The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

by Margaret Creighton

  The men who had led the Exposition and fought for it in the throes of crisis went separate ways. William Buchanan, director-general, continued to represent the United States in Latin American affairs. Fondly known as “the diplomat of the Americas,” he brokered discussions and agreements in Argentina, Panama, and Venezuela. He continued his work in international business enterprises as well, marketing free enterprise to his friends in the Southern Hemisphere. His family was still living in Buffalo, and he was actively involved in diplomatic work in London in 1909, when, at age fifty-seven, he abruptly died. His body was shipped back to Buffalo for burial, and Pan-American officials served as his honorary pallbearers.

  Buchanan’s partner in Rainbow City, John Milburn, tried to return to some level of normalcy in the fall of 1901, but it wasn’t easy. Even after attendants removed oxygen tanks and electric fans from McKinley’s sickroom on the second floor of his home, Milburn contended with reminders of the president’s death. He now lived in the most famous house in Buffalo. Souvenir hunters took stones from his driveway and leaves from his trees. “Kodak fiends” surveyed the house from every angle. One man brought a chisel to the site to take away a few bricks. Touring coaches also stopped outside and guides used megaphones to identify the windows of the room where McKinley breathed his last. Some sightseers even asked to be admitted to the house.

  In 1904, Milburn left Buffalo for New York City, where he carried on as a high-profile lawyer. He served as counsel to the New York Stock Exchange, and as a director of the American Express Company and the New York Life Insurance Company. He moved to an estate on Long Island, where his sons continued to play polo. Like his Pan-American cohort, William Buchanan, John Milburn died in London. It was 1930, and he was seventy-nine. His house on Delaware Avenue was torn down in the late 1950s.

  Conrad Diehl had had enough of mayoring by the end of 1901 and left office just after the Exposition closed. Some said he was devastated by the death of McKinley—a painful blow to his treasured project. Diehl’s time as mayor was marked not only by planning and hosting the Exposition but also by bringing electricity from Niagara Falls to operate streetcars and city lights. He also had to cope with a treasurer who ran away with more than $40,000 in city funds. After years of dealing with rich Buffalo businessmen, Diehl moved back into more comfortable work as a doctor and returned to his large practice. A robust man who had almost never been ill, he proved he was mortal on a stormy night in February 1918, when he slipped on ice during his evening walk and died a week later. “The Father of the Pan American,” who was also known as “The Beloved Physician,” was seventy-five years old.18

  The man who was made President of the United States in Buffalo, Theodore Roosevelt, established one of the most energetic presidencies in American history. Pursuing some of the same concerns he had announced when he first set foot in the Temple of Music in Rainbow City, he attacked corporate wealth. He continued to promote the doctrine of manliness, as well as the well-being of Anglo-Saxons. He embraced Latin America, as long as Latin America did not engage in “chronic wrongdoing,” and when it did, he embraced sending in the United States Navy to sort things out. (This policy, the Roosevelt Corollary, justified sending US troops to Latin America more than thirty times between 1898 and 1930.)

  Roosevelt was also known for land conservation. Echoing the themes of the Pan-American Exposition, he asserted in 1908 that “America’s position in the world has been attained by the extent and thoroughness of the control we have achieved over nature.” But to maintain this position, and to encourage the out-of-doors hardihood he championed, he believed that wilderness—forests, mountains, and waterways—needed to be protected. As president, Roosevelt created game reserves, bird refuges, and national parks, altogether setting aside 230 million acres of land.

  Roosevelt likely took many lessons from his days at the Buffalo Exposition, but embracing personal security was not one of them. He made a point of striding about Buffalo in the wake of the shooting, waving away worries about his safety. Six years later, on New Year’s Day in 1907, he set a record by shaking hands with 8,105 people at the White House. Five years after that, his confidence, or faith in his constituents, or both, almost proved fatal. On October 14, 1912, while campaigning (unsuccessfully) in Wisconsin for a third term in office, he stood up in a carriage to greet a well-wisher. Another man took advantage of his exposure and shot him point-blank in the chest.

