I have not been particularly shocked by how much I love Owen, but I am continually pleasantly surprised by how much I like him. He’s truly morbid. When he broke his collarbone by falling down some stairs he was playing on, an emergency room nurse tried to comfort him by giving him a cuddly stuffed lamb to play with. My sister, hoping to prompt a “thank you,” asked him, “What do you say, Owen?” He handed back the lamb, informing the nurse, “I like spooky stuff.”
“That was fun, Mama,” says Owen as Amy straps him back into his car seat to leave the cemetery. Before we do, I make her drive around for the longest time, trying to locate Mark Hanna’s tomb. A little motion sick from winding her way around the hills while scanning for Hanna’s name, Amy asks, “Now who is this guy?”
I answer that he was an Ohio senator, that as William McKinley’s campaign manager in the 1896 presidential election he raised six or seven million dollars when the opponent only scraped together about 600K, that Hanna’s nickname was “Dollar Mark,” that after he heard about McKinley’s assassination and realized Theodore Roosevelt would be sworn in, he’s the one who famously quipped, “Now that damn cowboy will be president of the United States,” and that the current president’s political guru, Karl Rove, claims Hanna as his campaign strategy hero. Hearing this, Amy sighs theatrically, which, in twin language, I understand as a hint that sleazy innovations in election finance and quips about TR are shaky reasons to drag out this car-sickening visit when she would very much like to return to our air-conditioned hotel room downtown for room service and a nap.
I try to sweeten the deal, remembering, “Oh! And Hanna’s tomb was designed by Henry Bacon, the architect of the Lincoln Memorial!”
“Wow. Henry Bacon. Yay.”
“We’ll just wait in the car,” Amy says after I spot it. I run up to Hanna’s Parthenon, crossing between fluted columns to peek in at Mr. and Mrs. Dollar Mark.
Normally, my sister has bottomless patience for looking at things having to do with the dead people and extinct dinosaurs Owen and I are interested in, but it’s been a long day. We’ve already been to Canton and back, having wasted nearly two hours sidetracked in a mall parking lot where we had stopped for lunch and gotten waylaid by a deranged woman who called the cops, alleging that our rental car was responsible for the apostrophe-size scratch on her Pontiac Grand Am. So Amy had to hash it out with the woman in the back of a patrolman’s squad car while Owen and I sat in the hundred-degree heat staring at ants frying on the asphalt, all because I wanted to see the tomb of yet another assassinated Ohio president. (Of course the officer sided with Amy, who, gloating as she got out of the police car, sneered at the Pontiac driver, “My sister is writing a book about our trip and I bet she’s going to put you in the McKinley chapter.”)
Like Garfield’s, the McKinley National Memorial in Canton is a domed edifice on top of a hill. It’s a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass. A wide staircase connects the mausoleum to the parking lot. Halfway up the stairs, a statue of McKinley stands watch. An inscription describes him as “good citizen, brave soldier, wise executive, helper and leader of men.” My guess is that the statue is inspirational for the visitors, but since all of them are joggers bounding past him up the steps and back, up the steps and back, I bet it’s McKinley’s portly girth more than his good citizenship that inspires them, if only to endure more laps.
Next to the tomb, the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum displays William McKinley’s ice skate; his bank book from 1892–1893, “the period of his personal financial crisis” (from which Mark Hanna bailed him out); photos of McKinley hosting visitors here in Canton during his front porch campaign; an “Iver Johnson .32 caliber revolver identical to the one used by anarchist Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley in September 1901”; a sullied white nightshirt believed to have been worn by McKinley as he lay dying; and a pair of slippers crocheted by Ida, McKinley’s wife.
The McKinley museum displays the silk bag where Ida kept her yarn and knitting needles, complete with a photograph of her dead husband affixed inside. That is how she passed her widowhood. She sewed a picture of her murdered spouse into her knitting bag and then spent the rest of her life in a rocking chair, crocheting four thousand pairs of bedroom slippers, seeing her dead husband’s face staring up at her every time she reached for a new ball of yarn.
