“. . . and for the man, if it is just to call him man, that struck the blow, only a single excuse exists, that his brain had been turned by the dark conspiracies in which he was involved, and that it was at the instigation of a fanaticism excited to the pitch of insanity that the deed was done.”

“. . . only some fiend in human form, in whose heart every instinct of manhood was strangled, could plot or execute the murder of the President of the United States.”

“It is unfortunate that the name of an assassin must be linked with that of his victim, and in that way perpetuated; yet we are sure that whenever mentioned it will be only with reprobation for his conduct and to hold up his name to execration.”

“It is due the State of New York to say the assassin was handled from the day of his crime to the moment of his disappearance in quicklime, with eminent good sense, perfect propriety, the inflexible policy being to spurn aside all sensationalism, have the duty of the State performed without hesitation or consenting in any way to the wretched sentimentalism giving murderers a promise of fame, however miserable.”

“In many respects he became a complete realization of degeneracy.”

“In Chicago he would have been lynched in a moment.”

“. . . he appears to be a strange creature of moods, a dreamy, uncanny sort of individual in whom the quality of imagination has been abnormally developed.”

“It is idle to denounce the man who committed the crime. If he is sane words cannot paint the heinous character of his offense against human and divine law. If he is demented, the pathos, the sorrow and the tragedy still remain. . . .”

“He did what it was his duty to do, and we honor him, while personally thinking his effort might better have been employed across the ocean upon some crowned head.”

“He is probably some German lunatic and fool.”

“So far as can be ascertained Czolgosz is of a piece with all the Anarchist type of murderers. His one overmastering trait is vanity. He is just the kind of vermin the Anarchist master spirits use as tools for their crimes. Like all of them, he is a coward at heart.”

“I respect the man who did the shooting as much as I respect any soldier who fought for his country.”

“I can’t believe Leon is the one. He was such a timid boy, so afraid of everything. Why, he was the biggest coward you ever saw in your life.”

“He said anarchy was his religion.”

“He was a great coward . . . and I am surprised he had the nerve to do as he did.”

“Those who knew him cannot understand how he ever plucked up the nerve to do his daring deed.”

“He had the appearance of one who, while not particularly proud of what he had done, was satisfied with his act.”

“It is to be regretted that Czolgosz did not seek notoriety by going over Niagara in a barrel instead of shooting the President in Buffalo.”

“He ought to be strung up.”

“Czolgosz seems to be a typical anarchist, blindly determined to kill a ruler because he is a ruler, and reckless of the consequences to himself.”

“Paul Czolgosz, the father, always predicted that Leon would die on the gallows.”

“In my country that wretch Czolgosz would receive the extreme penalty,—death by slow torture.”

“Before the commission of his dastardly crime the wretch Czolgosz was but an atom in that vast aggregate of millions called the people; today his name is one for lawless folk to conjure with; a name which makes crowned heads shake with palsy and presidents of republics look to the doubling of their bodyguard.”

“There is no reason to believe that Czolgosz is insane; he is simply a fanatic, and believes he has done a grand thing which will give him a great name.”

“He is described by those who know him as a lazy, cowardly, easily led young man of mediocre intellect.”

“The Polish Anarchist, Czolgosz, who attempted to assassinate the President, was hardly more sensitive to the motives to which men ordinarily respond than one of the lions in the building near where the President fell. Such a man has far more in common with the beast than humanity.”

“. . . this particular creature of blood had no motive which ordinary human beings could ever share.”

“If I had been there, I would have blown the scoundrel to atoms, if I had a pistol.”

“He must have been crazy.”

“Czolgosz’ guilt is clear and unquestioned.”

“In God’s name, hang the man as he deserves!”

“It will be hard for the criminologists to bring him under any of their classifications of innate criminality.”

“. . . a young, smooth-faced workingman of foreign type, not, if one may judge by the photographs, of peculiarly repulsive or degenerate cast of features, but not notably intelligent in appearance.”

“. . . if there is any power in a world’s detestation, it will be a poor sort of Hell that is not yawing for Czolgosz. There is no use for a Hell that doesn’t want him and his sort.”

“The one word that seems to fully describe him is that he is a ‘degenerate’—vicious from his earliest childhood, and made more so by harsh treatment—stupid, gluttonous, and knowing no more of the laws of our country than to believe that the murder of the President would overturn the Government.”

