IV
NIAGARA
Like every exposition, the Charleston fair that proved so disappointing for Annie Taylor was a magnet for controversy. Women in Buffalo had thought that a separate pavilion filled with women’s work was a backward step. Charleston women disagreed, and they proudly erected a building to show off women’s handicrafts and literature, and offered a place where mothers could deposit their babies. The Charleston exposition also featured a Negro Department headed by Booker T. Washington and a Negro Building with displays, including the Du Bois exhibit, which demonstrated African American progress since Emancipation. The building was set off in the “Natural” section of the fair, as opposed to the Art section with most of the other main buildings. A number of black Charlestonians objected to the segregation of both the Negro Department and the building, and also took issue with the art. A group statue in front of the building featured a “Negress” balancing a basket of cotton on her head, a man using an anvil, and another holding a banjo. Its designer claimed it celebrated African Americans for their “great ability as tillers of the soil and mechanics.” People of color in Charleston protested. They found the figures degrading and forced the statuary to another site on the grounds.
The Old Plantation concession from Buffalo’s Midway did not go to Charleston. What played well among white fairgoers in New York State would likely have fired a storm of anger in a city that was fifty percent African American and who knew, all too well, the truths of plantation life. Instead, the show moved on to Coney Island.
His stint as Laughing Ben thus over for the time being, Ben Ellington went back to Dublin, Georgia, and made a triumphant return. Having earned three dollars every week in salary, and as much as five dollars a day in tips, he brought back four hundred dollars. He hoped to buy a small house.
Ben became a town treasure. He was called on to greet distinguished visitors to Dublin and continued to use his talents to make money and to navigate his way through hard times. He avoided prosecution for occasional theft and laughed himself out of court fines. When he couldn’t produce identification, his laugh became his signature.
Ellington adopted a persona that worked for him. In a world of segregation and lynching, where black men met oppression at every turn, his performance as an inoffensive, happy man must have seemed a strategy for survival. As one newsman who met him commented, the old performer, despite his belly laughing, was “nobody’s fool.”
After completing several more national tours, Ben Ellington performed for the last time during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. He died back home in Laurens County, amid the red dirt hills he loved, in 1905.11
While Ben survived the Jim Crow era using his laugh, Jim Parker, who had tackled Leon Czolgosz in the Temple of Music, took his Pan-American fame on a different route. After hearing so often that he had been a “credit to his race” by aiding the stricken president, and after rejecting offers to go on stage in shows, he took to the lecture circuit.
In late December 1902, he reported receiving a new tribute. McKinley’s friend, Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, wanted to do something to make up for the way that Secret Service men and others at Czolgosz’s trial had dismissed Parker’s brave act. Hanna offered him a position as messenger in the United States Senate.
If Parker took the position, or held it long, we do not know, but for the next three or four years he continued to speak, often under the auspices of the AME Church. A handbill printed in Worcester, Massachusetts, spoke of him as “The Greatest Negro of the 20th Century.” Despite such labels, or perhaps because of them, Parker struggled for credibility. His efforts to be believed for what he did in Buffalo became a mission, and the mission was clouded by illness. In Atlantic City, in the spring of 1907, he was “arrested in a demented condition” and charged with vagrancy. The press maintained that he had gone from street to street, telling his story to passersby and crowds that gathered. White commentators suggested he had been unable to handle the accolades that had been bestowed on him and had succumbed to “fast living.”
Hospitalized, Parker persisted in appealing for help from the people who knew him from Buffalo. Sometime in 1907, he penned a letter to Ida McKinley:
Kind Madam. I write you to ask a favor of you. I have been sick in the hospital for some time and am sick yet. I want you to help me. I done all I could for your husband in trying to save his life and if I had of been successful I know he would of [found a place for] me for my efforts a word from you to Mr. Cortelyou is all I need.
Parker said he would be happy for anything, from a place to live to a job driving a wagon. Please, he asked, “do this for me in remembrance of your dear husband.”
