The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Read online

  Frank Bostock’s invitation to President McKinley, inked on leopard skin.

  Bostock also prepared a special act for September, a capstone to his successful season. Trainer Jack Bonavita’s command over lions was so convincing that six happy couples planned to tie the knot inside a cage in the company of the beasts. Confident that the McKinleys would be intrigued by the event, Bostock planned to stage a rehearsal of the nuptials, including a display of the golden wedding cage, while the president was in town.

  The lion wedding, if it worked, would give the Animal King a boost in public relations. While his concession was one of the busiest and most popular acts on the Midway—often playing to standing-room audiences—the show had suffered a small setback in early August. The incident, which had taken place just after Midway Day, had involved a baby marmoset and Jumbo II.

  The baby monkey, Prince Tiny Mite, orphaned shortly after birth, had quickly become a Midway sensation. Two inches long, with a nine-inch tail, Tiny Mite was fed with a goose quill, and he charmed visitors with his silvery fur, his inquisitive face, and his full set of teeth.

  Marmosets were deemed so adorable at the time that in Spain women wore them as corsages, and Bostock did the next best thing: He carried the orphan monkey in his pocket. There, Tiny Mite twittered and chirped like a canary. Bostock was pleased with the extremes of his show—Tiny Mite, the two-ounce speck of cleverness, and Jumbo II, the nine-ton war veteran. But being pleased wasn’t quite enough; Bostock wanted to experiment. Legend had it that elephants were terrified of tiny creatures, like mice. Would Jumbo really be frightened of Tiny Mite? What if the Animal King could capture a picture of him reacting to the monkey? It would be a great publicity shot.

  On Sunday afternoon, August 11, Bostock summoned a photographer to Jumbo’s stall. Faced with a space almost too dark to operate in, the cameraman set up a flashbulb and powder and watched as the baby marmoset was brought to the elephant’s quarters and put on top of a wooden rail. The cameraman, along with Bostock, waited. And waited. Jumbo didn’t see the monkey. Finally, Tiny Mite made a birdlike squeak and Jumbo caught sight of him. Maybe a flashbulb exploded, too. Terrified or panicked, the elephant tried to pull away. His feet, though, were in shackles, so, unable to do more than thrash, he lifted his trunk and roared. Attendants came running and tried to undo Jumbo’s chains before he destroyed the stall. Photographs were now out of the question. Worse, in the melee—whether from noise, fright, or hurt—the little monkey died.

  It was soon announced that Bostock’s show would find another marmoset. This one, meanwhile, would be stuffed.9

  Tiny Mite was not the only animal Bostock used for an experiment that summer. On another, quieter occasion, and, as Bostock claimed, “in the interest of science,” he put his aged Egyptian crocodile, Ptolemy, to a test. At three o’clock in the morning, early in July, two mules pulled a wagon carrying Ptolemy, in a box, to the edge of the Niagara River. Men put the box into a boat, rowed the boat out to an island, and released Ptolemy into the water, secured on top of a log. Bostock and other attendants bet each other on whether or not Ptolemy would survive a trip over Niagara Falls.

  As the crocodile approached the rapids near the precipice, the log rolled and threw the crocodile off. Ptolemy drifted on alone. When he got to the edge of the falls, at around three thirty in the morning, observers saw their first reaction from the animal. “With a mighty effort he raised himself partly out of the water [and] waved his arms wildly in the air,” one witness noted. “He opened his mighty jaws and closed them with a snap of despair.”

  Bostock and his entourage moved to the shore below the falls. They scanned the water for over an hour, at which time they assumed that Ptolemy “had been crushed against the rocks and pounded to a jelly.” But, just at daybreak, the crocodile’s trainer spotted something in the water. He whistled. An exhausted Ptolemy turned his head. The crocodile was “dragged” ashore, where he was tied into a box and hoisted up the high cliff. He was too tired to eat. How long Ptolemy lived after his ordeal is unknown. He was never mentioned again.10

  IV

  SMALL FRY

  As days at the fair rolled into the fall, and the humidity yielded, bit by bit, to drier air, excitement at the Exposition became palpable. Ticket sales were up, trains were booked, and boardinghouses were beginning to turn people away. “The floodgate has set in,” announced a reporter. He didn’t mention Chicago—that dream seemed to be slipping by. Still, officials hoped big crowds would let them hold their heads high at the end of the season.

