The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  CHAPTER 4

  The Dark Side of the Dream

  Nearly eight months after the Nathan May sidewalk shooting, another event, one that changed the course of history, confronted Fox with the violent currents that lay beneath the bustling, optimistic surfaces of turn-of-the-century America.

  In the late summer of 1901, an inventor came to Fox’s office at Knickerbocker. Flaunting a paper that he claimed was a U.S. patent for a unique souvenir, he showed Fox a miniature frying pan, about one or two inches in diameter and stamped with the image of a buffalo against the background of an American flag. This Pan American Buffalo, the inventor explained, would be a sure-fire seller at the Pan American Exposition, which had opened in Buffalo, New York, on May 1, 1901. Ten million visitors were expected before closing day on November 2, 1901, and, the inventor said, each one could reasonably be expected to buy at least ten pans at a dollar apiece. All Fox had to do to become the exclusive vendor was to pay the manufacturing costs.

  Fox fell for the pitch. In November 1900, Eva had given birth to their first child, Mona,* and Knickerbocker was still struggling. Fox cleared out his savings of $600, hired a factory to make the pans, shipped them ahead, and then boarded a train in early September for Buffalo. He was twenty-two.

  Arriving with only three dollars in his pocket but certain that he would be rich soon, he had reserved a room at one of the nicest hotels in town, the Iroquois. “From the railroad station to the fairgrounds was about five miles long, and on either side of the street the city had issued licenses to permit wooden stands to be erected in which the wares could be displayed to the visitors to this exposition. And lo and behold! All that I could see on these stands were pans with buffalos stamped on them with American flags. There were enough pans there to supply everybody with 100 pans.” Fox canceled his reservation at the Iroquois and put in at a dollar-a-day side-street boardinghouse.

  After two days at the Exposition, he hadn’t sold a single pan. Then he got an idea. The only store in town not selling the buffalo souvenir pans was F. W. Woolworth, whose headquarters were in Buffalo. Using twenty-five cents from his last dollar, Fox sent a telegram to forty-eight-year-old Woolworth himself and managed to get an appointment.

  At Woolworth’s office, Fox proposed to sell his entire inventory to the chain store magnate for the same $600 he had paid. Given that the manufacturing price for each pan had been about 2.5 cents, Woolworth could profitably undersell everyone else in town by offering the pans at his standard five- or ten-cent prices. Woolworth refused, explaining that he had not bought any of the pans because he had known there would be an oversupply. Fox pressed his case, confiding that he had a wife and a baby as well as “a business that was not over prosperous.” Sympathizing with the foolish yet sincere young man, Woolworth relented and agreed to buy all Fox’s frying pans.

  Enormously relieved at not getting wiped out, Fox decided to give himself an extra day to enjoy the Exposition.

  Around the same time that Fox’s train had departed from New York City, another young man boarded a train in Chicago and also headed for Buffalo. Like Fox, he longed for greatness. Unlike Fox, he lacked resilience and hope.

  The Detroit-born son of Polish immigrants, twenty-eight-year-old Leon Czolgosz had drifted around the Midwest for the previous few years. Unmarried, mentally fragile, and considered defective and cowardly by his family, he had never succeeded much at anything and never felt much at home anywhere. Several years before, he had gotten fired from his four-dollar-a-day job at a wire mill in Newburg, Ohio, when the workers there went on strike. Then he suffered a mental breakdown and developed a fascination with anarchists, especially the firebrand Emma Goldman.

  Her words “set me to thinking, so that my head nearly split with the pain,” he would later explain. He tried to join several anarchist groups, but, suspicious of his fanaticism, they rejected him. In the summer of 1901, Czolgosz read about the Pan American Exposition in a Chicago newspaper. Intending “to do something heroic for the cause I loved,” he bought his ticket for Buffalo.

