Buffalo, 1901: Bad Stamps and a Dead President

This Thursday, March 29, 2001, at the New York Postage Stamp Mega Event on Pier 92, Manhattan, the Postal Service will hold first day of issue ceremonies for stamps commemorating the centennial of the Pan-American Inverts: bicolored stamps, issued in 1901, with upside-down centers. The Postal Service now even celebrates its foul-ups.

In 1895, Buffalo, Queen City of the Lakes, began promoting a Pan-American Exposition celebrating the accomplishments and hopes of the Americas, to be held, of course, in Buffalo. In July 1898, Congress allocated $500,000 for an exposition to open in 1901.

Construction workers transformed a 350-acre cattle farm 20 minutes from downtown into the City of Light. They dug lakes and canals, planted flowering shrubs and rare trees, and installed 500 sculptures: Agriculture, the Genius of Man, a Michelangelo, a voluptuous Bacchante. They raised a shining city of palaces, columns, balconies, loggias, towers and minarets, all in a style officially labeled "Spanish Renaissance." The buildings only seemed marble: they were really made of staff, a composition of plaster of Paris and hemp fiber, nailed or wired onto wooden or steel frames. The exposition's centerpiece, the Electric Tower, crowned by Herbert Adams' statue Goddess of Light, was 391 feet tall, with deep green walls detailed in cream, blue and gold and a searchlight visible from Niagara Falls and Canada. The Temple of Music was pale yellow, ornamented in gold and red, with a light-blue dome soaring 180 feet. At dusk, in a spectacle of electric power, a quarter-million lightbulbs came on at once, not in a brilliant flash, but in a gradual increasing brightness until each building was bathed in light.

The exposition opened on May 1, 1901. Admission was 50 cents. Millions of visitors passed the Propylaeum (an important gateway or vestibule in front of a sacred enclosure) to tour the magnificent buildings and their exhibits, ranging from massive industrial machinery and railway equipment to the latest fashions and sporting goods. Incidentally, the most popular were the labor-saving domestic appliances, such as electric irons, washing machines and lawnmowers, and the premature babies in the Incubator Bldg.

Nobody didn't like the midway. There were movies, merry-go-rounds, captive balloon rides, miniature railways, a trip to the moon and wild animal shows such as Captain Bonavita and his 25 performing lions. One might enter the Upside Down House, Darkest Africa, the Eskimo Village, Fair Japan, Dreamland or Cleopatra's Temple. One might be amazed by huge cycloramas such as Lookout Mountain, Cemetery Ridge and Jerusalem on the Day of the Crucifixion. One might be appalled by the "Old Plantation," featuring slave quarters "occupied by genuine darkey families and their pickaninnies," with "Dancing and other pastimes dear to the old Negro."

Overhead stood the Aerio-Cycle: a huge teeter with a revolving wheel at each end, rotating its passengers in a giant perpendicular circle as much as 235 feet in the air. For refreshment, visitors might visit the beer garden in Alt Nurnberg or Akoun's Beautiful Orient, with its fortune-tellers, rug merchants, coffeehouses, dancing girls, charging camels, sword fighters and palm trees.

On opening day, the Post Office Dept. opened the exposition's branch station with first day of issue ceremonies for the Pan-American commemoratives. They included a one-cent stamp in green and black bearing a vignette of the steamship City of Alpena, for postcards. The two-cent stamp in carmine and black, for first-class mail, showed a steam locomotive hauling the Empire State Express.

Today's stamps are printed in one run on continuous web multicolor presses. In 1901, the Pan-Ams were produced on hand-operated flatbed presses in two runs?one for each color. The frame, or border, was printed first. Then the sheets went to another press for the vignette. At some point, a printer's concentration lapsed, sheets emerged from the second run with the ship or the train upside down, and no one noticed. Of 91,401,500 one-cent stamps and 209,759,700 two-cent stamps, roughly 800 and 200 inverts, respectively, were shipped to post offices.

On May 4, 1901, F.W. Davis of the Mergenthaler Linotype Co. in Brooklyn bought a sheet of 50 two-cent Pan-Americans. The locomotive was upside down. As a collector, Davis knew these were potentially valuable. He gave away a few to friends and sold most of the rest for as much as $75 each.

Faulty postage stamps were the least of the exposition's problems. It had cost too much. Attendance was low due to cold, rainy weather, which made the staff, the buildings' false marble, literally fall apart at the seams. Worse was the incident for which the exposition is remembered.

President William McKinley, then in his second term, was one of the most enigmatic men to occupy the presidency. He left no private correspondence and conveyed his intimate thoughts to no one. The Ohioan's genius was for handling men so they thought his ideas were their own. Himself incorruptible, he understood those who were not.

