On September 6, 1901, a photograph captured President William McKinley ascending the entrance stairs of the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Wearing a formal frock coat and top hat, McKinley is accompanied by exposition president John G. Milburn and his personal secretary, George B. Cortelyou. It is one of the last known images of the president before he entered the Temple of Music for a public reception.
The scene has acquired an unsettling significance. After climbing the wooden steps and entering the crowded auditorium, McKinley began greeting members of the public in a receiving line. At about 4:07 p.m., Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist who had concealed a .32-caliber revolver beneath a handkerchief wrapped around his hand, reached the president and fired two shots at close range. One bullet grazed McKinley; the other entered his abdomen.
McKinley was carried from the hall and taken by ambulance to the exposition’s emergency hospital, where surgeons operated that evening. Early official reports encouraged hopes of recovery, but his condition worsened as infection and gangrene developed. He died eight days later, at 2:15 a.m. on September 14, 1901.
The assassination stunned the nation and made Vice President Theodore Roosevelt president. Rather than literally ending one era and beginning another overnight, McKinley’s death became a powerful symbol of the country’s passage from the late Gilded Age toward the Progressive Era. In that sense, these stairs remain a poignant threshold: the last visible steps of a president moments before the event that transformed his administration—and the nation’s political future.
Image: President William McKinley ascending the steps of the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, September 6, 1901—one of the last photographs taken before he was shot.