  On Saturday, August 31, 1901, carrying a small traveling bag that contained only a few items of clothing, Czolgosz rented a room at a cheap hotel owned by a Polish man at 1078 Broadway. He kept to himself, rarely speaking to anyone. He got a haircut from a Polish barber and several times a day wandered around the exhibition grounds alone.

  After President McKinley arrived by train on Wednesday, September 4, for a ceremonial visit of several days, Czolgosz repeatedly tried to get close. Always he was buffeted back by police or “tossed about” by the crowds. He watched people “bowing to the great ruler.”

  Then he knew what he must do. There was no escape. “It was in my heart.”

  Around 4:00 p.m. on Friday, September 6, Fox was walking down Main Street toward the receiving line for President McKinley at Buffalo’s Temple of Music. From a distance of about one hundred feet, he saw it happen.

  Dressed in black, Czolgosz stepped forward to shake McKinley’s hand. Then, with the .32-caliber revolver he’d hidden underneath a white handkerchief wrapped around his right hand like a bandage, he shot twice.

  Struck in the breastbone and stomach, and bleeding profusely, McKinley crumpled to the ground. The man standing in the receiving line just behind Czolgosz whacked Czolgosz in the neck and lunged for the gun. After Secret Service agents toppled the assassin and pinned him to the ground, the civilian knocked the gun from Czolgosz’s hand before he could shoot McKinley a third time. Pandemonium broke out.

  Fox saw McKinley fall, yet he saw nothing. The event never acquired any deeper meaning for him—even though the nation froze for eight days as McKinley struggled to recover and then plunged into mourning when the president died of gangrene on September 14. Details of the crime, along with commentary and analyses, saturated the newspapers and public discourse.

  Fox might have paid attention to Czolgosz’s own words.

  “Fred Nieman”—Nieman means “nobody” in German—was the name Czolgosz would give to the police. In custody, he told officials, “I killed President McKinley because I done [sic] my duty. I didn’t believe one man should have so much power and another man should have none.” He had “trembled and trembled” before the shooting, and afterward was surprised to find himself still alive. Although police suspected an anarchist plot, Czolgosz denied any conspiracy. In the final words of his formal confession, he offered perhaps the clearest explanation of his motives: “I had no confidants, no one to help me. I was alone absolutely.”

  Fox might also have thought about the circumstances that had given Czolgosz his instant of opportunity and about the curious way the official story of the assassination changed.

  Ethnicity mattered. At the moment of the shooting, McKinley’s Secret Service agents had turned their attention away from the clean-shaven, fair-skinned, boyish-looking Czolgosz in order to concentrate on the suspicious-looking character in line ahead of him, a dark-complexioned man with a thick black mustache who, according to one of the agents, “appeared to be an Italian.” Race mattered, too. In initial reports, the spectator who hit Czolgosz and knocked the gun from his hand was described as African American. Within days, officials revised the story, identifying the hero as an Irish American soldier, and at Czolgosz’s trial, a Secret Service agent testified that no “colored man” had provided any help at all. Only certain types of people were trustworthy Americans. Two days after McKinley’s death, New York senator Chauncey Depew called for a halt to immigration to “stop the reservoirs of European anarchy pouring into our country.”

  Without pausing for reflection, Fox returned to New York City and shaped a memory that served his immediate needs. In his mind, the McKinley assassination receded to background scenery for a story about his own good fortune. He was thankful for the pans, “thankful that there is such a pan because if it had been any other kind of novelty, I probably could not have sold it.” The statement was odd not only for all that it ignored, but also because it didn’t ma
ke sense. If the pans had been a different sort of souvenir, he probably wouldn’t have allowed himself to be swindled by the salesman with the phony patent paper. He also seized upon the fact that F. W. Woolworth had helped him out of trouble. F. W.—his own initials in reverse. “This was a sign,” Fox later told his niece Angela. “God wanted to save me.” More than he wanted to understand events, Fox wanted to be happy.