Ida McKinley asked George Cortelyou—who by then was serving in the cabinet under Roosevelt—to help Parker out with a job in Washington and a home in the district. Whether or not Cortelyou did something for Parker is unclear. What is certain is that Parker’s life did not turn around. In the winter of 1908, the police again picked him up, this time on the streets of West Philadelphia. He was admitted to the “insane” department at the Philadelphia Hospital, and in late March, at age fifty-one, he died. Having no connections in the city, his body was given to Jefferson Medical College, and, two weeks later, was set out on a dissecting table for the benefit of medical students.12
While James Parker died institutionalized and alone, other people of color who had been active at the Buffalo Exposition saw more enduring success. The local community that had brought the Du Bois Negro Exhibit to the fair did not let up. Mary Talbert, in fact, figured in another important story. In 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to Mary’s husband, William Talbert, about finding a “quiet place” for a top-secret meeting near Buffalo. The meeting would discuss strategies to counter the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington and to demand equal rights for African Americans. In early July, a group of men, including Du Bois, met first at the Talbert home and then at a hotel in nearby Fort Erie, Canada.
Barred from the meeting, Booker T. Washington asked his wife to write to Mary Talbert in Buffalo, to keep him “closely informed.” He also hired local men to spy on the gathering, and he tried to block newspaper coverage of the event.
He was right to be concerned about the clout of the men getting together. Du Bois and the others, who spent two days in discussion, were launching what they called the Niagara Movement. At some point in their deliberations, in fact, they made a short excursion to Niagara Falls. What Du Bois made of the falls at the time, he didn’t say, but later he described the cataract as one of the “wonderfulest” things he had ever seen, and he attached its name to his new organization. Four years later, the alliance broadened, its leaders joined with other activists, and it became better known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The twentieth-century fight for civil rights was up and running.13
V
THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
On July 1, 1902, after a week of gloomy weather, the sun emerged and, for the final time, struck the gilded iron statue on top of the Electric Tower with a bouncing light. A workman from the Chicago House Wrecking Company climbed the tower, fastened a rope around the neck of the Goddess of Light, and ordered men to pull. The statue somersaulted twice, plummeted into two feet of mud at the Court of Fountains, and broke into pieces. Witnesses at the scene were dismayed but not entirely disappointed. The statue had been sold to the owner of a popcorn pavilion in Cleveland, and, had the buyer appeared in time, would have had an ignominious end. “Cleveland, of all places—a popcorn joint, of all thrones,” lamented one journalist. Better, he suggested, to have her deep in the Buffalo dirt.
Rainbow City shut down in the first week of November, 1901, but it disappeared slowly. Unlike Chicago, which saw much of the White City go up in a conflagration four months after its gates closed, Buffalo lost its fair in increments. For almost eighteen months, residents watched buildings lose their plaster façades or go down with the wrecker’s ball.
The Midway was the first big section to go. By the spring of 1902, it was little more than a wasteland. Where once spielers, brass bands, and Bostock’s animals had filled the air with noise, now only sparrows cheeped, pecking away at grit and dust.
The buildings on the formal courts were brought down more gradually and stood as skeletons for months. Next to them, and in nearby Delaware Park, the ground was piled high with twisted metal and wasted wood. Those who visited the site said it looked like a hurricane had hit the area, while others wouldn’t visit the grounds at all, saying it was just too sad.
By the summer of 1902, the grounds were empty. A reporter, now relegated to covering humdrum life, looked back at the previous year. “You miss the Exposition if you’re a Buffalonian,” he wrote. Some parts of the fair seemed so completely erased, he added, “it is mostly a dream.”
Buffalo residents had tried to save some of the dream. Even before the Exposition’s end, city dwellers had plaintively wondered how they might hold on to it. “Must all the beauty and magnificence of the exposition be thrown away?” asked the Express. “Ten thousand times has the question been repeated in this city.” The loss of the beautiful buildings had weighed on visitors during the fair’s last days, the paper said, and robbed them of pleasure. The Exposition seemed like a fairy-tale beauty, “condemned to a horrible death by the giant ogre.”
