The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  Now, though, the president’s expected recovery meant a triumphant new beginning for the city. The Exposition’s most intriguing exhibits had simply moved downtown. The Milburn house boasted the latest electric equipment, state-of-the-art telegraph and telephone lines, and Edison’s new and sophisticated (and unused) X-ray machine. The house had drawn under its roof many of the country’s best medical minds and some of the country’s most celebrated journalists, along with their artists and photographers. Famous war correspondents had encamped on Delaware Avenue, as had reporters from top New York City papers. Pulitzer had sent his people. So had the Associated Press.

  Buffalo correspondents became dizzy with pride. They stood side by side with some of the country’s most illustrious professionals. In fact, one reporter asserted, “a more notable gathering of writers probably never assembled anywhere.” The city also seemed to have become the hub of the federal government. The vice president, senators, and cabinet members conducted the important business of the country on its very own streets.

  Secretary of War Elihu Root, in town for the crisis, added to the excitement. “Yes,” he announced, “Buffalo will be the summer capital.” The Express echoed him, explaining that cabinet members would be headquartered at the Buffalo Club and the Milburn house would become the temporary White House. Its fame was also assured for the future. “The Milburn home,” the paper predicted, “will become historic as the executive mansion as well as the place where the president recovered. In after years the vicinity . . . will be pointed out as a famous neighborhood.” Buffalonians, who days earlier had hung their collective heads in discouragement, now beamed.1

  Pan-American directors concurred with the general sense of pride, but they hastened to remind the public that some of the attention could now be (respectfully) redirected to the Exposition itself. They assured potential guests that news from the Milburn house would be posted on five bulletin boards set up throughout the grounds and urged them not to miss new and original shows. Fresh from the Minnesota State Fair, for instance, an eighteen-foot-tall replica of historic Fort Snelling, made entirely of apples, with crabapple cannons, would soon make its appearance on the grounds. The fort would be almost as dazzling as Minnesota’s other marvel, the state capitol building sculpted out of butter.

  Fair promoters had more than crabapple guns to help people recover their carefree spirits. Saturday, September 14, was designated as Railroad Day, and, with reduced train fares, it was set to attract more than 150,000 people.

  Frank Bostock could hardly be contained. In anticipation of Railroad Day, Jack Maitland, his agent, who had been holding back out of respect for the president, unleashed a new set of gory stories. On September 12, at feeding time, two of Bostock’s hybrid lion and tiger cubs fought over a piece of meat, and the male hybrid ripped open the throat of his sister “and drank her blood.” Even worse, one of Bostock’s most celebrated trainers, Madame Morelli, had been attacked by a jaguar. She had been training him to walk on a tightrope when he “became balky.” When she “beat him to make him do his work,” the animal jumped on her and tore her arm open. “This is the third time,” Maitland explained, “that the same jaguar has attacked her.”

  Having piqued the interest of fans eager to see bloodstained trainers and vicious animals, Bostock also hoped to produce his delayed and much-touted lion weddings. On Thursday, September 12, he paraded the wedding altar, with lions pacing inside, through Buffalo streets. The next day, he planned to send the altar out again, and, this time, the four brides would be on hand to meet and greet their ferocious witnesses.

  Bostock issued regular notices about the wedding. President McKinley had bulletins; Bostock had bulletins, too. The Animal King’s last bulletin announced that the weddings would take place beginning at 3:45 on the Exposition grounds, and that the reception would be held in his own arena. He did not name the lucky minister who would officiate at the ceremony but did offer a heartfelt message to the couples: “I know you will never regret being married in a lion’s cage.”2

  Railroad Day, featuring the maned and hairy groomsmen, a parachuting human bomb, and an elephant race, would certainly sell masses of tickets and help the fair recover. But officials believed Buffalo could do more. There should be a new sort of President’s Day to thank God, thank the doctors, and thank the prayers of the world for the successful fight for the life of William McKinley.

