#44 — Sunday, 2nd November 1901
Tonight, at midnight, the Pan-American Exposition will close.
I have been watching it since May, when I stood outside the Temple of Music and marvelled at the quarter of a million lightbulbs powered by Niagara Falls. I watched McKinley give his speech about progress to a crowd of a hundred and sixteen thousand. I watched the organ play “Träumerei.” I watched the handkerchief. I watched the blood. I watched the X-ray machine that nobody used. I watched the President carried out on a stretcher, and the crowd moan at the sight of his ashen face, and the electric ambulance — electric, at the Exposition of electricity — carry him to the hospital where they could not save him.
Now it ends. Eight million people came. Twenty million were expected. The deficit is three million dollars. Rain and cold kept people away in the spring. The assassination kept them away in the fall. The Exposition that was built to celebrate the century’s progress will be remembered only for the moment the century’s progress was interrupted by a man with a pistol.
This afternoon, as a final entertainment, a sham battle was staged in the stadium. Several hundred participants — six tribes of Native Americans in ceremonial dress, and the United States Infantry — re-enacted a war. Theatrical explosions. Hand-to-hand combat. A spectacle of conquest performed for an audience of a hundred and twenty-five thousand people who paid to watch the violence their country had committed against these same peoples, re-enacted as sport.
Geronimo sat in his booth all summer, signing autographs, guarded by a soldier. The Kiowa land was opened by lottery in August. The Iroquois built longhouses on the Exposition grounds and were listed in the programme alongside the livestock exhibits. And now, on the last day, the Indians and the infantry stage a fight, and the fight is entertainment, and the entertainment is the century’s way of processing the things it has done — by turning them into shows, charging admission, and going home satisfied.
The buildings will be demolished by spring. The Chicago House Wrecking Company will bid $132,000 to dismantle everything. The canals will be filled in. The grounds will be subdivided into streets and house lots. Within a year, almost no evidence of the Exposition will remain. The Electric Tower, where the quarter of a million lights burned and the Goddess of Light stood with her arms raised, will be torn down. The statue will be toppled from the top, and it will shatter on the ground. The Temple of Music, where McKinley shook hands and the organ played and the bullet entered, will be reduced to lumber. The lumber will be sold to satisfy creditors.
Only one building will survive — the New York State Building, made of marble, the one permanent structure in a city of plaster and wood. Everything else was temporary. Everything else was designed to be destroyed. The century built its monument to progress out of materials that would not last, and is now tearing it down.
I find this appropriate.
Four days ago, on Tuesday, Leon Czolgosz was strapped to the electric chair at Auburn Prison.
He said his last words. He was not sorry. The current passed through him. They placed acid in his coffin to dissolve his body before burial. The man who killed the President of the United States at the Exposition of Electricity was killed by electricity, at a prison in the town where Annie Taylor was born, and his body was dissolved so that nothing would remain — no grave, no marker, no place for anyone to stand and remember or grieve.
The symmetry is the century’s, not mine. I merely observe it. The Exposition celebrated electrical power. The President was shot at the Exposition. The assassin was executed by electrical power. The Exposition is demolished. The assassin is dissolved. Both are erased. The century builds and tears down and builds again, and the tearing down is always faster than the building, and the erasure is always more efficient than the creation.
Czolgosz is gone. His body is chemistry now. His name will persist — in textbooks, in footnotes, in lists of assassins — but the man himself, the factory worker from Cleveland who lost his job in the Panic of 1893 and read the wrong pamphlets and listened to the wrong speeches and picked up a cheap revolver and wrapped it in a handkerchief and walked into a line of citizens waiting to shake the President’s hand — that man has been unmade. The century does not forgive. It does not even forget. It dissolves.
November. The year is turning. The leaves are down in Canton, where McKinley lies in a vault. The leaves are down in Dayton, where the Wrights are testing wing shapes in their tunnel — they will continue through December, hundreds of tests, the scrap wallpaper filling up with numbers. The leaves are down in New Orleans, where a boy named Louis is three months old and has not yet heard a cornet up close, though the cornets are everywhere around him, in the dance halls and the saloons and the funeral processions, the sound of the city leaking through the walls.
The year has ten weeks left. The century has its new president, who is already planning his first address to Congress — a twenty-thousand-word speech about trusts and monopolies that will signal, to anyone paying attention, that the age of unchallenged corporate power is ending, or at least being challenged for the first time by a man with the energy and the office to make the challenge stick.
In December, the first Nobel Prizes will be awarded in Stockholm. I do not know yet what I will say about them. The prizes are Alfred Nobel’s conscience — the dynamite inventor’s attempt to repay the world for the damage his invention caused. The century will take the prizes and transform them into the most prestigious honour on earth, which is another way of saying that the century will take an act of guilt and make it glamorous.
And in December — on the 12th, if the weather and the equipment cooperate — a man named Guglielmo Marconi will sit in a room on a cliff in Newfoundland and listen for a signal from Cornwall, three thousand four hundred kilometres away. Three dots. The letter S. The first wireless message to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The air, which Santos-Dumont conquered with hydrogen and the Wrights are conquering with mathematics, will be conquered a third way — not by flying through it, but by filling it with information. The invisible will become audible. The silence between continents will end.
I have been seeding Marconi since Post #23, when I wrote about the speed of loneliness. The speed of communication and the speed of loneliness are not related, I said. In six weeks, the speed of communication will make its greatest leap since the telegraph, and the loneliness of the world will not diminish by a single degree.
Midnight. The lights go out at the Pan-American Exposition. The Electric Tower, which burned all summer and all autumn, which lit the face of a president and an assassin and eight million visitors and a captive Apache war chief, goes dark.
I stand in the empty grounds. The plaster is already cracking. The canals are shallow and still. The Temple of Music is locked. Inside, the great pipe organ is silent. It played “Träumerei” — daydreaming — at the moment the century woke up.
The lights go out. The century does not go dark. The century never goes dark. It just moves its light somewhere else — to the White House, to the wind tunnel, to the cliff in Newfoundland where a man is building an antenna — and the places it leaves behind become what all abandoned places become: evidence that something was here, and is not, and will not be again.
The century is forty-four weeks old. The lights go out. I remain.
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