Edwin S. Porter, the cinematographer of the Pan-American Exposition, was the Edison Company’s film director. Before going on to direct the cinematic landmark The Great Train Robbery in 1903, Porter filmed a reenactment of the execution of Leon Czolgosz at New York’s Auburn Prison. The company was denied access to film the actual electrocution by Auburn’s warden, a man who was so concerned that Czolgosz might turn into a martyred object of outlaw romance that he ordered acid poured on the assassin’s corpse so that no one would be tempted to steal then venerate the dead man’s clothes or bones.
Porter’s film starts with a pan of the exterior of the actual prison and then cuts to the indoors reenactment, in which an actor playing Czolgosz stands behind bars as guards arrive, escorting him to the chair. They strap in his hands, legs and hands, fussing and primping as if they were tailors measuring for a suit. The men clear to the sides of the frame and then Czolgosz’s body levitates slightly three times. At the end of the film everyone stands around, staring at the still-seated corpse. It’s shocking how matter-of-fact it is. But then the facts of every stage of Leon Czolgosz’s life are all like this — brutal but banal.
Czolgosz’s childhood involving a wicked stepmother and grimy toil is a Cinderella story, except that at the climax this Cinderella doesn’t so much marry the prince as shoot him in the stomach. One of eight children born to Czech immigrants in Michigan, Czolgosz had to quit school and go to work in a glass factory for ten or twelve hours a day the year his mother died. He was twelve. His father remarried a woman whom Czolgosz despised so much he started skipping meals to avoid her, preferring to drink milk alone in his room. Like a lot of their fellow Slavs, the family moved around the Rust Belt of Ohio and Pennsylvania in search of work. Leon worked ten- or twelve-hour shifts making steel wires in another hot factory — that’s where he got his scar — until the depression of 1893, when wages were lowered and he went on strike. Fired, then blacklisted, he got his old job back by working under the alias Fred Nieman. German for “nobody,” Nieman is the name Czolgosz first gave to the Buffalo police upon arrest.
When Americans first heard of Czolgosz (pronounced “shol-gosh”), they found comfort in his z-ridden name, relieved that the president of the United States had been assassinated by a foreigner. But Czolgosz was born here. He was as American as that other son of Slavic Rust Belt immigrants, Pennsylvania’s Andrew Warhola, a.k.a. Andy Warhol.
Even Stephen Sondheim cannot tart up Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz is such a sad pathetic figure, and by pathetic I mean drowning in pathos, that he is the one psycho killer in the musical Assassins who never gets a laugh. He is as drab and morose as Charles Guiteau is snappy. “A scruffy sullen laborer” is how the Assassins stage directions describe him, as opposed to Guiteau, who is “seedy but dapper.” In one of the big production numbers, “Gun Song,” in which the assassins gather to extol the history-making virtues of squeezing a trigger, Czolgosz’s lyrics are about all the workers who die in the manufacturing process before a gun is even fired — iron miners, steel mill and factory workers, machinists. “A gun claims many men before it’s done,” he wails. In terms of musical showstoppers, “Gun Song” is not exactly “Seventy-six Trombones.” Come to think of it, Czolgosz would probably know all the ways musical instrument production could maim a guy too.
Having a hard life doesn’t justify murder. Insanity might explain it. The travesty of Czolgosz’s trial, which lasted eight measly hours, sheds little light on his psychiatric state. Though it’s amazing that Czolgosz lived to stand trial at all. In the melee after the shooting, the mob beat him up, crying, “Lynch him!” It was McKinley who actually saved his life. Looking up from his wound to see the assassin getting clobbered, the president commanded, “Go easy on him, boys.”
