The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  It was just after seven o’clock when the witnesses heard shuffling in the corridor and a lock clicking open. They saw Czolgosz, between guards, enter the room and walk to the chair. He was expressionless. Guards tied the restraining straps around him and attached the headgear.

  The prisoner was then permitted to speak.

  “I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people,” he said. “I am not sorry for my crime. I am sorry I could not see my father.”

  Inside the box, out of sight, the electrician—a man named Davis—waited for a signal from the warden. He got it. Then, for just over a minute, and at intervals, he delivered varying voltages—seventeen hundred being the maximum—into the body of Czolgosz. Davis was satisfied with the result. “It was,” he said, “as successful an execution as I have ever operated at in all my experience.” Other attendees concurred. There was “no scene,” one commented. “Everyone conducted himself with remarkable sang-froid.”

  Like the others, Skinner watched the extinguishing of life with little emotion. There was no more terror in the scene, he asserted, “than to see a cat catch a rat.” The prisoner’s face had been obscured by a black cap, and Skinner and his fellow witnesses had simply focused their minds on Czolgosz’s despicable act. “We all thought of the great crime against our country,” he said, “and nothing of the poor form in the chair.”

  Dr. Carlos MacDonald, an attending psychiatrist, was not as indifferent. He took pains to note that Czolgosz’s body was “thrown into a state of extreme rigidity,” as soon as the circuit closed, and that every muscle had gone into a “tonic spasm.” Another witness, a sheriff, noted that after the first shock, when physicians felt at the jugular vein for a heartbeat, they asked for a second round of electricity.

  Physicians performed the autopsy almost immediately. To their relief, Czolgosz’s brain seemed perfectly normal. Examining it in full, they could see nothing that spoke of pathology. They thus concurred with official psychiatrists and prosecuting attorneys that the assassin had been sane.

  Later that day, what remained of Leon Czolgosz was placed in a plain black casket, doused with sulfuric acid and quicklime to encourage disintegration, and buried. Czolgosz’s brother, Waldeck, who had traveled to the prison from Ohio, paid a visit to the grave. Speaking to the press, he said that he had no plans to change his name or to go into hiding.5

  And so it happened that, in the fall of 1901, the Pan-American Exposition, whose designers had worked so hard to demonstrate all the beautiful things electricity could do, became suddenly linked with the way electricity could kill. For months, Rainbow City had dazzled the public with art and sculpture that celebrated the hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls. It had captivated visitors with the magic of transformers. Its magnificent rheostat, mirroring the coming of dawn and dusk, had taken the spectacular lights of Chicago’s White City and moved them, quite literally, a step ahead. Its electric streetcars had taken visitors to and from the fair and its streetlights had illuminated walkways. Its electric elevators had ascended the fair’s highest tower, named in honor of this wondrous technology. The Queen City, some declared, should be known from then on as Electric City. Now, though, the public was reminded that electrical current could inspire fear as well as awe.

  Rainbow City’s founders and fairgoers had not, of course, been unaware of electricity’s dangers. Stories of fatal accidents near power stations and power lines appeared in the news with regularity. In New York State, in two recent years alone, ninety people had died by electric shock. By 1901, American consumers were so apprehensive about using electrical appliances that many of them shied away from newly patented toasters and irons. And at the Pan-American fair, electricity was blamed for a peculiar malady. In October, the Buffalo Express printed a column about a newly discovered ailment, the “Exposition Collapse.” Its symptoms were “exhaustive nervousness” and, in the worst cases, “nervous prostration.” Apparently, said a consulting physician, people believed that the “continuous use of such tremendous quantities of electricity, creating such a powerful light night after night for six months had resulted in diminishing certain properties in the atmosphere, whose presence was beneficial to the nervous system.” The physician readily dismissed the association, arguing that nervous prostration in Buffalo was more likely due to the “steady strain of receiving guests and sightseeing and rushing around.”

  The public was also mindful of the dangers of electricity, thanks to the high-profile rivalry between Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse and their support for alternating current on the one hand, and Thomas Edison and his low-voltage direct current on the other. In the early 1890s, Edison threw money and celebrity into persuading the public that alternating current was hazardous, and he demonstrated its deadliness by using it to kill animals, mostly dogs. He could do little, however, to explain away the fact that alternating current could travel long distances, and was less costly.

  Buffalonians had certainly read about the “current wars.” If they knew anything about recent history, they were also aware that their city had a unique relationship with electrocution. One of the inventors of the electric chair was a Buffalo dentist named Alfred Southwick. In the late 1880s, he launched a campaign for more “humane” capital punishment. Representing the bluntly named New York State Death Commission, Southwick wrote in 1887 to Thomas Edison, asking for advice on electrocuting the condemned. The commission wanted an alternative to hanging—something more “civilized.”

  Edison replied, saying that he couldn’t help. After a few months’ consideration, however, he wrote back, saying he had just the thing: one of George Westinghouse’s machines. “The most suitable apparatus for the purpose,” he advised, “is that class of dynamo-electric machine which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of those are known as ‘alternating machines,’ manufactured principally in this country by Mr. Geo. Westinghouse.” When the current from these machines entered the human body, Edison explained, the result was “instantaneous death.”

