While in Buffalo recently for the annual American Folklore Society meetings, I had some free time to explore this fascinating city. (Yes, it is much more than hot wings and Niagra Falls.) I set off to explore why Theodore Roosevelt was inaugurated in Buffalo in 1901.
I set off on a brisk (due to the 40sF temperature and wind) walk from downtown, admiring the architecture along the way, and soon arrived at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Historical Site
This stately mansion houses not only the library where Roosevelt was inaugurated, but an impressive array of interactive displays for deeper dives. While you wait for your guided tour through the house, you are immersed in an exhibit on the 1901 Pan Am Exposition, a sort of world’s fair designed to showcase everything progressive and superior about America. Considering that electricity, and even ice cream, were new things back then, there was a lot to ooh and aah over at this fantastic city of the future for the people of the day, and putting yourself in their place via the displays was fun.
Things get decidedly darker when the tour guide puts on a video that explains how, after a rousing speech about the wonders of the exposition and of America, President McKinley is shot while greeting well wishers. (Obviously at least one person, Leon Czolgosz, did not wish him well at all.) TR was the Vice President, and when poor McKinley finally succumbed to his wounds (unfortunately he did not die instantly but suffered in the hands of inferior medical practices of the day), Roosevelt was summoned to Buffalo to pay his respects and get sworn in.
The next area imagines the many pressing issues of the day that must have been going through Roosevelt’s mind as he prepared to take over the presidency. Many of them sounded disturbingly familiar to those of us reading the news in 2018: immigrants flooding the country; poor race relations; and rampant devastation of natural resources in some of the country’s most spectacular wild landscapes, among others.
Poor old Teddy had his hands full, in other words. As those of us who know a little something about his personal history (or find out more through a visit to one of the many TR historical sites around the country), he was not exactly perfect. (Let’s not get into such things as the eminent domain of the Philippines, destructive safaris in Africa, etc.)
In any case, the tour through the house, standing in the library were the inauguration took place, seeing a pile of facsimiles of telegrams (the email – or even Twitter – of the day) that he needed to address, and then diving into more history in the upstairs rooms of the mansion where you can pose with a larger-than-life cut out, pretend to be president, and contemplate further how far, but then again how close, we still are to issues of 1901, was all very interesting and powerful experience. Thanks to our tour guide and the staff of the site for an enlightening couple of hours.
This posting about Teddy Roosevelt in Buffalo brings to mind a song collected by Sidney Robertson [Cowell] during the WPA Northern California Folk Music Project that she conceived and directed from 1938-1940. Among the selections she recorded in the hastily-built “Boomtown” area near the site of the Shasta Dam (constructed across the Sacramento River in Northern California) was a song fragment Robertson listed as: “Buffalo, Buffalo (Death of McKinley).”
The singer was Warde Ford, who with his brothers, had moved recently to California from Wisconsin when they heard that workers were needed to construct the dam. Warde Ford recorded the song in December, 1938. You can hear it at: https://stream-media.loc.gov/afc/afc1940001/afc1940001_a4198b3.mp3
McKinley died a few days after being shot, seeming to be on the mend, but then his life took a turn for the worse. The lyrics, “the doctor said, McKinley, take off your belt . . . cause the next president is going to be Roosevelt,” suggests the handing over of a champion’s belt to a winning prize-fighter.
A fascinating addition to the documentation of this song can be found in Robertson’s fieldnotes. The collector notes that one of the WPA staff working on the project who transcribed the song “was distressed at having Mrs. McKinley so misrepresented in it. Mrs. Robertson,” she complained, “it’s a shame to preserve a song like [that]—honestly, none of it happened that way at all!” Robertson noted that the WPA worker was referring to the lines: “Miss McKinley said, “Doctor, do all you can, if you can save my husband, there’s a million in your hand, Buffalo, Buffalo.”