Great acclaim thundered up and Daniel Burnham stood briefly to receive the deserved adulation of those who might dare follow in his successful exposition venture footsteps.
Alderman Sullivan continued.
“We could not have come as far as we have today if not for the enthusiasm, the civic pride and untiring efforts of all those assembled here. We are especially thankful to Exposition President Milburn, the Commander who has valiantly led this great army of businessmen, architects, artists, participating nations, laborers and supporting citizens to the threshold of victory.”
Thunderous applause rang out. The Alderman paused for effect when the ovation began to subside, making sure that all eyes were his. He cleared his throat so that his words would not go unclearly heard.
“But we are especially honored this evening to welcome back—to once again enjoy the full undistracted attentions and boundless energies of Mr. William James Conners, now that the Canadian government has, regrettably, denied his bid to build for that country what would have been the greatest, most extensive grain processing facility in the entire world.”
The relaxed atmosphere of the cigar smoke-filled room suddenly erupted in a wave of charged murmurs at hearing the momentous news. Everyone present had feared Fingy’s plan and the devastation it would surely have wrought upon the city. Yet the untouchable narcissist Conners had the unmitigated sand to stride into that banquet room and sit there among them as an ally, gloating, pretending to support the endeavors of the united tens of thousands of Buffalo citizens to bring to life an undertaking which the megalomaniac’s own planned single-minded Canadian endeavor might well have annihilated.
The Alderman continued.
“And thus, Canada’s loss is Buffalo’s gain, as it were. So welcome back, Fingy my friend, to the Pan American Exposition Company family. Let us all now raise a glass and drink a toast to all the senior members of this directors’ board, these many fine and loyal citizens, the shining lights of our great city to whom we are indebted and tonight whom we are gathered here to honor. Here, here!” he shouted.
The Alderman brought his champagne to his lips to the booming of voices following his call, toasting themselves and each other. JP smiled as all joined with him, then turned and raised his glass one more time to Fingy Conners as their eyes met and locked, and the Alderman sipped again.
Fingy’s champagne glass trembled in his infuriated hand, his face crimson with anger. The moment the toast was finished, he shot out of the banquet hall like a lightning bolt, practically dragging Kennedy with him, cursing and spitting his humiliation. He headed down Main Street to the telegraph station at his offices at the Courier to try and determine exactly what the hell was going on.
As Fingy stormed out, Alderman Sullivan and Mayor Diehl exchanged broad grins across a calmed sea of crisp white linen and sparkling silver.
Dominion Day
July 1st marks the date that marks Canada’s Dominion Day.
In the week preceding, Ontario newspapers in Toronto, Hamilton, London and Niagara Falls were filled with advertisements placed by Buffalo shopping emporiums and hotels welcoming the hordes of Canadian celebrants who annually flowed over the border bridges to spend the national holiday. They arrived by train, carriage and lake steamer to celebrate their heritage by means of a shopping spree. The annual ritual proved a bonanza for the Buffalo businessmen whose advertised combined Dominion Day-4th Of July Sale produced the year’s greatest windfall other than that of Christmas.
Herbert Alexander Meldrum was on site at his department store the morning of July 1 to personally welcome the Canadian shoppers. The façade of the ultra-modern establishment across the street from the Tifft House Hotel was alive with the fluttering flags of the Dominion and of the Province of Ontario. Canadian guests filled the elegant hostelry.
Mr. Meldrum’s family was descended from an illustrious Scottish line and despite his being barely thirty years old he had made a great success for himself in the dry goods business.
Concurrently, old Joshua Lovejoy was suffering another bout of severe melancholy.
It was thought that the later in life that a woman gave birth the more prone to serious and regrettable mood problems her offspring might be. Joshua’s mother was 46 when he was born. She died a few days thereafter. Throughout his long and painful sixty eight years his demons had trailed after him doggedly. Most vivid in his mind’s recollection were the terrifying accounts of the murder and horrifying barbaric scalping of his grandmother Sarah Lovejoy on December 30, 1813 at the behest of the invading British and their Indian collaborators. Lovejoy’s earliest memories from childhood were of the terrifying stories his aunt had recounted with relish, vivid with bloody detail, that had haunted his tormented sleep ever since.
