by John Jakes
“The beauty and utility of the contributions will this day be submitted to your inspection by the managers of this Exhibition.”
The orchestra played the “Centennial Inauguration March,” a new piece composed by Wagner. After a prayer, a hymn, a cantata, and presentation of the buildings, the President spoke:
“While proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more.”
Grant finished at twelve. Accompanied by an organ, eight hundred choristers sang Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” Bells began to peal. From a hill overlooking Fairmout Park, artillery fired a hundred-gun salute.
“And now, fellow-citizens, I hope a careful examination of what is about to be exhibited to you will not only inspire you with a profound respect of the skill and taste of our friends of other nations …”
Marshals organized the U.S. and foreign dignitaries into a long procession. Rank on rank, the notables proceeded along the walkways to Machinery Hall.
“… but also satisfy you with the attainments made by our own people during the past one hundred years.”
In the Hall, President Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro climbed the iron stairs of the dual-cylinder wonder and showpiece of the exhibition, the Centennial Engine. Twenty boilers in another building powered the fifty-six-ton flywheel and the twenty-seven-foot walking beams of the fourteen-hundred-horse-power engine. George Corliss of Providence demonstrated one of the two silver-plated cranks that would start the engine. Below, among his fellow commissioners, George Hazard gazed blankly at the mammoth machine. He could not quite believe the moment had arrived after so many months of struggle and doubt. He was gratified, exhausted, lonely in the vast crowd. Dom Pedro turned his crank. President Grant turned his. The great walking beams began to shunt up and down. A thrill of response, a wordless exclamation like a rushing wind, rose around George, and then he began to hear the other machines in the hall. Turning, cranking, thumping—all driven by the Corliss engine, by U.S. industrial might.
“I declare the International Exhibition now open.”
George wrote:
Please be my guests for a week’s reunion of the Main and Hazard families at the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia. It will be my honor to underwrite all travel expenses, meals, incidentals and lodging commencing Saturday, July 1.
“When I first saw Los Angeles three years ago,” Billy said, “it wasn’t much besides unpaved streets and some old adobe houses. Now we’re tearing up the whole place and building hotels, warehouses, churches. The town’s going to boom. We’ll be sixty thousand instead of six thousand soon. I’ve banked my family’s future on it.”
His listener, a Unitarian minister from Boston, clutched his hat to keep the sea breeze from snatching it. The little excursion steamer was just putting out from the pier at Santa Monica, bound up the coast to Santa Barbara. It was a perfect morning, with some whitecaps showing on the Pacific.
“You are a civil engineer, you told me—”
“By training.” Billy was forty-one now, and as he grew more portly, he resembled his brother George more strongly. His side-whiskers were tipped with gray. He wore an expensive suit. “I actually spend more time developing and selling building lots.”
“Many customers yet?”
“No, but it’s the future I’m counting on.” He leaned on the rail, enthusiasm crinkling the corners of his eyes. “The transcontinental line brought seventy thousand visitors and newcomers last year. It’s only the beginning. We have everything, you see. Room for new cities. Magnificent scenery. Healthful air. A temperate climate. I grew up in Pennsylvania. I dream of the snow sometimes, but I don’t miss it.”
Brett came along the deck, stouter now, holding their youngest, two-year-old Alfred, securely by the hand. Billy introduced Brett to the cleric, who asked, “Is this handsome lad your only child?”
She laughed. “Oh, no. We have four girls and two other boys. Our oldest son’s eleven. He’s taking care of the others in our cabins.”
“And you’re all going to Philadelphia by train?” The cleric was amazed.
“Yes,” Billy said, “after we travel up the coast and show the children the sights. We’ll have one of the Concord coaches all to ourselves, I expect.”
“You must be very happy to be going home,” the visitor said.
Billy smiled. “I’ll be pleased to see my family after so many years. But California’s our home.”
Brett slipped her arm in his and followed his gaze back past the pier and the shore and up to the bluish mountains. The tiny steamer’s whistle momentarily scattered the gulls swooping in her wake over the bright sea.