  The commission was impressed and urged the New York State legislature to move forward. They did, setting 1889 as the date by which capital punishment would make the transition. Edison’s men did not hide their hope that AC would become known as “the executioner’s current,” and that condemned men would be “Westinghoused” in the same way that they had been guillotined (after French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin).

  Westinghouse, outraged, tried to hire an attorney to challenge the constitutionality of “electricide.” When William Kemmler, a vegetable peddler from Buffalo, became the first person condemned to die in the electric chair, Westinghouse paid to help Kemmler appeal his death sentence. The appeal failed. To make matters worse, the protracted electrocution of Kemmler in 1890 in Auburn was nothing short of a disaster. The prisoner shouted in pain, bled, gasped; his skin and hair burned; and his coat caught on fire. He had, said some, been “roasted to death.”

  Eleven years had passed since Kemmler’s death. Alternating current not only had become standard for executions but also was used by industry nationwide. Edison’s campaign had backfired. George Westinghouse had been awarded the contract to light Chicago’s White City, and, at that fair, as well as in Buffalo, the technology linked utility with spectacle and awe.

  Events in the fall of 1901 brought the perversities of electricity to center stage, but not everyone was disgusted by them. If for some people electricity linked distressing images of beauty and death, for others the association was strangely compelling. In this era of science and reason, individuals were sometimes drawn to mysterious forces—they went to Niagara Falls, after all—to see how close they could come to fatality. The electric chair held this same sort of dark appeal. It helped explain why more than a thousand people applied to see Czolgosz’s death. And it helped explain why, shortly after that electrocution, hundreds of people filed into Rainbow City to see the Animal King attach electrodes to the ears of an elephant.6

>   V

  THE WEEPING WILLOWS

  On Friday, November first, the day before the grand farewell, the Exposition opened without fanfare. Workmen hauled packed crates to railroad cars and concession owners tried to pretend the fair wasn’t in the throes of ending. Exposition buildings and Midway acts opened and closed on schedule, and demonstrations and drills went forward. On the Grand Court at night, fountains sent up plumes of colored mist; on the edges of buildings, the luminous jewels of incandescent lights waxed and waned.

  Alice Cenda wanted nothing more than an ordinary day, where hours passed without incident, and people, particularly the Bostock people, took little interest in her work. She got it. She dutifully performed as the Doll Lady in her salon, greeted and dismissed her audiences, ate her supper, and in the early evening settled into her apartment. A Bostock caretaker fastened her doors.

  Several hours later, at 11:30 p.m., a carriage with three men pulled up on Elmwood Avenue behind the fence on the backside of her concession. Tony got out and entered the grounds at the West Amherst gate. He moved from shadow to shadow and threaded his way behind the Exposition Hospital and the scenic railway. Mingling with late-night cleaners and sweepers and passing by weary performers, he approached Chiquita’s ticket booth. It was dark, but he was able to look through the window of the booth down to the floor.

  “There she was,” he recalled. Maneuvering her through the opening—no bigger than a cat door—wasn’t as easy as they had hoped, however, and knowing that Bostock’s men were on the prowl, they worked fast. Tony pulled and Alice struggled, and she wriggled out. Tony carried her to the fence and signaled to his friends. The two men—fellow workers in the Indian Congress—were there, waiting. “I boosted her over,” Tony said, “and they caught her.” The only casualty was Alice’s dress, which snagged on the top of the barbed-wire fence. Once Tony made it over, the carriage pulled away.

  Judge Thomas H. Rochford had probably seen a lot of hasty marriages in his time, and had helped tie the knot for dozens of seemingly mismatched people, but this might have topped them all. He had gone to bed when the knock came at his door. He could see a carriage outside, waiting, and he invited the couple inside. Tony said he was of legal age and Rochford knew Chiquita—he had been to the fair with his family. Tony didn’t have money, but he promised to pay the judge later, and Rochford was willing to help. He interviewed the couple, signed a marriage certificate, and watched them drive away.

  Maybe it was the commotion of escape that alerted the Animal King to Chiquita’s disappearance. Within the hour, the showman knew she was gone. He sent for bodyguards and the Exposition police, and his lies slid out as smooth as butter. He had been startled awake, he said, by “cries of help, coming from Chiquita’s headquarters.” He had thrown on some clothes, raced to her rooms, and, much to his horror, seen “evidences of a struggle having taken place in her room.” There was only one conclusion: Chiquita had been kidnapped. He needed the help of city police. Minutes later, a squad of Buffalo detectives was on the hunt.

  The mistake the couple made was to go back to the Exposition. They wanted some things to take on their honeymoon trip, Tony recalled. But when they pulled up to the West Amherst gate, they could see they were done. A Bostock clown, still in greasepaint, moved out of the dark and blocked their way. “He shoved a gun under my nose,” Tony said, and, as the clown wrenched Alice away, he shouted words at Tony whose meaning we can only guess. “You to the weeping willows,” he yelled, and ran off with his prey. Chiquita could do little to resist. “For once,” she said, “I wished I was big.”

  Chiquita and Bostock.