On Sept. 5, 1901, McKinley spoke to 50,000 people at the exposition. He had agreed to a public reception at the Temple of Music on the next day at 4 p.m. As the doors opened, the organist, W.J. Gomph, began Bach's Sonata in F. The President was a pro at this: he grasped hands firmly and made a single vigorous downward thrust with a discreet sideways pull to keep the line moving. At 4:07, Gomph reached a crescendo and paused, letting the chord reverberate throughout the building. The President, having shaken about 200 hands, turned to Leon Czolgosz, a young, slender man whose left hand was wrapped in a handkerchief. McKinley smiled and reached toward Czolgosz's right hand. Czolgosz raised his left and fired two shots from the revolver he had purchased at a hardware store at 316 Main St. that morning.

One bullet stopped at McKinley's breastbone. The other ripped into the left side of his abdomen, perforating the front and rear walls of the stomach. There was a moment's silence. McKinley gazed quizzically at his assassin.

Then James Parker, a tall, black, muscular waiter, tackled Czolgosz, knocking the pistol from his hand as a Buffalo detective and an artilleryman piled on. The President, gripping his chest, began wavering on his feet. A guard held him. McKinley asked, "Am I shot?" He saw detectives, policemen and soldiers beating Czolgosz. Somehow, the President's voice pierced the tumult. "Don't let them hurt him," he roared, and they stopped. Then he lapsed into shock.

At 5:20 p.m., Dr. Matthew T. Mann, Buffalo's leading surgeon, operated on the President. For unknown reasons, he used the exposition's ill-equipped emergency hospital. An assistant illuminated the incision by reflecting sunlight from a pocket mirror. Mann had never dealt with gunshot wounds and could not follow the track of the bullet. He finally gave up and sutured the incision without finding the slug or draining the wound against infection. Then they took the President to the Milburn residence at 1168 Delaware Ave., white and strained, but conscious.

At Isle La Motte on Lake Champlain, a telephone rang in the house of Nelson Fisk, former governor of Vermont. Fisk then went to the front door. Outside, Vice President Roosevelt stood chatting with one or two companions. Fisk beckoned him. As the door closed behind T.R., Fisk locked it. Keys turned in all the other doors to the house. Guards appeared at the windows.

When Roosevelt arrived in Buffalo the next afternoon, the President seemed to be recovering. Someone suggested national confidence was best restored by having Roosevelt resume his schedule. The Vice President left Buffalo on the afternoon of Tues., Sept. 10, for a family vacation in the Adirondacks.

They stayed in Camp Tahawus, "the most remote human habitation in the Empire State," as Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris noted. On Fri., Sept. 13, the Vice President climbed Mount Marcy, the Adirondacks' highest peak. He descended with his party to Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River, where they unpacked lunch. It was around 1:25 p.m., and Roosevelt was eating a sandwich when he saw a ranger running toward him through the trees.

He was 10 miles from the camp, which was 35 miles from the railhead at North Creek. A stage line, the only transportation, had placed relays of horses at his disposal. However, the roads were thick with mud and not even the Rough Rider could reach North Creek until long after midnight. A special train was waiting, with all tracks cleared to Buffalo.

He arrived around 1 p.m. on Sept. 14, and after borrowing a frock coat and striped trousers from a friend, Ansley Wilcox, called on Mrs. McKinley around 2:35 p.m. Then he returned to the Wilcox house at 646 Delaware Ave. At 3:31 p.m., Roosevelt went into the library. Secretary of War Elihu Root said, "Mr. Vice President, I..." and then his voice broke as the tears poured down his cheeks. Then he asked Roosevelt to take the oath of office. Roosevelt agreed, and turned to U.S. District Judge John R. Hazel, who said, "Theodore Roosevelt, raise your right hand."

Czolgosz was executed on Oct. 29, 1901?53 days after shooting the President.       The exposition closed on Nov. 1, having lost $4 million. By the spring of 1902, the City of Light had been knocked down, blown up and covered over. Much of the sculpture was removed and reinstalled. Bacchante and Goddess of Light are in the statuary court of the American wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Developers largely transformed the site into one-family housing. Only a large stone marker now stands where McKinley fell.

The Pan-American Inverts are among the world's most valuable stamps. For example, a normal, used one-cent Pan-Am is worth around $3. Two years ago, one of the three surviving postmarked one-cent inverts, still attached to a postcard mailed at the exposition on Aug. 2, 1901, sold for $121,000.

Some argue the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 heralded Buffalo's decline. For the Queen City of the Lakes, McKinley's final speech sounds of prophecy: "These buildings will disappear, this creation of art and beauty and industry will perish from sight..." Lauren Belfer, whose novel City of Light is set in Buffalo during the Exposition, grew up in the Queen City. She recently wrote, "Like many northern industrial cities, Buffalo was dying when I was young, and my friends and I talked only of how we would leave." In the last decade, Buffalo lost one-tenth of its population.

The stamps commemorating the Pan-American Inverts will first be released in New York, not Buffalo.