“Mr. McKinley’s last sublime public utterance was one of forgiveness for his assassin. When the anarchist was struggling with the guard, the President, forgetting his wounds, cried: ‘Let no man harm him.’ He counselled moderation and expressed pity for the assassin. We will not go that far. The man deserves no more pity than any other cowardly criminal. He deserves still less the exaltation that passionate and revengeful people would give him above the common herd of murderers.”

“He appeared to be a kindly disposed German boy, and had a decided Teutonic complexion that could not be mistaken.”

“Out of a foul and malignant heart came the impulse to betray and murder the nation’s head.”

“No, Czolgosz is not an anarchist; he is a nihilist—or insane. He will never be executed; mark my words.”

“. . . one whose narrow brain had soaked in the poisonous teachings of the offscourings of Europe.”

“His name is foremost in every public print in the world, familiar to children who have never heard of the greatest lawgivers, conquerors, reformers.”

“. . . Czolgosz seems to be only a type and executor of opinions founded upon social conditions unsatisfactory to, and oppressive of, certain classes of the people.”

“. . . he is not a voluble chap.”

“He does not appear to be of the familiar type of anarchists, nor is he good-looking enough to attract the second glance of one meeting him.”

“We shall fail to comprehend how the slayer could do his deed; but at least we may see that he is as alien to our humanity as he was to our institutions, and that he need not be reckoned one of us. A little relief is in that.”

Thou stinkest in the nostrils of the world
     As putrid offal on the shoe of man.
Assassin base! we loathe, yet pity thee,
     An pray God’s judgment may as generous be.

“His mind may have been to a certain extent unhinged by fanaticism, but it was clear to all that he was in complete possession of his faculties, and quite understood the consequences of his actions.”

“The assassin is in the hands of the law,—let him suffer the dues of the law, in full measure, pressed down and running over. Give him prison fare and no more. Let him sleep on a hard plank and no better. And by all means keep away from him the silly women that will ache to bring bouquets to him.”

“. . . in conversation and appearance he was more intelligent than the average Polish laborer . . . .”

“Of all the thousands of people upon those grounds, this one was perhaps the most insignificant in physical and mental equipment, in character, in capacity—a mere worm crawling in the dust. Yet he had in his perverted heart the venomous purpose, held in his hand the tiny instrument, which were to set the world a-weeping.”

“It was hard to realize that this country harbored a single individual so void of human instincts that he should attempt to kill one whose every act in life ought to insure him against harm by the vilest human character.”

What fiend is this whose vengeful heart
     Could lodge such hate to foul man’s name?
It can’t be man that did the deed,
     The devil ’twas that lit the flame
That fired his soul, in friendship’s guise,
To kill the brave, the good, the wise!

“The assassin is guilty as Judas.”

“Is Czolgosz a half-crazed fanatic, irresponsible, representing nothing but his own wild vagaries, or is he the natural product of a system of teaching, the legitimate outcome of certain degenerate tendencies which have been allowed to persist? He professes that he was impelled to the crime by the vicious teaching of Emma Goldman. There was a purpose in his act, a shrewdness in its execution, a method in his madness that never originated with himself. He is the product of a movement, the outcome of visionary ideas, the logical result of certain established tendencies. In this view of the case he is more than a puny individual, more than a hollow-chested, flabby-muscled degenerate. He is a Frankenstein that we have raised up among us. Nor can we attribute the paternity of this monster to the effete despotisms of the old land. This is the misery of it all. He was born on our own soil, he grew up amidst the liberty-loving children of America. He was fashioned by the tendencies that surrounded him from early manhood. These are all facts that we cannot blink, distasteful as they are to our national pride.”

“Father and stepmother give him the reputation of a timid weakling, a ne’er-do-well.”

“No war exists, no oppression, no depression, no party strife, no agitation of disputed questions, nothing to give the semblance of “a mission” to the miserable youth who has only carved his name in black marble.”

“This misguided young man who has done a deed that brings upon him the execrations of mankind is a product of countless evil influences that by force of circumstances have focused in him.”

“. . . he has the signs of strength and weakness, but these are unfortunately blended in such a way that they do not give him the right use of his qualities as a normal American citizen.”

“Czolgosz is the type of Hun and Vandal, which Macaulay, the English historian, declared long ago in a letter to Thomas Jefferson would ravage our republic in the twentieth century.”

“The shame and indignation that has been expressed, everywhere, at the dastardly crime of the heartless anarchist who committed the deed has exemplified the humility the American citizen feels,—that, in his land of liberty, order, justice, and humanity, there should exist one whose heart is so hardened to the purpose of the republic, whose conscience is so foreign to its liberties, and whose mind so insensible to its wonderful benefits, that he would dare to raise the hand of the assassin against its ruler. This person claims to be an American-born citizen. More horrifying the deed; far deeper our disgrace.”

