The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 5

  Among the floats in the Midway parade as it moved into and out of the Court of Fountains, was Lubin’s Picture Machines. Spectators were asked to stay still as Lubin’s big camera clicked past them, shuttering open and closed. Mabel Barnes was probably photographed. She had met friends and cousins at the East Amherst gate, and, after navigating through the thick swarms, had watched the parade from the Tower Bridge. Fred Nieman may have been captured on film, too. The family he lived with said he came into Buffalo like clockwork. They didn’t say whether or not he took his revolver with him. He kept one, apparently, in his bedroom.14

  3.

  The Favored Guest

  I

  CANTON

  Midway Day gave the fair’s directors new hope. The Pan-American had drawn the “biggest crowd of the Exposition”: more than 106,000 visitors. The next day, however, the crowds were down again, and exhibitors wrung their hands. The Exposition had sold fewer than three million tickets, and it needed to sell three times that many to make ends meet. It was, as one reporter put it, “high noon” in Rainbow City.

  Officials remained calm. Chicago had been slow to take off, they said. Director-General Buchanan offered soothing words, stating that most people liked to travel in the fall, when it was cooler.

  Press agents concurred. Just look at the weeks ahead, they argued. That swashbuckling hero of expositions, Buffalo Bill Cody, was on his way. Always attuned to the very latest in global skirmishes, Cody had added several new shows. He had retired the “Charge Up San Juan Hill” reenactment and replaced it with a scene from the Boxer Rebellion in China. His soldiers would perform “The Taking of Tientsin.”1

  But better even than Buffalo Bill would be the most illustrious guests ever: the president and the first lady of the United States. It did, however, seem wise to verify the arrangement, so, less than a week after Midway Day, Mayor Diehl, Exposition President Milburn, and Director-General Buchanan boarded a train for Canton, Ohio, site of the summer White House.

  The men made an odd trio. William Buchanan, a stout forty-eight-year-old with a stiff, brushlike mustache, had made a name for himself managing Corn Palace Festivals in Sioux City, Iowa. His oversight of these popular oddities, which featured a palace made entirely of husks and grain, had qualified him to supervise three departments at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He had done such a good job that Daniel Burnham, the White City’s director of works, had given him a recommendation for Buffalo. In addition, a diplomatic post as minister to Argentina, where he learned Spanish and studied the “character of the Latin American,” provided him with the international expertise that seemed perfect for the Pan-American. He was also respected for his Latin American stock portfolio.

  Pan-American Power Brokers. Buffalo Mayor Conrad Diehl (left); Exposition President John Milburn (center); Director-General William Buchanan (right).

  Of the three men, John Milburn was most like McKinley himself. A well-fed, curly-haired man, six feet tall, Milburn had grown up in Sunderland, England, but in his late teens moved to be near relatives in Batavia, New York. There he trained for the bar. Relocating to the big city of Buffalo, he became one of the most successful corporate lawyers in the state. Known for his velvety eloquence, he defended the “rights of capitalists.” Success begat success, and he soon surrounded himself with people of wealth and position. A friend of President Grover Cleveland, he became a “business-friendly” Democrat and a leader in local social clubs. He lived on Delaware Avenue.

  Milburn was in league with Buffalo’s elite, but he did not immerse himself too deeply in his adopted city. He sent his sons to boarding school in Philadelphia and to college at Oxford, where they played polo. By the time he was tapped to lead the Pan-American Exposition, he was also leading a double life. The Exposition captured half his attention, but a scandalous trial occupied the other half. In one of the country’s most sensational murder trials, where wealth seemed pitted against truth, Milburn defended New York society man Roland Molineux. A member of New York City’s famous Knickerbocker and New York Athletic Clubs, who was also known as a hot-headed “aesthete,” Molineux had been convicted of poisoning a female lover. In June 1901, with the Pan-American in full swing, lawyer Milburn persuaded a panel of judges that Molineux deserved a new trial.

