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Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901)

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Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901) Avery F. Gordon What happens if the term animism is no longer used primarily as an ethnographic category, but is turned onto Western modernity itself? The concept then opens up a very different set of problems, at the core of which lies not subjectivity of perception but percep- tion of the subjectivity of the so-called object. —Anselm Franke Leon F. Czolgosz, a 28 year old anarchist and steel worker who of- ten used his mother’s maiden name “Nieman,” shot President Wil- liam McKinley on September 6, 1901 in the Temple of Music at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley, who died eight days later, is best known for having been assassinated and for starting the Spanish American War, presumed to be the first US impe- rialist war.1 Very little is known about “the young man with the girlish face.”2 One of seven children of Polish immigrants, Czolgosz was born in Michigan and lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. Auburn New York Prison Card It was said he was estranged from his family and solitary, spending for Leon Czolgosz. 1901. Source: L. Vernon Briggs. The Manner his free time reading socialist and anarchist newspapers. He was ac- of Man that Kills (1921). Da Capo cused by the editors of Free Society: A Journal of Anarchist Commu- Press, 1983. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Czol_execution_card.jpg. 1 See Avery F. Gordon, “On Education During Wartime,” Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder CO: Paradigm Press, 2004), 18–26. 2 Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Free Society: A Journal of Anarchist Communism, (October 1901). http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ The_Tragedy_at_Buffalo. T. Dart Walker Wash drawing of assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception, ca. 1905 Source: Library of Congress Print and Photograph Division (cph.3a08686) Avery F. Gordon 75 3 “Leon Czolgosz.” nism of being a government provocateur, but Emma Goldman, who http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ inspired him, and who Czolgosz met very briefly, dismissed the charge Leon_czolgosz; Emma Goldman, and wrote eloquently about the young man who killed the “president “The Tragedy at Buffalo.” 3 of the money kings and trust magnates.” 4 The Buffalo History Works, “The Trial and Execution of Leon Leon Czolgosz moved to Buffalo in August and on that September Czolgosz.” http://www.buffalo- day waited in the receiving line to greet McKinley. Rather than shak- historyworks.com/panamex/ ing the President’s hand, he shot him twice at point blank range with assassination/executon.htm. “Buffalo Men at the Execution. a .32 caliber revolver. He was immediately captured by the secret serv- Sheriff Caldwell and Charles R. ice agents and military police present and beaten almost to death by Huntley Saw Czolgosz Die. them. Between the angry crowds, the police and the prison guards, by Their Impressions,” Buffalo Commercial, (October 29, 1901). the time Czolgosz arrived at Auburn Prison (via the Erie County Wom- http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ en’s Penitentiary) on September 27 to be executed by electric chair as Buffalo_Commercial/Buffalo_ Men_at_the_Execution. punishment for his crime, he was barely alive himself, unable to stand, moaning in pain. Czolgosz said nothing at his trial and refused to co- operate with his assigned lawyers, but moments before his death on October 29, strapped into the large electric chair, he was reported to have shouted out: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people, the working men of all countries!”4 Czolgosz’s brother Waldek and brother-in-law Frank Bandowski were witnesses to the execution, but they were not permitted to take away Leon’s body. After his brain was autopsied (no doubt to confirm the noted criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theory that “there were a greater number of ‘lunatics’ and ‘indirect suicides’… among anarchists than among ordinary criminals”), sulfuric acid was placed into his cof- First photograph of Leon Czol- fin to destroy the body, his letters and clothes were burned, and his gosz in jail. 1901. remains were buried on the prison grounds.5 McKinley’s assassination Source: Leslie’s Weekly. Sep- tember 9, 1901, Cover. Library of ignited another violent wave of anti-anarchist and anti-radical hysteria Congress Print and Photograph against those heard or known to be critical of McKinley and especially Division (cph.3b46778). of his war that included the arrest of Emma Goldman, the tarring and 5 Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, feathering of Reverend Joseph A. Wildman by his own congregation, Criminal Man: According to several near-lynchings, and numerous mob attacks that forced individ- the Classifications of Cesare Lombroso (Montclair