The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  Edward Rice and George Cortelyou exchanged signals. Rice, head of ceremonies at the Exposition, took his watch out of his hand. At the same time, Cortelyou pulled out his timepiece. Ten minutes, they had agreed, was long enough.16

  As close as anybody could remember, it was seven minutes past four.

  It was Nieman’s turn to shake hands.

  Instead of his palm, he brought forward his revolver.

  And fired.

  5.

  The Emergency

  I

  SHOCK

  To people within earshot, the two gunshots went off so close together they sounded like one. To others, it wasn’t the sound of the revolver that registered—it was the look of the president: His heat-flushed face was now white. He straightened up “convulsively,” said one witness—and recoiled. Others said no: He stood like a statue, perfectly still.

  They agreed that he did not fall.

  And this meant that he could be shot a third time. Nieman, his cotton handkerchief now singed, still held the revolver.

  Behind him, Jim Parker’s rage rose in an instant. “You son [of a bitch],” he shouted, as he grabbed the assailant around the throat and pushed him toward the floor. Secret Service men jumped into the act, knocking Nieman down and grabbing the gun. The Artillery soldiers rose to the occasion, too, but . . . it just wasn’t their week. The hand they grabbed did not belong to Nieman but to one of the agents—probably Albert Gallaher—and, attacking him, they took away the weapon. The floor became a blur of fury—six to ten men “struggling and swaying.”

  The president himself was calm. Eyeing the prisoner and the melee on the floor, Gallaher heard him ask the agents to “go easy on him.” George Cortelyou, meanwhile, had found McKinley a seat, and a Washington reporter named Randolph Keim stepped in to help. “I began fanning him with my straw hat,” Keim remembered. He could see McKinley’s opened vest and powder marks around a bullet hole. Blood had begun to seep through. The president noticed it, too, but he remained composed, telling Cortelyou he was in no pain. “Let no exaggerated reports reach Mrs. McKinley,” he told his secretary. Then he said it again, to be sure.

  The fanning went on. Six men, not knowing what else to do, joined in.

  Outside the Temple of Music, fairgoers, drawn to the sounds of calamity, began to cluster and agitate. “Kill him!” someone shouted, and another man, in the unfortunate parlance of the day, yelled, “Lynch him!” An electric ambulance pushed through the group and, within minutes, attendants had McKinley on a stretcher. As they emerged from the building, Randolph Keim put a hat over the president’s face, shielding it from spectators. There was no mistaking the big man, though, and some onlookers started to sob.

  The trip to the Exposition Hospital was fast. Keim, who held onto the back of the ambulance, also noted that it was exceptionally smooth, with no jostling and little vibration. The journalist attributed this to good rubber tires, and also to the asphalt. In almost any other circumstance, Buffalo would have been proud.1

  Surgeon Matthew Mann, a specialist in gynecology, was at a barbershop, mid-trim, when a courier ran in and told him to hurry to the Exposition Hospital. He arrived at 5:10 p.m. to find general surgeon Herman Mynter already there. Famed Dr. Roswell Park, the Exposition’s chief medical officer and an expert on gunshot wounds, was in Niagara Falls finishing neck surgery on a patient. It would be a while before he could get back to Buffalo.

  Mann and Mynter, along with McKinley’s faithful Dr. Rixey, decided to move ahead. One of the president’s wounds, they could see, was superficial—a bullet had fallen from his clothes—but the other was deep. It had entered the president’s abdomen, and was lodged—somewhere. Nurses shaved McKinley’s belly, wiped it with alcohol and green soap, and administered ether. After nine minutes, the president was unconscious, and the surgeons, with Mann taking the lead, went to work.

  Escaping gas soon told the physicians that a hollow organ had been perforated, and further searching showed that the bullet had gone into and exited the stomach. They sewed up these holes. Where, though, was the bullet? “The greatest difficulty,” commented Mann later, “was the great size of President McKinley’s abdomen and the amount of fat present.” Working in his belly, he said, was like “working at the bottom of a deep hole.”

