by Dawn Raffel
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Alexandre Lion had enjoyed a more solicitous American reception the previous autumn. The show he opened at 2 West Eighteenth Street in Manhattan was greeted with approval, but he had no intention of staying in that godforsaken city.
His heart was in France. He left his New York setup in the hands of a physician, where it quietly fizzled.
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Martin was reduced to hawking beer. “Dr. Martin Couney says nursing mothers cannot find its equal as a milk producer. It is also beneficial to the babes,” the ads read. (The accent aigu he’d added to his name would prove to be a nonstarter in American newspapers.) Plus, Dr. Couney—“who has had a wide experience”—claims, “We take pleasure in stating we have used Krug Cabinet bottled Beer constantly and for milk producing qualities we can cheerfully recommend it to all nursing mothers.” Well, that was one way to get his name in the papers. People said that drinking beer was good for nursing mothers—but still, this was undignified. The next fair, in Buffalo, would have to be better.
As Omaha wound down, Martin had one last piece of business. On November 3, 1898, he stood in the district court of Douglas County, raised his hand, and swore an honest oath. Sam was his witness. Exiting the courthouse, Mr. Martin A. Coney was an American citizen.
NAILING JELLY TO THE WALL: THE COUNEY BUFFS GAIN A FOLLOWER
I left Coney Island determined to find out whatever I could about Martin Couney—a search that quickly led to William Silverman’s article in Pediatrics. I found another item, about the letter from Felix Marx raising the issue of M. Lion. After that, the Couney buffs had one last piece of business in the pages of the journal. William Silverman’s letter to the editor, published in 1997, was cosigned by eleven colleagues. Under the header “Martin Couney’s Story Revisited: Writing History Is Like Trying to Nail Jelly to the Wall,” he reported more exasperating discrepancies in the showman’s story and concluded, “We write this letter to your readers in the hope that others will come forth with additional information about this curious episode in the history of newborn medicine.”
Reading it more than a decade later, I hoped that William Silverman was still alive somewhere. That would have been highly unlikely. His New York Times obituary ran under the headline “William A. Silverman, 87, Dies; Leading Neonatologist of 1950’s.” It was published on January 2, 2005. Too bad he couldn’t enjoy it over his morning coffee. And too bad I hadn’t tried to reach him sooner.
“THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN SHOT!”
Buffalo, New York, 1901
The new American Century was born to the sounds of the horn and drum and stomp and clap of John Philip Sousa’s marching bands, to the mischievous syncopation of Scott Joplin’s ragtime, to the heat and spice of a million immigrant kitchens. In England, Queen Victoria entered her final month of life. In America, William McKinley wouldn’t outlive her by much.
M. Alexandre Lion had returned to France to stay. On April 14, 1900, another Paris Universelle Exposition began, with its Art Nouveau and its talking films and its latest great invention—escalators! And yes, an infant incubator exhibition. M. Lion printed copious souvenir postcards with his likeness as directeur-fondateur.
On April 10, four days before the Paris exposition opened, Martin Coney signed a business agreement with Samuel Schenkein. Here was a name for you: Qbata. Cue-BAY-tah. As in, Come see the babies in the incubaytah, dahlink. This was their new company. With Alexandre Lion gone, Martin and Sam were going to make a grand showing of it. The Kny-Scheerer company in New York manufactured Lion’s machines for the United States, and a handful of hospitals bought them, including Chicago Lying-in, Low Maternity in Brooklyn, and Sloane Maternity in Manhattan. Copycat contraptions, some of them homemade, and some based on the clearly inferior Wärmewanne, were being tried as well. It was bupkis, when you thought of it, and nothing to match the grand showing the Qbata company planned. First on the agenda was the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Next would be Topeka, and then the crown jewel: the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, scheduled for St. Louis in 1904.
