The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 10

  But he did have food: roast pork and lamb, fried ham and eggs, boiled potatoes, succotash, sliced tomatoes, homemade bread and butter, coffee. “That man is a d——d glutton,” commented a police captain. People didn’t like hearing about his ample diet. Honest laboring men would be lucky to have that food once a year, one man complained. But the jailers weren’t simply being generous. The healthier the prisoner was, the better able he would be to stand trial. And to be convicted. And executed.

  When Nieman wasn’t eating or sleeping soundly, guards reported that he stared. He also laughed strangely and seemed oddly unaware of the magnitude of his crime. To the questions that were put to him by police and lawyers, he offered truth and lies. One truth was that his given name was not Fred Nieman but Leon Czolgosz. A Buffalo paper took pains to explain that the surname was pronounced “Shull-guss.”

  Czolgosz told officials that he had tried to kill the president “because I done my duty.” One man had so much power, he said, and others had so little. A detective asked whether he was an anarchist. “Yes, sir,” he replied. He said he had been studying anarchism for a while, listening to speakers, reading papers, meeting with believers.9

  Out of everything that interrogators soon learned about Czolgosz—including the struggles of his immigrant family, his work as a laborer, his unemployment, and his illnesses—it was his anarchism that drowned out everything else. Who cared what had made the man go in this dreadful direction? It was this unspeakable belief and the act that followed that mattered. The hysteria of the 1886 Chicago Haymarket affair suddenly seemed fresh. So did the anarchist assassinations of the French president in 1894 and the Italian king in 1900.

  By admitting his devotion to anarchism, Czolgosz also helped his prosecutors. They would worry less now about an insanity defense and could avoid the sickening charade that the assassin Charles Guiteau had perpetrated with William Garfield. Radical anarchism—the desire to create a stateless world through terror and violence—was an abominable belief, but people did not have to be certifiably insane to adhere to it. It was evil, but—this was a fine distinction—not madly evil.

  As soon as police officers extracted the word anarchism from the prisoner and handed it to the press, fury ignited. Across the country, crowds vandalized anarchist newspapers and printing presses and mobs threatened anarchists in their homes. In Tacoma, Washington, a group formed to “annihilate” the political radicals, and in Pennsylvania, two dozen armed men attacked an anarchist community and forced twenty-five families from their homes. In New York City, police put all known anarchists under surveillance. “The purpose of this,” announced the commissioner, was “to make life so disagreeable for anarchists in New York City that they will move out of it.”

  For all their outcries against the lawlessness of anarchy, some attackers ignored the legal process themselves. “Lynch him,” men yelled at a target in New York when they gathered to mete out vigilante justice. In Cleveland, a group of African American veterans organized to denounce both anarchism and lynching. Other black citizens strategically reminded the public of their longstanding loyalty to the nation.

  Rage burned hottest where Czolgosz had contacts: Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago. In Buffalo, Chief of Police William Bull flung a wide net over the city, particularly the immigrant East Side. Police in Ohio swept through Cleveland neighborhoods, locking one “foreign looking man” in a “sweatbox” overnight. Chicago police arrested thirteen alleged anarchists, including Czolgosz’s would-be mentor, Emma Goldman. When asked about his association with Goldman, Czolgosz denied her connection with the shooting but couldn’t resist commenting that “she is a good woman, a friend of the poor man and an enemy of the plutocrat and the monarch.”

  It didn’t matter that some anarchists eschewed violence, or that some “anarchists” were really socialists. It was not the time for anyone to critique the government of the United States. On Sunday, September 8, Buffalo police stopped a meeting of the Socialist Labor Party because they were afraid someone might say something negative about the president. Boris Reinstein, one of the speakers, explained that the “object of the meeting called for tonight was to . . . condemn emphatically the outrage of last Friday.” Reinstein also noted that, as a socialist, he was “opposed to the capitalistic arrangement of society, but our methods are to accomplish reforms by the use of the ballot.” The police chief canceled the meeting anyway.10

  III

  THE VORTEX

  While the country wrestled with its wrath, the Pan-American fair sputtered on.