“Spiritually he is an imbecile.”

“His bones should never be allowed to mingle with American soil. When the great sentence shall be executed, as it should be with swift justice becoming such an unspeakable tragedy, we could wish the United States Government would take the remains of the atrocious murderer 100 miles to sea and then, pinioned and manacled, with his revolver in his belt and a millstone chained about his neck, sink the corpse a thousand fathoms to the bottom of the ocean. . . .”

“. . . Leon Czolgosz will pass out into another world probably never realizing the horror and the grief he has caused in the world he is leaving behind.”

“It is at this time a perfectly natural and justifiable cause of satisfaction that the hopeless and self-convicted perpetrator of the infamous crime which now darkens with mourning every honest American household can anticipate nothing more gratifying to his brutal self-conceit, and nothing more heroically notorious or sensational, than a shameful death under the law.”

“Why did such a creature commit a crime so unutterably disproportionate to his capacity?”

“Uncle Sam has a rat in his trap—a human rat, fierce and vicious, with poisoned fangs. He is going to kill it like any other vermin, but mercifully. It will die by electricity, quickly and surely.”

“No crueller punishment could have been devised for the Buffalo specimen than to expel him from the prison which was his refuge. So faulty is our obedience to laws at the best that he would hardly have lived to walk twenty paces from the jail door. The ‘oppressed’ people would have converted him into souvenirs.”

“He is a strange product—a puzzle.”

“. . . he loved his fellow-men, not wisely but too well.”

“He was anxious to show his devotion to anarchy and its principles, and he followed the teachings of those subtle anarchists who preach assassination, and point the way to its commission, but are careful to avoid the act—the spilling of blood—and depend on the rashness of those who drink the poison of anarchy to die as Czolgosz has died this morning.”

“He was a venomous worm differing in infamy from the other anarchistic worms in that he sought notoriety by murdering a ruler while they talked of doing it.”

“Guiteau’s shooting of Garfield in the back was an awful deed, as was the work of Booth in assassinating Lincoln, but we have not the contempt for them that we have for Czolgosz, who offered one hand in friendship and then dealt murder with the other.”

“The wretch who attacked President McKinley seems to have been inspired directly by the enunciation of anarchical doctrines; but in a country where illegal, violent, and murderous acts are constantly being performed by mobs of citizens who take the law into their own hands and hang, shoot, and burn human beings ‘for the public good,’ in such a country how can it be expected that individuals will not sometimes act on their own peculiar theories of ‘public good’ and perform executions without warrant of law?”

“If ever the power of a criminal suggestion over a mind that yields to mesmeric influence was clearly revealed, it was in the influence which this speech by Emma Goldman exercised upon the brain of Leon Czolgosz, impelling him to the assassination of William McKinley.”

“. . . may we have cause to be thankful for a speedy execution of Czolgosz. The world has no place but the grave for such as he.”

“. . . the half responsible fellow who took the life of our President is less guilty than those who have made our thought atmosphere filthy with thoughts of revenge, of jealousy, of discontent, of atheism.”

“The terrible crime was conceived by himself as the result of a naturally weak nature meditating on the doctrine of violence. It is probable that, if he had not happened to encounter an apostle of anarchy, he would have lived a commonplace, undeveloped life, without doing any act of violence and without developing any particularly vicious traits. There was nothing to show that he had any proper realization of the enormity of the crime that he committed. He was simply a pitiful victim of anarchism. But he was not insane, not irresponsible. He was only a degenerate. He gives the best possible reason for all judicious restraint on the preaching of dangerous doctrines. When they lodge in a weak mind like his there is always a grave danger of tragic results.”

“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Czolgosz has paid the legal penalty for his murder of President McKinley, declaring to the last that he acted purely from a sense of duty and that he had no accomplices. Physicians who examined the assassin before and after death affirm that he was sane and of normal physical and mental development. There is some satisfaction in the theory now accepted by the police that Czolgosz’s crime was not the result of a conspiracy—one Czolgosz is enough.”

“. . . Czolgosz’s bearing, conduct and declarations from the time he murdered the President down to that of his execution have been entirely consistent with the teachings and the creed of Anarchism and stamp him as an Anarchist of the deepest dye.”

“Czolgosz was not a type, but an unreasoning, though not insane, moral pervert.”

“He went to his doom, not amid a blaze of tinsel glory, but silently disappeared from a world which he had designed to startle.”

“In the assassin we have the product of atheism. . . .”