  Roosevelt’s folded campaign speech—it was a long one—helped shield him from a deep bullet wound, and he went on with his lecture. Even as his chest bled and his voice weakened, he persisted in talking. Only later did he agree to an X-ray, which showed a bullet in one of his ribs. It was never removed. John Schrank, the man who shot Roosevelt, claimed he had been inspired by a dream about William McKinley, who had appeared to him as a ghost and had spoken to him from his coffin.

  The speech the wounded Roosevelt gave that night in Wisconsin had more than one echo of the shocking event in Buffalo. While continuing to remind his audience that he had been shot, and that he was all right, and that people could not use his injury as a chance to “escape” his speech, Roosevelt talked about what might have stirred up the would-be assassin. He blamed the “daily newspapers,” with their “mendacity and slander which . . . incite weak and violent natures to crimes of violence.” But he went further than that. “The incident that has just occurred,” he said, signaled an ominous trend in America, where, if nothing was done, “we shall see the creed of the ‘Havenots’ arraigned against the creed of the ‘Haves.’” If that day arrives, he said, shootings such as the one he just suffered would happen again and again. “When you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won,” he concluded, “it will be an ill day for our country.”

  After William McKinley had been killed, no politician would have dared to make such an assertion. It would have sounded disrespectful, unpatriotic, and radical. It would have sounded too much like Emma Goldman, who, in response to McKinley’s assassination, had suggested that Leon Czolgosz’s violence was a result of “conditions,” and explained that “there is ignorance, cruelty, starvation, poverty, suffering, and some victim grows tired of waiting.”

  Theodore Roosevelt did not readily champion the causes of working people. He worked from the top, not the bottom, targeting concentrated wealth held in trusts, banks, railroads, and corporations. Through his actions, though, and in rare speeches like this one, he did more than most presidents to address the inequalities of wealth at the turn of the century.19

  Roosevelt never forgot to be kind to Ida McKinley. He sent wreaths to be put on her husband’s tomb on Memorial Day and apologized if he went through Canton and did not stop to see her. For her part, Mrs. McKinley submerged herself in grief. She visited her husband’s cemetery vault daily, cared for the fresh flowers that arrived, and wept. Edith Roosevelt, the new first lady, occasionally sent flowers to the site, and Ida McKinley sent them back after they had withered. In her house, she knitted slippers for charity and ate meals in silence. A friend visiting in 1902 said that the house, with its stale air and dead quiet, seemed like a “cemetery,” and that its resident looked forward to her own death. “I only wait and want to go,” Mrs. McKinley had lamented.

  Contrary to general expectations, the death of her husband, and the grief that attended it, did not kill Ida McKinley. After several years of unhappy seclusion, she began to emerge. Her health seemed to improve. Her visits to the vault lessened, and she uncovered long-lost passions, such as her support for women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony had earlier sent her a four-volume history of the movement, and nurses read the books aloud to her at night. She began to take an interest in theater and relished the company of her grandnieces—one of whom reminded her of her long-lost daughter Katie. In 1907, Mrs. McKinley suffered a bout of the flu, and, shortly afterward, a stroke. She died on May 26, 1907. President R
oosevelt headed the government delegation at her funeral.20

  VII

  THE PROUD QUEEN

  The 1900s looked like they would be good to Buffalo. The money that helped build Rainbow City paid for more industry, new blast furnaces and grain elevators and more railroads. The century that began with Buffalo celebrating the subjugation of a waterfall became the century that saw the city succeed in smelting iron ore, as it became one of the world’s biggest centers for steelmaking. The Pan-American Exposition had done its part in honoring the transition when some of its lumber went into the construction of laborers’ homes near the Lackawanna Steel Works. The Exposition also generated dozens of new enterprises and manufacturing plants, and thousands of new jobs. The Larkin Soap Company echoed other businesses when its executives said that exhibiting at the Pan-American had been “the best investment we ever made.”

