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—RNS

William McKinley

Buried: McKinley National Memorial and Museum, Canton, Ohio

Twenty-fifth President - 1897-1901

Born: January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio

Died: 2:15 a.m. on September 14, 1901, in Buffalo, New York

Age at death: 58

Cause of death: Gangrene resulting from assassin’s bullet

Final words: “It is God’s way. His will be done, not ours.

We are all going. …Oh, dear”

Admission to McKinley National

Museum: $7.00

The election of 1896 pitted the fiery orator William Jennings Bryan against the genteel front-porch campaigner, William McKinley. The issue was money—and whether the U.S. currency would be backed by gold or silver. McKinley, supporting the gold standard and backed by the political organization and money of Ohio industrialist Mark Hanna, won a handy electoral college victory.

The 1898 explosion of the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor became a major factor in McKinley’s decision to fight the Spanish-American War. Among its outcomes was the transfer of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States; Hawaii was annexed and the Boxer Rebellion was quelled in China with U.S. involvement.

Against this foreign policy background, Bryan and McKinley faced off again in 1900. Republican party insiders, hoping to send New York’s noisy governor Theodore Roosevelt off to the oblivion of the vice presidency, chose him to join McKinley on the ticket.

Roosevelt served as vice president for just six months. In September 1901 McKinley traveled to Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition. The easygoing, gregarious president looked forward to the opportunity to get out among the populace. McKinley’s personal secretary, George Cortelyou, was more cautious. Fearing that such an open, uncontrolled event could prove dangerous, he cancelled the president’s appearance without his knowledge. When McKinley got wind of the change, he insisted that he would attend as scheduled, saying, “No one would want to hurt me.”

McKinley’s confidence proved fatally misplaced. On September 6 after a pleasant day trip to Niagara Falls, he returned to the fair for yet another round of handshakes. The receiving line stretched between a row of more than two dozen guards—extra security to appease the president’s aides.

In the crowd was an unemployed, disaffected young man named Leon Czolgosz, who had been trailing the president for days. As McKinley stepped forward to greet him, Czolgosz raised his bandaged right hand. The handkerchief wrapped around his hand concealed a .32-caliber revolver. He quickly fired two shots at the president’s midsection. The first ricocheted and missed its intended target. The second ripped through McKinley’s stomach.

The wounded president’s first thoughts were of others. As his secretary and security detail rushed to his aid, he begged them to protect the fragile health of his wife Ida, a chronic invalid. He feared that she would be unable to cope with the news of the shooting. The crowd tackled Czolgosz. McKinley pleaded with them not to injure the gunman.

McKinley was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Doctors operated to determine the bullet’s trajectory. They deemed the president stable enough to recover at the home of his host, John Milburn, the Exposition’s president. McKinley rested comfortably there and seemed to rally—so much that he requested solid food and a cigar.

Doctors allowed him the food, but after eating, the president took a turn for the worse. Doctors were unaware that gangrene had ravaged the president’s wounded organs.

With his wife at his bedside, McKinley died at 2:15 a.m. on September 14, eight days after the shooting, becoming the third American president to die at the hands of an assassin. Theodore Roosevelt, on vacation in the Adirondacks, received a telegram with the news and raced to Buffalo. That afternoon, he was sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

The funeral rites began with a private service at the Milburn home. The president