George read Scientific American for a while. He sat in a plush chair in the writing room of the Pennsylvania Building, which faced Fountain Avenue, one of the two main promenades crossing the exhibition grounds. The building, an outrageously ornamented Gothic cottage, was the work of young Schwarzmann, the Bavarian engineer who’d surveyed and platted the grounds and designed several of the major buildings. Since Pennsylvania was the official host, the cottage naturally emerged as the largest of the twenty-four state-sponsored buildings. Objectively, George knew it was a horror. The people of Philadelphia were terrified that it would remain in Fairmout Park permanently. Still, considered as part of the whole exhibition scheme, it was something for a citizen of Lehigh Station to be proud of, and he was.
It had been a busy year for George; a busy three or four years as far as the exhibition was concerned. He was one of the seven vice presidents of the private Centennial Commission, and a member of its Board of Finance. He’d helped raise a million dollars in state funds to underwrite the mammoth exposition. And when funding lagged, he’d spent weeks in Washington lobbying for a congressional appropriation. He’d worked hard on behalf of the Franco-American Union, too, helping to bring part of Bartholdi’s planned monument to the exhibition grounds. The statue was to be erected on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, if it was ever finished. But as George had predicted to the journalist Levie, the mood of the times was conservative, and even an outright gift from the French was suspect.
George had lately returned from Cincinnati. There he and his friend Carl Schurz and some like-minded Republicans had succeeded in blocking the presidential nomination of Speaker of the House James G. Blaine, who was evidently involved in some insider stock trading that was connected with the Union Pacific. The last thing the Republicans needed after the scandals generated by members of Grant’s administration was a tainted presidential candidate. George and his associates had gotten Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio to be the party’s standard-bearer.
He was proud of the Hayes nomination, just as he was proud of the exhibition—two hundred forty-nine large and small buildings on two hundred eighty-four acres of parkland along the Schuylkill River. He was particularly proud that so many foreign nations had decided to exhibit. It validated the country’s claim to be a new industrial giant. He liked to walk the aisle of Machinery Hall where Hazard’s displayed locomotive boilers, railroad track, and ornamental iron. In the artillery display outside the government building, Hazard’s was represented by two of the smoothbore coastal defense guns cast by the Rodman method during the war. Though less impressive than Friedrich Krupp’s enormous thirteen-incher, dubbed “Krupp’s Killing Machine,” the Hazard pieces were contributions to the Union war effort in which George took pride.
The words of the Scientific American article blurred suddenly. Quite without wanting to, he saw the sham of all his activity. The work he did was worthwhile, he’d never for a minute deny that. But it was a substitute for home and family. He was a lonesome man, and he had been ever since Constance died. He hated the silences at Belvedere. He hated his bed on a cold January night. His children’s growing up only aggravated the loneliness. He was a dervish in politics and civic work, so that he wouldn’t have to stop and think about what his life had become. But he seemed to remember anyway.
He heard noise in the foyer. Today’s exhibit
there was yet another Liberty Bell, this one from Harrisburg, a yard high, entirely of sugar. From behind the bell, Stanley stepped into sight.
Stanley would this fall stand for reelection, unopposed, as United States representative from Lehigh Station. It would be his third term. Stanley was quite heavy now, and florid, but he carried himself with the air of power that soon mantled those who went to Washington. With him, munching popcorn from a bag bought at one of the stands on the Avenue, was his ferretlike son Laban.
George laid the tabloid paper aside and strode over to shake his brother’s hand. It was half past noon on Friday, the last day of June.
“The train was late,” Stanley said, offering no apology.
“They’ll hold my reservation,” George said, “I haven’t seen you in a while, Laban. How are you?”
“Prospering,” said the young lawyer with a smirk.
Stanley brushed at his side-whiskers. “Where are we taking dinner?”
“Lauber’s,” George said as they walked out into the crowds. Far to the left, at the end of Fountain Avenue, a whistle hooted and a train shunted by on the narrow-gauge sightseeing railroad that made a circuit of the grounds every five minutes, for five cents.
