Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (15 page)

In such conditions, national unions formed, and mass strikes to protest long hours and cuts to already low wages became increasingly common. Corporate bosses would hire their own private security forces to ensure that strikers could not shut down production during strikes.

When private security was not enough, local police were called upon but often sided with the striking workers. Government militias would then be brought in from other areas and, in heated confrontations, violence erupted and crowds were fired on.

Many were killed or wounded. The notorious industrialist Jay Gould once boasted, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other.”

After striking and being subsequently fired and blacklisted from his new job at a wire mill in Cleveland, Ohio, Czolgosz prayed to God for help, but believing his prayers fell on deaf ears, he turned to socialist and anarchist writings that seemed to offer solutions to the problems of the working man in this lifetime.

Over the next few years, Czolgosz attended many socialist political meetings in Cleveland and was mesmerized when he heard a speech by the fiery spokeswoman for anarchism, Emma Goldman.

Though she did not support the use of violence to achieve anarchist goals, she could not condemn those who were willing to sacrifice their own life for their ideals and had praised the Italian-American anarchist who had recently assassinated the hated King Umberto I of Italy.

Hoping to do something for the cause, Czolgosz went to Chicago and tried to make connections with Goldman’s anarchist friends. In doing so, he mentioned to one person his disillusionment with the McKinley administration, in particular the outrages committed in the Philippine Islands by the American government.

Having “liberated” the Philippines from Spain in the brief Spanish-American War, the Americans immediately declared the Filipinos unfit for self-rule, and when the Filipinos established their own government anyhow, the United States sent in tens of thousands of troops.

The native population fighting for independence was labeled as insurgents, and in their war to establish control of the Philippines, American soldiers burned down whole villages and massacred men, women, and children, with a death toll of hundreds of thousands.

But Czolgosz’s overeagerness and questions about what plans of action the anarchists were drawing up made Emma Goldman’s friends suspicious of him, and an ad was placed in the major anarchist newspaper of the time warning others that a spy was in their midst.

In late August of 1901, Czolgosz was in Chicago when he saw in a newspaper that President McKinley would be attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He purchased a train ticket to Buffalo that same day.