NJ: uals and families to flee their homes. With the desecration and burial Paterson Smith, 1972), 305. of Czolgosz, the vigilantism momentarily quieted, but “America’s on- going anti-radical bloodlust” persisted in various forms, aided and ac- tivated by Edwin S. Porter’s widely viewed film of Czolgosz’s execution and others such as D. W. Griffith’sThe Voice of the Violin (1909).6 Leon Czolgosz was the fiftieth person to die in the electric chair in the state of New York. Edwin S. Porter’s reenactment of his execution for Thomas A. Edison Inc. marked the culmination of Edison’s oppor- tunistic involvement in electrocution. The first electric chair was built by Harold Brown, then secretly employed by Thomas Edison, and in- troduced at Auburn prison in 1890, replacing hanging as the principal form of capital punishment. Although Edison claimed to oppose capi- tal punishment, his desire to crush his competitor George Westinghouse was stronger. The War of the Currents was aggressively prosecuted by Edison who ran a smear campaign against Westinghouse and his AC Detail of Sing Sing Prison current, which included setting up a 1000 volt Westinghouse AC gen- Principal Keeper James Con- erator in New Jersey and publicly executing a dozen animals, the better naughton’s Execution Log Book. 1896-1897. Source: Sing Sing to discredit it, which garnered considerable press coverage and lead to Prison Documents, 1893–1928. the new term “electrocution” to describe death by electricity. A skilled Westchester County, NY. political operator, Edison not only lobbied the New York legislature to select AC for use in electrocution but managed to get Fred Peterson, Animism 76 6 See Byron R. Bryant, “When Czolgosz Shot McKinley: a a doctor hired by Edison to build him an AC chair, appointed to the Study in anti-Anarchist committee, which unsurprisingly selected the AC voltage electric chair. Hysteria,” Resistance, vol. 8, Despite the fact that for years people referred to the process of being no. 3 (December 1949): 5–7; Richard Porton, Film and the electrocuted as being “Westinghoused,” Westinghouse did not support Anarchist Imagination, (London capital punishment, refused to sell his generators to prison authorities, and New York: Verso, 1999), 16; and Chris Vials, “The Despot- and funded the legal appeals of the first prisoners sentenced to death ism of the Popular: Anarchy and by electricity. In the end, Thomas Edison lost the War of the Currents, Leon Czolgosz at the Turn of the Century,” Americana: The but the battle confirmed his great talent for maximizing profits and Journal of American Popular monopolizing intellectual property. The sober representation of Czol- Culture, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall 2004). gosz’s execution—swift, seemingly without pain or bodily mutilation, a model of rational efficiency—was in sharp contrast to the reality of electrocution and to the far more graphic 1903 Edison depiction of its 7 7 Electrocuting an Elephant use to kill Topsy the elephant. But, then, Execution of Czolgosz, with (1903). http://en.wikipedia.org/ its touted panorama of Auburn prison was less an argument for or wiki/File:Topsy.ogg. against electrocution than it was an example of electricity in the service of the restoration of a social order momentarily disrupted by the death of the President of Progress, Industry and Empire by a self-proclaimed 8 8 Both Gustave Baumont and anarchist. Alexis de Tocqueville (in On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Applica- tion in France, 1833) and Charles Dickens (in American Notes, 1842) offered a very different im- pression of that panorama, find- ing the Auburn system of silence and hard labor inhumane. 9 “Jacksonian editor Fran- cis Preston Blair rises from his coffin, revived by a primi- tive galvanic battery, as two demons look on. A man on the right throws up his hands as he is drawn toward Blair, saying: Had I not been born insensible to fear, now should I be most horribly afraid. Hence! horri- ble shadow! unreal mockery. Hence! And yet it stays: can it be real. How it grows! How ma- lignity and venom are ‘blend- ed in cadaverous union’ in its countenance! It must surely be a ‘galvanized corpse.’ But what H.R. Robinson. A Galvanized Corpse, 1836.9 do I feel? The thing begins to Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-11916). draw me… I can’t withstand it. I shall hug it!” Galvanism (from the exhibition Frankenstein: Pen- etrating the Secrets of Nature). United States National Library of By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mary Shelley’s Medicine. National Institutes of Dr. Frankenstein, grievously troubled over his usurpation of the di- Health. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ exhibition/frankenstein/galva- vine powers of creation, has been replaced by Edison’s Tower of Light, nism.html. blinding in its scientific harnessing of what Henry Adams called elec- tricity’s “occult mechanism” to capitalist expansion and social order.
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