  “We sincerely hope,” commented a tone-deaf official, “that the feeling will not get over the country that a gloom has been thrown over the Exposition.” It was, he added, the president’s desire that the fair “will be as great a success as we have always hoped.” The director of concessions, Frederick Townsend, echoed the sentiment with enthusiastic, if inapt, words. The Midway, he announced on Saturday, September seventh, will be open. “Everything will run full blast,” he declared.

  While Exposition directors, concessionaires, and local labor organizations issued resolutions expressing sympathy and concern, committees began to cancel events. New Jersey Day was put off and a committee of Poles canceled Polish Day.

  Some determined visitors did try to enjoy the Exposition. Twenty-five thousand of them, in fact, entered the gates on Sunday, September eighth. But the mood was somber, and guests seemed saddled with worry. An elderly couple confessed that they fixed their eyes on the flag at the end of the Esplanade, fearful that they would see it lowered. “Thank God it is there yet,” the old man said. “I hope it will never fly at half mast.”

  Eager to tap into the swelling emotion, exhibitors pulled out every photograph they could find of McKinley and charged customers double and triple. People paid. At the scene of the crime, visitors tried to determine exactly where the president had been shot. What remained of the reception had been cleared away, but the Temple of Music opened for organ concerts on September 7, and opportunistic relic hunters went to work. Assuming that McKinley had stood on the stage in the rotunda, they began taking pieces of wood by cutting or tearing the stage apart. A carpenter had to be called in to make repairs.

  Over on the Midway, the Animal King put on a brave face. Out of respect for the president, he announced, he would postpone his parade of the lion-wedding cage. He didn’t mention that he couldn’t have staged his parade anyway—police had blocked the streets.

  Bostock’s press agent, Captain Maitland, also shifted gears. Instead of highlighting rambunctious or bloodthirsty animals, he found a more dignified focus—the Animal King himself. While other publicists delivered tributes to the injured president, Maitland handed press offices a looming portrait of Bostock. Two days after the shooting, readers were also offered a complete biography of the menagerist, including details of the accolades awarded him by the Prince and Princess of Wales.11

  Beyond Buffalo’s perimeter of woe, in Niagara Falls, entertainers continued to market their acts. In fact, one of them, Maud Willard, Martha Wagenfuhrer’s friend, was ready to perform. Oddly enough, twenty-five-year-old Willard hailed from Canton, Ohio, just as McKinley did. Still odder, perhaps, was the revelation that she was no stranger to the matter of presidential assailants: Once upon a time, she had worked in a theater company with the brother of an assassin, Edwin Booth.

  Willard hoped to work her way out of hand-to-mouth living and to support her ailing mother. All she had to do was what her friend Martha had accomplished the day before: perform a barrel act in the wild Niagara River. Martha now had a marketable new name: “Queen of the Rapids.” How bad could it be?

  Willard’s barrel ride would actually be a double act with an experienced stuntman named Carlisle Graham, who had ridden the rapids five times. He would lend Maud his own well-tested barrel. But the plan was complicated. Maud would ride the barrel through the treacherous rapids below the falls, and then, if all went well, enter the Whirlpool. Graham would jump into the river opposite
the Whirlpool and swim with her barrel toward Lake Ontario. Her stunt and his long swim would be record-breaking. A moving-picture company would record the feat.

  Carlisle Graham and Maud Willard pose before their stunt.

  If there was such a thing as a good day for barrel riding, September seventh claimed it. The weather was hot and rainless. At 3:30 p.m., Maud Willard made her way to the dock of the Maid of the Mist tour boat and announced she was ready to go. In honor of the stricken president, her fellow Ohioan, she carried an American flag. And in honor of nobody in particular, but just because she could, she took along a small brown-and-white fox terrier. An hour later, she hoped to have survived the Whirlpool Rapids, boosted her income, and become a champion of the fallen American leader.

  Having been nearly killed by her own barrel run, Martha Wagenfuhrer had done her best to urge Maud to drop the idea. Others wondered about taking the dog. What was the point? There was only one small airhole in the barrel. She was told to leave her dog ashore.

