The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 11

  All this was reinforced by the suggestion that Garfield’s spirit had been broken by being shot in the back, unprotected and unsuspecting. McKinley, shot facing his enemy, was a soldier, and was determined to get well—for his wife’s sake if nothing else. Dr. McBurney summed up the opinion that there could be no comparison between Garfield and McKinley: Garfield’s wound was “an extremely unfortunate one, hard to get at and difficult to handle.” By contrast, McKinley’s wound was “a fortunate one, a lucky one.”

  By Tuesday afternoon, September 10, the cloud of disquiet that hung over Buffalo began to lift. The expressions of those who emerged from the Milburn house had broadened into wide smiles. Senator Hanna, reported one observer, “bubbled over with joy.” Doctors were hardly less thrilled. “I feel just like hollering,” said one. And the president? He “was in a fine mood,” too, and wanted to chat with everyone, about anything.

  Mrs. McKinley, who had been subdued with medication and, except for fleeting conversations with her husband, had kept to her room, celebrated the general optimism by taking a carriage ride. The next day, she took another.15

  The biggest indication that Buffalo itself was coming back to life was that the city began to debate matters other than medical prognoses. There was the question of women’s right to vote, for example. Suffragists, including celebrities such as Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, arrived in the city on September 9 and 10 for the meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Mayor Diehl welcomed the women at the City Convention Hall, and the activists launched into a spirited series of lectures and discussions about how the franchise would “create happier homes,” “advance the cause of peace,” “purify politics,” and “develop the higher manhood of men.”

  Vice President Roosevelt, among other high-level politicians in Buffalo at the time, steered clear of the suffragists. As governor in 1898, Roosevelt had expressed lukewarm support for women’s suffrage, but he also believed that white women should focus on “duties” instead of rights. It was a white woman’s duty, he would later assert, to be the “helpmate, the housewife, and mother,” and she should focus on bearing children—lots of them.

  While the suffragists rallied downtown, Roosevelt ambled about other parts of the city. He walked between the Wilcox and Milburn houses on Delaware Avenue and took a trip to the zoo. As for riding in a protected vehicle, or having more than a couple of security men near him? “Pshaw!” he said. A laborer stopped the unguarded Roosevelt as he strode about and asked him if he wasn’t afraid to be approached. “No sir,” Roosevelt snapped. “And I hope no official of this country ever will be afraid. You men are our protection and the foul deed done . . . will only make you the more vigorous in your protection of the lives of those whom you elect to office.”

  By the beginning of the week, confident officials and medical advisers began to exit the city. Dr. McBurney and Vice President Roosevelt left Buffalo on Tuesday night, September 10. Reporters, who seemed strangely obsessed with the past, asked Roosevelt once again about Garfield. He had seemed so well, they reminded the vice president. “Ah, but you forget twenty years of modern surgery, of progress,” Roosevelt replied, and got on his train. Charles McBurney, who planned to visit Niagara Falls before heading home to New York City, was not only certain but expansive. “Gentlemen,” he was heard to say, the president’s recovery “is the event of the century.”16 The papers reported his words the next day, September 11.

  V

  “BIG JIM”

  Now that the president was on the mend, there were heroes to thank. There were the doctors, of course, and there were the Secret Service men and detectives who had acted so quickly and selflessly. And there was Jim Parker. Hardly a day had passed after the shooting before the waiter was the talk of the town. His sudden fame had even added inches to his height. Forty-four-year-old James Benjamin Parker became known as “Big Jim,” and he had stretched to six and a half feet tall. He became the fair’s hero, its “tawny lion.”

  Parker, according to some observers, took his new fame in stride. “I happened to be in a position where I could aid in the capture of the man,” Parker was heard to say. “I do not think that the American people would like me to make capital out of the unfortunate circumstance. I am no freak, anyway. I do not want to be exhibited in all kinds of shows. I am glad that I was able to be of service to the country.”

