If you have ever watched a Buffalo Bills game you have seen the William McKinley Monument in front of City Hall. As the game begins, the camera will pan Niagara Falls and then show the memorial, William McKinley was not from Buffalo, but his life ended there. On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo’s Delaware Park. On September 14, he died.
McKinley was president thirty five years after the end of the Civil War, but he was the last veteran of the war to be elected president. A quarter of the monument is dedicated to his Civil War service.
The monument is an obelisk of 69 feet placed upon a base that is 24 feet high. The monument was dedicated on September 6, 1907. It was restored in 2017. The memorial is in the center of Niagara Square where all the major roads of 19th Century Buffalo converge.
The above photo was taken from the east on Court Street with City Hall standing behind the obelisk.
William McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio on January 29, 1843. He was only eighteen years old when Fort Sumter was fired upon. He joined a locally raised company called the Poland Guards which was later incorporated into the 23rd Ohio Regiment. William Rosecrans was the initial commander. When Rosecrans was promoted, McKinley’s commanding officer was Rutherford B. Hayes who would be elected president in 1876 in one of the most controversial elections in United States history.
McKinley’s bravery at Antietam led to a promotion to Lieutenant. He finished his career by being made a brevet major while still just a year after he could vote.
William McKinley was not a resident of Buffalo. However, the city was holding its Pan American Exposition in 1901. Against the advice of his aides, the president decided he wanted to visit this world’s fair and address the crowd. There had been several assassinations over the previous few years in Europe by anarchists. McKinley spoke on September 5 in front of a large crowd of 50,000 people. One person there was the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. The anarchist had come to Buffalo to assassinate the president. However, he was unable to go through with it. The next day, McKinley was meeting the public near what is now called the Albright Knox Art Galley in Delaware Park. Czolgosz hid his pistol under a handkerchief. Next to president were three Secret Service agents. The entrances to the Temple of Music where McKinley was greeting fairgoers had Buffalo Police scattered at the entrances. There were also ten artillerymen keeping watch for assassins. Czolgosz was undetected by these security men and he approached the president and he aimed his pistol at McKinley and fired.
The assassin fired two .32 caliber bullets into the president’s abdomen. An African American from Georgia knocked into Czolgosz as he was preparing to fire a third bullet into the president. John Geary, a Buffalo Police detective, and Francis O’Brien subdued the assassin.
McKinley was treated immediately by doctors. Most of McKinley’s cabinet arrived to support the president. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt came to Buffalo from his vacation in Vermont. By September 9, the doctors gave an encouraging prognosis and most of the dignitaries dispersed. Roosevelt decided to continue his vacation in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York. On September 13, McKinley’s health collapsed and his staff tried to contact Roosevelt to have him come back to Buffalo but he was not in an area where there was a telegraph or telephone. A state park ranger went on foot to try to find the vice president.
On September 14th, McKinley died.
On September 23rd, 1901, the trial of Czolgosz began. It was concluded the next day. The jury only took a half-hour to complete its deliberations and sentence him to death. After his trial, Czolgosz decided not to appeal his case. He was executed by electricity on October 29, less than two months after he shot the president. His last words were “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime. I am sorry I could not see my father.”
After McKinley was assassinated, Congress imposed strict new laws regulating the political views of new immigrants. Leon Frank Czolgosz was the most desperate type of immigrant, in the minds of most Americans. However, he was not an immigrant at all. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and he seemed to have no radical tendencies until he lost his job during the Panic of 1893. Suddenly impoverished, he joined a local labor organization and then a socialist group. Neither were dedicated to violence. In May, 1901 he attended a lecture by anarchist theorist Emma Goldman and he soon thereafter became an anarchist.
McKinley used his service to his country during the Civil War to advance himself politically. He studied law and he threw himself into Republican politics when he was in his early twenties. He supported his commander Rutherford B. Hayes when he ran for governor of Ohio in 1867 and he campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. Both campaigns were successful. In 1877,he was elected to Congress. He held that seat until1890 when he lost his election.
