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In and out
He was arrested and held on a $5,000
bond before the coroner's inquest, then held over
for the February 1905 grand jury trial. It was
reported that at his arrest, he remarked "I've
worked for the old man [Will J. Davis]
thirty years, and I'll stick to him now. I've done
nothing to be ashamed of, and the old man will be
along soon to get me out. I hate being locked up.
Mayor Harrison isn't, and he has been held
responsible just as much as I have. They've got no
business to drag me out of bed and lock me up." He
was correct about Davis getting him out; Iroquois
co-owner,
Harry Powers, came along later to pay Cummings bail. If Cummings
thought Davis had the pull to prevent his
prosecution, however, he was mistaken.
Given Cummings' level of authority and
responsibility on the Iroquois stage, his arrest was
predictable. His combative attitude may have
contributed to his being held over for the grand
jury investigation. On multiple occasions, the man
testified as to how the fire started - but also
testified that he wasn't even in the theater when
the fire started, was at the hardware store and saw
nothing. His absence was supported by other
witnesses, making his testimony of little value, but
that didn't prevent deputy coroner Lawrence Buckley
from trying to inflate it.
At the February 1904 inquest, Buckley tried to
establish that Cummings testimony was dishonest due
to his loyalty to his boss, asserting that he'd been
been coached by one of Davis'
attorneys,
LeGrande Perce.
Cummings freely admitted he'd discussed the inquest
with Davis and Perce but was adamant that he was not
told what to say. He described a casual
meet-up at the Illinois Theater, site of Will Davis'
offices. With the closing of Chicago's theaters
including the Iroquois and Illinois, Cummings had
time on his hands. He'd wandered into the
Illinois and sat around chewing the fat. Well, yes,
attorney Perce was there, and yes, they talked in
general about how the trial might go. True?
Probably not.
Wha?
Buckley also spent time highlighting another non-starter. Cummings
caused or allowed fireman Sallers to spend time serving as a doorman. Cummings
had on one occasion asked Sallers to serve as a
doorman for a half hour. Unbeknownst to Cummings,
during his absence from the Iroquois, the practice
had become common, and Sallers served as a doorman
an estimated twenty-five times, testified stage
worker Michael Bergin.
When the fire broke out, however, Sallers testified
he was in the basement looking for smokers, not
manning a door.
So okay, Buckley, why did you spend
so much time on questions about Sallers serving as a
doorman? Were you suggesting that Sallers spent so much time manning a door that it
prevented him from fireman tasks? Was your argument
that Sallers was manning a door when he could
instead have been nagging Iroquois management to
complete plumbing to the stage so water ran to the
standpipes? Reminding them to bring contractors back
to complete installation of roof vents? Contacting
fire chief Musham to say, "There's a disaster
waiting to happen on Randolph street"? Were you
perhaps trying to learn if serving as a doorman so
damaged Saller's credibility that management
discounted his advice about fire fighting
preparedness? Was your goal to establish that
Cummings was habitually a careless manager of
subordinates? Any/all of those might have been valid
lines of inquiry but if Buckley developed them, it
wasn't included in newspaper excerpts.
Herd of elephants in the corner
While he chased blind alleys, Buckley left unprobed
the most critical consequence of Cummings' loosey-goosey
management style, one that led directly to an
increased death count. Cummings knew that
pair of strip lamps, one on each side of the proscenium, when left open,
obstructed the fire curtain descent, preventing it
from dropping to the stage floor. Stage workers
testified that the curtain had hung up on the lamp
on prior occasions, that the solution employed by Mr.
Bluebeard stage
manager
William Carlton was to direct workers, usually his assistant stage
manager
William Plunkett.
"Plunk! Strips!"
In keeping with the
chronic blame game that went on between Mr.
Bluebeard stage workers and Iroquois house stage workers, Iroquois
workers were critical of Carlton's
catch-as-catch-can approach. (Seems like the
essential improvisational skills required of a
traveling company to meet constantly changing
physical conditions might inevitably be perceived as
disorganization by workers at a single house for
whom constancy and systems are critical for
accommodating the needs of changing shows. Different disciplines.)