  Parker’s role in subduing the shooter was splashed across the front pages of the nation’s papers, and sparked widespread celebrations. In Savannah, Georgia, where Parker had lived and worked as a constable, the black community was delighted. They remembered Parker’s brave work in that metropolis and hoped that he might be rewarded with a job in Washington. In Syracuse, twenty-five percent of the receipts from a performance at the Grand Opera House was scheduled to go to a fund for the man “who saved President McKinley’s life.” And in Buffalo, Jim Parker not only received offers to appear at the Exposition but also was credited with singlehandedly breaking down the barriers of segregation. The president and secretary of the Don’t Knock Society, which rarely accepted black members, decided to invite the courageous Parker to join them.17

  It is unclear whether the meteoric rise of Jim Parker did anything to mitigate the anger felt by Buffalo’s African American community toward the Pan-American Exposition. Since 1893, when Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass lambasted the directors of Chicago’s White City for race discrimination, and protested the absence of an African American exhibit, United States fair directors had had an uneven history of recognizing black achievements. Atlanta’s exposition had constructed a Negro Building for exhibits and conferences in 1895, but other fair directors, including Buffalo’s, were more interested in showcasing African villages—with cannibals, wild dances, and witches—than progressive developments in the contemporary diaspora.

  When the Pan-American’s Board of Managers took shape as an all-white body, and then said yes to Darkest Africa and yes to the Old Plantation, with its living exhibit of slavery’s “good old days,” Buffalo’s progressive black community—especially its women—spoke out. Rallying at the Michigan Street Baptist Church in November 1900, the Phyllis Wheatley Club of Colored Women protested the exclusion of people of color from the Board of Managers of the Exposition. Led by Mary Talbert, an Oberlin graduate and community organizer, the group also argued that the Exposition needed to highlight African American progress. And they had just the show: W. E. B. Du Bois’s prizewinning Negro Exhibit from the 1900 Paris exposition.

  Mary Talbert was tireless. Before the Pan-American Exposition opened in the spring of 1901, she staged a fundraising show that featured African American talent. She also helped host a conference for the National Association of Colored Women during the fair season, bringing to the city some of the most celebrated and enterprising women in America.

  And she got the Negro Exhibit to the fair. Boosted by an appeal from the exhibit’s curator, Thomas Calloway, Talbert and other clubwomen saw the award-winning show installed in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Through the exhibit’s charts, graphs, publications, and photographs, visitors learned about the progress of black Americans since Emancipation. They read that the literacy rate of African Americans was now greater than that of Romanians and Russians, and they viewed inventions and patents. They peered into dioramas to follow a family as it moved forward from the 1860s. Nine models, lit by electric lights, showed the group emerging from the shadows. “Behind them,” explained the curator, “are woods representing the darkness of slavery, and before them is a winding path leading into an unknown future.” The next model pictured the family building a small house as well as children clustered under a tree, learning their lessons. The final scenes revealed the family’s son, grown up, teaching his own classes in a “neat white schoolhouse with glass windows and a brick chimney” built by the community. It was a story of challenge and promise.18

  Mary Talbert.

  Mary Talbert and others put passion and e
ffort into celebrating African American accomplishments at the Exposition, but they climbed a steep, often insurmountable hill of public opinion. While African American newspapers lauded the show, hoping that it would dispel the “gloom” directed at the black community, the Negro Exhibit might as well have been off in the center of Lake Erie for all the attention white publicists gave it during the Exposition season. Most guidebooks, including authorized catalogues, ignored it. The local press, with the exception of the Express, turned its back on the show. The Express tried to be generous, explaining that an exhibit “more complete, valuable, and far-reaching in its effects could scarcely be imagined.” Then it qualified its enthusiasm, asserting that it would mostly be of interest to black visitors.

  The New York Times acknowledged the exhibit, barely. In commenting on its display of literary achievements, including works by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, the paper took pains to be unflattering: “We may as well be entirely frank in the appraisal. Much of it is rubbish. None of it is very great.”

