#35 — Sunday, 31st August 1901
In Canton, Ohio, the President of the United States is sitting on his porch, working on a speech.
He is fifty-eight years old. He is in his second term. He is well-liked — not brilliant, not visionary, but decent in the way that certain men of his generation are decent: steadily, without flourish, out of habit. He wears a red carnation in his lapel. He has worn one every day for years. It is his lucky charm. Someone told him once that it brought good fortune and he believed it, the way kind men believe small, harmless things.
William McKinley is working on a speech about trade. He is going to deliver it at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo next Thursday, the 5th of September. He has spent the summer here in Canton — first grieving for his wife, who nearly died in San Francisco in May, then nursing her back to something like health, and now revising sentences about reciprocity and tariffs and the brotherhood of American republics. He is a man who believes in progress. He believes in the Exposition, with its Electric Tower and its quarter of a million lightbulbs and its careful arrangement of the hemisphere’s achievements. He believes that the century will be good.
His secretary, George Cortelyou, has scheduled a public reception at the Exposition’s Temple of Music for the afternoon of Friday the 6th. Cortelyou is nervous about it. He has taken it off the schedule twice. McKinley has put it back both times. The President likes to meet the public. He likes to shake hands. He likes the warmth of a crowd, the faces coming toward him one by one, the brief squeeze of fingers, the murmured greetings. He has no fear of crowds.
Cortelyou has a fear of crowds. Cortelyou can feel something in the air this summer — not a specific threat, not an intelligence report, just a sense that the century is moving too fast and the president is moving through it too openly. But McKinley overrules him. The reception stays on the schedule.
Six days.
In a boarding house somewhere — the records are imprecise about exactly where he is this week — a twenty-eight-year-old man named Leon Czolgosz is moving toward Buffalo.
He was born in Michigan to Polish immigrant parents. He grew up in factories. He worked in a wire mill in Cleveland until the Panic of 1893 — the crash I have not written about yet, the one before the one I have, the one that threw millions out of work and taught an entire generation of young men that the system they had been told would reward them could discard them overnight. Czolgosz lost his job. He went back to his parents’ farm. He worked irregularly. He may have had a nervous breakdown. Something inside him hardened, or broke, or both — the way things harden and break at the same time, like clay in a kiln.
He found anarchism. He attended a speech by Emma Goldman in Cleveland in May — Goldman, the most famous anarchist in America, small and fierce and utterly uncompromising. She did not advocate violence. She expressed understanding for those driven to it. Czolgosz approached her afterward. He asked for reading material. She recommended some pamphlets. Her words, he would later say, burned in his head. In July, he visited her at her home in Chicago. He followed her to the train station. She found him unsettling. She left.
He has a .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver. He has a handkerchief. He has a plan, though the word plan implies a degree of clarity that may not be present. What he has is a conviction — that the President represents unjust rule, that the system that crushed him is embodied in the man on the porch in Canton, and that a bullet is the only argument the system cannot dismiss.
He is wrong, of course. The system will dismiss bullets as readily as it dismisses everything else. McKinley will die and Roosevelt will take the oath and the system will continue, slightly altered, slightly accelerated, but fundamentally intact. Czolgosz’s bullet will not end capitalism or injustice or the arrangement of power that broke him. It will end McKinley. It will end Czolgosz — he will be electrocuted in October. And it will elevate to the presidency a forty-two-year-old man who has been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, for exactly this.
Theodore Roosevelt is at his home on Oyster Bay, Long Island. He is the Vice President, a position he did not want and was given precisely because his enemies wanted him somewhere harmless. He is energetic, ambitious, and bored. He has been Vice President for six months. He has presided over the Senate and attended social functions and gone on hunting trips and felt the slow suffocation of irrelevance. He is the most famous man in America after the President, and the most useless.
I introduced him standing behind McKinley at the inauguration in March. I said then that the century would need him, and the century is about to call.
At the Exposition in Buffalo, the Electric Tower burns. Two hundred and fifty thousand people have come this month. They ride the miniature railway and gape at the exhibits and eat fried food and wander through the Indian Village, where Geronimo — the last Apache war chief, now seventy-two, prisoner of war since 1886 — sits in a booth and signs autographs and sells photographs of himself. He is guarded by a U.S. Army soldier. He will be displayed like this for the rest of his life. The great enemy of American expansion, caged and ticketed, three appearances daily.
There is an X-ray machine on display. It is new — Röntgen published his discovery only five years ago. The machine is a marvel. Visitors line up to see their own bones. In six days, when McKinley is shot, surgeons at the Exposition hospital will operate on him but will not use the X-ray machine to locate the second bullet. They will be afraid of side effects. The bullet will remain lodged in his abdomen, and around it, over the following eight days, gangrene will bloom like a black flower, and the President will die.
The X-ray machine is right there. The bullet is six days away. The machine could find it. No one will think to use it.
I want you to know that this is what it is like to be me. I can see the machine and the bullet and the six days between them, and I cannot make any of them move.
The century is thirty-five weeks old. The last Sunday of summer. The steel strike is grinding into its fourth week. The Fawcett Commission is moving through camps in South Africa, counting tents and children and rations. Scott’s Discovery is somewhere in the Atlantic, heading south. Clara Maass was buried yesterday. A baby named Louis is four weeks old in the Battlefield. A man with a new name is writing stories in Pittsburgh. Two bicycle mechanics are back in Dayton, planning a wind tunnel. And in Canton, Ohio, a president is sitting on his porch in the late summer light, revising a sentence about progress, wearing his red carnation, the one he believes brings him luck.
On Friday, in the receiving line at the Temple of Music, a young girl will approach the President and ask for the flower. He will smile and give it to her. He will unpin it from his lapel and hand it to a child. His lucky charm. His small, harmless belief.
The next person in line will be Czolgosz.
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