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Coroner sees through blame game
Coroner and later prosecutors apparently recognized
that though Carlton had the more important-sounding
title of stage manager, a fellow traveling through,
off at a different theater in a few weeks, isn't
responsible for preventing a theater's poorly
designed equipment from causing a safety problem.
Cummings was the house boss who should have directed
someone to mount the strip lamps to a pedestal or
build a frame, or hang them from the ceiling,
anything to get them out of the path of the fire
curtain. It was an important point because had the
curtain dropped to the floor, the fire would have
been contained to the stage a bit longer, giving
time for more people to evacuate the auditorium.
There would still have been hundreds of fatalities,
but a few hundred more people might have survived.
A coroner's inquest is supposed to be a
fact-finding process but Buckley's questions, at
least as excerpted in newspaper accounts, were
sometimes maddeningly off target. The line of
questioning I'd have liked to see might have
demonstrated that Cummings' approach to fire curtain
operation reflected his adoption of his boss's
priorities in which the fire curtain was relegated
to a decor device, functioning chiefly as eye candy.
Davis had contracted with artist St. John Lewis to paint a scene on
the curtain, then used a page of the souvenir
program book to
rhapsodize about it.▼2
In Davis' estate was a gouache
painting by Lewis of the Iroquois
Confederacy ,
possibly one of several submitted by the artist,
possibly even the one selected and painted on the
fire curtain. I suspect he and/or his secretary
Nellie O'Hagan,
who in 1907 became his wife, personally directed Lewis in the
project, approving the art as carefully as the
seating upholstery, light fixtures, and other
decorative appointments at the Iroquois. The decor,
including the native American theme, was his
personal imprint on the theater, as egocentric a
mark as if he'd named it the Davis Theater. As a
longtime employee, James E. Cummings got that
about his boss. Cummings knew that if Davis was in
the house, the Iroquois-themed curtain better be on
display. But when Davis was not around, such as on
December 30 when he was at a funeral for
Jerome Sykes, Cummings could relax a bit.
Another question Buckley seemingly didn't ask: why
wasn't a replacement appointed for Cummings position
during his month-long absence? Was it discussed?
Why did Davis pull away the head stage director for
a month during its first weeks of operation?
The Chicago Tribune would later remark in an
editorial that many of the problems that cropped up
during the fire resulted because important tasks
went undone during Cummings' absence. Davis
was responsible for that poor decision and Cummings'
testimony was necessary to pin it on him.
On to the next rung
Buckley's questioning satisfied the
coroner's jury that a more extensive investigation of Cummings role in
the disaster was needed. He was indicted for
manslaughter and held on $3,000 bond pending the
grand jury trial. Presumably, Davis and/or Klaw-Erlanger
again posted his bond.
In October 1904, along with Iroquois business
manager Thomas Noonan, Cummings was granted a change
of venue to Peoria. Circuit court judge
George Kersten spent
several months studying the cases and, in February
1905, announced that technical problems required him
to quash the indictments of defendants to be tried
in Chicago. He explained the problems to the
attorneys and gave the prosecution a month to
prepare new indictments. In Peoria,
judge Theodore N. Green ,
to whom the case against Cummings and Noonan had
been transferred, had no choice but to quash their
indictments as well.
When the grand jury met to determine a post-quash
strategy, they decided to drop prosecution of
Noonan, Cummings, Sallers, and
Iroquois co-owner Harry Powers .
Only three were re-indicted: Davis, for involuntary
manslaughter, and city building inspectors,
Edward Laughlin and
George Williams, for neglect of duty. James Cummings was free to
spend the rest of his life telling himself he did
nothing to be ashamed of.
Cummings bio
Forty-four-year-old James Cummings (1858–) was an
Iowa native. His wife of nineteen years, Sarah, was
from Tennessee, and his five sons were born in
Arkansas and Illinois. One of those sons,
eighteen-year-old Roger Morgan Cummings (1885–1942),
worked at the Iroquois as an assistant to his father
and was called to testify in fire attorney
Fulkerson's hearing.
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