The previous week he had visited the library of the Buffalo Historical Society and there discovered letters written by two sisters in 1876 whose family name, St. John, was familiar to him as relating to the stories of the incident his aunt had recounted. Curious, he sat down and began to read. For the next few hours he was unable to remove himself from the chair he’d occupied.
Far more elaborate and complex than the bare-bones version spun by his aunt, the recollected elements within the letters penned by the two St. John sisters who had escaped from the Indians on that fateful night, then returned to view the horrific aftermath, sent him spiraling downward like the whirling seeds shed by the great elm.
Lovejoy, smelling of spirits, teetered unsteadily out front of the Tifft House hotel, scowling at the well-dressed Canadian visitors. Sarah Lovejoy’s house had been built right on the very spot the hotel now occupied. She had died in agony and terror on the very spot he now stood. With him he carried a sturdy box and a megaphone. He was dressed in the style of thirty years previous, the garments ragged, yet clean. His hair was dyed jet black and was so dull that even with oil applied to give it a sheen, it was obvious the hue was not naturally his own.
Lovejoy crossed Main Street and set up his Lautz Soap box outside the main entrance of the Meldrum Store and commenced with his tirade, shouting through a megaphone constructed of green shellacked cardboard.
“They call themselves Canadians in a transparent charade of distraction to disguise themselves from the onerous truth that they are in fact British, and enthusiastic Royalists to boot!” he bellowed.
The scurrying forms of lovely Canadian women and their well-dressed gentlemen escorts were at first taken aback. They hastened by, trying to avoid the vehement exhortations amplified by the horn. As Lovejoy’s anger increased, the women became frightened. Those who were approaching the Meldrum Store from across the street or down the block turned and walked the other way.
“Shakespeare himself said it best,” Lovejoy went on, “‘What’s in a name?’ Those British scoundrels across the river over there thought that by takin’ on a new name that this would change things? That somehow, their character would be transformed along with it? Canada, as they have more recently come to call their prison, is nothing more than a toady British colony, its inmates shiverin’ with cowardice, a British possession terrified to stand up on its own, rollin’ over on its pitiful stomach whenever its boss’ depraved appetites demand satisfyin’!”
A sales girl at the front counter in the Meldrum store realized people were no longer coming through the doorway. She poked her curious head out to see the increasingly frantic Mr. Lovejoy preaching wildly, pedestrians detouring well out of their way to avoid his rancor. She ran back inside to fetch the manager, but as she flew down the aisle past Ladies’ Silks, the manager could be seen approaching from the opposite direction on the arm of Mr. Meldrum himself.
“Sir,” she panted as she ran up to the owner, “there’s an insane man in front of the store scaring customers away!”
Meldrum would have none of that, and with his walking stick ready as a weapon, the doors of the emporium flung open to disgorge him almost into the lap of the dedicated Mr. Lovejoy.
“That my
friends,” shouted Joshua Lovejoy, “over there on the other side of the river so close that a child’s toy arrow could reach it, lies Great Britain, and don’t you dare forget it! Their festerin’ colony on our very doorstep is rotten through and through!”
“Say you!” shouted Mr. Meldrum, “You come down off that box at once! You are frightening people away!”
“The worst oppressors of men in the history of this earth, that is the contemptible title that the English imperialists enjoy!” Lovejoy continued, undaunted.
Meldrum grabbed at Mr. Lovejoy’s waistcoat and pulled. The manager lingered there not knowing what to do.
“Don’t just stand there, Whitcomb! Help me get rid of this trash!” admonished the store owner.
Together the men tried to dismount Mr. Lovejoy, but a solid whack delivered from the lecturer’s cane across Mr. Meldrum’s head ended that. Whitcomb helped his employer up off the pavement and back into the store.
