Strange Fates of Lincoln 

President McKinley shot!

When Robert Lincoln stepped off the train in Buffalo, New York, he was handed a telegram with the shocking news. He and his family were to see the President at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the glorious promise of the 20th century. 

  The diorama shows the Pan-American Exposition where the assassination occurred. Sumptuous exhibit halls on the 350-acre park dazzled with electric lights powered by the nearby Niagara Falls. The official logo of the North and South in the shapes of two ladies joining hands represented the commercial exchange of the American Republics. In his evening address at the fair, and in what would be his last speech, President William McKinley said, “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.”

  Inside the domed Temple of Music, the grand organ played while the President greeted a long line of fair-goers. McKinley mistook the white wrapping for a bandage on the next person’s hand. Instead, it was a handkerchief hiding a revolver. Leon Czolgosz, a self-described anarchist, shot twice. One bullet entered McKinley’s abdomen whose first thoughts were for his dear wife Ida. “Be careful how you tell her, oh be careful.”

  When several men tackled the assassin, McKinley called out, “Be easy with him, boys.”

  McKinley conducted his first presidential campaign from his Canton, Ohio front porch rather than compete on the stump with the captivating orator William Jennings Bryan. Although Bryan espoused a populace platform on a whirlwind tour across the country, McKinley won the election with the advantage of an enormous treasure chest provided by his donors. They even built a railroad bringing potential voters to him with a ticket price so low that one passenger said, “It’s cheaper than staying at home.” This was during the industrial revolution where laborers swarmed from the farms into factories. The country was prosperous with the rich becoming richer and the workers suffering in sub-wage conditions.

  McKinley advocated the gold standard (instead of silver), symbolized by the gold coin on the reverse of the diorama. A gold prospector who supported McKinley renamed Denali Mountain after him. McKinley showed no interest in the naming and never visited the mountain.

  Immediate response to the shooting was a frenzy of sloppy newspaper reporting. When Czolgosz said that he was influenced by the speeches of known anarchist Emma Goldman, she was arrested and vilified by the press as “The high priestess of anarchy.” After two weeks, she was released for lack of evidence involving her in the assassination and she disappeared briefly from public view.

  The attending physicians were unable to locate the bullet lodged in the President. Gangrene set in and William McKinley would die eight painful days after he was shot at the age of 58, having served only six months into his second term.