  African American visitors who saw the Du Bois display were not interviewed by the white press, at least in Buffalo, and they left behind few, if any, printed accounts. Almost a century passed before local historians discovered a pamphlet describing the exhibit and realized that it had even been installed at the Exposition.19

  While white fairgoers likely bypassed the Negro Exhibit, they did attend other performances about people of color on the Midway. Menagerists elicited big laughs from visitors by showing how their well-trained animals outsmarted black performers. At the end of June, an African American performer from Georgia became the “pupil” of a horse. “The darky is learning to read and write,” explained a reporter. “His teacher is the black horse, Bonner, who not only reads and writes, but does sums in arithmetic.” Not to be outdone, Frank Bostock revealed that his chimpanzee, Esau, got on well with an “Old Plantation Negro.” The two were publicly introduced to each other in the monkey’s “private apartments.” They shook hands and joked together. “Ha-ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-!” laughed the black man. Esau laughed in return. “Waugh! Waugh! Waugh!” he said.

  Teacher Mabel Barnes never saw (or, if she saw, she never acknowledged) the Du Bois exhibit, but she was a keen fan of Darkest Africa and the Old Plantation. She and Abby Hale visited Darkest Africa in the summer, lured into the stockade by a gyrating “real pygmy” in a cotton loincloth. There she encountered “village life” performed in bamboo huts by nearly one hundred West and Central Africans. Surrounded by shrieking parrots and monkeys, Mabel and Abby watched African weavers and gold and ivory workers and became wide-eyed at the sight of drums, spears, and idols. They listened to stories of human sacrifice and polygamy. Mabel took notes on “specimens of pygmies and cannibals.” Many of them, she observed, had never before left home.

  The women were not shy about their curiosity. Of all the demonstrations at the Darkest Africa concession, the most appealing, said Mabel, were “the natives themselves.” Their bodies, she confessed, “are slender, strong, and clean.” She liked their white teeth, too. But most of all she admired their skin. It gleamed with palm oil, the schoolteacher said, and looked like satin. She admitted it was “so clean and smooth that it almost tempted one to lay hands upon it.”

  For their part, the performers reminded the women that they were more than specimens. “Miss Hale and I were making some comment upon [the skin],” explained Mabel, “not realizing that the owner of the skin, who, moreover, was of rather an intelligent appearance, could understand English.” For a split second, the two parties closed the distance between them and spoke. The women also discovered an African ivory worker returning visitors’ stares. Using his carving skills, he was busy reproducing a “Midway type,” an American woman, with “excellent fidelity.” Mabel was impressed—sort of. “As simple as they are,” she commented, “these natives are also quick at observing the customs of the world.”20

  Behind the doors of a columned antebellum façade at the Old Plantation, Mabel and Abby found more to learn about dark-skinned people. E. S. Dundy’s concession featured antebellum life in the American South, and slavery never saw such an endorsement. Slave families sang and danced and laughed as they picked real cotton. Of all the performers, nobody made the case for happy days in the Old South better than the man who had laughed with Bostock’s chimpanzee. Laughing Ben, diminutive and gray-haired, was an honest-to-goodness ex-slave. Opening his mouth wide—wide enough that visitors could count his nine teeth—Ben spent hour after hour roaring with mirth.

  Mabel Barnes enjoyed laughing with Ben. Had she—or any others, for that matter—taken a deeper interest in the old man, they would have realized that Ben was less than happy go lucky. Formerly enslaved in Dublin, Georgia, Ben Ellington was, bit by bit, laugh by laugh, earning money for his family back home. He was also scraping together funds to help his freedom feel real: He wanted to buy a plot of land.

  It was a Buffalo reporter who caught Ben off guard for a second, reminding people why he guffawed so readily: “‘Yes, sah, I was a slave (Ha! ha! ha!). Josiah Elander was my master (Ha! ha! ha!). I was on his plantation near Dublin Ga., where I live now (Ha! ha ! ha!). I had a good time when I was good and a bad time when I was bad.’

