Assassination Vacation (26 page)

A couple of weeks earlier, when Roosevelt first heard the news that McKinley had been attacked, the then–vice president said of the assassin, “If it had been I, he wouldn’t have gotten away so easily. I think I’d have guzzled him.”

He’s probably right. In 1912, when Roosevelt was in Milwaukee campaigning as the Bull Moose presidential candidate, would-be assassin John Schrank shot him at close range with a .38. Schrank claimed the ghost of William McKinley came to him in a dream and said of Roosevelt, “This is my murderer. Avenge my death.” The bullet was slowed down by the contents of Roosevelt’s chest pocket, a steel eyeglass case and the thick, folded text of the speech he was about to give. (The dinged case is on display at the Roosevelt birthplace in New York; the dinted papers in the Smithsonian.) Though bleeding, Roosevelt delivered his speech, pulling the bloodstained papers out of his pocket, crowing, “You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.”

Though the Roosevelt presidency had already begun Roosevelt-style in the mountains with the noisy racket of hoof-beats in the dark, Buffalo was muffled by McKinley’s death. Getting off the train, Roosevelt went straight to his friend Ansley Wilcox’s mansion, borrowed a proper coat, paid his respects to Mrs. McKinley, and then returned to Wilcox’s house to be sworn in. The house, with a pediment and columned porch, looks Greek enough to substitute for the usual ceremony amidst the columns of the U.S. Capitol. It’s now a museum administered by the National Park Service, the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.

Roosevelt took the oath here in the library on the first floor, a warm, brown Victorian room with a fireplace and leather chairs. The Park Service has a video playing, a reenactment of the ceremony produced for its centennial. It’s quite effective, capturing the mournful silence of that moment. There are times when the loudest thing happening is the light shining through the windows. More than fifty people, including future president Woodrow Wilson, crowded in here to watch, reporters included (though they were forbidden to take photographs).

According to the following day’s
Buffalo Courier,
when Secretary of War Elihu Root started to administer the oath, he broke down weeping “and for fully a minute he could not utter another word,” which made everyone else bow their heads and tear up too. “The Vice-President’s eyes were moist and he clutched nervously at the lapel of his frock coat.”

“I shall take the oath at once in accord with the request of you members of the Cabinet,” Roosevelt said. He continued,

In this hour of our deep and terrible bereavement I wish to state that it shall be my aim to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity and the honor of our beloved country.

The house displays the desk where Roosevelt wrote those words. It also features an exhibit of relics associated with Roosevelt and McKinley — the serpentine walking stick Roosevelt hiked Mount Marcy with, a Pan-Am commemorative plate decorated with the seal of North and South America holding hands, and, talk about sentimental, the “telegraph wires that were used to carry notice of McKinley’s death to local newspapers.”

The aforementioned nervously clutched black frock coat Roosevelt had borrowed for the swearing-in is also on display. Seeing the clothes in which Roosevelt became president reminds me of a letter Roosevelt soon received from Robert Todd Lincoln. Roosevelt had bumped into Lincoln here in Buffalo before heading to the Adirondacks. Lincoln had brought his family to town to see the Pan-American Exposition, never suspecting their vacation would see him reprise his cameo role as presidential assassination omen for the third and final time. Lincoln wrote to the new president, “I do not congratulate you for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as a desirable garment, but I do hope that you will have the strength and courage to carry you through a successful administration.” Roosevelt must have wanted to write back to Robert Todd —
tod,
the German word for death — Lincoln, “Well, since you brought it up, can I interest you in a diplomatic appointment in Katmandu?”

In downtown Buffalo, there’s a memorial to McKinley, an obelisk guarded by marble lions — the sorry - you - got - shafted shaft. My nephew Owen loved the lions so much he threw a weepy temper tantrum when we tried to leave. As my sister and I pried him off a marble paw he kicked us, screaming, “I want lions!” Coming between kids and their presidential monuments is like getting caught between a lioness and her cubs.

McKinley lay in state in downtown Buffalo before Roosevelt escorted his coffin back to Washington. Thousands stood in line in the rain to pay their respects, including James Parker, the black waiter who was standing in the receiving line at the Temple of Music and clocked Leon Czolgosz.