  The Queen City boomed through World War I. During the next war and into the 1950s, there seemed to be no stopping it, as Buffalo’s industrialists contracted to build automobiles, airplanes, ships, engines, and tanks. Some city boosters held onto the idea that Buffalo might match Chicago, even as Chicago spread wider and taller and became more populous. In the late 1920s, local advertisers maintained that Buffalo only needed better branding and more hustle. “Any other place in America with half the natural endowment of the Niagara Area,” commented a local writer, “would be chasing New York for first honors and laughing at the other cities. Look at Cleveland—just a spot on Lake Erie, and not a very good spot, either. Look at Chicago—entirely surrounded by prairie and bossed by bandits—or St. Louis, with nothing from Nature except the stickiest, muggiest climate this side of Sheol.”

  More sensible city leaders knew that catching up to New York City or Chicago was a fanciful ambition. Even Detroit and Cleveland had surged past Buffalo in population. Yet they dreamed of greatness, particularly in midcentury, when the booming economy helped Buffalo become a center for modern art, contemporary music, and, thanks to the new state university, cutting-edge humanities. An advertisement produced by the local Chamber of Commerce in 1963 echoed Pan-American boosters. Buffalo was the “port for 5,000 visiting ships of every flag . . . blast furnace for 7,220,500 tons of steel . . . terminal for more than 20,158,555 tons of rail freight . . . manufacturer of products worth $2 billion.” It was “flour mill for the nation” and the “research center of the world.”21

  And then there was a fall—a fall so protracted and deep that it made McKinley’s death feel like a bump in the road.

  Buffalo, once the grand way station—the famous inland port with grain elevators as imposing as office buildings—became known as a city of rust and struggle. In 1959, a project that had gestated since the 1920s became reality, as engineers completed the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a massive canal that offered shipping companies an opportunity to bypass Buffalo and send their freighters directly from the western Great Lakes through to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Thankfully, there was still the power of steel. In 1965, Buffalo produced more than seven million tons of steel at Bethlehem’s Lackawanna plant, and, nearby, factories stamped cars out of the metal.

  And then that, too, was gone. Bethlehem Steel, succumbing to the triple challenges of foreign competition, new regulations, and management miscalls, first laid off workers and then, in the late 1970s, fired them. Auto plants closed. Manufacturing jobs withered and died. By the early 1980s, big-muscled Buffalo had atrophied. In April 1983, a Buffalo company advertised for forty workers and ten thousand candidates stood in line. Four months later, the Lackawanna steel mill saw its last day of production. Its workers did not go out without comment, however. In the middle of the night on August 16, they raised the international distress signal on top of a blast furnace. The upside-down American flag, measuring more than five hundred square feet and illuminated by two big mercury vapor lamps, blew its message of defiance out over the lake. It was said it could be seen as far north as Niagara Falls.22

  It was in the wake of these losses, and in the face of a diminishing population—Buffalo went below three hundred thousand in 2000—that the city celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Pan-American Exposition. The university, the historical society, museum curators, city officials, local historians, and enthusiasts of all sorts collaborated to consider the meaning of Rainbow City. They pondered the implications of a fair that, in 1901, had encouraged an interconnected hemisphere. What did the fair now mean in the “global” twenty-first century? How did questions that the fair exposed—about racial justice, economic equality, the American mission, the promise and perils of technology—persist and change? The anniversary inspired a Pan-American Exposition website—with virtual visits to the fair—symposia, exhibits, tours, histories, not to mention a best-selling novel, City of Light, which brought to life some of Buffalo’s best-known characters.

  The anniversary, like the Exposition it honored, generated differences of opinion. Did 1901 represent Buffalo’s “shining moment,” as some suggested, or did this sort of thinking dismiss the city’s promise and future? The New York Times weighed in on the debate. In an essay by Randal Archibold announcing the centennial, a headline said it all: “Buffalo Gazes Back to a Time When Fortune Shone: Much-Maligned City Celebrates the Glory of a Century Ago.”