  Less than ten days before the president was to arrive, though, there was an unexpected hitch. Fairgoers on the North Midway began to complain that the Lane of Laughter had started to smell. Visitors expected odors of tobacco and dung, but this was more like rotten eggs that had festered in the sun, and it was so heavy and strong that some guests began to feel sick. Concession owners and fair directors fumigated show buildings, cleaned out sewers, and sent a torrent of water down the main Midway street. Health officials arrived and studied the building plans. Nothing. A week went by. Finally, the source of the nauseating odor became obvious. The asphalt—the pride of Buffalo—had erupted in large sores. One of the spots, near the Filipino Village and the Popcorn Concession, had grown to sixty feet by fifteen feet.

  Engineers sampled the putrid spots and came up with a chemical answer: A layer of slag, a waste product of steelmaking used as a bed for the asphalt, had been improperly burned. Its carbons and sulfates were eating Midway streets. Matters would get worse before they got better. The slag had to be dug up and replaced, and, for the time being, the North Midway would feature a stinking hole. The president, with his sensitive wife, was due soon.11

  On August 17, newspapers printed detailed accounts of the president’s schedule. The McKinleys would stay at John Milburn’s house on Delaware Avenue, and the chief executive would spend September fifth, President’s Day, touring the fair, giving a speech, meeting foreign commissioners, and capping the event with the Illumination. The next day, he would travel to Niagara Falls. With two days to go, papers offered even more detail. The information was important, the Commercial explained, because “the president’s every move will be followed with interest.” On Friday, September sixth, after touring the falls, the president would hold a short reception at the Temple of Music on the northwest corner of the Esplanade. Even though McKinley would be surrounded by mounted and walking escorts throughout his entire visit, Exposition promoters urged well-wishers to show him rousing enthusiasm.12

  Exposition guards and Buffalo police likely looked to the president’s visit with confidence. For the previous four months, the Pan-American grounds and the city itself had been relatively free of serious crime. The superintendent of police in Buffalo, William S. Bull, had worked hard to achieve these results. In April, he had delivered a public warning about the impending intrusion of thieves, housebreakers, shoplifters, pickpockets, and tricksters. City residents, he had explained, needed to be on alert. If a parade went by, they might be drawn to their front porches to see the goings-on. A thief could move to the back and try to get through doors and open windows. At the fairgrounds, too, criminals might be very sly. Male pickpockets might be “well-groomed and gentlemanly,” and crooked women might be “humble in attire, unassuming.” Don’t be too curious, he warned. Don’t make friends with strangers, and “Don’t be too sure that a crook cannot do you.”

  Once the fair opened, Buffalo police scoured the environs for suspicious types. They apprehended Sarah Gawley and Minnie May, pickpockets, and Robert Tasnow, alias Dutch Bob, a con man. They arrested Dick “High Card” Taylor, and Hoppy Loftus, a stickup man. And they nabbed Thomas “Spotty Wing” Cullors, who had come from Cincinnati to open safes. Mary Smith, known around town as “the woman in black,” who specialized in robbing apartment houses, was arrested as well. There were dozens of others, but, all in all, there were no “big jobs,” and most of the confidence men were “small fry.”13


  V

  NIEMAN

  On the last day of August, a young man called on John Nowak, the proprietor of a Buffalo boardinghouse, and asked about renting a room. He offered a reference—a Mr. Dalkowski, who had just left the day before. He had actually never met Dalkowski, but Nowak didn’t know that, and he didn’t bother to check. The man seemed harmless. So neatly dressed and groomed, too. Nowak and his wife wondered whether he was a waiter.