The Triumphal Bridge in ruins, June 1903.
Ideas for saving some of the site poured forth. A local man suggested the grounds become a national park, because the president had been shot at the location. New Yorker John Carrère, the fair’s architect, threw out a different plan. The beautiful Pan-American fair had cost a lot of money. Why not keep the canals, the fountains, and even the Triumphal Bridge and the Electric Tower? Why not plant new trees and make use of the vistas? Think, he said, of “Versailles and Fontainebleau.” It would be an investment such as they make in Europe. If Buffalonians would only show the same “public spirit” they had earlier.
Carrère wanted Versailles. Others said they would be happy with a toboggan run. They pictured a mammoth slide running from the Electric Tower to the Triumphal Bridge, and then down the incline of Park Lake. The canals and fountain basins would become skating ponds, lighted at night. A concessionaire had an even more extravagant thought: Why not spray water onto the Exposition buildings and turn them into fanciful ice palaces? A local businessman thought the “scheme would, I venture to say, draw people from nearby cities.”14
But officials had had enough of such schemes. Who could dream of a new spectacle when they had not yet paid for this one—when, as one commentator put it, “the surplus was on the wrong side of the balance sheet?” The fair had cost close to $7 million and had brought in $6 million. Many contractors and laborers who had built the Exposition buildings had not been paid at all. Mortgage holders had been reimbursed, but not completely. Stockholders would see nothing.
The Exposition Company and all the people who had poured hearts, souls, and money into the fair hoped that Washington would help out with a million dollars. The federal government had not helped fund the fair, after all, as it had done for other big expositions; it had simply paid for its own exhibit buildings. And hadn’t the fair failed because it had hosted the president, with disastrous results? One newsman summed up the case: “The fact that the President’s death occurred in Buffalo at the time when the full tide was welling and that it stopped the growing throng and broke the thread of enthusiasm, gives the Exposition Company a certain amount of claim on the country at large.” Exposition directors brought out attendance numbers and projections that backed their claims—McKinley’s death, they said, had cost the corporation $1.5 million.
The fair’s movers and shakers knew, of course, that the Exposition’s losses were grounded in more than the death of an American president. They had had worries about low attendance back in the early summer, when immense crowds weren’t materializing. They had blamed the numbers on the weather: Spring snows and summer chills had delayed construction and dampened the enthusiasm of early visitors. They also thought that railroads hadn’t lowered rates soon enough. Concessionaires had other opinions. Closing the Midway on Sundays—turning the Exposition into “a funeral,” as some of them put it—turned off patrons. Others thought the advertising was off. Pan American promoters, they complained, did silly things like print ads “on miniature frying pans and beer mugs or in pretty booklets and folders.” If they had put an ad in a thousand daily papers, and run it for three months, it would have been far more effective.
Maybe, though, it boiled down to expectations that were too high. Looking back, William Buchanan described the attempt of a city of 350,000 to hold an international exposition without the financial backing of the nation or the state as a “hazardous undertaking.” And Marian De Forest, secretary of the Board of Women Managers, said that the city had held out too much hope for patrons across the Americas. “Those most familiar with exposition history,” she wrote, “have no hesitation in saying that it was too large for a city like Buffalo.”15
John Milburn, who would travel to Washington and ask for help, would never say such things. He reminded people that the fair’s officials—unlike the press—had really only hoped for ten million visitors, and the assassination had unraveled the rate of attendance. He also couldn’t let pity ruin the pride the city felt in hosting the Pan-American Exposition. He walked a fine line—he had to let the country know the Exposition Company needed help, but he needed to remind Buffalonians that they had done a magnificent thing. To local residents who had lost money, Milburn pointed out that Buffalo had just attracted a slew of new investors and that millions of people had emptied their pockets in the city. If anyone dared complain that the fair had not matched the success of Chicago, he asked them—how convincingly is unknown—to think again. “The pro rata expenditure at the Chicago World’s Fair was something like $14 for each visitor and as we have had a considerably better class of people . . . it is reasonable to suppose that the amount each visitor left here was at least $20.”
