Czolgoszs Cranial and Facial Characteristics

Czolgosz's Cranial and Facial Characteristics Buffalo Courier,
November 17, 1901

He Is Shown to Have Been Peculiarly Fitted for His Fearful Crime-
Has High Order of Criminal Capability.

By Broughton Brandenburg.
IN BEGINNING this careful and critical review of the points of the
skull and face of Leon Czolgosz as indications of his character, the
writer desires to say that there are few people who do not laugh at
phrenology and physiognemetry in the abstract, but that is because they
know so very little of it in the concrete. The writer in a long period of
amateur investigations and examinations of all classes of human faces
and heads, has as yet failed to find an instance where a man's character
is not as plainly written thereon as the letters on a giant signboard
would be, only that it takes an understanding won by patience to
perceive the characters and translate them. Once this art is understood,
the human race is an open book to the reader. Let him who thinks it is a
great gain in power to be so equipped, pause and think what a loss it is
to be compelled to be ever aware of your enemies' good traits and the
blackening faults of your friends.
In this sketch the writer will give the salient points in the nature of the
murderer of President McKinley, as observed during short periods in
the assassin's presence, immediately after arrest and while the private
examinations were taking place in District Attorney Penney's office.
This has been supplemented, for the sake of absolute accuracy, by some
one hundred measurements of the photographs of the condemned man.
In the first place, Czolgosz showed remarkable development, for a

young man, in certain faculties, and in all, was fairly up to the average.
Let it not be thought for a moment that he was an ordinary man, stupid,
a degenerate, a maniac or a man of low, vicious propensities. He had
qualities so far above this level that if they had been rightly combined
and supplemented by a development of true idealism they would have
made him an admirable citizen instead of a victim of the electric chair.
In his domestic nature there were certain faculties which render his
career pathetic. These faculties lay in the base of the brain at the back,
and the writer found that he was fully developed there, showing that he
loved his home and his parents, and his sense of patriotism was
strongly developed but perverted by a preponderance of a very bad
combination of other characteristics.
His love of his family and of children was strong but had been
suppressed by his secretive, reticent faculty, one of the most strongly
developed faculties of its class the writer has ever seen. The domestic
qualities were all inherited from his father and mother, both of whom
have strong characteristics of this sort, as their home and family show.
The lack of the bestial was shown notably behind and before the ears.
The physical vitativeness was not good nor was the alimentiveness up
to the average. The combative, or fighting, sense was unnaturally raised
and combined with the large faculty of caution, was shown to be more
defensive than offensive and aggressive. Of love of life there was but a
shred, and that accounts for much of the prisoner's strange conduct after
the crime. It is not to be thought for a minute that he did not feel and
know the dreadfulness of his position, for his senses of perception were
fairly acute but he was lacking in the mind love of existence and so,
knowing that he would certainly be captured and killed by law if not at
the hands of the populace, he nevertheless did as he thought was right,
regardless of consequences to himself. This seems to belie what has
already been said about his extreme caution, but the writer is positive
that this feature is borne out in the care which he took to conceal his
accomplices, if he had any, to get a perfect chance at the President and
to conceal his weapon and intentions so cleverly. He was a careful man
with the incentive, but holding little love of life, he had not the

incentive.
The functions, of the brain are like those of a clock of many parts; all
work together and each is dependent upon all.
Now, let the development of his moral nature be considered. A man
who is good, will not do wrong, because his impulses are to do right
unless he abstain through fear of consequences, when his moral nature
has little to do with it.
Leon Czolgosz was not morally a bad man. He was just about the
average. This combination of faculties was shown in height and breadth