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67 Chapter 4 A Carnival of Blood and Lust Although the Palmetto killings held the front pages for a short period, the story was rather quickly lost to other events, both local and national. One of these was the visit of U.S. president William McKinley to Georgia for a restful vacation in Thomasville, located in the extreme southern part of the state near the Florida border. On March 10, it had been announced that McKinley, accompanied by his wife and a small party including the vice president, Garret (Gus) Hobart, Hobart’s wife, Ohio Senator and Mrs. Mark Hanna, and a few other dignitaries would be making the trip to Georgia to stay at the plantation owned by Hanna’s brother Mel. “The president goes south to get the benefit of the magnificent Georgia weather to rest, and he does not care to make any plans with anything else in view,” the Constitution noted. “There are to be no receptions and no speeches. It will be the quietest kind of a social visit.”1 The special train, made up of five Pullmans, a dining car, and a combination smoking/baggage car, left Washington’s Union Station at 6:00 p.m. on Monday the thirteenth and arrived in Thomasville twenty-four hours later. “It is entirely fortunate that the president should have chosen Thomasville as the point at which to seek repose,” an editorial in the Constitution remarked. He will find the mockingbirds singing there, and the pungent odor of the pines will fill his nostrils and soothe what Old Aunt Minervy Ann calls the “mukyous membrine.” If he does not find spring in Thomasville, he will find a semblance of her, a fairly good imitation. Reflecting on the unusually cold and wet weather the South had experienced in the first months of 1899, the paper continued, in a slightly eroticized mode: 68 Chapter Four There are times too, when spring shows herself to be as shifty and as tantalizing a trollop as ever teased man withal. . . . Her reputation is gone in these parts, and we are waiting now, not for spring, but for summer—for those glorious days when the mercury stands at 98 degrees in the shade, and the whole body glows with a generous warmth that is mitigated now and again by light breezes that blow softly through the ivy leaves on the veranda.2 Georgia papers divided their attention between the shootings in Palmetto and McKinley’s vacation (and, for a few days, the hanging in the Tower of Robert Lewis), sometimes producing odd juxtapositions. On March 16, Palmetto got the headlines, but McKinley shared the front page in articles that emphasized Old South charm. “Mark Hanna seems determined that President McKinley shall pump ozone into his lungs until they reek with it,” the Constitution reported.3 McKinley told the Atlanta Journal, “I have always enjoyed my trips to Georgia. Your balmy climate is delightful, and I always find it pleasant here. Georgia possesses many attractions, and I consider this place a fine one in which to rest for a time.”4 He made no mention of the incidents concerning black militia or of the recent lynchings in Lee County and then in Palmetto. McKinley would spend two weeks in the state, leaving Thomasville for Jekyll Island and other resort spots on the coast. By Saturday, March 18, a second story had pushed Palmetto from the front pages. In New York City, the burning of the Windsor Hotel presented a scene of horror and derring-do that immediately captured the attention of the reading public. Located at Forty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, the Windsor was one of the city’s finest, a luxury hotel that filled an entire block of Fifth Avenue. The fire started on Friday afternoon as the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade was passing below the building. It spread so rapidly through the interior of the building that some who were watching the parade from windows or the roof were forced to jump into the streets, some to their deaths. “Windows were thrown up on every side of the building and guests, mostly women, in all stages of terror, made their appearance and uttered frantic appeals for assistance to the crowd below,” the Constitution recounted: As the flames gathered about them they became more and more terror-stricken, and presently some of them stood upon the narrow window sills and beckoned to the spectators that...

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