In one ultimate Pan-American moment, Geronimo himself strutted past the coffin. One of the Indians riding in the faux battles staged at the exposition, the sexagenarian Apache warrior who fought the Mexicans as a young man and then the Americans after they defeated the Mexicans was still technically a U.S. prisoner of war in the custody of armed guards. He enclosed a card with a memorial wreath for McKinley. He wrote, “The rainbow of hope is out of the sky. Heavy clouds hang about us. Tears wet the ground of the tepees. The chief of the nation is dead. Farewell.” Geronimo had probably buried so many people by then he could knock out a eulogy in his sleep. Four years later, he would ride in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade, cornering TR after the festivities and begging to be allowed to go back home to what was now New Mexico to die where he was born, pleading, “Great Father, my hands are tied as with a rope…. I pray you to cut the ropes and make me free. Let me die in my own country, as an old man who has been punished enough and is free.” To no avail — he passed away in 1909 in Oklahoma, incarcerated at Fort Still.

Unfortunately for Roosevelt, the McKinley assassination had a theme song. Reportedly among the dying president’s last words was the title of his favorite hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.” So a quartet sang the song in the Milburn house before the body was ushered out, where a band across the street repeated it as the coffin was carried out the door. As Roosevelt accompanied his predecessor’s coffin from Buffalo to Washington and on to Canton for burial, mourners serenaded the train. At Harrisburg, for instance, thousands bellowed “Nearer My God to Thee” from the platform of the station. Then they played it at the White House, then again at the Capitol rotunda. Roosevelt must have groaned every time he heard the lines “Still all my songs shall be, nearer my God to thee.”

Soon enough, though, Roosevelt would be singing his own theme song, which I like to think of as an arrangement of the Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” butchered by a high school marching band. Roosevelt took the melody he helped McKinley compose, the idea that the United States was poised for global domination, and then he went electric. Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, earned a Nobel Prize brokering a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, secured Moroccan independence, and sent the “Great White Fleet” of the U.S. Navy on tour around the globe to warn the world that the United States was a power to contend with.

When McKinley was attacked, Roosevelt complained that he didn’t want to get to the presidency “through the graveyard.” In 1904, the American people elected Roosevelt in his own right. To make up for the solemn silence of his first swearing-in, his second was a wingding of parties and parades. And on March 4, 1905, when Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time, he wore a ring given to him by Secretary of State John Hay. The ring contained the hair of Abraham Lincoln.

Scenes from the life of Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath. Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son had the misfortune of attending his father’s deathbed after his assassination in 1865, witnessing the assassination of James A. Garfield in Washington in 1881, and detraining in Buffalo in 1901 to learn that William McKinley had been assassinated mere moments before his arrival. Robert Lincoln lived a long life, attending the Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony in 1922.

Chapter Four

The America that Lincoln was bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous America that he wished to preserve, has nothing in common with the sedulously classic monument that was erected to his memory. Who lives in that shrine, I wonder — Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean?

LEWIS MUMFORD
Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, 1924

I
n 1904, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, William Howard Taft, sent his fellow Republican, architect Daniel Burnham, to the Philippines (where Taft had recently served as the new U.S. territory’s governor). Burnham’s assignment was to draw a new plan for the city of Manila. Burnham had been the mastermind behind the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That fair was an architectural watershed. The “White City,” a neoclassical enclave on the shores of Lake Michigan, would spark what came to be known as the City Beautiful movement of urban design, involving Greco-Roman buildings and monuments erected on geometric street grids among grand boulevards and restful, pretty parks. After the success of the fair, Chicago businessmen hired Burnham to draw up new plans for the lakefront and eventually the city as a whole. Before he did, like so many artists and architects of his generation, Burnham took off on a European study trip, where he got religion — pagan religion. Always drawn to classicism, Burnham described Rome as a “delight.” His travels in Greece, and especially staring at the Athens Acropolis crowned with the Parthenon, converted him from a Sunday classicist to an evangelist of columns and pediments. “I have,” he claimed, “the spirit of Greece once and forever stamped on my soul.”

At the same time Burnham was trying to turn the Philippine capital into Chicago — and Manila could do a lot worse — Burnham was making his mark on our nation’s capital by serving on the 1901–02 McMillan Senate Park Commission for the Improvement of Washington, D.C. If you have gone sightseeing in Washington, you have walked around inside Burnham’s head.