Before his execution, Czolgosz explained, “I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people — the good working people.” Truth was, Czolgosz hadn’t held down a job in years. In 1897, the first year of the McKinley administration, Czolgosz suffered some sort of mysterious breakdown, quit working, and started to study socialism and then anarchism, attending meetings in Cleveland and elsewhere. It was in that city that Czolgosz heard the anarchist Emma Goldman speak on May 5, 1901. “She set me on fire,” he later told his jailers. This is what he heard her say:
Under the galling yoke of government, ecclesiasticism and the bonds of custom and prejudice it is impossible for the individual to work out his own career as he could wish. Anarchism aims at a new and complete freedom…. We merely desire complete individual liberty and this can never be obtained as long as there is an existing government.
After the assassination, forgetting her own descriptions of “the galling yoke of government,” Goldman would wonder why Czolgosz chose to attack McKinley instead of “some more direct representative of the system of economic oppression and misery.” Surely Goldman was thinking of her ex-boyfriend Alexander Berkman, incarcerated for attempting to murder Henry Frick of the Carnegie Steel Company after Frick had ordered Pinkerton gunmen to open fire on striking workers in Pennsylvania in 1892.
If one applies Goldman’s logic to search for an alternative target, a “more direct representative of the system of economic oppression and misery” than McKinley, Robert Todd Lincoln immediately springs to mind. Lincoln had returned to Chicago and his lucrative private law practice after his service in the Garfield and Arthur administrations. George Pullman, founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company, was his most important client. In 1894, Pullman workers were either laid off or had their wages cut. And even though they lived in the company town of Pullman in housing owned by George Pullman, he refused to lower his workers’ rents. The resulting Pullman strike became a red-letter date in labor history, bringing socialist Eugene Debs to national attention. Pullman’s drawn-out, stubborn refusal to budge on worker demands prompted even “Dollar Mark” Hanna to complain, “A man who won’t meet his men half-way is a God-damn fool.” Robert Todd Lincoln was Pullman’s special counsel through the entire episode. Lincoln’s representation of Pullman is consistent with his preference for capital over labor. Take, for example, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which a bomb got thrown and anarchist workers employed by the McCormick Reaper Works were hanged as scapegoats. (Their execution, by the way, inspired Emma Goldman to join the anarchist ranks.) In 1893, when Illinois’s governor John P. Altgeld committed political suicide to bravely pardon three of the innocent Haymarket defendants who were still rotting in prison, Robert Todd Lincoln, who had vacationed with the McCormick family, gave a speech at Harvard calling Governor Altgeld’s mercy a “slander upon justice I must denounce.” In 1901, at the time of the McKinley assassination, Robert Todd Lincoln had just become president of the Pullman Company, a position he would hold until 1911. So by Emma Goldman’s criteria Robert Todd Lincoln would have made an exceedingly perfect mark for Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo instead of President McKinley. And given his second career as the presidential angel of death, Robert Lincoln was even in town at the time.
After Emma Goldman’s Cleveland speech set Leon Czolgosz on fire, he followed her to Chicago, tracking her down at the home of the editor of the anarchist paper Free Society at the moment she was rushing off to catch a train. (Sondheim and his collaborator John Weidman scripted this brief meeting as a love scene in Assassins.) He introduced himself as Nieman, then stuck around after she left to quiz her editor friend whether they were having any “secret meetings.” The editor, thinking Nieman was a narc, printed a warning against him in Free Society, calling him a possible spy the anarchist community should look out for, claiming that he pretended “to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names, or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence.” Goldman was appalled by the ad. She complained, had the smear retracted, but too late. Czolgosz was already in Buffalo, about to prove what a true anarchist he was.
Years later, in her riveting autobiography Living My Life, Goldman, recalling the fervor with which Nieman/Czolgosz had asked h
er to recommend books he should read, wrote that “it must have hurt him to the quick to be so cruelly misjudged by the very people to whom he had come for inspiration.”
