Joe Biden was in town last week and, while we don’t know how he liked the barbecued oysters at Dragos, his visit at least prompted us to wonder about past presidents, particularly who was the first incumbent president to visit here. The main purpose of Biden’s trip was to promote and to present a check to the “Cancer Moonshot“ effort, which funds researchers looking at even more advanced ways to detect cancer quickly.
Through the magic of the World Wide Web, I received an e-mail from reader Chris Duncan, and as an example of how worldwide this web thing can be, he is from Opelike, Alabama. As a PhD candidate at Auburn University, Duncan’s 2008 dissertation was entitled “Benjamin Morgan Palmer: Southern Presbyterian Divine.” Palmer was a fiery orator whose words added fuel to pro-Confederacy passions. The native of Charleston, South Carolina served several congregations throughout the South including in New Orleans.
In 1901, Palmer was front and center during a visit by William McKinley. That was the first trip by a Commander in Chief to the city. McKinley was a Republican, former governor of Ohio who was originally elected to the presidency in 1896 and re-elected in 1900. During his time in office he was active in what I call “tropical expansion” including freeing Cuba from Spain; taking ownership of the Republic of Hawaii; and purchasing the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. Economic growth was good and there was little labor unrest during his time in office so he was relatively popular.
Shortly after his second inauguration, McKinley and his wife, Ida, took a six-week tour of the nation that was scheduled to include the South and Southwest and then up the Pacific Coast before heading back across the nation to the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York.
Because his wife became ill, the last part of the trip was curtailed, but not the visit to New Orleans.
As announced by the Louisiana Historical Society, the president and his cabinet would visit the city on Thursday, May 2, 1901. The occasion was the 98th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris. There was a receiving line at the Cabildo, and then the president appeared on the second floor balcony to be introduced and to speak to the crowd.
Presbyterian Minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a celebrity-level orator was presented to the president. Reportedly, there was a warm exchange between the two men.
(Traveling by train, the president no doubt had his own first class accommodations on board, but if he stayed overnight it would have likely been at the St. Charles Hotel, which was the classiest place in town and whose list of celebrity political “big shots” would have included the Grand Duke Alexis in 1872.)
Here the story takes a dramatic twist.
Because McKinley’s trip had been delayed, his last scheduled stop, the Exhibition in Buffalo, was rescheduled to September 1901. There, McKinley was shot by an anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who had lost his job during the Panic of 1893. Eight years later he would shoot the president, who he regarded as a symbol of oppression.
The president died 13 days later on Sept. 14, 1901.
Czolgosz was sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair. (The event had a legislative impact that still resonates today: Congress passed a law to officially charge the Secret Service with the responsibility for protecting the president.)
That was one of two tragic events associated to when the president was on the Cabildo balcony. Palmer, the outspoken minister embraced by the president, would be killed on May 28, 1902 when he was hit by a streetcar. The location was on S. Carrollton Avenue near where a park would one day be named after him.
Since many of his Civil War-era lectures were in support of slavery and secession, Palmer’s once esteemed reputation would not survive. The park would be renamed “Marsalis Harmony Park” after musician Ellis.
One name that did become revered, especially to New Orleans, was the vice-president who succeeded after the McKinley assassination – Theodore Roosevelt. As though taking control of a bull-dozer himself, Roosevelt hastened the sluggish project to build a link connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans trough Central America. The Panama Canal would be a boon to trade along the Southern rim of the United States including locally.
Had this been another era, McKinley might have stayed in a hotel that would one day be named after his vice-president.
Like the railroad tracks between Washington and New Orleans the path of history takes many twists.
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