As they stepped around a couple of burly Centennial Guards who were hustling a drunk toward the gate, George surveyed the crowds with satisfaction. “We had more than thirty-five thousand paid admission yesterday.” For a while, after the crush on opening day, admissions had limped along at little better than twelve thousand each day.
“It will still lose money,” Stanley said.
That was true. The commissioners had lost their war with Philadelphia’s preachers, who insisted that opening the exhibition on Sundays would desecrate the Sabbath. Although most Americans worked six days a week, they were unable to visit the exhibition on their day off.
“Well, we wouldn’t be here at all if the House hadn’t passed that million and a half in special appropriations,” George said. “I’ll always be grateful for your support there.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Congressman Hazard, who lately had begun to act like what he was, an older brother. George smiled, but Stanley didn’t notice.
“When do the others pull in?” Laban asked as he tossed his empty popcorn bag on the ground.
“William and Patricia and their families are already here,” George said. “They’ll be joining us at the German restaurant. The next group should arrive this evening. Orry’s cousin Charles, all the way from Texas.”
At that same hour, a train from New York carried Colonel Charles Main, his wife, Willa, and their twelve-year-old son, Augustus, toward Philadelphia. “Colonel” was an honorary title given Charles by his neighbors when they perceived that he was growing rich and therefore becoming important.
Charles still wore his hair long, and he dressed like what he was, a prosperous rancher, in tooled boots, a creamy white hat with broad brim, and a flowing neckerchief instead of a cravat. He owned fifty-five thousand acres a half-day’s ride west of Fort Worth and was negotiating to double that. His cowboys drove a huge herd to Kansas every summer. His ranch was named Main Chance; his horse Satan was enjoying a comfortable retirement there. He also owned several large blocks of Fort Worth real estate, and the opulent Parker Opera House, which was less than a year old.
As the train chugged through the farmlands of New Jersey, Charles read a book with the aid of a pair of spectacles. His son, who still bore a long, thin scar on his right cheek, was a solemn, dark-eyed boy, already growing tall and muscular, like his father. Willa loved him like her own, something of a necessity since she’d never been able to conceive a child, much as they wanted that.
Charles laughed without humor. The book was My Life on the Plains, published two years ago. He hadn’t had time to read it until now.
“I didn’t know it was a humorous book,” Willa said. Gus gazed out the sooty window at some rusty-colored cattle in a dairy shed.
“No, it isn’t,” Charles said. “But it’s damn cleverly done. I mean, the bones are there. What’s missing is the meat. The bloody meat. For instance, Custer calls one of the Cheyenne children we killed at the Washita a ‘dusky little chieftain,’ and ‘a plucky spirit.’ ” He put in his leather marker and closed the book. “He’s poured on flowing phrases like disinfectant. It was a massacre.”
“Which doesn’t seem to have harmed the book’s popularity.”
“Nor the General’s reputation, either,” Charles said with disgust.
George’s son William III and his son’s wife, Polly, walked up the steps of Lauber’s Restaurant a moment ahead of George and Stanley. William wore good Methodist black. He was twenty-seven now, in the third year of his pastorate at a small church in the town of Xenia, Ohio. Although Constance had raised him a Roman Catholic, he’d met Polly Wharton, whose father was a Methodist bishop, when he was twenty-one, and she had single-handedly won him as a husband and a member of her denomination. She had taught school to support them while he attended a seminary.
They had no children, but Patricia and her husband and their three, all under six years old, more than made up for the lack with noise and chatter at the round restaurant table. Patricia lived in Titusville. Her husband, Fremont Nevin, edited and published the Titusville Independent. George liked the tall, thoughtful émigré from Texas, even though he was a Democrat. The couple’s children were Constance Anne, who was the youngest, Fremont Junior, and George Hazard Nevin. Growing up among the Titusville derricks, little George Hazard was already saying he wanted to be an oil man.
