1873-1901

Famous for having assasinated President William McKinley. Czolgosz was born to Polish parents and like most assasins, had a history of mental problems. Being exposed to anarchist doctrines as a young man didn't help matters any. Czolgosz believed that the US government was the enemy of the working man.

This really bugged him but alas, the year was 1901 and Rage Against the Machine wouldn't be in full effect for another 90 years. Czolgosz decided that he had to kill McKinley. At the Pan-American Trade Expo in Buffalo, NY Czolgosz got his chance. McKinley reached out to shake the young man's hand and Czolgosz shot him twice with a gun hidden in a hanky. McKinley died and Czolgosz was executed in October of the same year.

Painting Czolgosz as simply a mentally disturbed bad man misses the point and the larger issues of the era in which he lived. It didn't take an immigrant with a 'history of mental problems' to realize the US government was the 'enemy of the working man' in the Robber Baron era of the late 19th century.

In the year before Czolgosz shot McKinley, federal troops were called out to massacre striking miners in Utah. Czolgosz himself cut his teeth working in a bottle factory under the horrible conditions that prevailed at the time - conditions of course that were due to government inaction, because government had become, like today, merely the legal enforcement arm of corporations. He regularly witnessed his co-workers, many of whom were mere teenagers, burned and disfigured by the machinery they worked with for twelve hours a day. Regardless of his mental state, Czolgosz had some pretty legitimate concerns about what the US government was doing.

There is an interesting post-script to this story: Czolgosz grew up on a farm in northern Ohio that was a mere 25 miles from the town of Niles where McKinley was born.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.