  As early as September 10, the public learned that John Milburn and William Buchanan were all for it. It would not be announced, they said, “if there were doubts of the patient’s recovery.” Doubts or not, news of the planning seeped into the press, and two days later, the director-general was quoted describing the event. The day would be one of “great joy,” said Buchanan, a “general thanksgiving over the happy outcome of last Friday’s incident.” An incident. The attempted assassination of the president had now been downgraded to a short-lived, not terribly meaningful occurrence.

  National Jubilee Day, as it would be called, was scheduled for September 21. It would begin with the click of a telegraph key, and this in turn would signal a simultaneous Hurrah across the country. Church bells would ring. Factory whistles would steam and toot their joy. Cannons would fire. And the whole United States would resound with happiness.

  Ribbon issued to celebrate President McKinley’s anticipated recovery.

  Within Rainbow City itself, a children’s chorus of three to five thousand young singers would add their pure sound to the celebration and, in the Temple of Music (of course), statesmen and orators would speak. One Exposition commissioner proposed (was Jim Parker listening?) that an African American leader be invited to lecture because “one of his race took so prominent a part in the events attending the attempt on the President’s life.” At this suggestion, other commissioners applauded.

  In truth, not all of them clapped. Colonel J. C. Hemphill, representing the upcoming Charleston, South Carolina, exposition, suggested that one of the orators might be a veteran of the Confederate army. That, he submitted, would balance things out.

  While the guest list was debated, what was certain was that Buffalo would be the graceful, hospitable hub of the festivities, the “Mecca toward which the people will be drawn.” William Buchanan made it plain that he and others wanted to make Buffalo the place that from then on people visited to express thanks for the president’s recovery. As one official explained, it would raise the Pan-American Exposition “from a landmark of gloom to a symbol of happiness.”3

  II

  THE TURN

  The change occurred on Thursday, September 12. It happened so quickly that those beyond the orbit of the Milburn house might have blinked and missed it. If they were newsmen, maybe they took the afternoon off, perhaps caught up on sleep. If they were city businessmen, maybe they read the morning paper, went about their day, and missed the evening news. Or they had a late shift at a factory. Or they went out to the Exposition and came back tired and collapsed from happy fatigue.

  And then what they heard made them shudder.

  Last thing they knew, the men coming and going from the Milburn house were bantering with reporters and saying that the president was better than ever. He had even asked for a cigar and been served solid food. Nothing pointed to recovery better than a man with a bullet in his back taking in toast, coffee, and chicken broth.

  But now? Men were running across the Milburn lawn with their heads down, silent. Automobiles, not horses, were wheeling into view, bringing doctors and nurses.

  John Milburn, who hours before had called the president as “fine as silk,” began to use a different tone of voice, and made a different sort of announcement. “I do not haul down the flag yet,” he said.4

  On Thursday morning, the twelfth, President McKinley had awoken in a cheerful mood. He had not, however, wanted to eat his toast. By the afternoon, his appetite had gone. He was uncomfortable, restless, and exhausted. His pulse raced—higher than it had been in a while.

  The early ve
rdict was positive. The solid food was a mistake, but cathartics surely would do the trick. At 8:30 that evening, however, doctors reported that the president’s condition “was not so good. His food has not agreed with him.”

  Some newsmen wondered whether it was more serious than indigestion. Outside the Milburn house at 10 p.m. on Thursday, they asked Dr. Roswell Park whether he was concerned. “People should not feel alarmed,” he replied.

  By dawn, Dr. Park was worried too. The cathartic had cleaned out the president’s bowels, but strychnine and digitalis and salt solutions had not strengthened his heart or slowed his pulse. Secretary Cortelyou called in Abner McKinley, the present’s brother. The medical team asked for more doctors. They sent again for Dr. McBurney, now in Massachusetts, and for the eminent Dr. W. W. Johnston, of Washington, DC. They also summoned Dr. Edward Janeway, who had helped save the writer Rudyard Kipling from pneumonia. Telegrams went out to the cabinet, to the vice president.5

  Ida McKinley was not told of the downturn in her husband’s condition, and Dr. Rixey gave her opiates. Nurses and doctors talked in hushed voices near her room and walked softly.

