The Anarchist by John Smolens Read Free Book Online

out at farmland where neat rows of corn flickered by with such uniformity and speed that it created the optical illusion that the earth was spinning while the train wasn’t moving at all.
    Though he was born in Detroit, Czolgosz was conceived in Europe. He imagined that it happened the night before his father left for America. Nearly eight months later, his wife and three children followed him across the Atlantic. A month after they arrived in Detroit, Leon was born. The year was 1873, though no one in the family could remember the exact date of birth. His family moved about Michigan frequently, but his father only managed to find laborer’s work up north: Rogers City, Alpena, and Posen, isolated lumber towns that attracted many Poles. Month to month it was a struggle to pay the rent and keep the family fed.
    When Leon was ten his mother died while giving birth to her eighth child, Victoria. His mother was forty years old. Less than two years later, his father married Katren Metzfaltr. She was hard on all the children and cruel to Leon. He was quiet and withdrawn, and she distrusted how he would be idle for long periods of time. She accused him of stealing food from his brothers’ and sisters’ plates. He attended school less than six years, but had learned to speak and read English so well—better than any of his siblings—that it intimidated her.
    His father couldn’t keep in steady work in northern Michigan, so when Leon was in his teens the family lived for a couple of years in Pennsylvania, and then finally settled in Cleveland, where they ran a grocery. When all the children were old enough to work, their father collected money from each of them to buy a fifty-five-acre farm in Warrensville. They kept the house and store in Cleveland, but the farm was their father’s dream: to own land in America.
    When he was twenty-five, Czolgosz suddenly quit his job at a wire plant in Cleveland. He was skilled at repairing machines, as well as operating them, but he didn’t look for another job. For the next three years he spent most of his time at the farm, tending to the animals, hunting, and fishing. At dinner he usually piled his plate with food—he was a voracious eater—and ate alone in his room. He could spend an entire day in bed, sleeping and reading; he read newspapers constantly, in English and Polish. Often he demanded money from his family and there were frequent arguments. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, and mostly left him alone.
    After leaving Big Maud’s, Czolgosz boarded the Lakeshore Line express for Chicago, with the hope of seeing Emma Goldman. He knew she also traveled by train a great deal, giving speeches around the country and selling stationery products to stores, butshe had spent the past few months at the home of Abraham Isaak, the editor of
Free Society
. Czolgosz couldn’t stop thinking about her. He didn’t feel well—he seldom did. His catarrh caused severe sinus pain and shortness of breath; he constantly took elixirs and lozenges, but eventually they made him lethargic, dazed, and nauseous. As the train traveled west across northern Ohio, he was lulled into a stupor, his head lolling against the window glass. He saw Goldman’s round face, her intelligent eyes behind her rimless glasses. He had spent a great deal of the summer of 1901 in Buffalo because he believed she wanted him to go to the Pan-American Exposition. That year thousands of people were traveling to and from Buffalo, the city of electric light, the city with the bright future. Even President McKinley had been expected to visit the exposition when it first opened in the spring, but his wife had taken ill and their trip was canceled.
    Czolgosz didn’t know exactly when he decided to shoot the president, but the idea had first gripped him the night before he left his family’s farm earlier in the summer. He was in the barn, cleaning rabbits. His sister Victoria came across the yard from the house, followed by