I think about Ida, the constant looping of her hook through the yarn, every time I play with my souvenir from the museum that I keep on my desk — the McKinley Memorial yo-yo. It is the only yo-yo I’ve ever seen decorated with the picture of a mausoleum.
Quarantined on that Canton hilltop, McKinley’s tomb is as opulent as it is abstract. It’s where his bones are, his skeleton, as Owen would say, but I can’t say that looking at his coffin beneath the coffered dome made me feel like he was close.
On the other hand, the simple marker of his assassination on a residential street in Buffalo gets to me. It’s just a plaque bolted to a big rock on the ground. You would miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Yesterday in Buffalo, we were looking for it and we missed it twice. After Amy has driven up and down Fordham Drive a couple of times without spotting the thing, I finally flag down a dog walker — they seem to know these things — and he points up the block, says it’s a few houses in from Lincoln Parkway.
Lined with earthy bungalows, the street is American-dreamy, all sidewalks and green lawns. The McKinley marker sits inside the grassy center median that makes the middle of the road into a long, skinny park. We get out of the car, read the plaque. Sponsored by the Buffalo Historical Society, it says, “In the Pan-American Temple of Music which covered this spot President McKinley was fatally shot Sept. 6, 1901.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, McKinley hosted a receiving line, shaking the hands of exposition-goers and kissing babies as an organist played Bach’s Sonata in F. One of the people waiting in line was James Parker, a black waiter from Georgia who worked at the fair but had taken the afternoon off to meet the president. In front of him, a man extended his bandaged hand to McKinley. But that was no bandage. The assassin Czolgosz had wrapped his revolver in a handkerchief. When Czolgosz shot McKinley in the stomach the handkerchief caught fire. Czolgosz, who never said a thing, shot McKinley once again. One of McKinley’s guards, Private Francis O’Brien, tackled the assassin before he could fire a third shot. Then James Parker punched Czolgosz in the head. O’Brien extracted the gun from Czolgosz’s hand. McKinley, who seemed to care less about what the bullets were doing to his insides than what the news of the bullets would do to his notoriously frail wife, told his secretary not to tell her.
All of which took place right here where this marker is. I wonder how many times that dog walker has allowed his pet to pee on it. McKinley’s death is part of this neighborhood’s life. My dad knows a woman who grew up here, and her brother has had a scar on his face since they were kids; he got it crashing his bike into the rock with the plaque — one of Leon Czolgosz’s lesser victims. Hunkered down in the everyday midst of the families on the block, McKinley’s death seems more personal and thus more sad, the loss of a husband, a friend. This rock calls to mind Mark Hanna’s lament at his dying chum: “William, William, speak to me!”
The architecture of the Pan-American Exposition was built to be torn down. The temporary structures, including the Temple of Music, were modeled out of staff, a kind of plaster reinforced with hemp. The New York Building was the only one they put up for keeps. Now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, it’s nice that it’s still here but too bad that they saved the one building that’s least representative of what the fair looked like. In 1901, the New York Building’s marble and columns was a bleached island of Greece in a colorful ocean of colonial Spain.
In fact, the Pan-American Exposition was called “The Rainbow City” to distinguish it from the neoclassical “White City” that was the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Still, the Pan-American used color as an argument for whiteness. In one
of the more bizarre manifestations of the turn-of-the-century social Darwinism fad — which employed Darwin’s theory of evolution to argue that Anglo-Saxon culture was the fittest and therefore the best, a claim made on stomachs full of steak and kidney pie by men who never tasted the glory that is the taco — the Pan-Am appointed a “director of color” who cooked up a thematic scheme in which “primitive” pursuits and societies’ buildings were slathered with summery paint and “civilized” advancements were pastel. Thus, the buildings devoted to horticulture or ethnology (i.e., things growing in dirt and nonwhites living in the dirt) were painted shades of orange, whereas the expo’s most important building, the four-hundred-foot-tall Electric Tower, was “ivory-white” with capitalist accents of green and gold.
