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Home , Leon Czolgosz, Old Sparky

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 , 1901 in the Temple of Music at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, . 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 , 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 : 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 , “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Free Society: A Journal of Anarchist , (). http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ The_Tragedy_at_Buffalo.

T. Dart Walker Wash drawing of of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at Pan-American Exposition reception, ca. 1905 Source: 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, Leon Czolgosz moved to Buffalo in August and on that September “The Trial and Execution of Leon 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 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 . The first electric chair was built by Harold Brown, then secretly employed by Thomas Edison, and in- troduced at Auburn prison in 1890, replacing as the principal form of . 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 Prison current, which included setting up a 1000 volt Westinghouse AC gen- Principal Keeper James Con- erator in 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: 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. As one nineteenth-century observer remarked, “The old world of crea- tion is, that God breathed into the clay the breath of life. In the new world of invention mind has breathed into matter, and a new and ex- 10 Edward W. Byrn quoted in panding creation unfolds itself…. He [man] has touched it [matter] Jurgen Martschukat, “‘The Art of 10 Killing by Electricity’: The Sub- with the divine breath of thought and made a new world.” This new lime and the Electric Chair” world was conspicuously displayed first in 1893 at the World’s Co- The Journal of American History, vol. 89, no. 3 (December 2002): lumbian Exposition in and then at the 1901 Pan-American 906, 908–9 (on Henry Adams). Exposition in Buffalo New York, both important industrial cities, each

Avery F. Gordon 77 fair designed to celebrate a phase in the conquest of the Americas. Chicago, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, debuted the installation of the 82 foot tall Edison Tower of Light, its 10,000 light bulbs flashing in concert with the 90,000 bulbs and 5,000 arc lambs lighting the grounds, which was built to 391 feet in Buffalo. This dazzling display of invention illuminated its automa- chinic wonders—the first electric chair among them—and the appro- priate instruction to be made of them. Inspired by the living ethno- logical villages French anthropologists helped design to represent the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, Chicago hired Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam to design the Midway Plaisance. Set at an angle to the White City, the Midway’s liv- ing museum of “primitive” peoples was conceived to enable visitors to measure progress toward the electrified idea of civilization displayed in 11 the White City. That electricity was a key technological and symbolic 11 It’s worth noting that the medium by which modernity’s presumptive progress was articulated segregationist schooling faltered on at least two fronts. First, the was reiterated at the Pan American Exposition where it was explicitly Midway became the amusement tied to service in justifying the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish American center of the fair—George Ferris’s great wheel was there and be- War, and US global expansion. As President McKinley said in the final cause the ethnological villages speech he made before being shot by Czolgosz: “The Pan-American were also concessionary busi- nesses, they offered more exotic Exposition has done its work thoroughly… illustrating the progress of and enticing entertainment than the human family in the Western Hemisphere…. The expansion of our the more “civilized” and Victo- 12 rian White City. Second, despite trade and commerce is the pressing problem.” Frederick Douglass’s participa- By 1901, “American capital was no longer a middling mercantile tion as Haiti’s representative, player in a global economy commanded by imperial European pow- there was organized opposition (including a boycott) by African ers. Now it was a robust industrial society voraciously appropriating a Americans to their racist exclu- vast but disparate labor force which required cultural discipline, social sion, led by the great anti-lynch- ing agitator, Ida B. Wells. Black and cultural hybridity (even if consistently disavowed) remained two key modalities by which white supremacy and seg- regationism have been continu- ously challenged and sometimes even undone.

12 “The Last Speech of William McKinley,” Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/1900/filmmore/reference/ primary/lastspeech.html. Silent film of the president’s last speech is online at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=OtaGGG2uP7A.

An African-American prisoner is prepared for execution in “Old Sparky,” Sing-Sing Prison’s electric chair. c1900. William M. Van der Weyde. (Library of Congress). Retrieved from: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/ ig/Types-of-Executions/The-Electric-Chair.htm.

Animism 78 13 Cedric J. Robinson, habituation, and political regulation.”13 The social and human terms Forgeries of Memory and Mean- ing: Blacks and the Regimes of of this advanced society were deadly: a finance-controlled monopoly Race in American Theater and capitalism rooted in patriarchal militarism and white supremacy. The Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North US nation state will also, in time, be secured by regimes of punish- Carolina Press, 2007), 92. ment and imprisonment whose origins in the aftermath of the Civil War determined its trajectory and the particular fate of Black Ameri- cans who today remain the disproportionate object of state violence and its legal sovereignty in matters of life and death. Cinema played an important role justifying and normalizing this way of life. Thomas A. Edison Inc.’s propaganda films for the Spanish American War made by William Paley, for the Pan American Exposition, and for McKinley’s presidential authority (his inauguration, death, and funeral) are only 14 See Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning and the most literal examples of Edison’s particular contribution to this cin- Jonathan Auerbach, “McKinley ematic project.14 Certainly too, it’s arguably the case, that, in all these at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News,” American films, what’s notably absent and repressed is just as significant: Black Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4 (Decem- soldier resistance and desertion and the ongoing guerilla insurgency in ber 1999). The most comprehen- sive collection of Edison source the Philippines; the courageous movement to stop the lynching epidem- materials is available from the ic that terrorized black men, women and children from 1892–1902; or Library of Congress: http://mem- ory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/ed- the organizing by workers against the degradations of capitalism and biohm.html. the founding of the US Socialist Party (1901) and the IWW (1905).

ELECTROCUTION OF CZOLGOSZ. Unhonored. [code for tel- egraphic orders]. A detailed reproduction of the execution of the assas- sin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness. The picture is in three scenes. First: Panoramic view of Auburn Prison taken the morning of the electrocution. The picture then dissolves into the corridor of murderer’s row. The keepers are seen taking Czolgosz from his cell to the death chamber, and shows State Electrician, Wardens and Doctors making a final test of the chair. Czolgosz is then brought in by the guard and is quickly strapped into the chair. The current is turned on at a signal from the Warden, and 15 Edison film company catalog. http://memory.loc.gov/ the assassin heaves heavily as though the straps would break. He drops cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@ prone after the current is turned off. The doctors examine the body filreq(@field(NUMBER+@ band(lcmp001+m1b38298))+@ and report to the Warden that he is dead, and he in turn officially an- field(COLLID+mckin)). nounces the death to the witness.15

Avery F. Gordon 79 A perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object is exactly what Execution of Czolgosz does not animate or conjure. Only the object and something of the forces that made it are there. Not because “pass- ing from life to death, the figure on the screen… revers[es] the normal animating process by which cinema works its magic.”16 It’s not a ques- tion of cinematic form per se, whose effectivity and residual melan- choly is precisely that it can pass in both directions—from death to life and life to death—simultaneously, in time and across time. It’s a question of whether there is to be found even a trace of sympathy for “the young man with the girlish face, about to be put to death by the coarse, brutal hands of the law, walking up and down the narrow cell, with cold, cruel eyes following him, ‘who watch him when he tries Portrait of Leon Czolgosz to weep.’” It is a question of whether we are invited to contemplate, Source: Harper’s Weekly. September 21, 1901. touch even, the animating force that “induces… a man to strike a blow at organized power.”17 This is the force the state tried unsuccessfully to 16 Auberbach, “McKinley at Home,” 824. kill and which, notwithstanding the objectification of Leon Czolgosz, the solitary anarchist with a girlish face, remains still, barely, a trace 17 Emma Goldman, “The Trag- edy at Buffalo,” quoting Oscar reaching across time to me, to us, today. Wilde’s meditation on the death penalty, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after he was re- leased from Reading prison on May 19, 1897.

Animism 80