  Maud didn’t listen.

  At ten minutes to four, in view of hundreds of spectators clustered along banks and jammed overhead on the steel-arch bridge, a small boat towed Maud’s barrel to the center of the river and cut it free. Within seconds the barrel was thrown about by the rapids, but it remained upright and moved fast. In less than eight minutes, it had traveled into the Whirlpool.

  Carlisle Graham, who had witnessed the launching of the barrel, hopped on a private railway car to keep up with it. He saw Maud enter the Whirlpool and watched as she made one wide revolution and edged closer to the Canadian bank. The barrel took longer to move around the Whirlpool than he had expected, but Maud would be hooked and brought ashore after one more circle. He was sure of it.

  In the meantime, Graham would do the river trip alone. Donning a cork life preserver and an inflated neck tube, he jumped into the rapids below the Whirlpool, powered through the currents, and entered the river’s calmer stretch, a mile from Lewiston, New York, his destination.

  Graham completed his swim and took time to rest in Lewiston and savor his success. Close to 6 p.m., he headed back to the falls on the Gorge Railway. It was a pleasant evening along the lush, tree-banked river, and Graham chatted with friends and admiring strangers. If anxiety over Maud shadowed his pleasure, he did not acknowledge it. He had not seen what others had witnessed—that, at 5 p.m., after Maud had made more than thirty revolutions around the Whirlpool, her barrel had been sucked down by an undercurrent and had disappeared for several minutes.

  It wasn’t until Graham’s railroad car approached the Whirlpool that he realized what had happened. Even in the slanting light, he knew that the dark shape in the water was her barrel—his barrel—and that it was trapped in the spiral. As soon as the train got close enough, Graham jumped off, hurried to the Canadian shore, and dove in. He was strong, but not strong enough to counter the current, and, along with everybody else, he could do nothing but wait. The barrel listed now—its contents had shifted.

  At around 8 p.m., four hours after Willard had begun her trip, men brought in a searchlight car from the Gorge railway and focused its beam on the water. In what was becoming a macabre ritual on the riverbanks, they lit bonfires. Half an hour more, and a man spotted a piece of wood drifting closer to shore. The current had changed. Then the barrel bobbed into sight. Two local brothers swam to the cask and pulled it to the rocky bank. Maud Willard and her terrier had been encased nearly five hours.

  Some witnesses recalled that one of the men who pulled Maud out of the barrel, Captain Billy Johnson, thought there was hope left, and tried to resuscitate her. Johnson, a former lifeguard, struggled for more than an hour. Another person ran for a doctor. The physician was not optimistic, and, at about 10 p.m., he pronounced her dead. She hadn’t died easily, he concluded. Her lips were blue, her body was bruised, and “the facial expression denoted much suffering.”

  Graham paced from rock to rock to rock in anguish. He spoke of his last words to her. “Don’t open the cover,” he had told her. And she never had. There wasn’t even a “pailful” of water in the barrel when it was opened.

  On other matters, though, Maud hadn’t taken anybody’s advice. She had carried a dog with her, for God’s sake. And when the men broke open the top of the cask and looked in, there he was. He was sitting on Maud’s face, his nose to the airhole.

  The good news? He was very much alive.

  It was bad enough that her daughter had died in such a gruesome way, but Willard’s mother was horrified by descriptions of the incident. Reporters claimed that her daughter’s body had laid out on a rock for hours, and that the ghoulish glow of the firelight had created a scene “not unlike Dante’s Inferno.” A Toronto paper claimed that Maud’s friends had pulled her corpse up the embankment by her hair and ankles and that they had been so drunk that one or two of them climbed into Maud’s coffin and passed out.

  It was all too much. Two weeks later Mrs. Willard, like her daughter, was dead.12

  Stories of Maud Willard’s suffocation circulated widely. Michigan papers, including the Bay City press, reported the failed stunt, so Annie Edson Taylor, would-be barrel rider, certainly read about it. In public, at least, she barely blinked an eye. And why would she have? She believed she stood worlds apart from the likes of Maud Willard. Not only had she studied the matter for months, but she was a woman of dignity, education, and, above all, class.

