#36 — Sunday, 7th September 1901
Yesterday, at seven minutes past four in the afternoon, in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, while the great pipe organ played Schumann’s “Träumerei” — which means Daydreaming — Leon Czolgosz stepped forward in the receiving line, and the century hinged.
McKinley saw the bandaged hand and did what a kind man does — he reached for the other one. He reached to shake the left hand instead, so as not to hurt the injured right. Beneath the handkerchief, Czolgosz pulled the trigger twice. The first bullet hit a button on McKinley’s coat and deflected off his sternum. The second entered his abdomen.
McKinley stepped back. He looked down. He put his hand inside his vest and felt the blood spreading across his white shirt. He was still standing. Behind Czolgosz, a man named James Benjamin Parker — tall, Black, standing in line to shake the President’s hand like everyone else — punched Czolgosz in the face and knocked him to the ground. Secret Service agents and soldiers piled on. They began beating him. The crowd surged inward.
And the President, shot, bleeding, still on his feet, said two things.
The first: Don’t let them hurt him. He didn’t know, poor fellow, what he was doing.
The second, to Cortelyou, who was trying to hold him upright: My wife — be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her — oh, be careful.
I have been carrying these words since Post #18, when I first stood outside the Temple of Music and watched the quarter of a million lightbulbs burn. I have been waiting to deliver them because they are the most important words the century has spoken so far, and I needed you to understand who was speaking and why.
A man who has just been shot in the stomach thinks first of his assassin’s safety, and second of his wife’s feelings. Not his own pain. Not his own survival. Not revenge, not justice, not the Republic. His assassin and his wife. The two people in the room who need protection — the one from the mob, the other from the news.
William McKinley is not a great president. He is not a visionary. He presided over a war of imperial conquest and signed the legislation that leashed Cuba and opened Kiowa land and governed the Philippines. He is a man of his time, with all the limitations that implies. But in the moment when the bullet enters his body, he is something the century will spend a hundred years trying to be and mostly failing: he is decent.
Today, Sunday, the President is alive.
The doctors are optimistic. They operated on him yesterday evening — Dr. Matthew Mann, a gynaecologist, the only qualified surgeon available at the Exposition hospital, a man who has never treated a gunshot wound. He found the entry wound, traced the path through the stomach, repaired the perforations. He could not find the second bullet. It is lodged somewhere in the abdomen — in the pancreas, perhaps, or near the kidney. He closed the wound and hoped.
There is an X-ray machine at the Exposition. I told you about it last week. Thomas Edison has sent another one from New Jersey, with a trained operator. The doctors in charge of McKinley’s case have decided not to use either machine. They are concerned about side effects. The technology is only five years old. They do not trust it.
The bullet sits in the President’s body like a seed.
This morning, McKinley is conversational. He has asked Cortelyou how the crowd received his speech. He has been allowed to see his wife. The bulletins describe his condition as “quite encouraging.” The newspapers are already drafting their recovery narratives. Roosevelt, informed that the President will survive, has left Buffalo. The markets, which plunged on Friday, are steadying. The century exhales.
I do not exhale. I know what is growing around that bullet.
Over the next week, gangrene will bloom along the track the bullet carved through the stomach, the pancreas, the kidney. It will spread the way fire spreads through a wall — invisibly, behind the surface, while the visible structure looks intact. McKinley will eat toast. He will drink coffee. He will read the newspaper. The bulletins will report improvement. And inside him, the tissue will be dying, turning black, filling with gas, becoming something that no surgeon in 1901 has the tools or the knowledge to stop.
On September 12, he will eat solid food. That evening, his heart will begin to fail. On September 13, the doctors will admit what has been true for days. On September 14, in the early hours of the morning, William McKinley will die, whispering the words of his favourite hymn — Nearer, my God, to Thee — and the century will have its third assassinated American president, and the twenty-sixth will be Theodore Roosevelt, forty-two years old, who at this moment is hiking in the Adirondacks, believing the crisis has passed.
Roosevelt will receive word while descending a mountain in the dark. He will race by carriage over unpaved roads to the nearest railway station. He will take the oath of office in a borrowed house in Buffalo on the afternoon of September 14, in a room that smells of flowers and grief, and the century will accelerate.
I said in the beginning — Post #1, the first Sunday of everything — that the century was a fuse. I said it was lit before anyone noticed. The fuse has been burning through Victoria’s death, through Spindletop, through the Boer camps and the Philippine surrender and the stock panic and the heat wave and the land lottery and the steel strike. Now it reaches its first detonation.
Not because McKinley’s death changes the structure of power — the system persists, as I said it would. But because Roosevelt is a different kind of instrument. McKinley governed the way a man of the nineteenth century governed — cautiously, by consensus, by deference to the machine that elected him. Roosevelt will govern the way the twentieth century demands — loudly, personally, by force of personality and conviction, breaking trusts and building canals and sending fleets around the world to prove that the Republic is an empire whether it admits it or not.
The bullet does not end anything. It begins something.
Czolgosz will be tried in three days, convicted in two more, and electrocuted on October 29. His last words: “I killed the president for the good of the laboring people, the good people. I am not sorry for my crime.” He will be wrong about everything except the laboring people, who are, in fact, good, and who will not benefit in the slightest from what he has done.
Today the Boxer Protocol is signed in Beijing, officially ending the Boxer Rebellion. The European powers and Japan extract from China massive indemnities, territorial concessions, and the right to station troops on Chinese soil. The Qing dynasty will stagger on for another decade before collapsing. I mention this because the century insists on doing several enormous things at once, and I am obligated to notice.
The steel strike will end on September 14. The same day McKinley dies. The workers will accept terms worse than what was offered before they walked out. The coincidence of dates is not symbolic — history does not arrange itself for the convenience of narrators — but I note it because I note everything, and because the century has a way of rhyming even when it isn’t trying.
The century is thirty-six weeks old. In the Temple of Music, the organ has stopped. The blood has been cleaned from the floor. The President lies in a bed at the Milburn house on Delaware Avenue, surrounded by doctors who believe he will live, and he is talking, and eating, and asking about his speech, and inside him the gangrene is spreading, and outside the window the Electric Tower is burning with a quarter of a million lights, and the century is daydreaming, and I am the only one awake.
Träumerei. Daydreaming. The piece Schumann wrote when he was twenty-eight, the same age as the man who fired the gun. The organ was playing it because it is beautiful, because it is gentle, because it fills a room like warm light. It was still playing when the screaming started. I do not know if the organist stopped at the first shot or the second. I do not know if anyone in the room heard the music under the noise. But I heard it. I hear everything. And of all the sounds the century has made so far — the gusher at Spindletop, the guns in the Transvaal, the cornet on Rampart Street, the silence of the camps, the thunder of the heat — the one that stays with me is the organ in the Temple of Music, playing a piece called Daydreaming, one second before the world changed.
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