Case VII [excerpt]

[. . .] my readers may recall that Leon Czolgosz, before being executed for the murder of President McKinley, announced his belief in the speeches of Emma Goldman. Czolgosz declared that he had decided upon the assassination after listening to Goldman talk four or five times. But I was never able to fasten upon Goldman the direct responsibility. I was never able to prove that she had said that President McKinley should have been assassinated. In brief, we were unable to trace Czolgosz’s crazy deed back to the source defined.
     But there was no reasonable argument against the belief that it was Goldman who planted the seed in the assassin’s mind.
     You will recall Andrea Salsedo, the Anarchist printer, who committed suicide by jumping from one of the windows of the Department of Justice offices in Park Row. Salsedo admitted to us that he was a member of the Galleani group of radicals. I learned from sources too impressive and reliable to be disbelieved that it was Galleani who not only sowed the seed that grew into the attack upon Wall street [sic] but he plotted the thing and forwarded his suggestions to America.
     I might have connected Salsedo with that outrage more closely than we could connect Czolgosz’s act with Emma Goldman or Emma Goldman with the actual assassination of President McKinley, but between the actual outrage and the Anarchists we questioned there was, as there always is in such affairs, that vague span of probability for which we could find no solid foundation. In other words, evidence of the sort the court would require was missing.