On Sept. 6, 1901, in Buffalo, New York, anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally shot U.S. President William McKinley. He died from the gunshot wound eight days later.
During this era in America, there were a series of high-value assassinations committed by individuals who history refers to as “anarchists,” who were looking to upset the ruling order.
Winter Watch suggests that McKinley (1843-1901) may have in fact been a target of the usual suspects — headed by Jacob Schiff, JP Morgan and the Rothschilds — because he was a strong proponent of sound money, opposed central banking and utilized protectionism for American goods. McKinley could also be characterized as an America Firster nationalist, as opposed to an internationalist.
One frequent opponent Sen. George Hoar of Massachusetts acknowledged that McKinley’s “great wisdom and tact and his delightful individual quality” gave him unusual influence.
At 58, the son of an Ohio iron-worker and very popular and capable, McKinley would have been a powerful influence over the subsequent fifteen years in the plans of the budding Crime Syndicate’s New World Order.
Czolgosz (1873 -1901) shot McKinley twice at point-blank range with a covered revolver. Security was non-existent as the shooter came through a receiving line at the Temple of Music at the Buffalo, New York Pan-American Exposition. As assassinations go, this was an easy operation.
George Cortelyou, President McKinley’s Assassination and the Panic of 1907
Questionable Medical Treatment
Although the wound was serious, the medical attention was incompetent. The ambulance carrying McKinley went to the Exposition hospital at 4:25 p.m. Though it usually dealt only with the minor medical issues of fair-goers, the hospital did have an operating theatre. At the time of the shooting, no fully qualified doctor was at the hospital, only nurses and interns.
Even though the POTUS was at the fair, the best surgeon in the city was the Exposition’s medical director, Dr. Roswell Park, who was away in Niagara Falls performing a neck operation. When interrupted during the procedure on Sept. 6 and told he was needed in Buffalo, he responded that he could not leave, not even for the president of the United States.
The first physician to arrive at the hospital was Dr. Herman Mynter. With Park unavailable and with the fading afternoon light (the major source of illumination in the operating room), another surgeon, Dr. Matthew D. Mann, arrived to assist. The decision was made to operate at once to try to remove the remaining bullet. Mann was a noted gynecologist but had no experience in trauma surgery.
To increase the lighting, sunlight was reflected onto the wound by another physician. Finally, toward the end of the surgery, a better light was rigged. The hospital lacked even basic surgical equipment, such as retractors. Mann did little probing of the wound to find the bullet. His work was complicated by the fact that the president was obese. The stomach displayed both an entry and exit wound. Mann sewed up both holes in the organ but could not find the bullet itself. As the operation concluded, the experienced surgeon, Dr. Park, arrived from Niagara Falls, but he was unwilling to intervene.
Rather than being removed to a better hospital, McKinley was then taken to the home of John Milburn to convalesce, or in reality to die. The next day, McKinley seemed to be recovering and was conversational. The main issue the patient faced was gangrene from the failure to track the bullet path and find the round. To deal with this, an X-ray machine, accompanied by a trained operator, was sent by its inventor, Thomas Edison. However, it was not used on the president on orders of the doctors in charge of McKinley’s case.
Following a week of more neglect, in the early morning of Sept. 13, McKinley suffered a collapse. By 2:15 a.m. on the 14th, he was dead. As the autopsy would reveal, gangrene was growing on the walls of his stomach and toxins were passing into his blood. The same curious crew of Mynter and Mann also handled the autopsy, and still they couldn’t find the bullet.
Winter Watch Takeaway: Was there a hidden hand behind this malpractice?
The Case of Assassin Leon Czolgosz
When McKinley was shot, there were hundreds of eyewitnesses. There was no doubt or sleight of hand regarding the culprit. Czolgosz quickly confessed his guilt but was not cooperative with investigators even after being administered a third-degree beating. Czolgosz seems to be operating under a strict code of “omerta” (silence) and was resigned to his death. He didn’t cooperate or even speak to his defense attorneys. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch article from Oct. 29, 1901, states the Czolgosz was isolated and was denied his mail.
The trial and execution were all over in six weeks. He was electrocuted on Oct. 29, 1901. Like Jack Ruby, he never revealed the conspiracy and projected the lone-nut theory. Sulfuric acid was poured into Czolgosz’s coffin so that his body would be completely disfigured. His brother asked for the body, but Czolgosz was buried in an unmarked grave on the prison grounds.
A New York Times article dated Sept. 8, 1901, states:
The general theory now held by the detectives is that a circle of Czolgosz’s associates plotted the murder of President McKinley, and that he was picked by lot or induced by persuasion to carry out the conspiracy. They say that he lacks the shrewdness to have planned and executed the crime as he did.
Emma Goldman: An Inspiration or a Plotter?
Czolgosz, who stemmed from a Polish-Catholic background, claimed he was inspired to commit his deed by the radical anarchist firebrand and Russian-Lithuanian Jewess Emma Goldman (1869-1940).
[NYT cont.] Walter Nowak was brought to Police Headquarters this morning. He is a cigar dealer, and also a Polish newspaper man of Chicago. He says he knows Czolgosz well, and corroborates the statement that the latter was inspired to his cowardly act by Emma Goldman.