The immediate challenge was money. Machines were but a fraction of Sam’s projected expenses. Now he needed architects and carpenters. No more sleepy buildings. This would need to be a dazzler. Every world’s fair was all but strangled with red tape, which meant he could count on paying workers overtime to be ready on opening day. Plus gas, water, light. The new electric bulbs that everybody wanted. Blankets, bottles, diapers, powders, tiny clothes and tiny hats, and pink and blue ribbons. Salaries for nurses, wet nurses. Someone to take tickets. A barker to haul in the crowds, which was something you needed out East. The fair’s administration would of course require payment. And finally, the cost of demolition. He was going to build a miniature hospital, only to knock it down.
Sam found an investor, Emmett W. McConnell, who would get 50 percent of the gate in Buffalo until his debt was paid, and 25 percent thereafter. Plus, McConnell would take a cut of any profit made from licensing baby powders and lotions—which seemed like a sweet idea at the time.
McConnell was Sam’s problem, but Martin had his own. For starters, after Omaha, it might have occurred to him that “Counéy” didn’t work. Was it possibly too foreign? Not friendly enough? He would try “Dr. Coney.” More than anything else, he needed to find a nurse as competent and self-assured as Mlle. Louise, who was back in France.
Someone recommended Miss Annabelle Maye Segner. Maye (as she preferred) was all-American, raised in Lafayette, Indiana. She had received a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University and trained as a registered nurse at Maurice Porter Memorial, a children’s hospital in Chicago. And she was thoroughly lovely, with flowing golden curls, the favorite child of her widowed mother.
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Maye must have found him charming. Imagine: This Dr. Martin Coney didn’t have a clue what to do with a newborn—in fact, she might need to remind him how to properly hold one. But he seemed to care. He was courtly and European, easy to talk to. And while some of the city’s physicians would check in from time to time, she would run the nursery.
At twenty-five, Maye could have seen her future and not liked the way it looked. Spinster. Dreary halls of overcrowded hospitals that were never entirely clean. Doctors snapping orders, even when she knew more about a particular patient than they did. Every day, growing more invisible. Trapped.
Well, here was her adventure. When Dr. Coney offered her the job, she said yes.
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Stately and ornate, at the junction of the midway and the busy pedestrian mall, the infant incubator building would have been difficult to bypass. But just in case, a barker hollered: Don’t forget to see the babies! Inside, all commotion yielded to peace and common sense. Eight machines stood tall against the walls, while cordons kept the line in perfect order. The floors were clean enough to lick. Miss Maye Segner had taken charge, never revealing an ankle, a forearm, the slightest hint of skin below the collar of her starched white dress.
As soon as a child arrived, she gave it a bath in “synized” water and mustard. If it could swallow, two drops of brandy went into its mouth, and then it was rubbed with alcohol, swaddled tight, given a pink or blue ribbon, and placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. And, oh yes, the baby was given a show name, for confidentiality’s sake. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest got the funneled spoon.
Greeting every guest was Dr. Martin Arthur Coney, with a garter on his sleeve and a bow tie at his neck and a fine, curled mustache and atop his head an Edwardian boater. He lavished attention on physicians, who’d gotten free season passes from Sam, signed “Dr. Schenkein.”
Some of Coney’s women visitors favored Little Willie, two pounds, fourteen ounces, delivered
into the world by a Buffalo doctor. The twin girls were cuties. The baby boy, A.S., as they called him, arrived in bad condition; they were treating an infection in his eyes. To everyone’s delight, triplets arrived with their mother on the train from New York City.
Photographers materialized. Martin would pose an infant, its delicate life in his hands. No syllable of worry crossed his lips. Yet his eyes, in the moment when the shutter was released, looked solemn, almost grave, as if he had some inkling of the decades ahead.
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Trouble broke out at the Indian Congress exhibition. Cries. A gasp. Apache princess Ikishupaw had gone into labor. The father was Chief Many Tales. In the heat of July, the baby was born too soon—but an incubator awaited!
