On this day in 1901, President William McKinley died, eight days after being shot in the stomach at the World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. He was the third U.S. President to be assassinated–and his death created the modern Secret Service.
McKinley was speaking at a public reception at the fair when he was shot, writes Evan Andrews for History.com. He “underwent emergency surgery and initially seemed to have recovered, but his health quickly deteriorated after he developed gangrene and blood poisoning,” Andrews writes. Although his death was widely mourned, the fact that someone had attempted to kill him didn’t come as a surprise to advisors, who had been worrying about that very thing.
The president himself had a fairly laid-back approach to security, even though two of his predecessors (President Lincoln and President Garfield) had been killed in the past half-century, writes Karen Robertson for Ohio History Connection.