Burnham and his fellow commissioners hoped to turn the Mall into “a work of civic art.” They decided to carry out Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the Mall as an unobstructed open space, which required tearing down the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station where President Garfield got shot. (They replaced it with the present-day depot a few blocks away, Union Station, designed by Burnham.) Also, the commission ratified the digging of the Reflecting Pool, the construction of a bridge to Arlington Cemetery, and the radical notion of erecting a memorial to Abraham Lincoln on the drained swamp next to the river.

The McMillan Commission begat the 1902 Lincoln Memorial Commission starring Secretary of State and former Lincoln secretary John Hay. Pleased that the shrine honoring his late boss would go up in what was then a remote location, Hay remarked that Lincoln “was of the immortals. You must not approach too close to the immortals. His monument should stand alone…isolated, distinguished, and serene.”

In 1910, William Howard Taft, now president, established the United States Commission of Fine Arts — Washington loves a commission — to advise the government on aesthetic matters having to do with art, architecture, planning, and design. (It still does.) Taft appointed men to his commission who were boosters of the previous commissions, including architects Burnham and Cass Gilbert and sculptor Daniel Chester French, whose cronies would soon offer him the gig of sculpting Lincoln.

Three years earlier, Gilbert and French had collaborated on the new neoclassical New York Custom House near the docks downtown. It was built to replace the old stomping grounds of Chester Arthur and Herman Melville. If trade and the money that comes with it were cash cows during the administrations of Hayes and Garfield, the influx of goods from America’s new colonial ports in the Caribbean, as well as the anticipated booty from the Panama Canal, the new improved Custom House symbolized the emerging economic global dominance of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His
America,
from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I’ve ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head. (Ironically, after U.S. Customs decamped to offices in the World Trade Center in 1973, Gilbert’s building became the National Museum of the American Indian. Thus does a sculpture about native subjugation guard the door to a place devoted to preserving and celebrating Native American culture.)

One afternoon, I walked downtown from my apartment in Chelsea to look at Gilbert’s design and French’s sculptures. When I was researching the people and places having some connection to the McKinley administration, I came across the names of architects and artists Burnham, Gilbert, and French about nine thousand times. But I never studied them in school, and I have a master’s degree in art history. Standing downtown looking at French’s 1907
America
step on the Mayan mask next to his similarly questionable
Africa
reminded me of what I had been taught about the art and architecture of the period — Pablo Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Picasso was of the generation of young Spaniards who made their mark after the war they called “
el Desastre del
98,” the disaster in which the United States won the remnants of the Spanish empire, known here as the Spanish-American War. In 1907, the same year French sculpted
America,
Picasso made one of the most influential paintings of the twentieth century,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Back in school, I took essay exams and wrote papers about this painting all the time. And one thing the A student is supposed to say about it is that three of the five nude prostitutes in the picture have the faces of African masks. Picasso saw the beauty in African art, just as Frank Lloyd Wright saw the beauty in Mayan architecture. To Wright, the Mayans weren’t a people to step on, they were a people to learn from, a people with ideas worth stealing. (If you want to get a clear picture of this turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetic and moral clash, go to Buffalo, where you can leave the Burnham-inspired neoclassical white columns of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, built for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, and walk basically around the corner to see the earthy horizontals of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie-style Darwin Martin house built in 1903. Those two years between the buildings might as well be two centuries they look so different. One is ancient history, the other sci-fi.)

There are two reasons I find this classicism versus modernism tiff interesting to think about. First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it’s fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It’s not? Whew.

Secondly, with a building as iconic as the Lincoln Memorial, it’s such a given, seems so inevitable, I cannot imagine the Mall without it. Moreover, it’s so universally revered it’s hard to believe there were ever protests against the way it looked. But when Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Daniel Chester French, and their fellow commissioners chose Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design for the Lincoln Memorial in 1913, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, led by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, threw a fit. Understandably, the prairie school architects from the Land of Lincoln were outraged that the Lincoln Memorial was going to be so “purely Greek and entirely un-American.”

Henry Bacon’s previous buildings included a Greek-looking bank still standing on New York’s Union Square and the Greek-looking tomb for Republican boss Mark Hanna in Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery. Bacon and French had already collaborated on a tomb for Chicago retail magnate Marshall Field. So by the time they were hired to work on the Lincoln Memorial, they were the Republican Party’s top marble go-to guys.

