On this day, Sept. 14, in 1901, President McKinley died from wounds caused by an assassin’s bullet that went through his stomach and lodged in his back eight days earlier.
McKinley was at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., delivering a speech on foreign trade when he was shot by anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz. Czolgosz approached the president with a revolver in a handkerchief. His first shot grazed McKinley’s shoulder, but the second ripped through the president’s stomach. The newly developed X-ray machine had been shown at the fair, but doctors were reluctant to use it to search for the bullet because they did not know its side effects.
McKinley died eight days later of gangrene.
Czolgosz was executed by electric chair.
— Scott McCabe