“Telephone the police!” Whitcomb shouted toward the direction of the telephone.
“The scourge of the entire globe!” Lovejoy ranted on, “That’s what them people are! If them cowardly Royalists to the north had an ounce of gumption or a speck of backbone, don’t you think they’d have declared their independensh long ago, the same as we...we have?”
Lovejoy stopped a moment to take a swig from his bottle, then resumed the tirade.
“It wasn’t until thirteen long years after the start of our American Revolution in 1776 that we finally had a true government with George Washington as our President. Thirteen endless, arduous, bloody years during which we had to continue fightin’ off them British scum any way we might, and still they refused to back away! They stopped our American ships at sea and on our Great Lakes and boarded them and kidnapped over six thousand of our citizens and enslaved them into their French war with Napoleon! White American slaves, forshed to die for the diabolical British! They took American boys as young as ten years old for cannon fodder! What sort of animals are them Britishers? What levelsh of cruelty have they not sh…schtriven mightily to attain?”
Increasingly besotted, he looked down at a refined gentleman clearly from a monied background.
“How about you? Are you a white slaver, monsieur? “ he asked. “Hey my canuck fr…friend! I’m talkin’ to you! You got any Americans locked up in your Ontario coal shellar, perhaps?”
Lovejoy’s speech was beginning to heavily slur.
Detectives Jim Sullivan and John Geary had heard the commotion from up Main Street. They had been on high alert for pickpockets attracted to the city from all outlying regions by the promise of the bounty contained in the Canadian shoppers’ purses and vest pockets and had just come from policing the Flint & Kent Store. They ran up to Lovejoy and ordered him to stop.
“You cease that tomfoolery right this instant, you!” shouted Jim, as Lovejoy’s cane connected with his skull. It glanced off, landing hard on his shoulder, recalling an old injury.
“It’s not as if the damn British navy is going to come a-sailin’ up the St. Lawrence and begin bombardin’ you spineless people!” Lovejoy continued. “You can end your evil ash…assosh…association anytime you choose, and yet you do not choose! What in God’s name is wrong with you? What are you people waitin’ for?”
His whiskey bottle at that very moment dropped to the walkway with a crash resulting in an explosion of glass shards. The heavy smell of drunkenness surrounded the orator.
Geary tackled the lecturer and toppled him like a rotted stump. Jim rose up from the sidewalk with the great urge to break a few of Lovejoy’s teeth but the pathetic nature of the man’s condition stopped him.
“You’re comin’ with us. I’ll put you in wrist shackles if you so much as try and resist detention!” Jim warned angrily.
Lovejoy was suddenly crestfallen. He offered no resistance, but considering his inebriated state walked quite handily to the lockup. He toddled without coaxing straight into the opened cell.
“Them Redcoats and their red savages chopped the bloody scalp right off me dear sweet grandmother!” he sobbed as the door clanged shut.
Sullivan and Geary walked off to write him up.
Lovejoy looked around his cell, not surprised at where he had ended up, but disappointed he had not been allowed his entire say outside the H.A. Meldrum Store on Main Street.
With nothing else to occupy his mind, his tormented psyche replayed the old story, yet again, from the beginning.
The Exposition Takes Shape
As of the first of August, 1437 applications had been received for permission to operate various kinds of concessions within the boundaries of the Pan American Exposition. Many of the applications were for shows of a kind that could not be permitted at a great moral exhibition such as the Pan-American was intended to be. Some were so utterly absurd as to tax one’s ability to understand the mental processes of the applicant.
If the Exposition officials had carried out the proposition presented by A.H. Kilian of Indianapolis, visitors to the Exposition would have had the opportunity of gazing upon something extraordinary, but Mr. Kilian’s idea was not acted upon for reasons which must be patent upon any respectful American.