  The weather, on the other hand, could not be muffled. Echoing the alarm, an electrical storm settled over the Niagara frontier, and the sky stuttered with flashes.6

  Deep in the Adirondack Mountains, Theodore Roosevelt had spent the early part of Friday with his wife and children, and later he gathered a small party of men to climb Mount Marcy. Fifteen miles into the Adirondack wilderness from their base at the Tahawus Club, the hikers had ascended the rocky slopes of the 5,000-foot mountain and were on the way down. They spread out tarps for lunch. It was rainy, but it was the middle of the afternoon, and the men were hungry. They were eating when they heard the noises: cracking twigs, snapping branches, the unmistakable sound of human feet moving fast. A courier broke upon them, a yellow envelope in his hands. Roosevelt guessed, but he tore the paper anyway. “The President’s condition has changed for the worse—CORTELYOU.” Theodore Roosevelt’s hiking trip, his family vacation, and life as he had known it, was over.

  Thus began one of the most dramatic changes of command in American history. The rain, begun as mist, became a torrent. After midnight, a buckboard arrived to take Roosevelt off the mountain, and, swaying wildly, its lantern barely hanging onto its flame, it plunged down the pitch. Three times the driver and his passenger stopped at remote stations for fresh horses. Urged to stop and rest, Roosevelt said no. The wagon pulled into the railroad station at North Creek, New York, just as day was breaking, around 5 a.m.7

  In Buffalo, people had begun to mass near the Milburn house on Thursday night, September 12; and by the next morning, they had to be held back by horses. Part of the reason for the crowds was the news—it was so uncertain.

  In the early hours of Friday, September 13, the bulletin delivered to reporters had been hopeful. Then the news came that the president’s condition was grave. By 6 a.m., however, his condition had “somewhat improved,” and, by early afternoon, the report was even better. He had “more than held his own” and there was “expectation of further improvement.”

  But no. Four hours after that, at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, came frightening word: the “end is only a question of time.”

  The watchers passed the time on the street waiting and fearing, sharing stories and premonitions. One among them announced that six weeks earlier he had been to a fireworks show at the Pan-American. As a matter of course, a portrait was lit up in fire—this one of Vice President Roosevelt. It was a good likeness. Then words emerged underneath, in patriotic colors: OUR VICE PRESIDENT, it started to say. But a fuse malfunctioned, and the words Our and Vice were erased. He wondered whether it had been an omen.

  Inside the house, doctors gave their patient all the treatments they had, based on everything they knew: digitalis, adrenaline, strychnine, oxygen, nitroglycerin, camphor, and salt solutions. Clam broth and brandy. Why wouldn’t his heart respond? They worried that the first bullet, the one that seemed of so little account, had bruised it. They wondered how strong his heart was to begin with, since he got so little exercise, worked hard, and smoked three to four cigars a day.8

  In the early evening, when it appeared that McKinley was suffering, doctors gave him morphine and informed his wife that there was no hope. They also determined that she could withstand a last visit, and, in the early evening, before the morphine took hold, the couple had a final, private conversation. Others, too, began to listen carefully to the president. They knew that out of all the words he uttered while conscious, there would be a sentence or two that they would offer to the public as his final comment on life.

  Some witnesses thought that what he said about trees was noteworthy. When a nurse rearranged his pillows to block some of the light, he protested. “No, I want to see the trees,” he murmured. “They are so beautiful.” Others thought his Christian comments were important. He recited the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and then offered a simple farewell. “Good bye, Good bye all,” he said. “It is God’s way. His will be done.”