According to Buffalo attorney and Pan-Am president John G. Milburn, in whose home McKinley would die, the point of the exposition, its guiding principle, was one “grand idea — the bringing closer together of the peoples of this hemisphere in their social, political, and commercial relations. That aspect of it has been the inspiration of the enterprise and the source of the enthusiasm which has carried it forward to completion.”
President McKinley had actually come to Buffalo back in 1897 to break ground for an exposition. But something got in the way: 1898. The fair was postponed due to the Spanish-American War. Because of the Cuban combat, the United States was suddenly a world power almost overnight. In fact, during one twenty-four-hour period in August, we conquered Manila Bay in the Philippines and seized control of Puerto Rico. McKinley also annexed Hawaii and Guam. So what better way to calm the nerves of our hemispheric neighbors, thought the Buffalo exposition planners, than ask the Latin American and Canadian governments to join us in putting on a show? The exposition’s secret theme? We’re Not Going to Shoot You (Especially If You Buy Our Stuff).
At the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, I buy a coaster of the Pan-American’s logo, the best possible picture not just of the exposition and its aims of hemispheric friendship, but of the McKinley administration itself. It is an allegorical picture of the Western Hemisphere. North America is a blond woman, South America a brunette. Both of them are white. Swimming between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific, the two women clasp hands in friendship. The handshake takes place in Central America on the future site of the Panama Canal. Miss South America smiles, unaware that two years later, the U.S. Navy would swoop in and hack her arm off at the elbow so that cargo ships could sail through the blood of her severed stump.
In the logo, most of the United States and Canada is blanketed in Miss North America’s billowy yellow dress. But one delicate bare foot pokes out of the southeastern edge, shaped like the state of Florida, as if she’s poised to step on Cuba.
The Cuban people suffered at the hands of the Spanish in the 1890s, especially those who were rounded up into concentration camps. American newspapers, especially Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, sensationalized Spanish atrocities, stirring up an idealistic fad for Cuba libre among the American people. The clincher, the hard proof of Spanish evildoing was one of those acts that, in retrospect, might not have happened at all. Historians still disagree. On February 15, 1898, the American battleship the Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, killing around 260 men. Remember the Maine? War boosters like Hearst accused the Spanish of bombing the ship and shrieked for a declaration of war. In fact, the evidence was inconclusive then and remains so today. Some historians believe it may have been a freak accident, a coal fire that ignited explosives on board the ship.
Four days after the Maine went down, Hearst called on the public to contribute to the construction of a monument to the fallen in New York. Dedicated in 1913, the Maine memorial, a forty-foot-tall tower decorated with allegorical sea people and inscribed with the names of the dead, guards the southwestern entrance to Central Park at Columbus Circle. Nowadays it looks like it was always there; on sunny afternoons citizens sit on or near it, eating sandwiches and watching break-dancers in yellow tracksuits perform acrobatics for spare change. At the time it was erected, the Maine memorial was criticized as a park-spoiling monstrosity — a “cheap disfigurement” for which trees were cut down to make room. Like the obnoxious William Randolph Hearst himself, it seemed to take up too much space. Good thing all those people who hated it were dead by the time the eighty-story Time Warner Center went up across the street; that thing makes the hulking Maine memorial look like an adorable little birdbath.
And, while we’re on the subject of Central Park and McKinley and Hearst, northeast of the Maine memorial, up the block from the park’s 102nd Street entrance, is a monument to Hearst’s most powerful editor and columnist, Arthur Brisbane. A pink granite job with a portrait of Brisbane in profile and a bench to sit on, it lauds Brisbane as “a champion of work and peace before all mankind.” Never mind that after the McKinley assassination, Hearst was excoriated for a column he published in the New York Journal five months before Leon Czolgosz pulled the trigger, an anonymous column generally attributed to Brisbane that said of the president, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” Hearst’s enemies even spread the erroneous rumor that Czolgosz was carrying that Journal clipping in his pocket upon arrest. Hearst, scared for his life, started carrying a revolver. (The publisher lived another fifty years.)