  Some lodgers later recalled that the young man, who was Nieman, made some friends at the boardinghouse, particularly a socialist named Stutz. The two men had talked for hours. But Nieman didn’t speak much to Nowak. “You might ask him a question,” remembered the landlord, “getting a few short words for answer sometimes and then again he would ignore you.” Actually, Nieman didn’t think much of Nowak. Later on, he referred to him as “an old pumpkin-head.”14

  It is hard to know exactly when Nieman began planning to kill the president. He told the police it was sort of an impulsive thing, but he was often confused about dates—and he was awfully good at lying. Two men who had crossed paths with him earlier in the summer claimed that he seemed to have vague plans even then. His older brother, Waldeck, with whom he was as close as anyone, recalled that he began to sound increasingly desperate, declaring, “I can’t stand it any longer.” Another Cleveland man remembered Nieman saying something similar: “Something must be done.”

  Whether Nieman’s plan had been gestating for weeks or months, or had been born impulsively in the first days of September, the roots of his disturbance lay deep. Since the mid 1890s, when he was in his early twenties, he had been sick. Complaining of coughs and congestion, he visited as many doctors and took as many medicines as his savings would allow. He used drops and teas and atomizers and smoked the leaves of a plant. He left his work at a wire mill because of illness and returned to the family farm.

  Among his many troubles was certainly some sort of mental illness. Not only did he worry obsessively about his ailments; he also washed and groomed himself compulsively. And he wasn’t trying to please anybody, either, for he avoided people. According to a sister-in-law who lived with him, he “acted very queerly.” Nieman was also depressed. He said he was “tired of life” and in July, just before he left home for good, he spoke of an ending. He had demanded money—his share of the family farm. He needed it, he said, right away. “What can you want the money for?” Waldeck had asked. “Look,” Nieman had replied, gesturing to a tree that was losing its leaves. “It is just the same as a tree that commences dying—you can see it [isn’t] going to live long.”15

  Nieman’s illnesses, whatever they were, fueled his distress over people without power—working people, mostly. This was no abstract concern. After he stopped attending school at fourteen, Nieman labored steadily for ten years—first in tobacco stores in Michigan, and then, when his family moved to Pennsylvania, at a glass factory, processing molten-hot bottles. When his family transferred to Ohio, he took a job at a wire mill in Cleveland and worked ten-to-twelve-hour shifts. Although rarely cited for carelessness, he had mishandled a sharp wire on one occasion and bore signs of the slash on his cheek. Then, in 1894, he was done. When he and Waldeck joined others in a strike for better pay, the men were fired.

  Leon Czolgosz, alias Fred Nieman.

  By all accounts, the loss of his job was something of a personal watershed, the moment when Nieman exchanged his Catholic faith for political purpose. He and Waldeck had been urged by their priest to pray for help during this troubled time, but, his brother explained later, “no help came.” As the two men lost confidence in the Catholic Church, they found a degree of comfort in the socialist labor party in Cleveland. Nieman began to buy books and pamphlets about Christian “superstition,” including the atheist magazine The Freethinker. He also liked Edward Bellamy’s bestselling Looking Backward, a romantic utopian novel that described a world without strikes, where property was shared.

  Although Nieman was eventually rehired at work, he couldn’t stick it out. In 1897, after two years on the job, he suddenly quit, saying he was sick. His stepmother called him a malingerer. Waldeck took him at his word and suggested he go to a hospital. Nieman had an answer for that. “There is no place in the hospital for poor people,” he argued. “If you have lots of money you will get well taken care of!”

  So he stayed at home on the farm and “fussed about,” fixing machines, clocks, and wagons, and shooting rabbits and squirrels. He was a very good shot, noted Waldeck, with a revolver.

  In the early summer of 1900, Nieman came across the newspaper article about Gaetano Bresci’s assassination of Umberto I. Less than a year later, he discovered the anarchist Emma Goldman, when she spoke in Cleveland. In her lecture, Goldman had talked about how the “galling yoke of government” made it hard for individuals to shape their own futures and their careers. “Anarchism,” she explained, “aims at a new and complete freedom.” Churches were oppressive, too, she said, and even modern schools inhibited freedom. Her anarchy did not support violence or bomb throwing, but she knew others—including those with “high and noble motives”—who felt differently. Nieman liked what he heard. Listeners recalled that he had applauded vigorously.16

  Goldman was to Nieman both fire and balm, and, shortly after hearing her, he sought out other anarchists, including a man named Emil Schilling in Cleveland. Nieman talked to Schilling about “forming plots” and asked about the assassin Bresci. Were there, he wondered, similar plans afoot in the United States? Bresci, after all, had been “selected by the comrades to do the deed.” Schilling told Nieman that his associates did not do any such plotting. He thought Nieman seemed odd, and suspicious. But it was only later, Schilling said, that he realized his visitor had something very particular in mind.

