Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [70]
As flags were a matter of no respect to Anarchists, Schilling became suspicious of him and published a warning in Free Society that the oddly behaved Polish visitor might be an agent provocateur. This was on September 1, 1901, and was wide of the mark. Five days later Czolgosz turned up in Buffalo, where, in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition, he shot President McKinley. The President died eight days later and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. Thus Czolgosz, on the lowest level of understanding among Anarchist assassins, performed of them all the act with the greatest consequences.
“I killed President McKinley,” Czolgosz wrote in his confession, “because I done my duty,” and later added, “because he was an enemy of the good working people.” He told reporters that he had heard Emma Goldman lecture and her doctrine “that all rulers should be exterminated … set me to thinking so that my head nearly split with pain.” He said, “McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.” And further, “I don’t believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them.… I know other men who believe what I do that it would be a good thing to kill the President and to have no rulers.… I don’t believe in voting; it is against my principles. I am an Anarchist. I don’t believe in marriage. I believe in free love.”
The Idea of Anarchism, its vision of a better society, had not come within Czolgosz’s ken. Like Caserio, the simple assassin of President Carnot, he was of the type of regicide who becomes obsessed by the delusion that it is his mission to kill the sovereign. This was brought out, shortly after Czolgosz’s hurried trial and electrocution on October 29, by Dr. Walter Channing, Professor of Mental Diseases at Tufts, and son of the poet William Ellery Channing. Dissatisfied with the official alienists’ report, Channing made his own study and concluded that Czolgosz had been “drifting in the direction of dementia praecox” and was a victim of a delusion already isolated and described by a French alienist, Dr. Emanuel Regis, in 1890. According to Dr. Regis, the regicide type is much given to cogitations and solitude and “whatever sane reason he may have possessed gives way to a sickly fixation that he is called on to deal a great blow, sacrifice his life to a just cause and kill a monarch or a dignitary in the name of God, Country, Liberty, Anarchy or some analogous principle.” He is characterized by premeditation and obsession. He does not act suddenly or blindly, but on the contrary, prepares carefully and alone. He is a solitaire. Proud of his mission and his role, he acts always in daylight and in public, and never uses a secret weapon like poison but one that demands personal violence. Afterwards, he does not seek to escape but exhibits pride in his deed and desire for glory and for death, either by suicide or “indirect suicide” as an executed martyr.
The description fits, but for the delusions to become active there is required a certain climate of protest—and an example. This the Anarchist creed and deeds provided. There may be at any time a hundred Czolgoszes living mute, inactive lives; it took the series of acts from Ravachol to Bresci to inspire one to kill the President of the United States.
The public was by now thoroughly aroused, and the public was composed not only of the rich but of the imitators of the rich. The ordinary man, the petty bourgeois, the salaried employee, associated himself—as Emile Henry knew when he threw his bomb in the Café Terminus—with his employers. His living, as he thought, depended on their property. When this was threatened, he felt threatened. He felt a peculiar horror at the Anarchist’s desire to destroy the foundations on which everyday life was based; the flag, the legal family, marriage, the church, the vote, the law. The Anarchist became everybody’s enemy. His sinister figure became synonymous with everything wicked