Buffalonians of less wealth had invested in the fair, too, and to them Milburn offered comforting—if financially unhelpful—words. They had had “their ideas broadened.” Furthermore, their hometown was now known. The Exposition, said its president, “has put Buffalo on the map of the great cities. It is no longer thought of as the town of which Grover Cleveland was once Mayor, but as the beautiful city on the lake where the Pan-American Exposition was held.” Throughout the previous six months, important visitors had admired the city’s fine homes and office buildings, its well-designed parks, and its asphalted avenues.
John Milburn also reminded people that the fair’s theme had been successfully executed. “We have not lost sight of the fact,” he said, “that the Exposition was held primarily to stimulate commercial relations between countries of North and South America. . . .” This goal, he announced, had been met, and, offering some selective evidence, remarked that “the English and Spanish languages mingled as they have never been mingled before. . . .” Other observers echoed the president. The Pan-American fair, said one, has been “a great loving cup from which all the nations of the Western Hemisphere have sipped.” Chile had traveled seven thousand miles to take part in the big show, and Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, and Cuba had joined in “as if the Spanish language never existed.”
Given the many translators necessary for speeches throughout the season, the Spanish language seemed alive and well. But the “Pan American movement,” as Milburn and others called it, in which Latin American republics opened themselves to investment and trade, and the United States took the lead in development, was considered well begun. It wouldn’t be an American empire in the sense that the Philippines had now become part of an empire, but it wouldn’t be far off, either.
Sounding like their old optimistic selves, local newspapers took up the beats of praise. Not only the country, but whole continents now held the city in esteem. The
Pan-American had placed Buffalo “among the great commercial centers of two continents.” Even more than that, the Exposition “has caused the eyes of the world to be fixed upon the Queen City.”The magnificent Pan-American Exposition had even made Buffalo “on many occasions shine as the center of the universe.”
It was early June all over again.
Pleas for help from Washington found a sympathetic ear. On the same July day that the Goddess of Light lost her noble perch, the United States Congress passed a relief bill giving $500,000 to the Pan American Exposition Company. John Milburn’s months-long appeal had resulted in a whittling-down of the requested amount, but the money would help. Now, finally, the contractors who had cleared the grounds, built the Exposition halls, and prepared the grounds would be paid. Buffalo had other New Yorkers to thank for the rescue money. In the final vote in Congress, New York legislators had stood up for their western counterparts and “fought for Buffalo like Trojans.”16
VI
MCKINLEY’S GHOST
The make-believe world of Rainbow City, with its minarets and arcades, its starry lights and luminous colors, did not last. It was not remade into an amusement park or a historic site, or turned into majestic gardens. Some bits of it, though, had a second shot at life. The floor of the Temple of Music, where the president had been attacked, was sawed up and stored in an office, and officials announced it would go to a museum. Bostock’s big animal stage became a dance pavilion. The Exposition Hospital, although picked apart by souvenir hunters, was turned into a storage area for the wrecking company. In a reception area near where surgeons had treated the injured president, between seven and ten workhorses were housed temporarily, along with their troughs and feed boxes.
A more elegant future was in store for the New York State Building. Marbled and columned, more reminiscent of Chicago’s neoclassical White City than the Spanish-style structures of the Pan-American, it became the permanent residence of the Buffalo Historical Society. Within its archives stand vast records of the Exposition, including, on a sturdy shelf, Mabel Barnes’s record of her thirty-three trips to the fair. Her neatly penned and decorated homage to Rainbow City, in three volumes, took her from 1905 to 1914 to complete. Mabel continued to serve Buffalo schools, first in the classroom and then for thirty years as a librarian. She died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1946.17
The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Page 23