Mr. Kilian proposed to erect a statue of George Washington 80 stories tall, having elevators running up both legs and through the body to the head, where various forms of amusement would be provided; to have restaurants, beer halls and shows of various kinds spread along from the hips to the chin, and to have a great stairway encircling the statue from top to bottom. Secretary Fleming turned down the idea, which at first he thought must be a hoax, explaining that it “did not recommend itself” to the officials.
Other ideas that were turned away included a gigantic baked bean pot fifty feet in diameter inside which people would be served beans put up especially for Boston people.
A man from Paris wanted a space three meters by ten to build a restaurant smack dab in the middle of the esplanade, disregarding the effect it would visit upon the overall artistic concept.
Another wanted a space three feet by twenty-five feet alongside one of the permanent structures, the Grecian-columned Albright Art Gallery, on which to knock together a lean-to from which to sell milk and pie.
George C. Tilyon of Coney Island, who was awarded the steeple-chase concession, planned to also show there a Negro he had picked up in St. Louis who could drink a bucket of water, then shoot it out his nose and mouth in imitation of a whale, a fire engine or an electric fountain.
A Texas man wrote that he was the proprietor of the only genuine four-legged girl in the U.S. and wished to exhibit her at the Exposition. Another asked for permission to erect a derrick at the brink of Niagara Falls that would swing people out over the cataract. Another applied to exhibit a family of claw-footed hook-handed humans.
New York publisher Roy Crandall, falsely promoting himself as an agent of the Exposition, announced a competition to choose a Miss Pan-American Beauty to represent North America on the official Pan-American seal. Anna McLean of Paterson N.J. was piqued at not having been chosen and thus killed herself by drinking carbolic acid. She had entered her photograph in a contest supported by the New York Sunday World. When she discovered that she was not among the finalists chosen, Miss McLean wrote letters to all of her friends and to the directors of the Pan American expressing her utter disappointment, and then dressed in her best gown, her hair beautifully arranged and wearing her grandmother’s diamond brooch, drank the poison and lay down on her lace bed pillow to die in agony.
Underscoring the futility of her tragedy, the newspaper’s scheme petered out without any winner having been selected after the Exposition’s publicity department denied any connection whatsoever with publisher Crandall’s beauty contest.
The city of Buffalo, having wrested the honor to mount the exposition from the determined clutches of Detroit, had to face the fact that the Queen City had no previous qualification in the field of hosting such an international fête. Buffalo’s
planners could only look to the Chicago Fair of 1893 as a guide for possible predicaments and complications. The challenge taken on by the city and its optimistic citizens was admittedly monumental.
When subscriptions were first offered in 1899 a huge swell of support welled up immediately. Buffalonians rich and poor, from captains of industry to immigrant schoolchildren, backed the grand exposition with enthusiastic pledges of hard-earned money. On the first day, nearly a half million dollars was pledged.
In July, when the fair was taking recognizable shape, Mayor Conrad Diehl, as top man in the hierarchy of esteemed citizens backing the exposition, experienced dreadful nightmares concerning fire consuming the entire scheme. He and Director General Buchanan were greatly agitated over the failure of the city’s Aldermanic Committee on Fire to act upon their request for additional fire protection for the Pan American grounds.
The Mayor warned the committee that if action was not taken immediately, he intended to order fire apparatus transferred from city firehouses to be established on the grounds to protect the huge buildings rising there.
“I never saw a body of men so slow in acting on a proposition in my life as these aldermen in charge of fire,” fumed the Mayor. “Petty jealousy and an enlarged imagination of their own importance seem to have completely carried them away. If they don’t do something at their meeting this very night I will order the largest steamer in the Fire Department to the grounds tomorrow, even if it has to be put under a tent!
“Every night I fear that fire may occur on the grounds. Locomotive engines are passing frequently on the tracks nearby and a spark from one of those might start a conflagration which would wipe out all the work done thus far. After all the progress we have made, a fire there is a dreadful thing to contemplate. It will mean an end to the exposition, a shame put upon the entire city for the next few decades, and a great loss to the thousands of people in Buffalo who are stockholders in the company.
Fingy Conners & The New Century Page 16