Leon Czolgosz was a 28-year-old former wire-mill worker from the Cleveland area when, on the afternoon of September 6, 1901, he joined a public reception in Buffalo, New York, and fatally wounded President William McKinley. The President was visiting the Pan-American Exposition, and the reception was meant to let ordinary visitors shake his hand. He lived for eight days. He died in Buffalo on September 14, and that afternoon Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office in the same city.
Czolgosz never denied what he had done. He admitted it within hours, insisted that no one else had a part in it, and tried to plead guilty when he was arraigned. The State of New York would not accept the plea in a capital case, so a plea of not guilty was entered for him and he was tried before a jury of the state Supreme Court in Buffalo. The trial opened on Monday, September 23, and on September 24 the jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to death, filed no appeal, and was executed in Auburn, New York, on October 29, 1901, less than eight weeks after the reception.
Czolgosz was born in Detroit in 1873. When he stood before the court in Buffalo he gave his name, his age as 28, his birthplace as Detroit and his occupation as laborer, and he said he had been raised a Catholic. He had less than six years of schooling.
By 1891 he was living in Cleveland, and that year he went to work at the Newburgh Wire Mill. The economic crash of 1893 reached the mill, and that year Czolgosz took part in a strike there that failed. He lost his place there and was blacklisted, and from that time he went by another name, Fred Nieman. He joined the Knights of the Golden Eagle, an organization that helped its members find work, and he was present at several labor disputes in those years.
In the years after the strike he grew bitter toward religion, which he had once practiced, and toward the economic order that he believed had thrown men like him out of work. He came to see American society as unjust, a system in which the rich lived off the poor, and he laid the blame on the structure of government itself. In 1898 he quit the mill. He did not hold a regular job again. He spent the next years on a farm outside Cleveland, read anarchist newspapers, and kept largely to himself.
Czolgosz wanted to belong to the anarchist movement, but the movement did not want him. He tried to join the Liberty Club, a small anarchist group in Cleveland, and its leaders did not trust him. Other groups turned him away as well, and he remained on the edge of a movement he could not enter.
The assassination of King Umberto I of Italy by an anarchist in July 1900 made a deep impression on him, and he kept a newspaper account of it. In May 1901 he attended a lecture in Cleveland given by one of the best-known anarchist speakers in the country, a talk about class struggle and the duty to act against government. He later said the lecture had set him on his course, and when he was questioned in Buffalo he described himself as an anarchist and as a follower of the speaker's teaching. He never claimed that anyone had directed him.
On July 11, 1901, he left the farm and moved to West Seneca, a town just outside Buffalo. On August 31 he took a rented room in Buffalo itself. The President was due to visit the Pan-American Exposition in the first week of September.
The reception was held on the afternoon of Friday, September 6, on the Exposition grounds in Buffalo. Members of the public stood in line to meet him in person, and Czolgosz was among them. There he fatally wounded the President and was taken into custody.
The President died in Buffalo on September 14, 1901. Theodore Roosevelt, who had been in Vermont when word reached him and had come to Buffalo, was sworn in as President that afternoon by a federal district judge.
Czolgosz was taken into custody on the spot and brought under guard to police headquarters in Buffalo, where the city's police held him for the next ten days.
The Erie County district attorney questioned him at headquarters that same evening. Czolgosz admitted the act at once and without being pressed. He said he had acted alone, that no one had helped him or known of his intention, and he described the act as a duty he owed to working people. His statements at headquarters, taken down by the officials who heard them, became part of the state's case at trial.
After the President's death the charge he faced became murder. After his indictment he was moved from police headquarters to the county's custody in Buffalo to await trial.
The Erie County grand jury heard the state's evidence on September 16, 1901, ten days after the reception. It voted to indict Czolgosz on one count of murder in the first degree, and he was arraigned the same day. At the grand jury he would not speak.
He had no lawyer and no means to hire one, and the court assigned two of the most respected members of the Buffalo bar to defend him, both retired justices of the state Supreme Court. Neither man wanted the assignment. One let it be known publicly that he was unwilling to be named. They took it on as a duty to the court, and they had a client who would not help them. Czolgosz refused to talk to them about the case, about his history or about his state of mind.