  Nevertheless, Mann investigated, and, in one of surgery’s most elegant euphemisms, he “introduced his arm,” and probed. The search began to have an effect on the patient—he was showing signs of shock—and they knew they faced a choice: continue to “eviscerate” the president (there was no nice word for that one) or stop altogether.

  They got out. They cleaned the bullet track, irrigated the site with hot salt solution, and sutured the wound with silkworm and catgut. Just as the men were finishing, the door opened and Dr. Park appeared. The square-faced Park, known for both his cool reserve and his professional talent, had had to wait for trains at the Niagara Falls station. While the surgeons closed the incisions, Park took a back seat, but then he called the surgical team into his office. Whatever they felt, he said, and however they might not concur, they were now to present a “united appearance.” Keenly aware of recent history, he urged them to “avoid all the discussions and differences of opinion which had so conspicuously marked the conduct of President Garfield’s case.” Park knew that the reputation of Buffalo medicine, not to mention the good name of the city itself, rested on decorum. That and a good outcome.2

  Fairgoers wait near the Exposition Hospital as President McKinley undergoes emergency surgery.

  Roswell Park did not actually agree with the treatment he witnessed at the hospital. A decade later, from the safe distance of time and with the help of hindsight, he confessed he had seen things that bothered him. He didn’t like the way that Dr. Mann used one of his surgical instruments to “rap” Dr. Mynter over the hand to get him out of the way. It had not been the time, Park felt, for Mann’s “petulance.” Park also thought that surgical caps should have been used. Dr. Mynter hadn’t worn a cap, and the other two surgeons watched “drops of perspiration fall into the wound from Dr. Mynter’s forehead.” Park explained that this was not due to nervousness: “Mynter . . . always perspired freely when doing any of this work in a warm room.”

  There were other omissions. Why had the wound not been drained more aggressively? Park himself had assented to the lack of a drain, but it had been a “hurried” decision. And it was disturbing that the surgeons had not used the right retractors or needles. After McKinley’s operation, Park discovered a complete, unused surgical case sitting in his office.

  And then there was the problem with the light. It would become the great irony: The fair with the grand Illumination, the place where electricity was more plentiful than almost anywhere else on earth, the Exposition applauded by Tesla and Edison both, and they couldn’t get a decent light bulb.

  The operating room, darkened by an awning, allowed the afternoon sun into the room, and this was just enough to bother eyes but not sufficient to light the site. It was Dr. Rixey who came to the rescue with a hand mirror, and he angled the slanting rays into position. Finally, well into the procedure, an electric light arrived—eight watts. As people commented later, it would have barely brightened a Christmas tree.

  Why, Roswell Park also wondered, had they not waited for him? He would have found light and instruments and would have insisted on different ways of doing things. The surgeons told him that they couldn’t wait; the president was weakening. Park disagreed, and wondered whether there was more going on than medical decision-making. Maybe the rush to surgery had been shaped by something else. Maybe it was “jealousy.” Others would have the benefit of hindsight, too, of course, and would contend that if Dr. Park had been there, it would not have made a whit of difference.3

  The sun was close to setting when President McKinley was loaded back into an ambulance for a ride to the chosen place of recovery—John Milburn’s house. The procession, made up of police, guards, and men on foot and on
bicycles, moved slowly in the fading light. There was no rush now, only a need to keep the patient as still as possible and free from pain. McKinley was beginning to show signs of waking up.

  As the ambulance approached the Lincoln Parkway entrance, Rainbow City, as it always did at dusk, began to come to life. Its buildings, budded with lights, began to glow red, and then brightened to a cheery yellow. For about thirty seconds, the illumination expanded. Then, just as the procession reached the gate, the lights cut off, and dark descended like an untethered and ponderous curtain.

