9, 1893 the anarchist Auguste Vaillant tossed a bomb from the visitor’s gallery onto the floor of the Chamber of Deputies. Twenty people were wounded, and none killed. Despite there being no deaths, Vaillant was executed on February 3, 1894. (May his memory be a blessing).
In Lyon on June 24, 1894 the anarchist Santo Caserio stabbed to death Sadi Carnot, the president of France and grandson of the Revolutionary regicide Lazare Carnot . He was executed on August 16, 1894. (May his memory be a blessing.)
In Monza, Italy on July 29, 1900 the Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci stabbed King Umberto I to death. The death penalty having been abolished, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was found dead in his cell a year letter, a supposed suicide. (May his memory be a blessing.)
These events, the high points of the anarchist tactic of propaganda by the deed, all occurred during the political education of the American anarchist Leon Czolgosz who, in Buffalo on Sept 6, 1901, assassinated President William McKinley.
At the time of his act some considered him insane since, as a contemporary medical authority put it, “to assume that he was sane is to assume that he did a sane act.” This explanation exculpates Czolgosz by removing any meaning from his gesture, but it also exculpates American capitalism. But Czolgosz’s act was not the fruit of a sudden impulse or of dementia. It was the conscious response of a worker and radical to the situation in turn of the century America.
Czolgosz’s life was in many ways typical: the child of immigrants, he was born in 1873 in Alpena, Michigan, not far from Detroit. In search of work, the family moved, settling near Pittsburgh, where Czolgosz began his education in working class life at age sixteen at a glass factory. He later moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a wire factory and, in 1893, participated in a strike that led to his being blacklisted and only being able to return to the workforce under an assumed name.
Czolgosz was a political autodidact, learning from his extensive reading in left-wing sources, but also from the strikes and struggles going on around him. He was already politically aware at the time of the Homestead Strike of 1892 (which inspired Alexander Berkman’s attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick) and the Pullman Strike of 1894. The government’s actions in the latter event, with President Cleveland sending in federal troops to intervene on the side of the bosses, only confirmed all that Czolgosz had been reading: that the state was an instrument of the ruling class.
The Lattimer Massacre of September 1897 at the mines in Hazleton, Pennsylvania struck even more closely to home, for in this case the marchers who were killed and wounded were, like Czolgosz, Slavs. And the injustice of the killing of peaceful marchers was compounded when all the killers, local deputies, were found not guilty.
Czolgosz continued to work and continued to read and attend political - particularly anarchist - meetings, and was especially impressed by Emma Goldman, though the amount of his contact with her became subject of dispute in the aftermath of his attentat.
His reading, his lived experience, all pushed him further and further to the left, and Czolgosz spoke to comrades of how impressed he was by the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900.
In fact, Czolgosz’z opinions had become so extreme that there were those in the anarchist community who grew suspicious that he was a spy or an agent provocateur. In the September 1, 1901 issue of the Chicago anarchist paper “Free Society” the editor wrote that “the attention of the comrades is called to another spy…His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere the comrades are warned in advance and can act accordingly.”
We’ll never know if this pushed Czolgosz to go to Buffalo in order to prove his revolutionary bona fides. To be sure, anarchist suspicion of the existence of spies in their midst was justified. But Czolgosz had lived the reality of capitalism, read of the massacres perpetrated in the Philippines during McKinley’s war there, and admired the example set by European anarchists. He traveled to Buffalo, where the president was attending an exposition. He joined the reception line at the Temple of Music on the fairgrounds, wrapped the gun in his hand in a handkerchief, stepped forward to greet the president, and smilingly fired two shots into the president, who died eight days later. Czolgosz was set upon by a mob, and the badly beaten assassin was taken to the police station, where he told a physician the following day: “I don’t believe in the republican form of government and I don’t believe we should have any ruler. It is right to kill them. I had that idea when I shot the President, and that is why I was there…I know other men who believe what I do, that it would be a good thing to kill the president and to have no rulers.”
After the assassination anarchists who were interviewed were at pains to distance themselves from Czolgosz, denying that he was an anarchist, saying he was, instead, a socialist. Given the atmosphere this is hardly surprising. Czolgosz spoke often of Emma Goldman’s influence on him, so anarchist circles would have been at some pains to distance themselves from him. In France anarchists like Ravachol and Emile Henry, also responsible for acts of individual terror, became folk heroes, since there existed a community of like-minded individuals and a revolutionary counter-society. This was not the case in America, and so Czolgosz was cast off and denied by those whose ideals he shared.
He never denied his guilt, and in fact attempted to enter a guilty plea at his arraignment. His trial was brief, and he was executed on October 29, 1901 at Auburn Prison. As he was being strapped into the electric chair he said, “I shot the President because I thought it would help the working people and for the sake of the common people. I am not ashamed of my crime. That is all I have to say.” He was buried in the prison yard, but only after his body had been dissolved in quicklime.
The horror of Czolgosz’s act (if horror there was) is that of any terrorist act: it’s that of one man arrogating to himself the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in deciding whether another man should live.
The grandeur of Czolgosz’s act (if grandeur there was) is that the one man who acted as judge, jury, and executioner did so as a member of a class that was historically on the receiving end of death sentences, and that the victim was in this case an executioner.
(May his memory be a blessing.)
by Mitchell Abidor