Was it a boy or a girl? The papers never said. “It” tipped the scales at two pounds, two ounces. The Buffalo News declared “it” the smallest child ever born—a compelling statistic, if not necessarily true.
Martin just kept winning with the reporters. They may have ignored him in Omaha, but here in Buffalo they loved him, even the medical journals. Pediatrics judged the exhibit instructive, despite its location in an area “almost wholly given over to the amusement of those frivolously inclined.” The magazine noted the 85 percent survival rate (without any clinical evidence) and further stated, “The exhibit is one of, if not the most popular, in all the Midway.”
Scientific American repeated the 85 percent survival rate. Ordinarily only about 25 percent of infants born “prematurely or weakly” lived. “Most of the babies lie with their eyes closed, and practically the only sign of life is the occasional flutter of one of the tiny hands.”
Arthur Brisbane, among the nation’s most influential journalists, skipped the specifics, waxing ecstatic in the pages of Cosmopolitan. The two features of the world’s fair most worth seeing, he opined, were “two vast extremes. The weakest and the most powerful manifestation of nature’s power. The falls of Niagara, with the great system of rivers and lakes behind them. The diminutive baby in its hot-air chamber, sightless, deaf, feeble—but with the great human race, the vast sea of organized thought back of it.” For Brisbane, the babies won the contest. “There is more to interest in the little form behind the incubator glass than in all the roaring and power of ‘the Thunder of Waters.’” Further, “The incubator baby begins life in the blissful state of Nirvana, for which the Buddhist struggles through existence.”
But one report was chilling. Whoever wrote it didn’t sign it. “The question naturally presents itself as to whether this is worthwhile; whether the race as a whole does not suffer from the preservation of these weaklings to perpetuate their kind,” the article printed in the Buffalo Medical Journal stated. “Medical science is a little illogical in respect to the results obtained, and in its efforts to preserve the individual it forgets to consider the effects of such action upon the race as a whole. Every stock raiser appreciates the necessity of healthful environment, abundant food and fresh air in maintaining a breed of animals in a state of high physical development; and sanitary science insists upon the necessity of these conditions for the physical uplifting of the human race. The stock raise [sic], however, breeds only from the most sound, healthy and perfect animals, and thus secures a physical conformation and constitution upon which the conditions of environment can act most advantageously. Medical science, on the other hand, does not hesitate to undo the advantages gained by the hygienic rules it has promulgated, by preserving the weakling, the deformed, and the tuberculous, and placing these defectives—who would otherwise surely have perished in an active struggle for existence—in a condition to transmit their deficiencies, deformities and vices to generations as yet unborn.”
This strain of eugenic thought would cast a shadow over the perception of premature infants and dim their prospects for decades to come.
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Dr. Matthew D. Mann was in possession of a fistful of complimentary passes, as befitted a person of his standing. A senior gynecologist and obstetrician at the University of Buffalo, he was someone for whom the term “pillar of society” might have been coined. Son of a senator. Frequently seen on a dais. Active in the Laymen’s Missionary League. Past president of the American Gynecological Society and, by the way, an expert in abdominal surgery. As a matter of course, he preserved clippings about his many civic and medical accolades, menus from gala dinners at which he was the honoree, and similar mementos.
Naturally, Dr. Mann had been present among the invited VIPs on the opening day of the world’s fair. Along with his season tickets to Darkest Africa and the Indian Congress was the pass for himself and a guest to the Qbata company’s interesting show. Colleagues of his apparently were sending their patients to these fellows.
Matthew D. Mann would save his season tickets for his scrapbook. And naturally, when Mr. McKinley arrived for his presidential visit, Dr. Mann, as a local dignitary, would surely have keepsakes from that.
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From the thick of the midway, a trio of showmen was watching Dr. Coney. Damned if this clever foreigner wasn’t the same “eminent Dr. Counéy” they’d last seen hawking beer in Omaha.