  On a night like this, someone had decreed, there should be no beauty.4

  The news of the shooting spread around Buffalo in fits and starts—in bold headlines, in shouts from street corners, and in urgent messages that shattered nerves and dashed plans. Pan-American director Frank Baird had plans like these. Following the hot day at the falls, and after seeing the president off for his reception, Baird had stopped at the Exposition’s Log Cabin for a drink and a talk. He wanted to hear Colonel Webb Hayes, recently returned from the Philippines, tell stories of army life at the front. It would be a short presentation, Baird hoped, because he had a big evening in the works: George Williams, the treasurer of the Exposition, was hosting a formal dinner for the McKinleys. In fact, Williams had been preparing for days. He had ordered his house on Delaware Avenue, designed by the famous Stanford White, dusted and polished like a piece of fine furniture. He had sent servants up to the attic to lower the big gold-plated chandelier so that it could be fitted with candles. And that morning his wife had delivered to each of the dignitaries—Exposition directors, cabinet officers, and of course the McKinley group—a little pasteboard box containing a boutonniere.

  They had not been at the Log Cabin long, Baird remembered, when one of the party pulled out his watch and realized the lateness of the hour. It was almost four o’clock. Time to secure a carriage, drive home, and, with their wives, do all the bathing and powdering and boutonniere-fastening that the state occasion required.

  Baird, whose house was the closest to the grounds, shared a ride and got out first. He did not watch the carriage as it moved down Delaware Avenue. Had he done so, he would have noticed that two blocks farther along, someone hailed the carriage and ran, frantically, up to the driver.

  It was his wife, who had been out calling on some Ohio acquaintances, who flew inside with the news. “The president has been shot,” she cried. Baird did not believe it. Running to his carriage, he ordered the driver to put the horses into a gallop. Racing up the avenue and back through the Exposition gate, he shouted, “Is it true?”

  The governor was in a boat on the Erie Canal, inspecting the waterway, when he heard.5

  And Vice President Roosevelt was on an island in Lake Champlain, three hundred miles to the east, when the news came by telephone.

  Roosevelt had been in his element, banqueting outdoors with hunters, fishermen, and fellow politicians. He was the guest of honor at a meeting of the Vermont Fish and Game League at the Isle La Motte estate of former lieutenant governor Nelson Fisk. The sportsmen had dined under a tent and listened to a rousing rendition of “To Arms” by the St. Albans Glee Club. Then toasts had been proffered, and Roosevelt had addressed the men.

  “I am,” he told the group, “interested in all furred, finned and feathered inhabitants of the woods and waters.” Hunting and fishing, he said, cured boredom, and wilderness itself turned a profit. He used the example of a deer. “A dead deer is worth a few dollars, but a live deer is worth much more. It is a bait for city sportsmen. They do not always hit the deer and they . . . leave a hundred times the worth of the deer in money.”

  It was a short speech, and afterward Roosevelt excused himself and walked into the Fisk house to prepare for the evening reception.

  Somewhere in the interior, a phone rang.

  It was for the guest of honor. Roosevelt was located and given the earpiece.

  He took it, listened for a minute, and then dropped it. He put his hands up to his temples.

  “My God,” he said.

  Minutes later, Senator Redfield Proctor walked to the stone portico of the house to deliver the bad news to the group. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is my sad duty to announce that word has just been received by telephone—I trust that it may prove false—that . . .”

  Nearby, a steamboat let out a shrill whistle. What was it that Proctor was saying? It was hard to make out his words. Then the boat moved away, and Proctor finished. In a single breath, the crowd groaned. Some broke into tears.

  There was no shortage of men to help move Roosevelt off the island and toward Buffalo. Dr. William Seward Webb offered his steam yacht Elfrida to take Roosevelt back to Burlington in order to catch a special train south. Other men ordered private railway cars. They would use all the power and influence they could muster to get the vice president to McKinley’s bedside and to the site of the dastardly act.6

  II

  THE HOUSE NEAR THE CORNER

  Running through Buffalo’s heart, Delaware Avenue carried the crucial work of the moment. From its foot close to the lake, the avenue moved north and south through the city, past the house of Ansley Wilcox, where Vice President Roosevelt arrived in a hurry at midday on Saturday, September 7. It then ran a mile uptown, past grand edifices, trimmed lawns, and draping trees, to the Milburn house, where the president lay on his back in a hospital bed. A mile farther on, it flanked the Exposition. The fair was still open, going through the motions of existence.

