Local Spotlight: Samuel Hopkins Adams

Samuel Hopkins Adams was born in Dunkirk, New York  on January 26, 1871, the son of Minister Myron Adams and Hester Rose. Hopkins entered Hamilton College in 1887. Upon graduation he served as Trustee between 1905 and 1916. His future investigative work as a journalist led to his receiving an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 1926.

In October, 1905, he began a series of eleven articles called The Great American Fraud in Collier's Weekly. Adams analyzed the contents of some of the country's most popular medicines. He argued that many of the companies producing these medicines were making false claims about their products. Adams went on to point out that in some cases, these medicines were actually damaging the health of those people using them. The Great American Fraud had a tremendous impact on public opinion and resulted in the passing of the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906 .

In 1911 the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition of falsifications referred only to the ingredients of the medicine. This meant that companies were now free to make false claims about their products. Adams returned to the attack and in articles in Collier's Weekly such as Fraud Medicines Own Up (20th January), Tricks of the Trade (17th February, 1912), The Law, the Label, and the Liars (13th April, 1912) and Fraud Above the Law (11th May, 1912), Adams exposed the misleading advertising that companies were using to sell their products.

He soon turned to books and in the 1920s, Adams launched into a prolific period of writing fiction, including hundreds of short stories. Success (1921) was followed by his collection of short stories set in New York City, From a Bench in Our Square (1922). His Jazz Age Flaming Youth (1923) was published under his pseudonym Warner Fabian. Siege (1924) and The Piper's Fee (1926) were followed by Revelry (1926) which is based on President Warren G. Harding's scandal-rocked administration, suitably of the muckraking genre. Who and What: A Book of Clues for the Clever (1927), Unforbidden Fruit (1928), and The Flagrant Years (1929) were followed by his Daniel Webster biography, The Godlike Daniel (1929).

Several of his stories were adapted for the screen. Some of the more popular stories included:  Men in Her Life was made into a film for Colleen Moore and Clara Bow. Night Bus was renamed It Happened One Night by Columbia thereby making Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert household words and promoting the Studio out of poverty row much to the consternation of Louis Mayer. The Harvey Girls was also a huge success starring Judy Garland.

Execution of Czolgosz, with panorama of Auburn Prison by Edison

— maybe America’s First Shock-umentary

Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish-Russian immigrants, was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1873. His parents had six other children and in 1881 it was decided to move to a small farm near Cleveland. Czolgosz found work in a wire mill but in 1898 he suffered a mental breakdown and returned to the family farm.

Czolgosz rejected his family's Roman Catholic beliefs and in 1900 became excited by the news that the Italian immigrant, Gaetano Bresci, had returned to Italy and assassinated King Umberto. He kept newspapers cuttings of the assassination and started to read anarchist newspapers. On May 6, 1901, Czolgosz traveled to Cleveland to hear Emma Goldman make a speech at the Federal Liberal Club. Afterwards Czolgosz spoke briefly to Goldman. He also followed her back to Chicago and attended other meetings where she made speeches on anarchism. Abraham Isaak became convinced that Czolgosz was a spy and issued a warning about him in his journal, the Free Society.

While in Chicago Czolgosz read that President McKinley was planning to visit the Pan American Exposition.  All of the bright lights, developments and innovations of the McKinley years were presented at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

The exposition opened in the spring of 1901 with a welcome by the new vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. President McKinley had been scheduled to do the honors but cancelled because of his wife's illness. It was not until September that McKinley was able to visit the Exposition.

Early September 5th, the president and first lady crossed the Triumphal Causeway and entered the fair grounds. The following day, the presidential party took an excursion by rail to see the area’s natural wonder, Niagara Falls.  McKinley returned to the exposition grounds for a reception in the Music Building to meet a fate probably written before he was born.

The president had been standing in a receiving line greeting the public for a short while when Czolgosz, who bought a pistol two days earlier, fired two shots at him. Although surrounded by fifty bodyguards, the mentally unstable anarchist, was able to walk up to McKinley hitting him in the chest and abdomen.

McKinley then shouted out "Be easy with him, boys" as secret service agents beat Czolgosz. He was taken to a hospital where it was discovered that the chest wound was superficial but the other bullet had torn through the stomach wall. His condition improved for the first few days and newspapers reported that he would recover. However, the path of the bullet that had passed through the wall of the stomach and his kidney, had turned gangrenous and he died on the 14th of September, 1901, despite hopes that he might survive the attack. Those who gathered near to witness the President’s passing heard him whispering the words of his favorite hymn, "Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee."

When questioned Czolgosz claimed he had been incited to kill McKinley by the speeches of Emma Goldman. She was arrested and imprisoned for questioning. When she was finally released she shocked the public by stating that: "He (Czolgosz) had committed the act for no personal reasons or gain. He did it for what is his ideal: the good of the people. That is why my sympathies are with him."

The country was in a near panic state over the senseless assignation and would settle for nothing less than a death penalty for Czolgosz and a quick one at that. Giving its citizens what they wanted, no expense nor time remedy was spared and a speedy trial ensued. Two days after McKinley died, a grand jury, meeting for the first and only time, indicted Leon Czolgosz for murder.

Showing no remorse, it didn’t take long for a jury of Czolgosz peers to find him guilty. Judgment was passed and the death penalty was ordered. A death penalty to be carried out at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, NY. My history rich  small town in Central New York.

Before being executed on October 20th, 1901, Czolgosz remarked that: "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people - the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime."

This was a story that needed to be told. Always ahead of his time, Edison decided to film the execution. His thought just might have been to give his new moving picture audience something they never saw before—the news in the form of moving pictures. It was unheard of for the time.  Edison soon found that the law did not allow photographing an execution.  No stranger to rejection, Edison’s team remained undeterred and decided to make the film anyway. The solution— the execution would be recreated moment by moment in all its gloriously gruesome detail. He sent the soon to be revered cameraman Edwin S. Porter to cinema-photograph the event.

Porter’s fame would grow from shuttering important shorts such as Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery in 1903, one of the cinema’s first Westerns. The latter was also groundbreaking for its use of "cross-cutting" in editing to show simultaneous action in different places. He also directed trick films such as Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906 based on the comic strip by Windsor McCay.

Having watched the film, courtesy of the Library of Congress, I can report that we are led to believe that it is a detailed reproduction of the execution faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness. The ten minute motion picture was developed and filmed in three scenes. First: A panoramic view of Auburn Prison taken the morning of the electrocution.  The picture then dissolves into the (recreated) corridor of murderer's row. The keepers are seen taking Czolgosz from his cell to the death chamber. It then shows the State Electrician, Wardens and Doctors making a final test of the chair.

Czolgosz is then brought in by the guard and is quickly strapped into the chair. The rest is what you can imagine and still shocking one hundred years later. Here’s the interesting part. This film about the electrocution of a heinous assassin in Auburn, NY may be the very first shock-documentary ever photographed commercially. It also represents one of the first U.S. legitimate news documentaries filmed and exhibited in theaters.

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