  In many ways, John Milburn and Conrad Diehl represented Buffalo’s flip sides. The son of German immigrants—his father was a stonemason—the quiet-mannered Diehl had put himself through the local university and medical school. He was a familiar sight to city residents at the turn of the century, trotting along in his buggy with his black dog, Jack, by his side. When he was elected mayor, he served as physician for 5,000 Buffalo families. He also advocated on behalf of the poorhouse, the orphan asylum, and local schools, and he lived in the same small brick house on West Genesee Street where he had been born. “Buffalo is a word that means all to me,” the mayor had announced in 1899, at the Exposition’s launch, and probably no one wanted the fair to succeed more than he did.

  As a Democrat and an advocate for Buffalo’s poorer communities, Conrad Diehl had not wanted too many businessmen dominating Exposition planning. Money won out, however, and at board meetings, the balding, soft-eyed Diehl sat across from many of his adversaries, some of whom had vocally opposed his election as mayor. John Milburn, in fact, had labeled Diehl’s support for more equitable distribution of wealth and an income tax as “socialistic and anarchistic” and suggested he be “thrashed and thrashed soundly” at the polls.

  Conrad Diehl, fifty-eight years old in 1901, was anything but anarchistic. But he believed that government should take a stand against concentrated wealth and monopolies, and he supported William Jennings Bryan’s position against the country’s aggressive imperialism. To rich men and investors, all this sounded frightening.2

  On the way to Canton, though, the men traveled with a single purpose, and they had reason to be optimistic. They knew that the president loved fairs and that he would surely want to see this one. It mirrored so much of the America that he cherished. And he had actually been to the fair before, sort of. Back in 1897, when Cayuga Island near Niagara Falls had been proposed as the Exposition site, the president had driven in the very first stake.

  The president was a pushover. He and his secretary settled on the first week of September for his visit. It would be a significant occasion for many reasons, but most especially because it was Ida McKinley’s first major appearance after her long convalescence. The American people would be pleased to see her on the mend.

  II

  THE SUMMER WHITE HOUSE

  The McKinleys had spent the height of the summer at Canton, gliding quietly from one day to the next. They had entertained a few friends and officials, but by and large their days were marked by simple domesticity. Such a life suited the twenty-fifth president. At fifty-eight, William McKinley was not a vigorous man. He had once had a tougher constitution—it would have been hard to survive the Battle of Antietam without one—but those days were behind him. At slightly more than five and a half feet tall, he carried most of his weight in his chest. His eyebrows gave some alertness to his round face—they had the tilt of a screech owl—but they did not take away from his stolidity. Americans appeared to like this about him. He had built his reputation on his slow and steady ways, as well as on his desire to listen to the will of the people. One politician claimed that his ears were full of grasshoppers, so closely did he keep them to the ground.

  It would have been hard to tell from his unruffled and genial demeanor, but McKinley had made controversial decisions since taking office in 1897—such as going to war with Spain, seizing control over Cuba, and then taking the Philippines as an American possession. Democrats, who called him Emperor McKinley, rallied behind the charismatic William Jennings Bryan, who ran against McKinley in 1896 and again in 1900. “Running” was too strong a word for the way McKinley himself campaigned. Avoiding debates with the masterful Bryan, and wanting to stay close to his wife, he had remained i
n Canton in 1900 and speechified from his veranda. While Bryan rode the rails around the country, reddening and sweating with political bluster, McKinley literally stood his ground.3

  Now, six months into his second term as president of the United States, he was at ease with his job. The American economy was continuing its steady rebound from the depression of the 1890s; the climate for business and trade—McKinley’s pet concerns—was favorable; and foreign crises had subsided. Washington had settled into its seasonal repose. The only thing that seemed to challenge the president was his wife’s chronically poor health.

