NARRATOR: On September 6, 1901 President
William McKinley was shot.
Eight days later, he died.
Teddy Roosevelt became president and the first president
to have around the clock Secret Service protection.
But why did it take Congress 25 presidencies
and three assassinations to make that happen?
To answer that, we have to go back
to the end of the Civil War when America
had some real money problems.
By 1865, up to one half of American money in circulation
was fake.
So on April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln
authorized the creation of a government agency
to fight counterfeiting.
He called it the Secret Service.
Later that night, Lincoln would be assassinated.
But that wasn't enough to convince Congress to give
the president his own police.
And it wasn't enough, in 1881, when President James
A. Garfield was assassinated.
Because, for the most part, Congress feared
centralized power more than they feared
for the president's life.
Congress had hesitated to create a national law enforcement
agency, preferring to leave matters of law and order
to the individual states.
But toward the end of the 19th century,
these attitudes began to change as America
grew into an economic and imperialist powerhouse.
McKinley's presidency, in particular,
was marked by unparalleled industrial and territorial
expansion.
But as America grew in size and power, so,
too, did the threats against it.
Anarchists who advocated for stateless societies
had been staging attacks against powerful governments
across the world since the 1870s,
including one that sparked Chicago's
Haymarket Riot in 1886.
Leaders at the national level grew
more concerned about the president's safety,
fearing he may be a target.
So the Secret Service stepped in to unofficially protect
the president, when needed.
When President McKinley attended the Pan American Exposition
in Buffalo in September of 1901, he
had a fair amount of security, 18 exposition guards,
seven soldiers provided by the 73rd Seacoast Artillery,
and three Secret Service agents.
McKinley, though, like many presidents before and after,
found protection mostly annoying,
believing it got in between the president and the people.
So when Americans lined up to shake hands with McKinley
on September 6, he nixed the standard two guards next to him
in exchange for his secretary and the president
of the Exposition.
That was a big mistake, because in line to meet the president
that day was a lone anarchist who may have also
suffered from mental illness.
When his turn came to shake hands with McKinley,
he instead drew a gun hidden beneath his handkerchief
and shot the president twice, point blank in the stomach.
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His name was Leon Czolgosz.
And that's important.
Because while he was a natural born American citizen,
Leon Czolgosz didn't quite have the same Anglo-Saxon ring
as John Wilkes Booth.
And this foreign-looking name added to the perception
that anarchism was coming into America through foreigners,
leading to the passage of the 1903 Immigration Act, which
allowed anyone associated with anarchism
to be barred or expelled.
It became the first federal law since the 1798 Alien
and Sedition Acts, authorizing deportation
and exclusion based on a person's ideological beliefs
and associations.
McKinley's death also confirmed the real fear
that US presidents would be targeted
for political assassinations, spurring the expansion
of the Secret Service to officially include protecting
our nation's leaders, which was a smart move because as America
rose in power through the 20th century, so, too,
would the number of threads against its presidents.
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