  Dr. Rixey, on the other hand, reported that the president’s very last words were for his wife. “What will become of her?” he wondered.9

  Across the city, people gathered, warding off the chill and giving way to tears. On Main Street, women and men, well-off and poor, crowded newspaper offices and huddled under electric lights to read bulletins. They were not allowed near Leon Czolgosz. Superintendent William Bull had posted a hundred officers around the city jail, and other men at armories. When asked by a reporter whether he was prepared for riots or a lynching, Bull pounded his hand onto a desk. “We are going to keep this fellow safe, no matter how dastardly his crime may be,” he declared. “I advise well-meaning people to keep away from this building . . . and let the law take its course.”

  At 11 p.m., a rumor circulated—some said it was spread by the press—that the president had died. The word must have reached the city coroner, for he hurried his carriage over to the Milburn house. At 12:30 a.m., he pulled up and asked about the body. He was told to leave at once—the president still breathed.

  Inside the residence itself, there were no rumors, just grim truths. Attendants kept the lights on all night, sending rays out into the gloom and making the scene too lively for the hour. In the sick room, Dr. Rixey watched over the ebbing of President McKinley’s life as others—mostly relatives, nurses, and orderlies—came and went. The president lost consciousness by 9:30 p.m.; by 11:30, his extremities were cold. His breaths became gasps, the gasps grew uneven, and then they stopped. The people filtered out of the room, the lights went off, and the ever-loyal George Cortelyou went down the stairs. He informed officials in the drawing room and then went out the front door to tell newsmen that the president had died at 2:15 a.m. They in turn passed the word on to the rest of the world.10

  A few hours later on September 14, Hartford sculptor Edward Pausch telegraphed Cortelyou. He wanted to make a death mask of McKinley. Cortelyou agreed, and at 7:20 a.m., Pausch made his way into the Milburn house. He did not show his eagerness, even though this was the sort of opportunity that might cap his career. He went into the bedroom with buckets of plaster and made a complete mask—not just the face, but the whole massive head. It weighed twenty-five pounds. A man who saw it not long afterward said that the features were “calm and peaceful,” and that there were traces of a “benevolent smile about the lips.” He also noticed a few of the president’s hairs on the right temple of the cast, and, on the right cheek, an eyelash. By November, Pausch’s finished work would be on its way to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And from then on, anyone wanting to honor William McKinley with a lifelike bust or statue would have Pausch to thank for the model.

  On Sunday, September 15, pathologists opened up McKinley’s chest and belly. They found, besides a heart that was weakened by age, an insidious bullet track. The missile had entered and exited the stomach, nicked a kidney, but, worst of all, damaged the pancreas
, spilling its poisonous enzymes. The track had become a gangrenous tunnel. A century later, surgeons employing antibiotics, imaging, and intravenous fluids could have saved a man injured like this, but in 1901 it was an almost impossible task.

  The physicians spent four hours looking for the bullet that had killed the president but, try as they might, and digging as deep as they could, they could not locate it. Ultimately, they were asked to stop searching. The family did not want “to injure the corpse any longer.”11

  Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Buffalo at a little after 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, September 14. He alighted from the train, brushed aside some young boys who had broken through the guards, quelled cheers, and shook hands. To a reporter’s question, he simply replied, “There is nothing to say at all.” He was then walled in by police and mounted soldiers, and the entourage moved north. He stopped at Ansley Wilcox’s home briefly, then moved up Delaware Avenue to pay his respects to the McKinley family.

  By midafternoon, Roosevelt was back at the Wilcox house, and at 3:30 p.m., in borrowed frock coat and hat, he stood in the bay window of the house’s library and took the oath of office. When Secretary of War Elihu Root, on behalf of the Cabinet, formally asked Roosevelt to take the oath, Root got out only three words before he broke down. For two minutes he cried. Others cried too. And then Roosevelt signed a piece of parchment and the deed was done.

  President Theodore Roosevelt, newly sworn in, talks with reporters.

  Farther north, at the Pan-American Exposition, the fairgrounds had become a graveyard. The big, empty buildings and the silent, dark towers were, said one man who walked in, “monuments to a dead president.” Exhibits were locked, gates were closed, and the Midway for once was nearly soundless. Like somber apparitions, a few employees flitted in and out of the gates, did some work, and scattered.