Publication information
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Source: Free Society
Source type: magazine
Document type: article
Document title: “Excommunication Rejected”
Author(s): Isaak, Abraham, Jr.
Date of publication: 9 March 1902
Volume number: 9
Issue number: 10
Pagination: 2

 
Citation
Isaak, Abraham, Jr. “Excommunication Rejected.” Free Society 9 Mar. 1902 v9n10: p. 2.
 
Transcription
full text
 
Keywords
McKinley assassination (personal response: anarchists); McKinley assassination (personal response: criticism); Wat Tyler; Leon Czolgosz (mental health); Walter Channing; Leon Czolgosz (psychiatric examination: criticism).
 
Named persons
Michele Angiolillo; Gaetano Bresci; Sante Geronimo Caserio; Walter Channing; J. Sanderson Christison; Leon Czolgosz; Luigi Luccheni; Wat Tyler.
 
Notes
Click here to view the article by Wat Tyler that the piece below is written in response to.

Click here to view J. Sanderson Christison’s “Epilepsy, Responsibility and the Czolgosz Case” as it appears in the January 1902 issue of Kansas City Medical Index-Lancet.

“Abe Isaak Jr.” (p. 2).
 
Document

 

Excommunication Rejected

     Notwithstanding Wat Tyler, I am not inclined to recede from the position I have taken in considering Leon Czolgosz’s act of political significance. If the acts of Caserio, Angiolillo, Luccheni, and Bresci can be said to have any political significance (and they certainly can), that of Czolgosz appears in the same light. The attempt to brush the latter aside on the grounds of alleged insanity, remains to be proven. Dr. Channing does not even positively assert him to be insane, but simply that his case “furnishes more grounds for diagnosis of insanity.” This is certainly very weak evidence on which to declare a man a lunatic, in view of the fact that Dr. Channing failed to examine the most important witness—Czolgosz himself.
     The reliability of the evidence on which this hypothesis rests may well be questioned. In a pamphlet on “Responsibility and the Czolgosz Case,” by Dr. J. Sanderson Christison, based on “personal investigation,” and announced to be the leader of the “theory that Czolgosz was insane,” several questions of fact contradict Dr. Channing’s results. On whom can we rely?
     Besides these experts show a tendency to prove the world insane on no matter what ground. One of the reasons for Czolgosz’s insanity is stated to be as follows:

     Moral Chaos, e. g., He declared that he did not believe in government, nor in law, nor in marriage, nor in God.

     This probably puts Wat Tyler in the direct way of being declared a lunatic. Certainly all Anarchists come under this head. “Wat Tyler” bears a rather suggestive pseudonym to be engaged in the attempt to excommunicate Leon Czolgosz. I reject it utterly and entirely.

 

 


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