As the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination
approaches, and that of Abraham Lincoln remains in the public consciousness, we
might take the time to remember that two other presidents died at the hands of
an assassin. Their deaths were the engine for significant changes in the way
the federal bureaucracy was staffed, and an “old” organization was redesigned
to provide protection for the president. Yet today these presidents are mostly
unremembered and unknown to the public.
After Lincoln, the second president to succumb to an
assassin’s designs was James A. Garfield in 1881. Garfield was an
unlikely president, having been nominated despite expressing a desire not to be
the nominee in 1880. He initially backed another candidate, John Sherman, over
incumbent Ulysses S. Grant; but his nomination speech for Sherman caused such a
stir among delegates at the Republican Convention that after three dozen
ballots, a majority of delegates swung to Garfield. During the election
campaign against former Union Army general Winfield Scott Hancock, Garfield
played up his “rags to riches” background on his way to a close election
victory. Garfield, who during his tenure as a congressman from Ohio had been a
member of the Radical Republican faction, in his inauguration speech he continued
to preach the elevation of the ex-slaves. He was also a strong supporter of
public education as the means to elevate the ordinary citizen in general.
Garfield was president for only a few months, and his demise
had its roots in the “patronage”—or “spoils”—system in play at the time, where political
and campaign supporters were rewarded with job appointments. Garfield was beset
by so many demands from would-be officeholders that he wondered why anyone
would want to be president. His refusal to satisfy some of them created bitter
enemies.
One of these enemies, Charles Guiteau, was practically a
complete stranger to him, having only met him once in an informal setting. One
of those people who became radicalized after failing in a number enterprises,
he was likely insane—as his family judged him in 1875 when he was committed to
an asylum, but apparently escaped. In 1880 Guiteau wrote and distributed a
pamphlet in which he supported first Grant and then Garfield for president. After
Garfield’s victory, he had it in his mind that this pamphlet was instrumental in
the result, and he deserved a diplomat post in Paris as a reward.
To this purpose Guiteau roamed Washington, DC for months in
the only suit of clothes he owned, attempting to gain access to the president
and pestering Secretary of State James G. Blaine for his desired appointment.
When Blaine finally told him never to return and bother him again about the
matter, Guiteau switched his intentions to vengeance; in his delusions, he believed
that Garfield had “divided” the Republican Party, and that by removing him it would
bring warring party factions together.
With borrowed money, Guiteau purchased a 44 caliber
revolver. He also sent letters in every direction telegraphing his designs, but
rather than causing suspicious among government officials, he was apparently simply
judged as nuts. He even visited the DC jail, asking for a “tour” so that he
could see where he would be incarcerated later. On the day of the assassination attempt, July 2, 1881,
Garfield—who like presidents before did not feel he required a security detail—stopped
by in the Sixth Street train station in the capitol, before he continued to
Williams College to give a speech. Unbeknownst to him, Guiteau was camped out
in the waiting room, preparing to exact his revenge. As the president entered
the room, Guiteau stepped forward and shot Garfield twice; one bullet lodged in
his shoulder, but was not fatal, while the other hit him in the back. It was
not found by attending physicians until the autopsy.
Today, it is believed that Garfield would have survived his
wounds, had it not been for the lack of competent surgeons among those who
attended him. He was told the day of the shooting that he would not survive the
night, yet Garfield lived for another 80 days. In fact he died not just from
incompetence—the erroneous probing for the bullet in his back only served to puncture
his liver and create another channel in which infected pus could filter into—but
the unsterilized habits of doctors, whose dirty hands and instruments did the
rest of the work of the bullet. Garfield eventually succumbed to pneumonia and
infection that ravaged his body. At his trial, Guiteau claimed that he had not
killed Garfield, but incompetent doctors did—which was in fact half-true.
Guiteau’s trial turned out to be a media circus, as he harangued
the court with his literary “prowess” on the stand, insulting his defense
attorneys and preferring to “consult” with the audience. He actually believed
that he would be acquitted, after which he would go on a lecture tour and
perhaps even run for president himself. In his delusion, he seemed completely
unaware of the hatred that people held for him; he was even shocked when he was
found guilty of murder. Guiteau was clearly insane, and his counsel tried to
use this as a defense; but his courtroom antics soured the jury from even considering
this. On the day of his execution, Guiteau sang and danced his way up the
scaffold stairs, rejoicing that he was on his way to meet his “Lordy.”
One result of Garfield’s assassination was the passage of
the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, which declared that civil
service jobs could no longer be political appointments, but given based on
merit and competitive exams. Although not a direct result of the assassination,
concerns over who would govern if a president was disabled for a long period of
time was decided in 1967 by 25th Amendment, in which Section 3
stipulates that the vice president will assume presidential powers during the
period of the president’s incapacity. What was not settled, however, was the
question of presidential security; that would have to wait until the next
presidential assassination twenty years later.