  Neither did he think about the assassin’s fate. America couldn’t wait to dispose of Czolgosz. After a two-day trial that began in Buffalo on September 23, nine days after McKinley died, and that lasted for only eight hours and twenty-six minutes, a jury took thirty-five minutes to reach a guilty verdict. On September 26, Czolgosz was sentenced to death; on October 29, he was executed in the electric chair at Auburn State Prison. “I want to make a statement before you kill me,” Czolgosz said that morning. “Well, you cannot,” the prison superintendent replied. Guards pushed Czolgosz into the electric chair and attached a strap across his forehead and chin, muffling his last words: “I am awfully sorry I could not see my father.”

  Three surges of current at 1,700 volts killed Czolgosz. Because the Buffalo Cremation Company refused to handle the remains, Czolgosz’s body was put into a pine box, lowered into a burial plot next to the prison, and drenched with a powerful acid to obliterate it within hours. All his clothes and personal effects were burned. A Los Angeles Times editorial commented, “So far as possible all traces of this degenerate wretch have been removed from the face of the earth; and the earth is better for the removal of this refuse.”

  Given his belief that God had planned his destiny in minute detail, Fox might have wondered if he was supposed to learn something from Czolgosz’s experience. Had this marginalized, unassimilated immigrant son been driven to derangement by his disappointment in America? Was Fox also at risk from the same social forces that had undone Czolgosz? Equally, Fox might have listened to the voices that spoke up in the aftermath of the tragedy. Following Czolgosz’s conviction and sentencing, for instance, Booker T. Washington issued a warning from the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute: “In all sincerity, I want to ask, is Czolgosz alone guilty? Has not the entire nation had a part in this greatest crime of the century? What is anarchy but a defiance of law, and has not the nation reaped what it has been sowing?”

  But Fox didn’t pay attention. He was young, full of energy and ambition and hope. To get where he was going, he needed to believe in America.

  PART II

  THE GREATEST

  ADVENTURE

  1904–1925

  EVERY COUNTRY IS RENEWED OUT OF THE RANKS OF THE UNKNOWN, NOT OUT OF THE RANKS OF THOSE ALREADY FAMOUS AND POWERFUL AND IN CONTROL.

  —WOODROW WILSON, THE NEW FREEDOM, 1913

  CHAPTER 5

  700 Broadway

  Consumed by ambition, Fox was restless. The garment industry wasn’t the right place for him. Already established, it didn’t need him. He said, “I always knew there was something else for me to do.”

  Perhaps that something else was real estate. In 1902, he bought a $12,000 tenement house for $1,000 in cash and an $11,000 mortgage. “Gee, I was proud! I was a landlord now—a landlord at about 23 years of age,” he said. With no time to manage the property himself, he assigned Eva. “That is where I made my greatest error. Not only didn’t Mrs. Fox collect the rent due from the tenants, but I soon found my butchers’ and grocers’ bills mounting. When she called to collect these rents, if the tenant by the merest chance was unable to pay it and gave as an excuse unemployment, she made sure to send provisions to this family while the man was out of work. So by the end of the year, I found the privilege of being a landlord was very costly to me, and instead of having collected the rents, more than the amount of the rent had been expended by Mrs. Fox for what she called ‘the relief to the tenants.’ ”

  Empathy wasn’t a quality that Fox wanted to dismantle in his wife. Besides, something of the socialist still remained in him. He didn’t feel comfortable trying to extract a profit from the poor for the necessities of life. He sold the property at a loss.

  Another idea soon occurred to him. Walking along Fourteenth Street between Broadway and University Place in Manhattan, Fox noticed a mostly young crowd surging into the Automatic Vaudeville Company.* A sign on the wall read, “A Penny Operates Any Machine.” Stepping in, he saw a slot machine arcade—a busy jumble of phonographs, peep show machines, punching bags, weighing machines, chewing gum machines, fortune-telling machines, stationary bicycles, and mechanical horses. Going down to the basement, he watched a small train shuttle around on a track, stop underneath each machine, and collect a cascade of pennies.