  Nieman tried to see Emma Goldman again, traveling to Chicago when he left Cleveland in July. He followed Goldman to talk with her, but she brushed him off—she was leaving town to visit the Pan-American Exposition. She did, however, introduce him to a friend of hers, an anarchist editor named Abraham Isaak. Isaak recalled that Nieman seemed especially angry about “the outrages committed by the American government in the Philippine Islands.” Nieman felt they did “not harmonize with the teachings in our public schools about our flag.” The young man had a request, too. He was, said Isaak, intent on “soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence.”

  Isaak said he offered no support. In fact, he claimed he was put off. Nieman’s questions and ignorance suggested that he was an impostor or a federal agent. The editor published a notice against him on September first, describing how a well-dressed, narrow-shouldered man was making the rounds in Cleveland and Chicago. “Comrades are warned in advance,” it read. Isaak was either covering his collusion with Nieman or, more likely, he was nervous about the young laborer. Either way, the warning was delivered too late. By September first, Nieman was back in Buffalo.17

  VI

  CUBA LIBRE

  Fred Nieman was the most dangerous man circulating through the Pan-American grounds in late summer, and he stood on the end of the spectrum of sanity. But he was hardly the only McKinley critic at the fair. The Exposition swelled with others who, quietly or unremarkably, disagreed with the president. Even John Milburn had at one time voiced his concern over McKinley’s imperialist policies.

  Then there were dissenters who were more vocal. On Cuba Day, August 29, just a week before the president was due to visit, Cuban dignitaries gave Exposition audiences an earful. It wouldn’t be the first opportunity for fairgoers to hear from Latin American visitors, of course. By showcasing New World republics, the Exposition had offered its exhibitors a stage from which to talk to the United States all season long, and they had done so—at building dedication ceremonies, banquets, and other formal events. Many of them spoke for the business communities in their countries—those invested in modernizing, in selling products, in attracting immigrants and capital. Some of them glorified their indigenous pasts, and others emph
asized their affinities with Europe. They did not speak with one voice.

  All of them, though, were certainly aware of how the Pan-American represented a departure from earlier world’s fairs. Latin American countries had been allocated limited space at previous Western expositions, and they frequently had been grouped together in one pavilion and located near colonial displays. Catalogues and official reports had sometimes barely acknowledged their presence.

  At Chicago in 1893, individual New World nations had been better recognized, but most had been placed in generic buildings such as Agriculture or Manufactures. Furthermore, they were asked to demonstrate the “aboriginal” end of the progression from savagery to civilization in anthropology exhibits. Peru and Bolivia, for example, had been urged to round up “wild” Andeans for display. When some of these indigenous people arrived in the Windy City wearing Western clothes and haircuts, they had been pressured to look “primitive.”18

  Buffalo, like Chicago, emphasized the advanced status of the United States, but it also encouraged Latin American republics to build exhibit halls (next to state exhibits) and to show off accomplishments in the arts, literature, education, and commerce. Sometimes this worked out, and sometimes it did not. In July, the Exposition suffered a public-relations setback when the keynote speaker for Chile Day, Don Carlos Morla Vicuña, minister to the United States, caught pneumonia. He languished for almost five weeks in a Buffalo hotel, rallying, then sinking again, and died on August 20. For Mexico, it was a matter of dignity more than grief. Mexican president Porfirio Diaz had urged that the Streets of Mexico Midway exhibit “not in any way bring ridicule upon Mexico, her inhabitants, or buildings.” Diaz’s protests went unheard, though, and the “Streets,” with dancers, burros, and peasants, set up shop. The Mexican president could take pride, though, in Mexico’s handsome two-story building, its celebrated military band from Mexico City, and Captain Garcia Cuellar’s visiting soldiers.