A Week After the Handshake Line
William McKinley died in Buffalo, New York, on September 14, 1901, after lingering for a week with the wounds he had received during a public appearance at the Pan-American Exposition. He was 58 years old, the 25th president of the United States, and his death closed a presidency that had run from 1897 to 1901. Britannica’s account places the shooting on September 6, when McKinley was greeting a crowd and Leon Czolgosz fired two shots into his chest and abdomen.
For the next week, the presidency remained tied to a hospital room in Buffalo. McKinley had been rushed there after the attack, and doctors initially believed that he would survive; only one bullet could be removed. The Library of Congress records that complications from the bullet wounds ultimately caused his death. A public greeting had become a national emergency, and the emergency soon became a transfer of power.
Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s vice president, assumed the presidency after McKinley died. Britannica identifies Roosevelt as McKinley’s successor, which made the loss immediate in every sense: a president had died, and another man now held the office. The handover also gave the killing a force that extended far beyond Buffalo. Every presidential death changes the government at once; this one followed an attack in the open, before a crowd that had come to see its president.
That setting gives the story its central question. McKinley had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, entered Congress as a Republican in 1872, and reached the presidency after Marcus Hanna secured his party’s nomination in 1896. The contemporary account collected by Libcom traces that path through war, Congress, party organization, and the White House. Yet on September 6, 1901, the career of that president met a man in a public crowd, and within eight days the country had a new president. The route from political power to that handshake line is where the story begins.
From Niles to the White House
The career had begun far from the office it eventually reached, in Niles, Ohio, where William McKinley was born on January 29, 1843. Britannica records the date and place with the plain precision that suits the beginning of a public life: a town, a state, a future still unmarked by the roles that would follow. Those roles arrived one after another, each placing McKinley inside a larger national story and giving his path a steady institutional shape.
His first place in that story came through service in the Union Army during the Civil War. The contemporary account collected by Libcom places that service at the start of the political ascent that followed. War gave McKinley a connection to the defining conflict of his generation, and the years after it brought him into electoral politics. In 1872, he entered Congress as a Republican, beginning the long association with party power that would carry him through the next stages of his career.
Congress provided the durable middle of that journey. McKinley had moved from military service into a Republican seat, and the route from there to a presidential nomination ran through the machinery of his party. Marcus Hanna secured McKinley the Republican presidential nomination in 1896, according to Libcom’s account. The sequence matters for its clarity: Ohio birth, Union service, congressional office, party nomination, then the presidency. Each step placed McKinley closer to the center of American public life.
He became the 25th president of the United States and served from 1897 to 1901. Britannica’s biography fixes those years as the frame for the administration whose decisions would shape the political atmosphere around him. By the time he entered the White House, McKinley’s career already carried the marks of war, Congress, and Republican organization. His presidency then gave those earlier experiences a wider stage, with the country’s actions reaching beyond the domestic political world that had first elevated him.
That wider stage is essential to the Buffalo story, since the presidency supplied the power, the visibility, and the political meaning attached to McKinley’s public presence. The man born in Niles had traveled through the central institutions of his era before arriving at the White House. From there, the administration’s reach would grow, and with it the forces gathering around the president in the final year of his term.
A presidency shaped by expansion
That expansion began with the presidency itself. From the White House, McKinley governed during the Spanish American War, a conflict that placed the United States in a newly consequential position beyond its borders. Accounts of the period place the war squarely under his presidency, making it part of the political setting carried by his name as he traveled and appeared before the public.
The war’s aftermath extended that setting further. After the conflict, the United States demanded the Philippines, an action that tied McKinley’s administration to a far-reaching claim of power. The same contemporary account also identifies Hawaii as taken under McKinley’s presidency, while Cuba became an American colonial state. Together, those actions gave the administration a larger map and gave its decisions a sharper political charge.
Each development carried the presidency beyond the domestic institutions that had made McKinley’s career. The office now stood at the center of war, territorial demands, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, with McKinley as the public figure attached to that expanding reach. His appearances therefore carried the weight of a government whose role had visibly widened. A president greeting citizens in a crowd also represented the policies and power of the administration he led.
That connection matters as the story returns to Buffalo. The Pan-American Exposition offered a public setting for a president whose administration had become associated with American action across borders, and public settings gather many kinds of political feeling into one place. The world surrounding McKinley had grown broader, more contested, and more charged by the decisions of his presidency. Within that atmosphere, dissent was already moving toward the exposition crowd.
Leon Czolgosz and the Politics He Carried
Into that charged public world came Leon Czolgosz, a 29-year-old man born in Detroit to Russian-Polish parents, whose politics had taken him toward anarchism. Accounts of the period identify him as an anarchist, and they place a formative moment in that path at a talk by Emma Goldman, after which Czolgosz became committed to the movement.
That commitment belonged to a political current whose language treated power, work, and public authority as urgent subjects rather than distant abstractions. Czolgosz carried those concerns into his own account of what he did. His final words named McKinley as “the enemy of the good people, the good working people,” before adding, “I am not sorry for my crime.” The statement provides the clearest surviving expression of the motive Czolgosz claimed for himself: he framed the president through the interests of working people, then cast his act as an answer to that division.
The words also show how broadly he understood the target. McKinley stood at the center of a government whose actions had reached across borders, while Czolgosz described the conflict in terms of ordinary workers and an enemy set against them. The gap between those two frames was immense, yet it helps explain why a public encounter with the president could carry such political force in Czolgosz’s mind.
Events beyond the United States formed part of the atmosphere as well. On July 29, King Humbert I was assassinated in Italy, an event recorded alongside the story of Czolgosz and McKinley. The sequence places Czolgosz’s politics in a period already marked by the killing of a monarch, when political violence could enter public life as an international fact as well as an American fear.
