THE NEED FOR PROTECTION FURTHER DEMONSTRATED
For a short time after the war, soldiers assigned by the War Department continued to protect the White House and its grounds. Metropolitan Washington policemen assisted on special occasions to maintain order and prevent the congregation of crowds. The permanent Metropolitan Police guard was reduced to three and assigned entirely to protection at the White House. There was no special group of trained officers to protect the person of the President. Presidents after Lincoln continued to move about in Washington virtually unattended, as their predecessors had done before the Civil War, and, as before, such protection as they got at the White House came from the doormen, who were not especially trained for guard duty.[A7-16]
This lack of personal protection for the President came again tragically to the attention of the country with the shooting of President James A. Garfield in 1881. The President’s assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, was a self-styled “lawyer, theologian, and politician” who had convinced himself that his unsolicited efforts to help elect Garfield in 1880 entitled him to appointment as a consul in Europe. Bitterly disappointed that the President ignored his repeated written requests for appointment to office and obsessed with a kind of megalomania, he resolved to kill Garfield.
At that time Guiteau was 38 years old and had an unusually checkered career behind him. He had been an itinerant and generally unsuccessful lecturer and evangelist, a lawyer, and a would-be politician. While it is true he resented Garfield’s failure to appoint him consul in Paris as a reward for his wholly illusory contribution to the Garfield campaign, and he verbally attacked Garfield for his lack of support for the so-called Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, these may not have supplied the total motivation for his crime. At his trial he testified that the “Deity” had commanded him to remove the President. There is no evidence that he confided his assassination plans to anyone or that he had any close friends or confidants. He made his attack on the President under circumstances where escape after the shooting was inconceivable. There were some hereditary mental problems in his family and Guiteau apparently believed in divine inspiration.[A7-17]
Guiteau later testified that he had had three opportunities to attack the President prior to the actual shooting. On all of these occasions, within a brief period of 3 weeks, the President was unguarded. Guiteau finally realized his intent on the morning of July 2, 1881. As Garfield was walking to a train in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, Guiteau stepped up and shot him in the back. Garfield did not die from the effects of the wound until September 19, 1881. Although there was evidence of serious abnormality in Guiteau, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged. The execution took place on June 30, 1882.[A7-18]
At least one newspaper, the New York Tribune, predicted that the assault on Garfield would lead to the President becoming “the slave of his office, the prisoner of forms and restrictions,” in sharp and unwelcome contrast to the splendidly simple life he had been able to live before.
The bullet of the assassin who lurked in the Washington railway station to take the life of President Garfield shattered the simple Republican manner of life which the custom of nearly a century has prescribed for the Chief Magistrate of the United States. Our Presidents have been the first citizens of the Republic—nothing more. With a measure of power in their hands far greater than is wielded by the ruler of any limited monarchy in Europe, they have never surrounded themselves with the forms and safeguards of courts. The White House has been a business office to everybody. Its occupant has always been more accessible than the heads of great commercial establishments. When the passions of the war were at fever heat, Mr. Lincoln used to have a small guard of cavalry when he rode out to his summer residence at the Soldier’s Home; but at no other time in our history has it been thought needful for a President to have any special protection against violence when inside or outside the White House. Presidents have driven about Washington like other people and travelled over the country as unguarded and unconstrained as any private citizen.[A7-19]
The prediction of the Tribune did not come to pass. Although the Nation was shocked by this deed, its representatives took no steps to provide the President with personal protection. The President continued to move about Washington, sometimes completely alone, and to travel without special protection. There is a story that President Chester A. Arthur, Garfield’s successor, once went to a ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard on a public conveyance that he hailed in front of the White House.[A7-20]
During Grover Cleveland’s second administration (1893-97) the number of threatening letters addressed to the President increased markedly, and Mrs. Cleveland persuaded the President to increase the number of White House policemen to 27 from the 3 who had constituted the force since the Civil War. In 1894, the Secret Service began to provide protection, on an informal basis.[A7-21]
The Secret Service was organized as a division of the Department of the Treasury in 1865, to deal with counterfeiting.[A7-22] Its jurisdiction was extended to other fiscal crimes against the United States in later appropriations acts,[A7-23] but its early work in assisting in protecting the President was an unofficial, stopgap response to a need for a trained organization, with investigative capabilities, to perform this task. In 1894, while investigating a plot by a group of gamblers in Colorado to assassinate President Cleveland, the Secret Service assigned a small detail of operatives to the White House to help protect him. Secret Service men accompanied the President and his family to their vacation home in Massachusetts; special details protected the President in Washington, on trips, and at special functions.[A7-24] For a time, two agents rode in a buggy behind President Cleveland’s carriage, but this practice attracted so much attention in the opposition newspapers that it was soon discontinued at the President’s insistence.[A7-25] These initially informal and part-time arrangements eventually led to the organization of permanent systematic protection for the President and his family.
During the Spanish-American War the Secret Service stationed a detail at the White House to provide continuous protection for President McKinley. The special wartime protective measures were relaxed after the war, but Secret Service guards remained on duty at the White House at least part of the time.[A7-26]
Between 1894 and 1900, anarchists murdered the President of France, the Premier of Spain, the Empress of Austria, and the King of Italy. At the turn of the century the Secret Service thought that the strong police action taken against the anarchists in Europe was compelling them to flee and that many were coming to the United States. Concerned about the protection of the President, the Secret Service increased the number of guards and directed that a guard accompany him on all of his trips.[A7-27]
Unlike Lincoln and Garfield, President McKinley was being guarded when he was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz, an American-born 28-year-old factory worker and farmhand. On September 6, 1901, the President was holding a brief reception for the public in the Temple of Music at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Long lines of people passed between two rows of policemen and soldiers to reach the President and shake his hand. In the immediate vicinity of the President were four Buffalo detectives, four soldiers, and three Secret Service agents. Two of the Secret Service men were facing the President at a distance of 3 feet. One of them stated later that it was normally his custom to stand at the side of the President on such occasions, but that he had been requested not to do so at this time in order to permit McKinley’s secretary and the president of the exposition to stand on either side of McKinley. Czolgosz joined the line, concealed a pistol under a handkerchief, and when he stood in front of the President shot twice through the handkerchief. McKinley fell critically wounded.[A7-28]
Czolgosz, a self-styled anarchist, did not believe in rulers of any kind. There is evidence that the organized anarchists in the U.S.A. did not accept or trust him. He was not admitted as a member to any of the secret anarchist societies. No co-plotters were ever discovered, and there is no evidence that he had confided in anyone. A calm inquiry made by two eminent alienists about a year after Czolgosz was executed found that Czolgosz had for some time been suffering from delusions. One was that he was an anarchist; another was that it was his duty to assassinate the President.[A7-29]
The assassin said he had no grudge against the President personally but did not believe in the republican form of government or in rulers of any kind. In his written confession he included the words, “‘I don’t believe one man should have so much service and another man should have none.’” As he was strapped to the chair to be electrocuted, he said: “‘I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people—the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.’”[A7-30]
McKinley lingered on for 8 days before he died of blood poisoning early on the morning of September 14. Czolgosz, who had been captured immediately, was swiftly tried, convicted, and condemned to death. Although it seemed to some contemporaries that Czolgosz was incompetent, the defense made no effort to plead insanity. Czolgosz was executed 45 days after the President’s death. Investigations by the Buffalo police and the Secret Service revealed no accomplices and no plot of any kind.[A7-31]