There is no horizontal Stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our Stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
For the first time in their memory, certainly since the earliest beginnings of the Civil War, Americans facing the shared tragedy of Garfield’s ordeal felt a deep and surprising connection to one another. Divided by vast stretches of dangerous wilderness and stark differences in race, religion, and culture, there had been little beyond severely strained notions of common citizenship to unite them. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sixteen years earlier had only deepened that divide. But the attempt on Garfield’s life aroused feelings of patriotism that many Americans had long since forgotten, or never knew they had.
The waves of emotion that swept over the country, moreover, were fed not only by the fact that America’s president had been attacked in the train station that morning, but that that president had been Garfield. To his countrymen, a staggeringly diverse array of people, Garfield was at the same time familiar and extraordinary, a man who represented both what they were and what they hoped to be. Although he had been elevated to the highest seat of power, he was still, and would always be, one of their own.
A nation of immigrants, the United States found in Garfield a president who knew well the brutal indignities of poverty, and the struggle to overcome them. Between 1850 and 1930, the country’s foreign-born population would rise from more than two million to more than fourteen million. This flood of people, known as the “new immigrants,” came from a broader range of countries and with a greater number of languages than ever before. In Garfield’s humble origins, remarkable rise, and soaring erudition, they found justification for their sacrifices, and hope for their children.
In the West, those Americans who had endured the perils and hardship of the frontier to find a better life knew Garfield not only as a child of poverty but as the son of pioneers. Although it was still a long and difficult journey from any part of the West to Washington, Garfield himself was a powerful link to the world of covered wagons and dirt farms. Since he had taken office, settlers, living on land they had cleared themselves and which, every day, they fought to defend, had felt secure in one thing at least, that they would not be forgotten in their nation’s capital.
For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.”
Even in the South, where he had once been hated and feared as an abolitionist and Union general, there was a surprising pride in Garfield’s presidency. Although he had made it clear from the moment he took office, even in his inaugural address, that he would not tolerate the discrimination he knew was taking place in the South, what he promised was not judgment and vengeance but help. The root of the problem, he believed, was ignorance, and it was the responsibility, indeed “the high privilege and sacred duty,” of the entire nation, North and South, to educate its people.
Garfield’s plan was to “give the South, as rapidly as possible, the blessings of general education and business enterprise and trust to time and these forces.” The South had taken him at his word, and, for the first time in decades, had accepted the president of the North as its president as well. With Garfield in the White House, the New York Times wrote, Southerners “felt, as they had not felt before for years, that the Government … was their Government, and that the chief magistrate of the country had an equal claim upon the loyal affection of the whole people.”
Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, a contemporary of Garfield’s wrote, the nation was “united, as if by magic.” Even Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy and a man whom Garfield had voted to indict as a war criminal, admitted that the assassination attempt had made “the whole Nation kin.”
Together, Americans waited for news of the president’s condition, helpless to prevent what they feared most. Although Garfield had not died in the attack, neither had he yet been saved. He was in an agonizing place in between, and as he suffered, so did his countrymen. Unable to rejoice or mourn, they waited in silence, and prayed as if they were at the sickbed not of a president but a brother.
What made the suffering even harder to bear was that, despite the fury directed at men like Conkling and Arthur, it was devastatingly clear that there was nothing and no one to blame. In no man’s mind save the assassin’s had the shooting achieved anything. It had not been carried out in the name of personal or political freedom, national unity, or even war. It had addressed no wrong, been the consequence of no injustice.
Garfield’s shooting had also revealed to the American people how vulnerable they were. In the little more than a century since its inception, the United States had become a powerful and respected country. Yet Americans suddenly realized that they still had no real control over their own fate. Not only could they not prevent a tragedy of such magnitude, they couldn’t even anticipate it. The course of their lives could be changed in an instant, by a man who did not even understand what he had done.