It’s amusing to speculate on what kind of low, flat slab Frank Lloyd Wright might have come up with to honor the tall, skinny Lincoln. It’s more intriguing still to imagine what Wright’s Chicago mentor Louis Sullivan might have designed had he been asked. Sullivan is my favorite architect for the same reason Lincoln is my favorite president — his buildings are logical but warm, pragmatic but not without frippery, grand and human all at once. It’s telling that when Daniel Burnham got back from Europe he started drawing Doric columns, and when Louis Sullivan returned to Chicago from his European study sojourn he started taking long walks out on the prairie. Sullivan accused the classical influence of Burnham’s World’s Fair of being a “virus,” a “violent outbreak” of the “bogus antique.” Whereas Burnham’s aesthetic, shared by Henry Bacon, attempted to catapult Abraham Lincoln up to Mount Olympus — “isolated, distinguished, and serene” just like John Hay hoped — Sullivan’s buildings live here on earth. Having strode so often on the prairie that Lincoln also walked upon, Sullivan thought stalks of wheat were as inspiring as the columns of the Parthenon and hoped that his fellow Americans could build their own new country out of the one Lincoln had saved. Sullivan complained in his 1924 autobiography about the sort-of-Greek, kind-of-Roman buildings springing up all over the United States, including the recently dedicated Lincoln Memorial, that

In a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress thus did the virus of a culture, snobbish and alien to the land, perform its work of disintegration; and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man’s follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot…when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable.

What I wouldn’t give to see what a man like that would have conjured in honor of a man like Lincoln. What if this memorial, and, while we’re at it, all three branches of government, were more courageous and sympathetic and made more sense and aspired and again aspired? What if the pallid and the academic, the fictitious and the false were banished from this Mall and from this town? Spend too much time pondering what-ifs like that about the nation’s capital and you’ll want to hurl yourself off the Washington Monument.

Thanks to congressional feet-dragging, political infighting, World War I, and the simple time-consuming process of mining then shipping tons upon tons of marble all the way from Colorado, by the time the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, Abraham Lincoln had been dead for fifty-seven years. There is a wonderful photograph of a clearly enchanted Robert Todd Lincoln sitting in the audience at the ceremony — sitting with the white people in the audience. Because the Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony was segregated. Segregated!

So it took a while for the Lincoln Memorial to come to mean what it’s come to mean. Thanks to Marian Anderson, who performed here on Easter Sunday 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall because of her skin color and of course Martin Luther King Jr., who stood on what he called “this hallowed spot” in 1963 making history with “I have a dream,” the memorial has long been physically and philosophically desegregated.

So much so in fact that one time I came to the memorial with my friend Dave and as we were climbing the steps he said, “It looks fake.”

“What does?”

“These people,” he said, pointing at the other visitors. “Look at them. Every color, from all over the world.”

“Why is that fake?”

“It’s too perfect, like they were brought here by a casting agent to make a commercial.”

He was right. The people who visit the memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out “It’s a Small World After All” flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren.

Yes, the memorial is lousy with coldhearted columns, a white Greek temple for a man associated with browns and blacks — the log cabin, the prairie, the top hat, the skin of slaves. Yes, Lewis Mumford called it a memorial to the Spanish-American War and he’s not all wrong. But loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way; it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble, the structure’s a fake and ye olde Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel. But the Lincoln Memorial is still my favorite place in the world and not just in spite of its many stupid flaws. It’s my favorite place partly because of its blankness, because of those columns that are such standard-issue Western civ clichés they don’t so much exist as float. Inside the Lincoln Memorial I know what Frederick Douglass meant when he described what it was like to be invited to Lincoln’s White House: “I felt big there.”

Never underestimate the corrective lens that is sentimentality. Take, for example, the new National World War II Memorial next to the Washington Monument. Each state gets its own bland stone pillar. The first time I see it I hate it at once, think it mucks up the Mall, but nevertheless search for the granite Oklahoma pylon because my late uncle, John A. Parson, served in the Philippines. Damndest thing, but the instant I spot it, “Oklahoma,” I burst into tears. One time I asked him about his service and he told me about fighting the Japanese for control of a hill. It took a month and it was raining the whole time. He said they only gained a couple of inches every day, every day in the rain. His socks, he said, were never dry. A month to get up a hill while being shot at in wet socks. John A. died a couple of years ago. Suddenly and forever the World War II Memorial stopped being clunky architecture and turned into the sound of my uncle’s voice telling me that story. Now I don’t care what it looks like. They could have carved it out of chewed bubble gum and I would think of it fondly.