“The world may well dismiss Czolgosz as in no sense the exponent of, but rather a sporadic product of Socialism and Anarchy, and simply regard him as a soft creature, not deranged, but acting under an evil impulse, fully conscious of what he was doing and what the consequences would be.”

“It is difficult to imagine a suitable punishment for the horrible wretch now that McKinley is dead.”

“. . . one whose mental and moral nature had been wholly perverted.”

“. . . everything in his history as shown by his conduct and declarations, points to the existence in him of the social disease, Anarchy, of which he was a victim.”

“Czolgosz himself was hardly a native; though born in America, his associations had not been American.”

“Believing as I have, that a public school is in itself a social community where the child learns, if he learns nothing else, the necessity for subordinating his individual will to the welfare of the whole, I wondered how it was possible for this man to grow up in this republic with such a defective mind and character.”

“He was a young man, born in this country, educated in the common schools, in good health, and with unimpaired mind. He was a believer in the religion of his fathers and in the government of his country until he fell under the fatal influence of the anarchists. He attended their meetings, he hearkened to their harangues, he drank in their doctrines. The poison saturated his soul. He abjured his religion, he renounced his country, he devoted himself to the destruction of society. He became, what every anarchist is at heart, an apostate, a traitor, an outlaw.”

“There is no reason to believe him insane, but the logic employed to prove his sanity was not altogether scientific.”

“He was a Pole by birth, and had a long line of revolutionary ancestry behind him. The Polish race of all others is the most likely to advocate revolution and assassination as ‘reform’ measures. Long years of oppression, and reaction against it, are responsible for this trait. The ‘removal’ of political and social obstacles was, therefore, an inborn principle with Czolgosz. What heredity had begun education completed, for he was trained in Polish parochial schools.”

“He was an unintelligent, dull young man whose brain had been inflamed by listening to the oratory of foreign anarchists. . . .”

“His soul craved freedom and he longed to hear the trumpet of the liberating battle.”

“If martyrdom is insisted upon, which was the martyr, the man who had had the good of life, who was past middle years, who had received reward and distinction to satiety, who had ordered others killed without once jeopardizing his own life, and to whom death came more easily than to millions who die of long want and slow tortures of disease, or this young strong soul which struck its own blow and paid with its own life, so capable of the utterest devotion, so embittered and ruined in its youth, so hopeless, so wasted, so cast out of the heart of pity, so altogether alone in its last agony?”

“. . . an anarchist with a name unpronounceable by an Anglo-Saxon tongue. . . .”

“Leon Czolgosz presents a unique figure in the annals of revolutionary history. Never before did a fighter for freedom go to his death so absolutely alone and forsaken.”

“Poor Leon Czolgosz, your crime consisted of too sensitive a social consciousness. Unlike your idealless and brainless American brothers, your ideals soared above the belly and the bank account.”

“Had there been a rope handy I should have helped to hang the brute to the nearest lamppost.”

“Now, after a decade, as we approach his sombre suffering figure, we see in him the nameless representative of a nameless humanity—humanity enduring endlessly, hoping endlessly, and forever thrust back into the abyss of poverty and despair.”

“‘I did it for the good of the people,’ were the last words of the solitary youth in the death-chair of Auburn prison. But the people knew him not, the people passed him by in blind hatred. Yet with all that, he was flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood. He suffered for them, endured humiliation for them, gave his life for them. His tragedy consisted in his great and intense love for the people, but unlike many of his brother slaves he could neither submit nor bow his neck. Thus he had to die.”

“He was an example of an uneducated man imbued with anarchistic ideas, especially in an extreme form.”

“We have not the least doubt that the future historians, who will not be content with picturing the glories of great generals and their armies, but who will deal with the struggles of humanity for greater freedom, will assign to Leon Czolgosz a more honorable niche in the temple of humanity, than to William McKinley.”

“. . . Leon Czolgosz was of that idealist calibre which our perverted society forever nails to the cross.”

“. . . there can be no doubt that in a social psychological sense the motives which urged him on were essentially the same as those that led a John Brown to attack Harpers Ferry, or that inspired the men of the Chicago Haymarket trial to their bold arraignment of society before they died on the scaffold.”

“The assassin was really a defective who had long been drifting to paranoia, and whose actual delusions of persecution and grandeur found soil in which to grow.”

“This ass with the unpronounceable name was probably more insane than usual this week or two back, and may get back upon his bearings by and by, but he was over the sanity-border when he shot the President.”

“There is no doubt that he was an uneducated, misguided fanatic.”