That the Maine memorial stares across the asphalt at the Christopher Columbus statue on Columbus Circle is a reminder of just what the United States was up against taking on Spain — the empire of Columbus and Cortés. These people overpowered the Aztecs, took over Holland, parts of Italy, and France. Sure, Spain’s power had been on the decline since the Brits trounced its Armada in 1588, but they were so powerful and so rich from the conquistadors’ gold, it still took another three centuries to knock them down for good. In 1898, Spain still owned Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which is to say they controlled Caribbean sugar as well as a couple of handy off ramps to the market of China. It says a lot about American military confidence that this upstart baby of a country was ready to challenge what had once been the mightiest empire since Rome. We had of course won the Revolutionary War against the British, but no one was certain if that marked our beginning as an international force to be reckoned with, or if it was a fluke victory inspired by our willingness to die before we’ll pay too many taxes.
Back in 1898, days before the Maine blew up, Hearst’s Journal published a letter attributed to a Spanish diplomat that accused McKinley of being “petty” and “weak.” The article’s subtle headline: “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”
At first President McKinley resisted going to war with Spain. The Civil War veteran lamented, “I’ve been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”
Then, as now, optional wars are fought because there are people in the government who really, really want to fight them. The Paul Wolfowitz of McKinley’s first term, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, was a part of a group of young wonks from various branches of the government who had been arguing that it was in the American interest to wrench Cuba from the clutches of Spain. They feared what would happen if the unpredictable Cuban rebels governed themselves, they wanted American companies to get a piece of the Cuban sugar business — described as white gold then the way oil is nicknamed black gold now — and they thought Cuba would be a convenient base of operations from which to get cracking on that canal they hoped to one day build in Central America.
Roosevelt wanted all those things, but more than anything, he wanted to fight. He wanted to wear an outfit — I mean, uniform. He wanted — to use one of his favorite words — “adventure.” And he wanted these things so badly that once the United States declared war on Spain he resigned as assistant secretary of the navy, ordered himself a custom-tailored uniform from Brooks Brothers, and volunteered to fight as a comparatively lowly lieut
enant colonel with the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.
Roosevelt helped assemble the volunteer cavalry, a ragtag regiment of cowboys, Indians, Ivy League graduates, one genuine Dodge City marshal, and a Jew nicknamed “Porkchop,” that came to be known as the Rough Riders. He described the Rough Riders as men in “whose veins the blood stirred with the same impulse which once sent the Vikings over sea.”
And how did our Vikings fare? The war was over in four short months. America’s first time out in interventionist warfare with the aim of regime change was seen as such a success that it became known, in John Hay’s phrase, as the “splendid little war.” Success, hell; if Teddy Roosevelt is to be believed it was downright fun — in his memoir of his Rough Riders days, he can’t stop using the word “delighted.”
Marking my place in Roosevelt’s book, I went to the kitchen to fetch some tea. As I was putting the boiling cup on my desk, I focused on the Pan-American Exposition souvenir coaster I bought in Buffalo, the one with the two female continents holding hands. I used Roosevelt’s book as a coaster instead, holding up the Pan-Am logo to get a closer look.
The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle’s dream.)
That North America would be symbolized by a Virginian, by the daughter of a Confederate army captain no less, would have been unthinkable before the Spanish-American War. It was the first conflict in which North and South cooperated after the Civil War.
McKinley and Mark Hanna, already innovators in corporate campaign contributions, were the first Republicans to actively woo white (male) southern Democrats. (The two made a point of vacationing in Thomasville, Georgia — where Hanna’s brother Mel had bought a plantation for cheap — in 1895, where they planned the ’96 campaign and courted local pols.)