Frederic Thompson didn’t have any reason to pay him much mind back then. He was too busy making money hand over fist. A former architecture student from Irontown, Ohio, Thompson became so smitten by showbiz that he’d taken a gig as a janitor at Chicago’s White City, just to find a way in. He ended up getting to run a concession. Five summers later, in Omaha, he presented his own creation. The Mystic Garden was a fantastical cyclorama, a visceral 360-degree vision of heaven and hell. It was the hit of the midway.
The man who despised this show was the son of a prominent Omaha judge. He wasn’t morally offended; he was jealous. Elmer Dundy had recently ditched a budding—he thought boring—career in law to chase his jittery bliss. In 1898 he, too, was running a cyclorama on the Trans-Mississippi midway. His was called Darkness and Dawn, and by whatever quirk of the American psyche, his was also a trip though heaven and hell. The difference was, his sat gathering prairie dust while everyone bought tickets for the Mystic Garden.
By the time the afterlife purveyors arrived in Buffalo, they’d had a revelation. Thompson’s creativity was out of this world, no way to compete with that. But Dundy understood money and how to play connections. Here was the equation: Genius plus prowess would equal exponentially more than the sum of two individual talents.
In 1901, the former rivals were now partners running several concessions, including Darkness and Dawn (Dundy’s name but Thompson’s design: “The visitor witnesses the punishment meted out to scandal-mongers, umbrella borrowers and other offenders.”) But the big hit was Thompson’s latest flight of fancy, A Trip to the Moon. A dime would blast you into outer space, via sound effects and the most thrilling, lift-you-up-off-the-ground electronic engineering anyone had witnessed.
Already, Thompson and Dundy were plotting future schemes. And as they looked around, the partners couldn’t help noticing that the baby-saving show was quite the draw, at least as attractive as a ride or a freak.
Elsewhere on the midway, one Edward M. Bayliss of St. Louis was running grand-scale spectacles. His métier was dramatic reenactments of fires and wars, sanitized catastrophes for public enjoyment. In Omaha, the Battle of Manila was a victory for him. In Buffalo, he went for double, with a theatrical production called The Land of the Midnight Sun, using the new electric lighting, and The Great Fire at Dawson City.
Bayliss’s shows were highly labor-intensive. In the heat of the summer, he must have wondered why that fake French doctor, or whatever he was, should have a monopoly on a concession that, frankly, looked simpler than staging a disaster.
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September 5, 1901, was designated belated President’s Day at the Buffalo World’s Fair. William McKinley had originally planned to vis
it on June 13, but the trip was rescheduled when his wife, Ida, fell ill. Now that the couple was finally in Buffalo, the president faced two hectic days. On September 5 he rode the Great Gorge Railway at Niagara Falls, reviewed troops at the fair’s twelve-thousand-seat stadium, posed in front of the government building, and gave the requisite speech. “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress,” he stated. “They record the world’s advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise, and intellect of the people; and quicken human genius.”
The crowd that afternoon was fifty thousand thick, straining to hear, cramping their necks. One of them had come to kill the president. His name was Leon Czolgosz. And damn this smelly throng, he was stuck, trigger finger itching, too far away to get a reliable shot. That evening, McKinley and his wife, unaware of the near-assassination, toured the grounds in a carriage. Later, the electrical tower was kindled and fireworks rang through the air.
Leon Czolgosz’s mother might have told him: Tomorrow is another day.
On September 6, McKinley arrived at the fair’s Renaissance-style Temple of Music. His secretary, George B. Courtelyou, thought it a bad idea to shake the public’s hands, given the previous summer’s assassination of King Umberto I of Italy and an earlier attempt on King Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales. Courtelyou had tried twice to cancel the press-the-flesh but McKinley wouldn’t listen. That morning, as the president met with citizens who’d jammed the building (three thousand inside and another ten thousand outside), Czolgosz waited, gun in his handkerchief. Patience. These adulating tourists. This slow-moving line. Finally, William McKinley extended his hand, his flesh and blood, his pulse. Czolgosz shot him, twice.