Emma Goldman claimed to abhor violence, and yet her speeches and writings are full of sympathetic odes to killers and would-be killers, Czolgosz included. I’m more of a Ten Commandments, rule-of-law girl myself. The closest I’ve ever come to anarchy is buying a Sex Pistols record. I find Goldman fascinating, but bothersome. (Especially her blasé recounting of being Berkman’s accomplice in shooting Frick.) While her apologies for violence were loathsome and her utopian hooey about life without government childish, her book’s description of making friends with her fellow anarchists in New York is enchanting. Which is why her guilty assumption that Czolgosz would have been hurt by the anarchist paper’s warning — page 309 in my copy — is so poignant. The three hundred preceding pages are crammed with anecdotes and evidence of her entanglements and camaraderie. In fact, when I read her remarkable account of her first week in New York, when she met Berkman, who would become her lover, and Johann Most, who would become her mentor, I wanted to retrace her steps.
So one night, after a movie, my friend Bennett and I walked down Orchard Street to Canal to see where Emma’s aunt and uncle’s apartment used to be. It was her first stop in New York. I fill in Bennett about her giddy introduction to the city and then we reminisced about our own arrivals. He tells a funny story about being a college freshman and going to Times Square, where he was offered a new drug called crack. I recount the bohemian romance of how I lucked into a sublet thanks to the financial columnist at Esquire.
“Perhaps,” as Truman Capote once confessed as he exaggerated his Brooklyn neighborhood’s charms, “I take too Valentine a view.” But I’ve been lucky enough to go on swell walks with talkative people all over the world, and there really is something speedier and hopped up and deep about the magnificently blabbermouth nature of friendship in New York, and Goldman’s book is further proof of this.
Goldman’s description of her beginning here is a charming blur. She meets the most important people in her life, all the while eating and talking and walking around, drunk on ideas, friendship, and lust — and wine, her first. For example, in one breathtaking paragraph she is (I think) losing her virginity to Berkman (she had been married but to an impotent husband); meanwhile, what’s going through her head is the question, “Can idealists be cruel?” It’s thrilling, even though I did want to reach into the page and pat her head, breaking it to her that, Oh my dear, idealists are the cruelest monsters of them all.
The meetings she describes, the dinners, the walks in the parks with hotheads who speak in manifestos — that’s what Czolgosz craved. There is an aching loneliness in his denials to the police that Emma Goldman helped him shoot the president. “I had no confidants,” he insisted, “no one to help me. I was alone absolutely.”
Nevertheless, Goldman was jailed under suspicion of being Czolgosz’s accomplice. Though Goldman was eventually released if not exactly cleared, she became a pariah, receiving hate mail such as, “You damn bitch of an anarchist. I wish I could get at you. I would tear your heart out and feed it to my dog.”
As Theodore Roosevelt, the new president, would put it in his first message to Congress, “The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled it burns like a consuming flame.” Roosevelt, his wrath lit up like a wad of newspaper soaked in moonshine, continued:
For the anarchist himself, whether he preaches or practices his doctrines, we need not have one particle more concern than for any ordinary murderer. He is not the victim of social or political injustice. There are no wrongs to remedy in his case. The cause of his criminality is to be found in his own evil passions and in the evil conduct of those who urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a “product of social conditions,” save as a highwayman is “produced” by the fact than an unarmed man happens to have a purse…. Anarchistic speeches, writings, and meetings are essentially seditious and treasonable.
Then he called for legislation barring these talkative traitors from emigrating to the United States. Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1903. It was the first law allowing potential immigrants to be questioned about their political views.
On my walk home from that Canal Street jaunt reliving Emma’s first delirious week in New York, I swung by one of her old apartments on East Thirteenth Street. I read somewhere that her place now rents for four thousand dollars a month. There’s an Emma Goldman plaque on the side of the building calling her an “anarchist, orator and advocate of free speech and free love.” It concludes, “She was deported to the Soviet Union in 1919.” She and Berkman were kicked out of the country for speaking out against the United States’ entry into World War I, or as she put it, “for having an opinion.”
Walking westward, I passed by the Brevoort Apartments on Fifth Avenue, the site of an old watering hole where Goldman and Berkman had one of their farewell dinners with old friends before being exiled to Russia. “One does not live in a country thirty-four years and find it easy to go,” she bemoaned. “All the turmoil of body and soul, all the love and hate that come to an intense human being have come to me here.”