  It was the Milburn house, near the corner of Delaware Avenue and West Ferry Street, where most people wanted to be. They wanted to know the latest, to see who came and went, and to assess their expressions and steps. But they couldn’t. A block from the house in every direction, police put up barricades, and the crowds that gathered, the trucks and the carriages that slowed, could barely get a view of the house’s ivy-covered garret.

  The first hours, then the first days would be the most trying, doctors said. If McKinley made it through those, the dangers of blood poisoning diminished. The physicians promised to do their best to let everyone know, all the time, how things stood. And they would not worry about delicacy. If the American public had previously appreciated William McKinley distantly, as a dignified man in a waistcoat and a shimmering top hat, they would now get to know him on a more personal level. They would be apprised of his pulse rate and his urinary output. They would learn how he got his nourishment: hot water by mouth, and whiskey and egg through the rectum.

  The doctors ordered silence. Conversations with the patient—even for Ida McKinley—had to be brief. Footsteps had to be muffled. Telegraph machines, whose tapping could be heard in the house, were sent farther away, and trucks were forbidden. Men brought in ice and groceries by hand, carrying loads on their backs. Army soldiers who trod back and forth were ordered to use the grass, to dampen the noise of their boots. Nobody could do anything about the bell of the streetcar, though, and, blocks away, its clang reminded listeners that, for some people, life went on.7

  Outside the Milburn residence, under an old army tent, a cadre of reporters put up tables and chairs and waited and watched. They took their clues from the house itself. They thought they knew the windows—which ones belonged to Cortelyou, which belonged to Mrs. McKinley. They thought they knew the servants’ quarters, too, and kept their eyes on those for any sign that someone was up too long or too often. And they tried to imagine the president’s room, up on the second floor. They were told that John Milburn’s boys had slept there once, and that McKinley lay in a white iron bed. The shades were drawn most of the time, and the room was cooled by fans.

  For the newsmen who had served in Cuba and the Philippines, and for the old-timers who remembered encampments in the South, the emergency scene at the street corner had to have roused flashbacks to army life. Sentries from the Fourteenth US Infantry, with their rifles and bayonets, walked an incessant square around the Milburn house. Bodies, too, lay scattered here and there. Th
ese must have given some reporters a jolt, until they realized the recumbent forms were just exhausted newsboys, curled up against the cold.

  Secretary George Cortelyou delivers medical bulletins to reporters near the Milburn house.

  The weather worsened as the weekend progressed, and journalists did what they could to stay warm in the wind and rain. They brought in a coal stove to take the chill out of the air, and, when that did not work, they tried to find some heat by smoking. At night, kerosene lamps and an old streetcar headlight brightened the tent enough to allow them to work. Many of the men had not changed their clothes since the shooting.

  The first bulletins on the seventh and eighth of September told of a man injured but holding his own. Twenty-four hours after surgery, McKinley’s pulse was a high 130 and his temperature had risen to 103°F, but doctors maintained there was “no change for the worse.” The medical team, led by Roswell Park, also said they would know soon whether the bullet could stay in the president’s back muscles, or whether it had to be removed. There were X-ray machines in Buffalo, but McKinley was a big man and required different equipment. The Edison Laboratories were sending an apparatus up from New Jersey.

  In the morning after the shooting, the president asked for his wife, who had barely left her own bedroom. She came in, and they held hands. He told her he was not in much pain and that the night had been restful. “You know,” he added, “you must bear up well. That is the best for both of us.”

  The physicians reported that, after this visit, his pulse fell and his respiration calmed.8

  While President McKinley took nourishment from enemas, and quenched his thirst with teaspoons of water, Fred Nieman, swollen and bruised but otherwise uninjured, ate heartily at the city jail. His cell, deep below ground, was known as the “dungeon.” No sun reached the dungeon, only the fitful yellow of gaslight, and the prisoner was left to the stimulation of his own mind. For once, he did not have newspapers.