“Be sure you keep track of how many times you pay fifty cents at the gate, so I can reimburse you,” George said to the adults after they were seated.
“What about Grandfather Flynn, Papa?” Patricia asked him.
“I had a very gracious message from him after Filly transmitted the invitation. He’s quite old now, and he didn’t feel up to making the long trip from Los Angeles. He said he would be with us in spirit. I gather he still handles a few cases that interest him. A remarkable person—like his daughter,” he finished with an odd little catch in his throat.
Nevin, whose nickname was Champ, lit a cigarette and said to Stanley: “We’re going to whip Hayes in November, you know. Governor Tilden is a strong candidate.”
“I came here to eat, not to discuss politics, if you don’t mind,” Stanley said with ruffled dignity. George signaled the waiter. Laban rearranged his napkin in his lap for the third time. He didn’t enter into the conversation. He didn’t like any of the others in the family.
“We have a one-bedroom suite reserved,” said the clerk at the luxurious Continental Hotel at Chestnut and Ninth Streets. The lobby was bedlam, the noise level heightened by two gentlemen shouting about their nonexistent reservations.
The clerk raised his voice too. “Shall we put a cot in the sitting room for your servant?”
Standing behind Madeline, Jane looked aggrieved, but she was too tired to fight. It had been a long journey from Mont Royal. Madeline was dusty and cross and not inclined to show a similar restraint. “She isn’t my servant, she’s my friend and traveling companion. She needs a bed like mine.”
“We have no other accommodations,” the clerk said. Another clerk, to his left, leaped back as one of the men with no reservation took a swing at him. The second clerk yelled for help from the office.
“Then we’ll sleep together,” Madeline said, almost shouting to make herself heard. “Have our luggage taken upstairs.”
“Bellman,” the clerk said, snapping his fingers. He looked outraged.
Patricia said, “Fremont, don’t play with your knackwurst.” Fremont Junior speared it with his fork and flung it on the floor. Patricia smacked his knuckles.
Her husband said to George: “How many of the Mains from South Carolina will be joining us?”
George put down his stein of Centennial Bock Bier and shook his head.
“Only Orry’s widow, I regret to say. Orry’s niece M
arie-Louise is having her second child in August. Her doctor advised her not to travel. As for her father, Orry’s brother—” he drew a breath, his face grave. “After a good deal of thought, and despite the slight to his wife, who’s a lovely person, I declined to send an invitation to Cooper. He made it clear long ago that he was a Main in name only. Like Ashton. I never had any intention of trying to locate her.”
Judge Cork Bledsoe, three years retired from the state circuit, kept a small farm near the seacoast, ten miles south of Charleston. On a hot July morning, seven men riding single file turned into his lane to pay a call. They were not Klansmen; nothing concealed their faces. The only garments they wore in common were heavy red flannel shirts.
No one knew exactly why red had been adopted by loyal Democrats for their mounted rifle clubs; the custom had gotten started a few months ago, up around Aiken and Edgefield and Hamburg, along the Savannah River, where resistance to Republicans and blacks was perhaps the most savage in the state.
Cooper rode third in line. He’d tied a large white kerchief around his scrawny neck to sop up sweat, but it didn’t help much. From his saddle scabbard jutted the polished stock of the very latest Winchester big-bore, Model 1876—the “Centennial.” It fired a 350-grain bullet heavy enough to stop a stampeding buffalo. Lately Cooper had acquired a taste for firearms, something he’d never had before.
Judith objected to her husband’s keeping such a weapon at Tradd Street. She also disliked his new friends, and their activities. It made no difference to him; he no longer cared what she thought. They shared the same house but he displayed little affection toward her; their communication was minimal.
He considered the work of this group and similar ones throughout the state to be crucial. Only a government of dedicated white men could redeem South Carolina and put the social order right.
A dowdy woman with gray hair and bowed shoulders watched the horsemen ride into the dooryard and arrange themselves in a semicircle in front of the house. The woman had been pruning some of her roses; there were dozens of them, pink, dusty red, peach, fuming the air with their sweetness.