  When she was delivered to Frank Bostock, Chiquita cried, and apologized. That wasn’t quite enough for the Animal King, though. He wanted to teach his Doll Lady a lesson. Being four feet taller than she was, and probably two hundred pounds heavier, this was not difficult. He knocked her down, and she fell to the floor, “senseless.” Some of Bostock’s employees wondered whether she would survive.7

  VI

  THE GRATEFUL GUESTS

  Weather forecaster David Cuthbertson, when asked about prospects for Farewell Day at the Exposition, offered a mixed opinion. “There are indications of rain, possibly by tomorrow evening,” he announced, “but there are reports that cause me to hope for a change.” Cuthbertson’s forecast was impossible to get wrong. November second dawned as a sunny day, and the only clouds that appeared were flighty and meaningless.

  At the booths and shows on the Midway, the day began with good-byes. Workers who had labored side by side for more than six months offered good lucks for Charleston or St. Louis, exchanged souvenir picture books, and collected autographs. They produced more gifts for their managers—diamond rings, stickpins, and loving cups. And they grew nostalgic. A veteran spieler on the Midway could hardly hold back his tears. The guards, the ticket takers, the chair boys had all done so much, he said, and worked so very hard. “There ain’t very many shows I hates to go way from . . . but this is the exception which proves the rule,” he asserted. He hadn’t expected it, either. “Buffalo people and all the people up in this cold, chilly region are half dead and don’t know it,” he declared. But “give them a little more time than anybody else to do a thing and you will git it done bettr’n anybody else can do it. . . .”8

  As Midway performers departed, Buffalo leaders and the press beamed with satisfaction. The fair, they said, had made such a difference for some of these people. They had come to Buffalo untutored, poor-mannered, and unkempt, and, by the end of the season, they had been transformed.

  The “Esquimaux,” they said, had been “like so many children.” But now many spoke English and almost every male had bought himself an American suit of clothes. (In fact, many of these Canadian performers had been on the American fair circuit before.) The press claimed that the Filipinos had also blossomed, and some distinguished local women had even taken them into their social circles for meetings and meals. The best part of all was that these newest “possessions” would take recently acquired habits back to their homes. When they returned to their islands, they would introduce civilized customs and convey “the benevolent purpose of the American Government.”

  Africans, too, would carry new habits across the Atlantic. “One great ambition of the native inhabitants of Darkest Africa on the North Midway is to be civilized,” commented an Express reporter. There was, he went on, such a desire among the Africans to adopt Western manners and dress that quarrels among performers had sometimes grown violent. “The taunt that Chief So and So was more civilized than some other chief,” he said, “brought out the knives and clubs.”

  Another newsman remarked that some African performers, having arrived in a crude and “primitive” condition, now walked the streets of Buffalo “clad as are American negroes, with a bearing that is stronger and better. . . .” He claimed that at least half of the people in the African village hoped to remain in the States. In fact, eight Africans had recently broken away from their guard and were seen boarding a streetcar before they were caught.

  Some of the men and women of the Midway villages left with gratitude and envy of America to be sure. And some took away expertise in marketing or technology that they could employ to their advantage at home. Yet many probably had mixed feelings. They had found out what it was like to be dark-skinned strangers in a northern American city. They had been gawked at, scoffed at, and scrutinized. They had spent months performing for people like Mabel Barnes—earnest, well-meaning white people—who had studied them as specimens of subhumans.

  Darkest Africa performers with organizer, Xavier Pene.

  It wasn’t just Africans or Filipinos or Indians who found themselves on the opposite side of the looking glass or on the receiving end of stares. Ben Ellington and other Southern performers in the Old Plantation were certainly aware of how much the progressive black community in Buffalo disliked what they did to make money. They were also alert to the way that Northern people, of all backgrounds
, dismissed them. Ben reported that his tips from Northern customers were far inferior to those offered by Southerners. He was eager to get back home to Georgia.

  Then there were performers who would have been happy to take American “civilization” and to eliminate it altogether. The infamous Filipino Pablo Arcusa had brought to the fair little liking for American beliefs and policies, and another insurgent, Gregorea Tongana, had been discovered in Rainbow City in the fall. A banduris player who deeply resented American occupation of his homeland, Tongana had served on the staff of General Malabar of the Philippine resistance, and he later auditioned in Manila for a part in the band. Other band members knew who he was, and, until he fled, gave him help and cover.

  Finally, there were those who never made it home. Historians have explained that this wasn’t just bad luck, but rather a side effect of imperial encounters. Along with guns and money, Westerners had for years carried to indigenous peoples their invisible baggage of germs. In this case, the routes were reversed. In Buffalo, tuberculosis swept through the Indian Congress and sickened eight people. In the Filipino Village, it killed Tastuala Ruyes, twenty-five years old. It also took the life of Henak from Labrador. Mumps infected the Hawaiians and measles hit the Esquimaux Village, striking eleven Natives and killing seven-month-old Sebelia Nikolenik. Others became infected with diseases en route to the Pan-American fair. Social Darwinists at the time said that events like these gave a firsthand demonstration of the survival of the fittest and showed why some groups were vanishing. To them, every death was a lesson in evolution.9

  VII