  At the time, Fox had no great vision of the future. He simply thought this might be an easy, profitable sideline business. Knickerbocker’s fortunes had improved, so he had savings to invest.

  Only twenty-five, still believing there were no bad people in the world, Fox promptly got cheated. A real estate agent representing J. Stuart Blackton, the cofounder and president of one of the first U.S. movie studios, the Vitagraph Company of America, offered to sell Fox a slot machine arcade at 700 Broadway in Brooklyn. The two-story space was only about eighteen feet wide and ninety feet deep, but it was in the up-and-coming Williamsburg section and was surrounded by mostly respectable shops. Unknown to Fox, Blackton urgently needed money. Not only were he and his two Vitagraph partners preparing for a major expansion in film production and distribution, but also he had been ensnared for years in expensive patent infringement lawsuits by Thomas Edison, whose movie projector Blackton had converted into a camera.

  Blackton’s agent—“the handsomest man you ever laid eyes on,” Fox said—assured Fox that the arcade was doing booming business. That seemed to be true both times he visited. Eagerly, Fox rounded up two friends from the clothing business, Sol Brill and Jacob W. Loeb, and each contributed one-third of the $5,000 lease price. Under its new management, 700 Broadway opened for business on a Monday in May 1904.

  Only two customers came by the whole day.

  When business failed to improve, Fox realized that he’d been bamboozled. Blackton’s agent had hired crowds to pose as customers on the days of his visits. Naturally, the crowds stopped coming when they stopped getting paid.

  Fox couldn’t afford to lose his investment. His $1,666 stake represented almost all his savings, and his family responsibilities had increased substantially. He and Eva had just had their second child, Belle, in April 1904, and he continued to support his parents’ household. Altogether, he now had nine dependents: four siblings, two parents, two children, and one wife. If he lost all his remaining liquid assets, if Knickerbocker returned to its old pattern of misfortune, if serious illness or injury struck, then his family, both his families, might fall back swiftly into destitution.

  Desperate to find an answer, Fox realized he already had the answer: motion pictures.

  In the quest for self-improvement that he had pursued to appease his mother after dropping out of night school, he had visited the Eden Musée, a Madame Tussauds–style wax museum on Twenty-Third Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Billing itself “a Temple of Art without rival in this country” and offering “to all an opportunity for instruction, amusement and recreation,” the Eden Musée had begun showing motion pictures in December 1896. There, Fox had seen some footage of a tree with its leaves moving. Astonished by the spectacle, he found the Eden Musée’s projectionist, who showed him the film and explained the projection process. Returning frequently, Fox had always found a full, spellbound house.*

  The idea met his needs perfectly. In 1904, movie exhibition was a cheap and easy business to enter, requiring only about $400 to $500 in start-up capital. A “theater” could be set up in any small store or even a backyard shack that had a clear wall space of about nine square feet. A bedsheet would do for the screen, a projector could be bought for $75 to $95, and some chairs or wooden benches would do for seating.

  As for the films
themselves, distributors rented them out inexpensively by the foot. Spectators didn’t care much about the content. The lure consisted mostly of the novelty of moving pictures, and because most film subjects lasted only three to three and a half minutes, if they weren’t any good, at least they were over quickly. Movie theater personnel costs were also low. Exhibitors could hire a neighborhood child to operate the projector—and many did; one reporter saw an eleven-year-old boy doing so at the Model Nickelette in Hoboken, New Jersey—and enlist family members to sell tickets. Even the official fees seemed manageable. In New York, movie theaters with fewer than three hundred seats were lumped into the same category of amusements as merry-go-rounds and required only a $25 common show license issued by the mayor’s office. By contrast, larger legitimate and vaudeville theaters not only required a $500 theatrical license issued by the police commissioner but also were subject to much more stringent fire regulations.

  Best of all, the proprietor of a small movie theater could collect money all day long. Paying the standard ticket price of a nickel, audiences rotated in and out about every half hour: three three-minute films made a reel, and three reels made a show.