  At the same time, Taylor would have to admit that progress in Michigan was slow. The cooperage had made a mistake with the barrel cover—it was not big enough. There also was the matter of a manager. The first three men Annie approached refused. Finally, she located a Mr. Russell, the “best advertiser” in the city, who said he would take her on. Russell had even sent her a typewritten letter—a sure sign of reliability.

  Then there was the problem of money. After a wealthy acquaintance turned down Annie’s request for assistance, she determined to fund the project herself. She mortgaged everything she had: her sheets and pillows, her tablecloths and linens. All she had left in the world was a trunk full of her last possessions—and a nicely outfitted, humansized cask.

  Annie Taylor set her sights on the end of September. In the fullness and warmth of early autumn, Exposition crowds would certainly surge to the falls to see her. And after she made her miraculous trip, they would pay to see her in person. The wonderful Mr. Russell—Tussie, as he was known—would arrange the appearances: Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and, above all, the Pan-American Exposition.13

  IV

  GLORY DAYS

  There was no good news out of Niagara Falls on September 7, but upstream in Buffalo, the other resident of Canton, Ohio, was holding his own. By the evening of September 8, in fact, people emerging from the Milburn house were almost beginning to smile. McKinley’s aides reported no signs of impending fatality: no indication of blood poisoning, infection, or obvious abscesses. Senator Mark Hanna, the president’s good friend from Ohio, announced that the bullet, wherever it was, could become incrusted in forty-eight hours, and then be left alone, forever.

  The doctors were more cautious. On Monday, Dr. Matthew Mann, who had performed the surgery, admitted to reporters that he had “known cases to go well for ten days and then change for the worse.” The celebrated abdominal surgeon Dr. Charles McBurney, who had arrived from New York City on Sunday to join the medical team, claimed that the president would not be out of the woods for another week. McKinley, he said, was “far more confident than anyone around him.”

  But every hour that went by, then every half day, seemed to move the victim closer to recovery.

  By Monday, even the surgeons were beginning to show relief. Asked about the special X-ray machine that had been hauled up from Edison Labs, McBurney said it wasn’t needed now. The only point of that, said the surgeon, would be to take out the bullet, and why would anyone do that when it wasn’t causing any trouble?

  Newsboys could not be contained. “Extra!” they shouted. “The pre
sident will live.” Editors echoed them. “Crisis About Over,” claimed the Commercial on September 9. “President McKinley’s condition is now so favorable that it has dispelled almost the last shade of doubt and apprehension.” The next day, the paper was even more emphatic: “Now the President’s recovery is certain.” The searchlight at the Electric Tower sent an uplifting signal message to the tower at Niagara Falls: “The country rejoices at the rapid recovery of President McKinley.”

  Reporters who wondered whether the doctors were just telling the public what it wanted to hear were given an emphatic no. Vice President Roosevelt, still in town, was impatient with this sort of suspicion. “I want to say that the official bulletins are scrupulous understatements of the hopefulness of the situation,” he insisted, pounding his fist into his hand. Senator Hanna concurred. No physician wants to be overly optimistic, he insisted. “Their reputation is at stake and they have a right to guard it.”

  When journalists carried on about the president’s high pulse, they were told to stop their fretting: It was probably due to secondary shock. McKinley’s heart rate—and the McKinley family doctor, Rixey, confirmed this—had a “trick of quickening” anyway.14

  Still, skeptics recalled another president who had been shot, twenty years earlier. Wasn’t James Garfield’s case a caution to everyone: early optimism, and then a horrendous crash to fatality? They were assured the cases couldn’t be more different. The agonizing months waiting for Garfield to recover lacked one critical element: the president’s own desire to live. One commentator insisted that there stood over Garfield a strong sense of impending death. In fact, the insider argued, “Garfield believed from the beginning that he would never recover. He spoke words of cheer and comfort to those about him, for the dear sake of family and friends, but his physicians . . . knew that the man’s heart was not in the struggle.”