The “Bad Luck” Of William McKinley, The President Assassinated While Shaking Hands
Public DomainWilliam McKinley had just started his second term in office when he was killed by an assassin in Buffalo in September 1901.
A Civil War veteran like James Garfield, William McKinley ascended to the presidency in 1897 on the wave of an economic collapse in 1893 that had turned voters against the Democrats. He was easily reelected in 1900, his political star boosted by both a stronger economy and his victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 following the explosion of the USS Maine.
However, McKinley became the fifth president who died in office just a few months into his second term.
On Sept. 6, 1901, McKinley attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, to give a speech on trade policy and to tour the exhibits, which ranged from displays of American art to new advances in electricity technology. That afternoon, McKinley attended an exposition at the Temple of Music, where he met and shook hands with a group of supporters. One of them was a 12-year-old girl named Myrtle Ledger, whom the president gifted with the red carnation that he wore in his lapel for luck.
Just minutes later, McKinley reached to shake the hand of a man named Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz, an anarchist who saw McKinley as the “enemy of the good people,” had a gun in his right hand hidden under a white handkerchief. The president seemed to think that Czolgosz was hiding a deformity or injury and reached to shake his left hand, instead.
Public DomainA depiction of the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz.
Then, Czolgosz shot him twice in the abdomen.
“There was an instant of almost complete silence, like the hush that follows a clap of thunder,” The New York Times reported the next day. “The president stood stock still, a look of hesitancy, almost of bewilderment, on his face. Then he retreated a step while a pallor began to steal over his features.”
Still conscious, McKinley instructed the crowd not to hurt the “poor misguided fellow.” Then, the president’s thoughts seemed to turn to his wife, who was in poor health. Turning to his personal secretary, he said: “My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her — oh, be careful.”
At first, it seemed that the president might survive despite the severity of his wounds. But gangrene set in, and McKinley died on Sept. 14, 1901, at the age of 58, six months after his second inauguration.
Czolgosz expressed no remorse for the assassination and was executed a month later, on Oct. 29, 1901.
Public DomainLeon Czolgosz, seen shortly after he fatally wounded President William McKinley.
By then, McKinley’s energetic 42-year-old vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, had already been sworn in.