Czolgosz therefore arrived in Buffalo with a biography that was personal and a political language that reached far beyond himself. He was Detroit-born, 29 years old, and the child of Russian-Polish parents; he had attended Goldman’s talk and become an anarchist; he later spoke of “the good working people” as he explained his act. Each detail narrows the distance between the vast disputes surrounding the presidency and the individual who chose to act within them. The next question lay in the practical conditions of access: how close could such a man get to the president in a crowd?
Fifty guards, one handkerchief, two shots
Each detail narrows the distance between the vast disputes surrounding McKinley and the ordinary movements of a public event, where access depended on little more than joining the crowd. On September 5, 1901, McKinley gave an open-air speech in Buffalo, and the following day he appeared at the Pan-American Exposition for a public greeting. The president stood in a handshake line, receiving people one by one as the exposition carried on around him.
Security had a visible place in the scene. Fifty guards were stationed around McKinley, a substantial presence for a president greeting the public, yet the line still brought strangers close enough to take his hand. Czolgosz entered that space with a .32 calibre pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, according to the contemporary account collected by Libcom. The cloth concealed the weapon within the ritual of the greeting, where an outstretched hand belonged to the expected choreography of the day.
Then, on September 6, Czolgosz fired twice. One shot struck McKinley in the chest and the other in the abdomen, as Britannica’s account of the attack records. The guards remained around the president, while the handshake line had already delivered the gunman within range. That contrast gives the scene its force: public proximity was part of McKinley’s appearance, and the protection surrounding him operated inside that same openness.
The shots ended the greeting and sent McKinley from the exposition crowd toward the crisis that followed. For the people gathered in Buffalo, a familiar civic gesture had become the point at which a presidency turned.
When Survival Seemed Possible
From that shattered public moment, McKinley was rushed to a hospital in Buffalo, where the first medical judgment offered the country room for hope. Doctors initially believed that the president would survive, according to the Library of Congress, and that belief gave the next days a suspended quality: the shooting had transformed the presidency, yet its final consequence still appeared unsettled.
The treatment brought one tangible success. Doctors were able to remove one bullet, though only one, a detail that carried the limits of the situation as clearly as it carried the effort to save him. The Library of Congress records that only a single bullet could be removed. The other injuries presented a far more serious picture. The wound in McKinley’s chest was superficial, while the shot to his abdomen had passed through both walls of his stomach and through his kidney, as Libcom’s account describes. Those facts explain why an early expectation of recovery could coexist with danger that remained inside the president’s body.
For a week, McKinley lingered in Buffalo. Each passing day extended the interval between the attack and its outcome, holding family, officials, and the wider public in a period shaped by medical uncertainty. The public encounter at the exposition had lasted moments; its consequences unfolded over days, in a hospital, through wounds whose full force had yet to declare itself.
That force finally ended the uncertainty in the early morning of September 14, 1901. McKinley died in Buffalo at 58 from complications of the bullet wounds, according to the Library of Congress. The 25th president’s life had run from his birth in 1843 to that hospital room in 1901, and the week that began with guarded optimism closed with a death that left the office of the presidency suddenly vacant.
The Death That Made Theodore Roosevelt President
The vacancy passed immediately to Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s vice president, who assumed the presidency after McKinley’s death. The constitutional fact was clean and swift. The political feeling around it carried far more strain, because Roosevelt had long stood in the minds of McKinley’s circle as a sharply different kind of figure.
Marcus Hanna gave that unease its enduring phrase when he called Roosevelt “that damned cowboy,” a description recorded by Britannica. Hanna had helped secure McKinley the Republican presidential nomination in 1896, and his words now placed a blunt human edge on the transfer of power. A president had died after a public shooting; the vice president whom Hanna distrusted was suddenly the president, with the whole office and its authority in his hands.
While that change took effect, the country began the formal work of carrying McKinley home. On September 15, a funeral train took his casket from Buffalo to the Capitol in Washington, DC, and then onward to Ohio, according to the Library of Congress. Its route drew a visible line across the places that framed the transition: Buffalo, where McKinley died; Washington, where the presidency continued; and Ohio, where his public farewell would end.
The train therefore moved through two events at once. It bore the casket of the 25th president away from Buffalo, and it marked the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency in the same public hours. McKinley’s final journey gave the transfer a shape people could see: one administration leaving the stage as another had already begun.
Czolgosz’s Final Month
As McKinley’s casket continued its passage from Buffalo through Washington and on toward Ohio, the man who had fired the shots entered a legal process measured in days. Leon Czolgosz’s trial began on September 23, 1901, placing the case before a jury while the country was still living through the immediate public aftermath of the president’s death. The speed mattered. McKinley’s funeral journey had made the transfer of power visible across the country, and the trial gave the other side of that same event a formal timetable: accusation, judgment, sentence.
That timetable moved with remarkable compression. Three days after the trial began, the jury found Czolgosz guilty and sentenced him to death. The verdict turned the shooting from a moment of horror in a public crowd into a case with a fixed legal ending. There was little room in the calendar for distance or reflection. September had brought the attack, McKinley’s death, Roosevelt’s accession, the funeral train, and then the conviction of the man responsible.
The sentence reached its final stage on October 29. Czolgosz was strapped into the electric chair that day, just over a month after his trial had opened. Before his execution, he gave the statement that remains the clearest account of the grievance he chose to claim: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people...I am not sorry for my crime”.
Those words supplied a motive in his own terms, while the sequence around them had already changed the government he had attacked. A president had died after a public shooting; an anarchist had attached the act to a stated grievance about “the good working people”; and Theodore Roosevelt had assumed the presidency before Czolgosz’s case reached its end. The month closed with an execution, yet the consequences of September 1901 had already moved far beyond the man in the electric chair.
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