President William McKinley had just been reelected for a
second term of office in 1901. In 1897, the Republican McKinley ran as the “prosperity”
candidate, opposed to populist William Jennings Bryan running on the Democratic
ticket. This was the first presidential election in which industry giants
contributed what was then shockingly huge sums of campaign cash to defeat a too “radical” candidate. Bryan might have won the election, having carried all of the Midwest and
Northeastern states; but Southern Democrats apparently decided his pro-farmer
and working class program was too radical, for reasons we can surmise.
As president, McKinley’s main domestic accomplishment was
the passage of high tariffs, which aided the growth of American industry; he
would soon change his position, however, in order to open foreign markets to
surplus American goods. But McKinley would be better known—with a little “push”
from William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow journalism” machine—as the biggest proponent
of imperialism since James K. Polk, largely at the expense of Spain. The
Spanish-American War would net Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. His
presidency would also be known as a time when respectable old men could still dominate
the political scene—but soon to be replaced by younger men, like Theodore
Roosevelt, who had other ideas on how to run the country.
During McKinley’s presidency, the anarchist movement was
beginning to build steam. It had already been blamed for the Haymarket Square
bombing in 1886, and would continue conducting violent activities in the name
of opposition to oppression for decades to come. One of these anarchists was Michigan-born
Leon Czolgosz. Probably due to past experiences in the labor force, Czolgosz was
ripe for the propaganda of anarchist leaders like Emma Goldman, who supplied
him with literature on the subject. He would eventually see McKinley as the
embodiment of a system that enriched the few against the many impoverished—and
he acted to remove that “infection” of the body politic, and usher in a new era
more empathetic to the problems of the common man. Although it certainly wasn’t
in response to McKinley’s assassination, this action would bring in a president
who at least in part would realize certain of those expectations.
Czolgosz took up residence in Buffalo, NY but traveled about
the country in a failed effort to “connect” with anarchists groups he found
suitable to join. When he read in a Chicago newspaper that McKinley would be
soon visiting Buffalo to make an appearance at the Pan-American Exposition, he
returned home to plot his next move; this was his “big chance” to strike a “blow”
for the oppressed. After purchasing a gun a few days prior, on September 6,
1901 Czolgosz stood amongst a crowd of McKinley’s “fans” in the Temple of
Music. The president did enjoy immense popularity, and no doubt he reveled in
this adulation and had no fear.
Unfortunately, Czolgosz was not one of those “fans.” While
McKinley was walking through a line of people shaking hands, the president’s
security detail grew suspicious when he was approached by a “swarthy” man who
seemed “tense.” But it was the next man in line—Czolgosz—who had a gun in the
hand that McKinley was not shaking. Czolgosz fired off two shots point blank in
his stomach before the next person in line, a half-black, half-Spanish man
named James Parker, reached over and grabbed the gun. Soon, others were on top
of the assassin, giving him a ferocious beating until the wounded McKinley
ordered it stopped.
Only one bullet entered McKinley’s body; the other deflected
off a button. But as in the case of Garfield, he would not survive the level of
surgical competency of the times. Partly because of McKinley’s large girth, it
was impossible to look for the bullet without fear of causing further damage,
as had been the case in Garfield’s death. It was also believed that a bullet lodged
in the body could cause no further damage. McKinley’s stomach was found to have
an entrance and an exit hole, and these were stitched closed; however, the
failure to discover the path of the bullet and any further openings allowed
these passages to become infected—again as in the case of Garfield. McKinley would die eight days later of gangrene
of the stomach, pancreas, and a kidney—all that had been penetrated by the
bullet; failure to quickly address the damage to the pancreas was likely the
most fatal result.
Czolgosz was tried in Buffalo nine days after McKinley’s
death. His defense attorney seemed more interested in defending his own
reputation than defending his client. Czolgosz was sentenced to death, and
after his execution his body was dissolved with acid. There was the expected
backlash against anyone who was suspected to be an anarchist, but police failed
to find anyone they could prove to have aided the assassin. Various surveillance
programs designed to keep tabs on the activities of anarchists would form the
basis of the future FBI.
After the assassination, there were calls for greater
security for the president. The Secret Service was already in existence, but it
was not specifically tasked to provide security; because there were a limited
number of federal law enforcement organs at the time, it also acted as a police
force doing much the same work as the FBI does now. Following McKinley’s assassination,
Congress enlarged its duties to protect the president, and it wasn’t until
after JFK’s assassination that the Secret Service began focusing almost exclusively
on security operations.
No comments:
Post a Comment