  The writer began with harsh words: “It is hard for outsiders to imagine that before the steel mills died, the young people fled, and the Bills choked, Buffalo was unbowed and proud.” He went on: Buffalonians were indulging in “a spate of nostalgia that has become something of a civic obsession.”

  If Buffalo was maligned, New York City had, for more than a century, carried some of the guilt. Mismatched as they were, Buffalo and New York had been urban siblings. When opposition came from outside the state in 1901, Manhattan became a fierce protector: helping Buffalo secure the Exposition, helping defend Buffalo against slander after the assassination, and helping Buffalo get funds from the federal government. But, siblinglike, New York City threw punches. In 1901, New Yorkers were accused of seeing the Lake Erie city as a “pretentious little sister” and of not bothering to go to the Exposition “in sufficient numbers.”

  Now, some one hundred years later, the belittlement seemed to persist. It wasn’t just that New Yorkers saw Buffalo as a city of past, not future, magnificence, but a Manhattan urban planner suggested in 2010 that it was perhaps time for certain upstate cities to die. Across the Midwest, Mitchell Moss said, state governments had let once-proud cities disappear, and it was time for New York to “do the same.” He chose Buffalo as his example of a city that once flourished, and he used 1901 as his frame of reference.

  Buffalo, of course, was not giving up and not going anywhere. It had not given up when it was slammed with an assassination and an insolvent Exposition. It focused on what it had gained and what it had imparted. It had not given up when merchant ships went elsewhere and steel mills failed. It moved forward, reused, and reinhabited. Instead of taking iron ore and making steel, the city began to work at the earth a different way. Along the lake, using roads worn down by steelworkers and grounds flattened by blast furnaces, developers put up wind machines, sentinels of a new age. They planned factories for solar machines. Visionaries, too, reawakened neighborhoods and pulled people back to the core of the city. They turned industrial landscapes into byways and parks and defiantly, boldly, lit grain elevators with flashing colors.

  The pride that launched the Exposition in 1901 gave birth to the pride that ushered in Buffalo’s “new beginning” in the twenty-first century. Rainbow City itself, however, mostly disappeared. Buffalo honored McKinley with a ninety-six-foot obelisk, funded by the state, that went up in front of City Hall in 1907. It saw a downtown office building, reminiscent of the Electric Tower, rise in 1912, and it handed the house where a tired Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office to the National Park Service in 1969. With the exception of the New York State Building, however, the 1901 grounds were let go, and, with time, developers se
eded them into cropped lawns, put up well-appointed houses, and paved new avenues. Faded plaques mark the locations of some Exposition buildings, and metal tablets tell pedestrians where the president was shot and died, but mostly it is hard to know that, long ago, there stood on the site an enchanted metropolis.23

  Other evidence of Buffalo’s fair, on the other hand, lives on. Remnants of Rainbow City, and accounts of those who animated it, sit in museum exhibits and rest on shelves of local libraries. Records also exist, ever so compactly, in virtual archives. Tireless recordkeepers unlock them for us, not only bringing the Exposition back to life but also allowing it to change over time, with new ways of seeing.

  VIII

  THE TIMEKEEPERS

  The spectacle called Rainbow City had been built by people motivated by a love for their hometown and country and, of course, a desire to make money. They were exceptionally proud of their way of life and believed it should be shown off and shared. In their triumphant march to the apex of civilization, they said, they had not only overcome human savagery but also tamed the animal kingdom and, for the sake of modern technology, conquered the natural world.

  Rainbow City was not built without opposition, and, particularly in the autumn of 1901, it did not carry on without resistance from performers and members of the public. Animals acted out, too, and even “nature,” like Niagara Falls, and forces, like electricity, took prisoners. The Buffalo Exposition generated modern concerns about the meaning of technology and generated modern discussions about animal welfare. It also spurred talk of social equality and marked the sudden appearance of a modern American president. The Pan-American fair brought the country into the twentieth century with a literal jolt.