Buried: McKinley National Memorial and Museum, Canton, Ohio
Twenty-fifth President - 1897-1901
Born: January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio
Died: 2:15 a.m. on September 14, 1901, in Buffalo, New York
Age at death: 58
Cause of death: Gangrene resulting from assassin’s bullet
Final words: “It is God’s way. His will be done, not ours.
We are all going. …Oh, dear”
Admission to McKinley National
Museum: $7.00
The election of 1896 pitted the fiery orator William Jennings Bryan against the genteel front-porch campaigner, William McKinley. The issue was money—and whether the U.S. currency would be backed by gold or silver. McKinley, supporting the gold standard and backed by the political organization and money of Ohio industrialist Mark Hanna, won a handy electoral college victory.
The 1898 explosion of the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor became a major factor in McKinley’s decision to fight the Spanish-American War. Among its outcomes was the transfer of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States; Hawaii was annexed and the Boxer Rebellion was quelled in China with U.S. involvement.
Against this foreign policy background, Bryan and McKinley faced off again in 1900. Republican party insiders, hoping to send New York’s noisy governor Theodore Roosevelt off to the oblivion of the vice presidency, chose him to join McKinley on the ticket.
Roosevelt served as vice president for just six months. In September 1901 McKinley traveled to Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition. The easygoing, gregarious president looked forward to the opportunity to get out among the populace. McKinley’s personal secretary, George Cortelyou, was more cautious. Fearing that such an open, uncontrolled event could prove dangerous, he cancelled the president’s appearance without his knowledge. When McKinley got wind of the change, he insisted that he would attend as scheduled, saying, “No one would want to hurt me.”
McKinley’s confidence proved fatally misplaced. On September 6 after a pleasant day trip to Niagara Falls, he returned to the fair for yet another round of handshakes. The receiving line stretched between a row of more than two dozen guards—extra security to appease the president’s aides.
In the crowd was an unemployed, disaffected young man named Leon Czolgosz, who had been trailing the president for days. As McKinley stepped forward to greet him, Czolgosz raised his bandaged right hand. The handkerchief wrapped around his hand concealed a .32-caliber revolver. He quickly fired two shots at the president’s midsection. The first ricocheted and missed its intended target. The second ripped through McKinley’s stomach.
The wounded president’s first thoughts were of others. As his secretary and security detail rushed to his aid, he begged them to protect the fragile health of his wife Ida, a chronic invalid. He feared that she would be unable to cope with the news of the shooting. The crowd tackled Czolgosz. McKinley pleaded with them not to injure the gunman.
McKinley was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Doctors operated to determine the bullet’s trajectory. They deemed the president stable enough to recover at the home of his host, John Milburn, the Exposition’s president. McKinley rested comfortably there and seemed to rally—so much that he requested solid food and a cigar.
Doctors allowed him the food, but after eating, the president took a turn for the worse. Doctors were unaware that gangrene had ravaged the president’s wounded organs.
With his wife at his bedside, McKinley died at 2:15 a.m. on September 14, eight days after the shooting, becoming the third American president to die at the hands of an assassin. Theodore Roosevelt, on vacation in the Adirondacks, received a telegram with the news and raced to Buffalo. That afternoon, he was sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States.
The funeral rites began with a private service at the Milburn home. The president’s coffin lay in the drawing room, draped with an American flag and surrounded by floral arrangements. The new chief executive, Theodore Roosevelt, and various other dignitaries sat before the open casket. An impassive Ida McKinley listened from the top of the stairs.
At the service’s end, the casket was placed onto a funeral carriage to the strains of the president’s favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The procession made its way through Buffalo, its streets lined with mourners. The president lay in state at the Buffalo City Hall, where more than two hundred thousand citizens lined up to pay their respects.
The next morning, the funeral train departed for Washington, D.C. Following the customs established by earlier presidential funerals, McKinley’s body was returned to the White House before being taken down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. After lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, the president’s coffin was carried back to the funeral train for its final journey to his hometown. Neighbors and friends of the slain president attended a public service in Canton, Ohio. McKinley’s remains were temporarily interred in the receiving vault at Westlawn Cemetery.
An outraged public called for Leon Czolgosz to be lynched. The self-described anarchist and admitted assassin was held in prison under tight security. Czolgosz was tried, convicted, and executed for McKinley’s murder in less than two months.
The William McKinley National Memorial was completed in 1907, and his coffin was moved to its final resting place and enclosed in a dark green granite sarcophagus. Ida McKinley, who had died earlier that year, was buried alongside him.
The granite tombs of William and Ida McKinley
Touring William McKinley’s Tomb at the McKinley National Memorial and Museum
The McKinley National Memorial and Museum is located in Canton, Ohio. It is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Sundays. The site is closed on major holidays and may be closed intermittently from December 1 to April 1. Visitors are advised to call for further information on hours of operation.
There is no admission fee to visit the McKinley Monument. Admission to the museum is $7.00 for adults, $6.00 for senior citizens, and $5.00 for children ages three to eighteen. Children under age three are admitted free.
From the north: Take I-77 South to exit 106 and follow the signs to the McKinley National Memorial and Museum.
From the south: Take I-77 North to exit 105 and follow the signs to the McKinley National Memorial and Museum.
For additional information
McKinley National Memorial and Museum
800 McKinley Monument Drive, NW
Canton, Ohio 44708
Phone: (330) 455-7043
www.mckinleymuseum.org
“Elected on a staunchly protectionist platform, the last president of the nineteenth century came to anticipate many trends of the twentieth.”
—Richard Norton Smith
Americans like to think that the presidential office fosters growth in its occupants. (Woodrow Wilson more puckishly, and perhaps more accurately, observed that public men tend either to grow or swell.) William McKinley refutes the cynics. Elected on a staunchly protectionist platform, the last president of the nineteenth century came to anticipate many trends of the twentieth. A somewhat reluctant imperialist, McKinley saw the United States launched as a global power as a result of the Spanish-American War that brought the Philippines, Puerto Rico and (briefly) Cuba under American control.
Reelected in 1900, McKinley let it be known that he intended in his second term to break with tradition and visit his country’s newly added foreign outposts. In a still more radical departure from his own past, McKinley told a large crowd at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in September 1901 that “isolation is no longer possible or desirable…the period of exclusiveness is past.” In practical terms, this meant freer trade in place of the high tariff barriers of the past. McKinley the protectionist was transforming himself, almost overnight, into McKinley the internationalist.
His associates, concerned about security risks in an age of anarchist violence, urged the president to cancel a planned public reception at the fair. Knowing how much the kind-hearted McKinley hated to disappoint anyone, his personal secretary George Cortelyou tried another tack, reminding his boss that he couldn’t possibly shake hands with all the thousands assembled to see him.
“Well, they’ll know I tried, anyhow,” McKinley told Cortelyou.
In the event, a group of uniformed soldiers, added as a precaution at the last minute, obstructed the view of the president’s regular security staff, enabling Leon Czolgosz to get off two shots. “I didn’t believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none,” explained the assassin. On the day of McKinley’s funeral, the nation observed five minutes of silence. Secretary of State John Hay declared of the late president that he “showed in his life how a citizen should live, and in his last hour taught us how a great leader could die”—words that would echo over seventy years later in Walter Mondale’s eulogy to his old friend Hubert Humphrey.
Ironically, the invalid Ida McKinley would outlive her husband by six years, during which the First Lady, who had been chronically ill, never again experienced one of the seizures that had cast a shadow over her married life.
—-RNS