Unlike other Civil War veterans who ran for president, McKinley did not run on issues from the 1860s. His campaign was financed by large industrialists who had been organized by Senator Mark Hanna as a donor group. McKinley ran on the Gold Standard and for keeping high tariffs to promote internal production. Unlike many Republicans who opposed foreign expansion, McKinley annexed Hawaii in 1898 and he prepared for war with Spain over Cuba. When an internal explosion wrecked the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, McKinley promoted the move to war. The United States projected its power not only towards Cuba, but also in the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico as well. The war lasted four months, and after it concluded, America had built a colonial empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
The victory made McKinley a national hero, even though the cause of war was largely manufactured by the Hearst newspapers. Critics said that this war was turning the United States from a republic into an empire.
In 1899, a Philippines Republic was declared and American forces were sent into the country to suppress it. More than 200,000 Filipinos died, most of whom were civilians.
John Carrere and Thomas Hastings designed the monument. They were based in New York City and had designed the Triumphal Bridge at the Pan American Exposition. Their firm oversaw the buildings at the Exposition. Both had worked in the offices of McKim, Mead, and White, the foremost architectural firm in the United States. Carrere and Hastings are best know for their design of the New York City Public Library on 42nd Street which also uses lions.
I went to the monument in Buffalo as the sun was coming up.
The monument says who funded the erection of the memorial:
“This shaft was erected by the State of New York to honor the memory of William McKinley, twenty-fifth President of the United states of America.”
There are four water fountains in the base of the monument.
The inscription above reads:
William McKinley was born
at Niles, Ohio, January 29, 1843.
Was enlisted in Twenty-third Ohio
Volunteers June 11, 1865, as Major by
brevet for gallantry
under fire.
The four sculptures of lions were made by Alexander Proctor. The lions are twelve feet long and each weighs twelve tons. They are modeled on Sultan, a lion at the Bronx Zoo.
While the lions are massive, they show signs of erosion.
Throughout the monument there are signs of ornamentation that reminded me of Renaissance architecture.
The inscription above says:
This shaft was erected
by the State of New York
to honor the memory of
William McKinley, twenty-fifth President
of the United states of America
Above inscription describes McKinley’s death:
William McKinley died
in Buffalo September 14, 1901.
Victim of a treacherous
assassin who shot the
President as he was
extending to him the hand
of courtesy.
Niagara Square is surrounded by several notable buildings, including the original Statler Hotel. A block west of the McKinley monument is a memorial dedicated to Civil War soldiers from Buffalo.
Across the street from the monument are two statues. One is of Millard Fillmore. Fillmore grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York in 1800. As a young man he studied law and moved to Buffalo. In 1832 he was elected to represent Buffalo in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Whig Party. In 1846, Fillmore helped found the University of Buffalo, where I got my undergraduate degree. As the U.S. geared up for the Mexican War, Fillmore spoke out against it and the Democrats’ plans to annex Texas. In 1848 he was elected Vice President on a ticket with Zachery Taylor. In 1850, Taylor died and Fillmore ascended to the presidency. In spite of his opposition to slavery, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act placing the Federal government on the side of slave owners.
Fillmore was so unsuccessful as president that he was unable to secure the Whig nomination for presidency in 1852. In the mid-1850s, he became associated with the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know Nothings and he was their nominee for president in 1856.
Fillmore supported Steven Douglas in the 1860 election. When the war started, Fillmore commanded a home guard unit of men over 45 years of age to defend against a possible attack from Canada. In 1864, Fillmore called for “magnanimity” toward the South, which was seen by Republicans as Copperheadish and led to his condemnation by Lincoln supporters. In the election of that year, he supported George McClellan. When he did not put up mourning on his house after Lincoln was assassinated, his house was vandalized. He helped found the Albright-Knox art museum and he kept an interest in civic projects in Buffalo. He died in 1874.
Across from Fillmore is a statue of Grover Cleveland. Born in 1837, Cleveland was the first elected Democrat to win the presidency after the Civil War. Cleveland was elected mayor of Buffalo and, later, governor of New York. His campaign was dogged by allegations that he had raped a woman who later had his baby. These became the focus of his 1884 run for the presidency. He was also troubled by his decision to avoid the Civil War draft by paying a Polish substitute to serve for him. In spite of the scandals, he was elected.
Note: All color photos in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.