It was a warm spring night, but I shivered, feeling lucky to go home.
The Anarchist Exclusion Act strikes me as reactionary. I do believe that anyone coming here has the right to say whatever they want, however foolish, insane, or mean. Though Theodore Roosevelt cracked down on people like Emma Goldman, he did okay by people like Leon Czolgosz’s people — the workers, the miners, the poor. Calling his agenda the “square deal,” he achieved an unprecedented happy medium between the demands of labor and capital, settling a coal strike in 1902 in which he forced the owners to raise wages and stick to a maximum nine-hour workday, but prevented the workers from forming a union. (Nobody was entirely happy, but compared to the bloody strikes of the 1890s, it was an innovation in that nobody got killed.) Roosevelt also coined the term “muckrakers” to describe the crusading journalists like Ida Tarbell, who had taken on the monolith of Standard Oil, and Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle detailed the horrors of the meatpacking industry. Roosevelt acted on the abuses they brought to light, pursuing dozens of antitrust suits and signing into law the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
I think Roosevelt’s soft spot for the underdog in Washington was the influence of New York City — his aristocratic upbringing here and its resultant noblesse oblige. Unlike the ruthless nouveau riches like Standard Oil’s self-made John D. Rockefeller, Roosevelt had the easygoing morals of someone who was born rich. But also, back during his days as police commissioner in Manhattan, Roosevelt used to tramp around at night in the company of photographer and reporter Jacob Riis. If you want a clear picture of the gulf between the rich and the poor of Roosevelt’s era, go to the Museum of the City of New York, where you can look at a Riis photograph of a cobbler on Ludlow Street sitting down to a Sabbath dinner in the filthy coal cellar he calls home, and then take the elevator up to the installations of rooms from Rockefeller’s house, with his stupid solid gold fireplace poker and the cartoonish safe he kept right next to his bed.
The way Riis remembered making Roosevelt’s acquaintance in the first place is a likable anecdote. After reading Riis’s 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, about the poverty and squalor endured by immigrants on the Lower East Side, Roosevelt sent Riis a note that simply said, “How can I help?”
“I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life,” Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography about the effect of reading and meeting Riis. “But I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.” Of course, Roosevelt published that in 1913. And he wasn’t a Republican anymore.
I phoned my friend Matt. “Remember last summer when you asked me to go hiking in the Adirondacks and I told you that one of the reasons I moved away from Montana was so that I wouldn’t get asked to do outdoorsy stuff like that anymore?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, do you still want to go hiking in the damn Adirondacks? Have you heard of something called Mount Marcy?”
He does and he has. Marcy is the highest peak in the range. Luckily, Matt’s goal to climb every peak in the Adirondacks overlaps with my goal of McKinley assassination pilgrimage.
As President McKinley lay dying, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t sitting in some office somewhere when the cabinet summoned him to Buffalo to take the presidential oath. Nope, he was up enjoying a “bully good tramp” at the highest point in the state of New York. And the story of how he got to Buffalo is like a lot of Roosevelt stories — swashbuckling, death-defying, and hard to believe. Even though he is the only president who was born and raised in New York City, that’s not how we think of him. Even here, in his hometown memorial at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History, the statue of Roosevelt rides a horse. Chiseled into the front of the building are all the many words that describe him — “ranchman, scholar, explorer, scientist, conservationist, naturalist, statesman, author, historian, humanitarian, soldier, patriot,” all of which add up to the unspoken “better than you.”
Matt, an urbanite with the woods in his heart, is the most Theodore Roosevelt–like friend I have. That probably isn’t saying much, as I spend most of my free time indoors around people who talk about politics and entertainment, sprinkling conversations about action movies with insights such as “It wasn’t subversive the way Starship Troopers was subversive” or debating which founding father can be equated with which founding father of rock ’n’ roll — Thomas Paine = Chuck Berry, Ben Franklin = the Big Bopper, etc. (Though Bill Haley = Thomas Jefferson? As if.)