  Ida Saxton McKinley was a delicate woman, with an upturned mouth and blue eyes that belied her discomfort. Since the deaths of her daughters, an infant and a four-year-old, in the 1870s, she had suffered from epilepsy, depression, and a need—sometimes a desperate need—to be near her husband. He in turn was devoted to her, and to ensuring her dignity. On one legendary occasion, at a luncheon party, he anticipated a seizure and placed a handkerchief over her face to avoid embarrassment. Recently, her health had worsened. Their cross-country train tour in the spring had been interrupted by a near-fatal infection, and the couple had devoted the summer months to her convalescence.4

  William and Ida McKinley, in foreground, at a dinner party in Cleveland, ca. 1897.

  When William McKinley was not dealing with government business, he ambled about Canton, sauntering downtown and walking to church. He preferred to do so without escorts. The press asserted that his willingness to mingle with the public demonstrated his confidence. Unlike kings or tyrants who feared violence at every turn, this elected man trusted his constituents. Dismissing protection was also a sign of strength. Abraham Lincoln had been labeled a coward when he had worn a disguise while traveling through Baltimore in 1861, and he had never heard the end of it. Indeed, the criticism stung so painfully that Lincoln thereafter traveled in open carriages. As the war dragged on and his enemies and critics became increasingly bitter, he was assigned more and more protection, but he continued to object. It is likely he felt liberated when, after Lee’s surrender in April 1865, he pared down to a single bodyguard.

  William McKinley may have dismissed security officers for another reason. Some members of Congress believed armed guards expanded the power of the executive in unhealthy ways—they implied a standing army. Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 and Garfield’s in 1881, legislators argued, were the result of unusually fraught moments in history, and they did not signal the need for more security men.

  It was during Grover Cleveland’s second term in office in the 1890s that sentiment began to shift toward greater protection. Responding to the turbulence and anger generated by the 1893 depression, Cleveland’s wife and personal staff encouraged the Secret Service—which was originally formed to thwart counterfeiting—to collaborate with the Washington Metropolitan Police to guard Cleveland. The president’s opponents didn’t miss a beat. They claimed he was acting like royalty.5

  Things hadn’t changed much by 1901. It was still important for the chief executive to appear stalwart and trusting, and presidential aides and family members continued to fret about safety. Ida McKinley had feared a second term in the White House for the exposure it gave her husband, and she was well aware that the War of 1898 had spawned new enemies. She fretted about his speeches, his trips, any large public gathering. The president’s personal secretary—a nervous, bespectacled lawyer named George Cortelyou, who imagined snipers and bomb-wielding intruders around every corner—also kept a file called “Assassination Plots.” He filled it with newspaper clippings about threats, predictions, and attempted killings.

  Cortelyou and other members of McKinley’s staff were particularly worried about anarchists—those who opposed government in all its forms. Anarchists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, numbering ten thousand at the most, were mostly centered in urban working-class and European immigrant communities in the Midwest and Northeast. While many of these dissidents advocated a stateless society through nonviolence, a series of events led the media to jump to generalizations. The Chicago Haymarket bombing in 1886, attributed to anarchists, and a series of assassinations in Europe in the 1890s, carried out by or linked to anarchists, reinforced stereotypes of anarchists as violent revolutionaries. Worse, by 1901, radical American anarchists were said to be proliferating. In the summer of 1900, the Italian American silk weaver from New Jersey, Gaetano Bresci, had crossed the Atlantic and shot and killed the Italian king, Umberto I.

  Four days before he left for Buffalo, President McKinley entertained George von L. Meyer, ambassador to Italy, and General Arthur MacArthur, military governor of the Philippines, in Canton. The topic of anarchists came up. In conversation before dinner, a member of the party mentioned the murder of the young Italian king. The president, in a breezy mood, dismissed such dangers. Such dissenters needed to be tolerated, he said, and he wasn’t worried. When Ambassador Meyer showed him a news article about how some American anarchists hoped for more violent acts, the president did not react. “He saw no cloud,” said the ambassador.6

  And, indeed, it seemed only sunshine floated over Buffalo. The city itself had gone for McKinley in the 1900 election, and the Pan-American Exposition, where the eagerness to see him was rising high, was a McKinley fair. From its big guns to its living Cuban and Filipino exhibits, to its sculptures and bridges and buildings that proclaimed American supremacy, it proudly reflected the president.