“I knew him in Cleveland,” said Nowak. “He belonged to several secret societies, and one of them was Anarchistic. I think the idea of assassination had been turning in his mind for some time, as that sort of business is what is taught in the society to which he belongs.
Czolgosz said that he met Goldman for the first time during one of her lectures in Cleveland, Ohio, in May 1901. After the lecture, Czolgosz approached the speakers’ platform and asked her for reading recommendations.
In the June 2, 1901, issue of anarchist rag Free Society appeared an eulogistic article by Emma Goldman honoring Gaetono Bresci, the anarchist who assassinated the King of Italy.
Why did Czolgosz travel all the way to Chicago? Murky Chicago story doesn’t add up.
On the afternoon of July 12, 1901, Czolgosz visited Goldman at the home of Abraham Isaak, publisher of the newspaper Free Society, in Chicago and introduced himself as “Fred Nieman” (nobody/orphan). But Goldman was on her way to the train station. He only had enough time to explain to her about his disappointment in Cleveland’s socialists and for Goldman to introduce him to her anarchist friends who were at the train station.
However, in Free Society on Oct. 6, 1901, in an op-ed article written by Abraham Isaak, he noted that on July 12, 1901, the day of Goldman’s departure for Buffalo, Goldman pointed Czolgosz out to Isaak at the station as being a young man who desired to speak to Isaak.
Winter Watch Takeway: So we are asked to believe that Czolgosz traveled from Cleveland to Chicago but Goldman “got out of Dodge” (to go to Buffalo — what a cowinkydink)– just as he arrived. But she just so happened to offer him some key introductions to other likely plotters in her crew as the train pulled out. Yeah, right.
Goldman later wrote a piece in defense of Czolgosz. Another member of her Jewish anarchist group, Julius Edelson, was quoted by the New York police as saying, “No matter how much Czolgolz has been damned for his good work, we know that he was a great man. He was a true hero.”
Even so, Goldman’s colleague Isaak felt compelled to concoct a back story and diversion about Czolgosz days before the assassination. Did they know something was up? Free Society issued a doth-protest-too-loudly warning pertaining to Czolgosz on Sept. 1 (the shooting was on Sept. 6). What a strange convoluted story!
ATTENTION! The attention of the comrades is called to another spy. He is well dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shoulders, blond and about 25 years of age. Up to the present he has made his appearance in Chicago and Cleveland. In the former place he remained but a short time, while in Cleveland he disappeared when the comrades had confirmed themselves of his identity and were on the point of exposing him. His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere the comrades are warned in advance, and can act accordingly.
In the previously referenced St, Louis Dispatch article of Oct. 29, 1901, the warden of the prison attempted a last-ditch interrogation of Czolgosz during which the inmate let slip a reference to “someone in Chicago.” Would this be Abraham Issak or one of his conspirators?
Who gave you the money to get to Buffalo? ”
LC: “No one. A man in Chicago wanted to see me, and I went there from Cleveland.”“Who was the man?” pursued the superintendent.
LC: “I don’t remember his name.”“Do you remember where he lived?”
LC: “No. I don’t know the names of the streets there.”“How did you get to Buffalo from Chicago? Did this man pay your fare?”
LC: “No, sir. I had some money I earned at painting and carpenter work.”“Didn’t this man in Chicago and some others tell you to kill the president?” asked Mr. Collins.
LC: “No, they did not. I thought it out myself.”
Earlier, Czolgosz had claimed that when he reached Chicago, a boy whom he did not know approached him at the depot and handed him a packet of money. He said the money was for use on the Buffalo trip but that he never knew who sent it to him or the identity of the lad who delivered it. In the warden’s interrogation, Czolgosz tried to backtrack on this statement. But soon after the Chicago trip this penniless drifter somehow purchased a revolver.
Goldman was not a U.S. citizen and was implicated in the plot to murder industrialist Henry Frick during the contentious Homestead Strike of 1892. Goldman’s lover, Lithuanian Jew Alexander Berkman, shot Frick three times and stabbed him twice. However, Frick survived the attack. Berkman was imprisoned for 10 years. But Goldman, as always, seemed to skirt serious jail time. She was denied U.S. citizenship in 1908 and finally deported back to Russia in 1919. Eventually, she and Berkman moved on to Paris.
In the U.S., Goldman’s Jewish-anarchist crowd had hung out at Sach’s Cafe on Suffolk Street, their headquarters in New York City’s Lower East Side. This is where Trotsky, with Jacob Schiff’s financial support, had recruited many communist Jews to travel with him to Russia to incite the October Revolution of 1917. [See: “Firebrand Bolshevik Leon Trotsky: Fully Backed by International Banksters and the Pedo British War Party.”]
Winter Watch Takeaway: Emma Goldman and her crew were key suspects in the plot to murder President William McKinley. The internationalist banksters utilizing these radicals had ample motive to remove McKinley and replace him with a much more friendly New York politician, Theodore Roosevelt. To our eye, the story today looks whitewashed and hidden. We suspect, like many at the time, that Czolgosz was probably the miserable instrument of stronger minds.