  On stage at the Old Plantation

  “Laughing” Ben Ellington, seated on right, with fellow performers.

  “Uncle Ben then doubled up like a jackknife and laughed a full minute.

  “‘I usually gets a dime, gem’n, when I laughs like dat,’ said Uncle Ben.”21

  Onto this battlefield then—where white showmen tried to define blackness with savages, smiling slaves, and animals, and where African Americans demanded space to define themselves—strode the figure of James Benjamin Parker. Neither relegated to the Midway nor laughed at, Parker became a champion not only in the Exposition but in the newest, biggest, and most compelling national drama.

  And his standing in the public arena lasted about a minute. Almost as soon as he became the most famous African American in the country, it was time to bring him down a peg.

  The first efforts to push Parker from his pedestal meant transforming him into a dialect-mumbling man who was full of himself. “If it wan’t fo’ me,” he was alleged to have said, “that mu’derer would of fiahed the rest of them three shots fum his pistol and the President would of bin killed.” Parker was also described as an opportunist, walking through the Exposition selling his coat buttons for twenty-five dollars each, and scheming to make more money from shows. It was said he was getting a big head by being feted by city leaders. He was skipping work.

  The title of Hero did not adhere easily to a southern African American; it was also extremely inconvenient. Secret Service officers, who credited Parker with fast action immediately after the shooting, soon came to their senses. They insisted they had been perfectly attentive at the Temple of Music. Aside from the one (large) slipup, Secret Service operatives Gallaher and Ireland had been right on top of the assailant. Parker? Jim Parker? The black man? He hadn’t really been there at all.

  The Seventy-third Coast Artillery, the presidential guard, who were now two for three in public mishaps, also had their doubts. Parker hadn’t pulled down the assailant. Nor had a Secret Service agent. It had been their very own Private Frank O’Brien who had leaped into the fray. Or, if not O’Brien, then probably Private Neff, with help from their own Corporal Bertschey and their own Private Brooks. Parker? Parker who?

  The Buffalo Express summed it up. There was an exclusive club that was getting bigger by the day: “The First Hand on the Assassin Society.”

  Parker did have his defenders. If the man was missing some coat buttons, asserted one reporter, he gave them away. And he hadn’t been feted by city leaders or been dining at the Buffalo Club with rich men. He hadn’t even missed an hour at the restaurant. When approached at his job and asked what grand plans he had for the future, he demurred. “What are you going to do?” the reporter asked. “Do nothing,” Parker re
plied. “Ain’t I working?”22

  6.

  The Rise and the Fall

  I

  THE HUB

  While Jim Parker fended off a growing number of doubters, other actors in the crisis enjoyed a smooth celebrity. The surgeons who had worked on the president breezed easily into the spotlight. The public and high circles of medicine concurred: The local practitioners had bravely decided to go ahead and operate without waiting for their gunshot specialist, Dr. Roswell Park. Even if they didn’t hail from New York or Philadelphia or Boston, they had brought consummate skill to repairing the damage done to the president. They had deftly cleaned his wound, administered anesthesia and painkillers, and done a remarkable job of keeping their precious patient alive. It was an unprecedented achievement. Physicians researching the case claimed that no other ruler who had been shot had actually survived. This was a notable, laudable first.

  The surgeons rode the crest of public opinion and national gratitude. So did Buffalo itself. The city may have been widely praised for its Exposition, but now, as the headquarters of a national emergency, its capabilities truly shined. From New York City came glowing words. Buffalo, said the Brooklyn Eagle, had become “a heart pulsating with sympathy.” Its care of the president “was exquisitely well done.” Its residents had “shown themselves patriotic, hospitable, kind-hearted and indomitable.”

  Buffalo had taken the shooting hard; it could confess this now. The fair had been having its best day ever, the day it (literally) banked on, when McKinley had been shot. Not only did residents resent the fact that their hometown had been the site of such an evil act, but Exposition officials had quietly wondered whether they could survive the blow.