  As someone like George Cortelyou knew, though, a fair that served as a victory celebration was as likely to draw opponents as supporters. In the recent election, six million Americans had voted against McKinley, many of them against his plans for Philippine annexation. Nor was the war in the islands truly over. Even though revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo had been captured by American forces in March—his surrender had been orchestrated by General MacArthur himself—other Philippine fighters continued to resist American occupation.

  One of them, in fact, lived close by. Pablo Arcusa, a Filipino performing on the Pan-American Midway, had been good at fooling people. He had impressed “Pony” Moore, the manager of the Filipino Village, with his eagerness to come to America, and the clarinetist had worked hard and been well liked. The fact that Arcusa received letters from Hong Kong, where leaders of the Philippine insurgency had been exiled, didn’t raise any red flags. Arcusa said only that he had friends there.

  On August 10, though, Arcusa, who in truth hated “Americanos,” received some mail from Hong Kong that prompted him to call a meeting in his Midway hut. He told the men who gathered that the fight in the Philippines was still on, and that they could help free their country from American oppressors. While Emilio Aguinaldo had been captured, General Miguel Malvar was carrying on the fight for liberty. They could help the resistance if they would only return to their country with a gun. Smuggle out a musket, a rifle, or a revolver, and freedom would be that much closer. Arcusa was doing his part. When the Exposition finished, he would travel west, talk to Filipinos up and down the California coast, and try to take a regiment back home.

  No sooner had Arcusa unveiled his hopes to his fellow band members than several of them ran to Pony Moore and spilled the story. Arcusa fled the village and the Exposition. He left behind a few papers, including a military commission signed by Aguinaldo himself.

  Fair directors had to have exhaled gratefully when Arcusa ran off. They were assured, though, that other Filipino musicians were perfectly happy with American rule over their homeland—some were even hoping to become American citizens. “None was in sympathy with him,” wrote the Courier.7

  McKinley’s advisers and security men may or may not have known about Arcusa. They were certainly unaware of the disaffected man living as a lodger in West Seneca. And why would they have known? Fred Nieman led an unremarkable life. He read newspapers and ate by himself. Sometimes he left the boardinghouse, rode inconspicuously into Buffalo on streetcars, and then rode back. In mid-August, he made a
small dent in the memory of an exhibitor named Cecil Hooke when he appeared at the Exposition at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Nieman, wearing a new dark suit, asked Hooke for work, saying he had experience as a carpenter. Hooke didn’t figure out that Nieman was lying about his skills until he had been hired. He also thought Nieman had worked for other exhibitors, too, for he had been seen about the grounds. But then, Hooke said, he “disappeared.”

  One morning late in August, Nieman carried his trunk down the stairs of his boardinghouse, took a long look in the mirror, and announced he was leaving. When his landlord’s son asked him where he was going, he threw out a few possibilities: Detroit or Toledo or Cleveland. Or Baltimore or Pittsburgh. Nieman may not have had an exact plan. But he read the newspapers; he knew who was coming to the Exposition. There was an opportunity at hand in Rainbow City, and, after taking care of some business, he would be back.8

  III

  TINY MITE

  Of all the showmen at the Exposition, probably no one was as deliriously atwitter over McKinley’s upcoming visit as the Animal King. He knew the value of presidential attention and wanted an audience with the chief executive. Taking a leopard hide (of uncertain provenance), he artfully lettered an invitation to McKinley on the back of the skin, photographed it, and made sure Captain Maitland sent it to the press. He also put his minions to work printing advertisements for his show, and he produced so much material that he commandeered one of his young elephants, Little Doc, to haul it over to the post office.