Most afternoons on the family farm, Leon Czolgosz would take a break from his idling for a half-mile walk to the village store. There he would beat a direct path toward the newspaper rack and eagerly scan the headlines. Thumbing through the day’s editions, he would read the optimistic articles proclaiming the resurrection of the robust American economy and praising the president’s policies. Other headlines, too, would have caught his attention. As a student of social issues, Czolgosz possessed a natural interest in the election of 1900. Though he was hardly a McKinley man, he took advantage of discounted train transport to Canton, only a short distance to the south, and joined the crowds that were again marching up Market Avenue North to see the candidate in person.
Having spent an afternoon listening to McKinley, Czolgosz might have been itching to get out of Canton and get home. Yet, home was becoming a difficult place to be. The relaxing, lazy life that he had built there was coming under attack from the lady of the house, his father’s second wife. Catarina had had enough of her stepson’s malingering and wasn’t afraid to tell him so. Against such accusations, Czolgosz oddly made no attempt to defend himself; rather, he simply ran. When she was in the house, he refused to eat with the family, sullenly dining alone upstairs in his room on meals that consisted of milk from the barn, bread, and cake. When his stepmother was gone, Czolgosz became more sociable and might even cook for the family. But as soon as she returned, he would bolt, once leaving a frying pan of sizzling fish to burn rather than spend one second with her in the kitchen.
Czolgosz’s siblings agreed, at least in principle, with Catarina, convinced their brother’s ailment was nothing more than a severe case of self-pity. To one sister-in-law, Czolgosz showed no outward signs of illness other than that he sometimes “would spit out great chunks”—apparently coughing up phlegm. “If you said anything to him about his sickness he would get mad.”1 She would later join the chorus that he was “a rather lazy but nice boy.” Fueling the perception that he was a malingerer, Czolgosz developed the strange habit of falling asleep at odd times. His brothers and sisters taunted him with names like “old woman” or “grandmother.” To these jabs, Czolgosz displayed little sense of humor and would bitterly snap back. His brother Waldek encouraged him to go to a hospital but Czolgosz refused: “There is no place in the hospital for poor people; if you have lots of money you will get well taken care of!”2
Feeling harassed at home, and still harboring an interest in the broader world, Czolgosz increasingly took perplexing and mysterious trips. For days at a time, he would disappear without providing any explanation of his travels. The family, who quickly became used to his oddball nature, stopped asking questions and the young man was allowed to come and go as he pleased. The trips were for “meetings,”3 Czolgosz explained.
The afternoon of May 5, 1901, Emma Goldman prepared to give what seemed to be a routine speech at Cleveland’s Memorial Hall, organizing her notes and surveying the usual police detail that tracked her engagements. From across the room, a young man made his way toward her and began leafing through some pamphlets and books that were on sale. Noticing Goldman, Leon Czolgosz walked over and asked, “Will you suggest something for me to read?” He was, he explained, working in Akron and had to leave the lecture before she would finish.
Goldman later remembered him as “very young, a mere youth, of medium height, well built and carrying himself very erect. But it was his face that held me, a most sensitive face, with a delicate pink complexion; a handsome face made doubly so by his curly golden hair.…” After chatting briefly, Goldman suggested a couple of books and the two parted.4 “Strength,” she said, “showed in his large blue eyes.”
A few moments later, Goldman began her address in a strong resonant voice that hinted slightly of a German accent. She exhorted the crowd to note that alone among radical ideologies, anarchism promised to liberate downtrodden workers. “We do not favor the Socialist idea of converting men and women into mere producing machines under the eye of a paternal government. We go to the opposite extreme and demand the fullest and most complete liberty for each and every person to work out his own salvation upon any lines that he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the happiness of others.”
Anarchists were opposed to bloodshed to achieve their ends, she told the crowd. “Some believe that we should first obtain the force and let the intelligence and education come afterwards. Nothing could be more fallacious. If we get the education and intelligence first among the people the power will come to us without a struggle.”
But she next stated that it was understandable that some anarchists carried out violent attacks. Some men were so consumed with passion that they could not simply stand idly by and watch wrongs being committed.5
Goldman’s remarks that evening overwhelmed Czolgosz. He had been interested in social revolution for years, and apparently had been introduced to the idea of the propaganda of the deed long ago. But the philosophy had never been presented like this. Her words had, he later said, burned in his head with such intensity that it made his skull hurt. Goldman’s eloquence and stage manners surely had something to do with it. When she was on her game, few could hold an audience as well. But maybe more important was the state in which he now heard them.
Czolgosz had for years allowed himself to slip deeper and deeper into an emotional and psychological hole on the farm. It was a downward spiral that he was surely well aware of—he possessed a solid work ethic and was smart enough to realize what was happening. Yet he hadn’t known how to pull himself out. He found in Goldman’s remarks the inspiration and the method of escape. He hadn’t worked out how exactly, and probably only vaguely understood what it meant, but Czolgosz seemed from this night on to have resolved to pursue the life of radical social revolutionary.
Among the publications that Czolgosz likely perused that evening—he would later speak of frequently reading it—was a small newspaper titled Free Society. The country’s leading radical journal in the later part of the 1890s, Free Society was the brainchild of Abe Isaak and his wife, Mary, a pair of pacifist Mennonites who had fled czarist Russia in 1889. Together, they had first attempted to forge a simple agrarian life in distant Portland, Oregon. Halted by police for their paper’s radical ideas, however, they began publishing in Chicago, that center of radical American thought.
Curled up on his bed back at home or outside under a shade tree, away from prying family eyes, Czolgosz might have flipped through pages that in any given issue offered a caustic commentary on the powers that ruled the country. One front-page contribution, for example, was written in the form of a poem noting that even monkeys had sense enough not to elect leaders who would inevitably rob and cheat the others.
Though less likely to be the object of a satirical poet—possibly for lack of suitable words that rhymed with “McKinley”—the president, too, was a popular subject for Free Society’s writers. He had become, in the imagery of one author, self-appointed royalty whose aim was the enrichment of members of his court. “Mr. McKinley is more an absolute monarch than King Edward,” the paper said in its May 5, 1901, issue, stating that Mark Hanna was McKinley’s Cardinal Richelieu, a reference to the minister of France’s King Louis XIII. “The real rulers today are neither kings nor presidents, but capitalists and police.”
Large concentrations of commercial power, readers of Free Society were told, lay behind McKinley’s more sensational pursuit of a foreign empire. The president’s ambitious plans for Cuba, his handling of the Boxer uprising, his efforts to thrust a foreign government upon native peoples, all were ready-made fodder for the paper. And then there was the deepening military quagmire in the Philippines. “More than 3,500 Americans have perished in the Philippines in order to carry out an after-thought of the emperor at Washington by subduing a race who innocently imagined they might set up their own brand of political authority,” wrote one columnist in a front-page story in June 30, 1901. “The earth is for the strong. And so the government is backed by the majority in carrying out the doctrine that might is right.”6
In Europe, heads of state had been killed for transgressions less egregious than these. Should the president of the United States suffer a similar fate? On this, Free Society was largely opposed, though for purely pragmatic reasons. Radicals, one article said, could do worse than what they were up against in the United States. “The anarchists are treated with sufficiently gross injustice even in this country. But they are at least allowed the right of conducting peaceful propaganda and the consequence is that McKinley, hated and despised though he is, needs no body guard to protect him from revolutionaries.” The paper went on: “No anarchist wants McKinley assassinated. He is of more use to us right where he is, an object lesson of the worst results of representative government. Any fool who should kill the paltry Napoleon would be the deadliest enemy of anarchism.”7