The trial opened at ten in the morning on Monday, September 23, 1901, in the Criminal Section of the Supreme Court in Buffalo, in a courtroom in the city hall. One justice of the Supreme Court presided. The district attorney led the prosecution, with an assistant district attorney presenting the case to the jury.
When Czolgosz was arraigned before the trial court he again pleaded guilty. The court would not let the plea stand and ordered a plea of not guilty entered in its place, so that the state would have to prove its case to a jury.
Jury selection was finished by half past two that afternoon. The twelve men in the box included a plumber, several farmers, a bank cashier, a manufacturer and a contractor. Every one of them acknowledged that he had already formed an opinion about the case. The first witness took the stand a quarter of an hour after the jury was sworn.
The state built its case methodically. The chief engineer of the Exposition testified first, and a photographer produced pictures that the defense accepted without objection. Physicians who had attended the President testified next and were cross-examined by the defense. Men who had stood near the President at the reception described what they had seen. Police officials repeated the admissions Czolgosz had made at headquarters, and a soldier who had been on duty at the reception testified for the state.
The defense called no witnesses. Six physicians who specialized in mental disease, known then as alienists, had examined Czolgosz on behalf of the prosecution and the defense, and none had found evidence of insanity. The defense lawyers could therefore offer the jury no expert who would say he was insane, and with a client who refused to discuss his mind with them, they had nothing else to present. They raised the question of his sanity only briefly, in closing argument.
The state rested after about a day and a half, and the case went to the jury after the closing arguments and the court's charge. On September 24, 1901, after deliberating for about half an hour, the jury returned its verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.
Czolgosz was brought back before the court for sentence later that week. Asked whether he had anything to say before judgment was pronounced, he answered first that he had nothing to say about the legal grounds, and then that he did. His voice was so weak that one of his assigned lawyers repeated his words aloud for the court. "There was no one else but me," he said. "No one else told me to do it, and no one paid me to do it."
The court then pronounced judgment. Czolgosz was to "suffer the punishment of death" in the week beginning October 28, 1901, in the manner the law prescribed, and the warrant directed that the sentence be carried out at the state prison in Auburn. His lawyers filed no appeal. He was moved from Buffalo to Auburn at the end of September.
Czolgosz spent his last month in Auburn. No appeal was filed on his behalf, and the sentence stood as the court had pronounced it. He was executed in Auburn on October 29, 1901, 45 days after the President's death and seven weeks and four days after the reception in Buffalo. He was 28.
Czolgosz insisted from his first questioning to his last words in court that he had acted alone, that no one had told him to do it and that no one had paid him. No court ever found otherwise.
His sanity was examined by six alienists retained by both sides, who found no evidence of insanity, and the jury rejected the defense's brief argument on the point. Every juror admitted to having formed an opinion before the trial began. One week passed between the indictment and the opening of the trial, the assigned defense lawyers had a client who would not talk to them, and the defense called no witnesses. The trial took little more than a day from the opening of court to the verdict. No appeal was taken, so no higher court ever reviewed it.
1873: Leon F. Czolgosz is born in Detroit, Michigan.
1891: He is living in Cleveland and goes to work at the Newburgh Wire Mill.
1893: He takes part in a failed strike at the mill, is blacklisted and begins using the name Fred Nieman.
1898: He quits the mill and does not hold regular work again.
July 1900: The assassination of King Umberto I of Italy makes a deep impression on him.
May 1901: He attends an anarchist lecture in Cleveland.
July 11, 1901: He moves to West Seneca, New York, near Buffalo.
August 31, 1901: He takes a rented room in Buffalo.
September 6, 1901: At a public reception in Buffalo during the Pan-American Exposition, he fatally wounds the President and is taken into custody.
September 14, 1901: The President dies in Buffalo; Theodore Roosevelt takes the oath of office there that afternoon.
September 16, 1901: The Erie County grand jury indicts Czolgosz on one count of murder in the first degree, and he is arraigned.
September 23, 1901: His trial opens in the Supreme Court in Buffalo; the court enters a plea of not guilty in place of his plea of guilty.
September 24, 1901: The jury finds him guilty of murder in the first degree.
Late September 1901: He is sentenced to death and moved to Auburn, New York.
October 29, 1901: He is executed in Auburn.