As he waited cheerfully in Cell Two, Charles Guiteau felt no remorse for his actions, or even fear for his life. He was, in fact, happier now than he had ever been. Having long thirsted for fame and recognition, he found the intense interest in his life and the frenzy of activity that surrounded him at the District Jail not terrifying but thrilling. “I felt lighthearted and merry the moment I got into that cell,” he would later say.
Although reporters visited him on Murderers’ Row in a steady stream, they recoiled when they met him. Even the most seasoned journalists were sickened by the arrogance and enthusiasm with which he recounted his plans to murder the president. “His vanity is literally nauseating,” one reporter, Edmund Bailey, wrote. “Guiteau has an idea that the civilized world is holding its breath waiting to hear of the minutest details of his career.”
Anxious to control what he was asked and how he was perceived, Guiteau wrote up a list of subjects that he wanted to cover, and brought the list with him to interviews. He also encouraged reporters to describe him in detail, from his dress to his demeanor, and he labored to give them his best stories, told with an almost theatrical flourish. “He spoke with deliberation,” Bailey recalled, “occasionally emphasizing, somewhat dramatically, with his voice or by gesture, a remark which he deemed of transcendent importance, or chuckling at the mention of some incident which he considered amusing.”
As much as he was enjoying himself, Guiteau expected to be shown respect during the interviews, even deference. He saw himself not as a man reviled by an entire country but as a national hero and the object of widespread fascination. “He objected strenuously to the ‘continuity of his thought’ being disturbed by interruption,” Bailey wrote, “and frequently stated so in a most imperious way, intimating that the interruption had placed in immediate jeopardy of destruction some thought of vital interest and importance to the community.”
Guiteau’s desire for control extended even to the photographer who was sent to the prison to take his picture. He had always been extremely particular about how he was photographed, giving detailed instructions about every feature and flaw. “I want you to be sure and take a good picture of me,” he once told a photographer. “Be sure you get the right expression of my face and eyes, and I think you had better not take a side view.” Now, with the world watching, he was almost frantic in his concern that the picture be flattering. “I don’t want to appear strained and awkward,” he said as he sat down before the camera in the prison’s rotunda. “If my picture is taken at all it must be a good one.” Before returning to his cell, he asked the photographer for a $25 royalty fee.
Having lived most of his adult life in dire poverty, surviving only by stealing, cheating, and borrowing, Guiteau spent much of his time in prison planning ways to make money. He believed that he would be released on bail by the fall, at which time he planned to go on a speaking tour that, he was confident, would earn tens of thousands of dollars. He also expected to now generate a considerable income from sales of his book, The Truth. Nor was he above selling personal items. In particular, he hoped to auction off the thin, ragged suit he had been wearing when he shot the president, which he hoped would bring a high price because of its historical value.
Beyond his financial needs, Guiteau did not worry about his own fate. As soon as Arthur was made president, he expected grateful Stalwarts to begin visiting him “by the hundreds.” He also insisted that the American people were on his side. He was not allowed to read newspapers while in prison, the one deprivation he felt, but even if he had seen the countless editorials that demanded his hanging or the articles that described angry mobs forming across the country, Guiteau would not have believed them. He vowed that, if he were to be tried—and he did not think Arthur would let that happen—“a conviction would shock the public.”
So carefree was Guiteau, he was quickly putting on weight. While the president was unable to keep anything down, had literally begun to starve, his would-be assassin ate everything he could get his hands on. By the time the summer was out, Guiteau would gain 10 pounds, a substantial amount of weight for a man who had been only 135 pounds when he was brought through the prison gates.
Guiteau also began to make plans for his future. Although by now he was used to being alone, he felt that it was time to remarry, and that he should take advantage of his newly won fame to find a wife. Having offered his autobiography for publication to the New York Herald, he tacked onto the end a personal note. “I am looking for a wife and see no objection to mentioning it here. I want an elegant Christian lady of wealth, under thirty, belonging to a first-class family. Any such lady can address me in the utmost confidence.”
Guiteau also used his autobiography to announce his candidacy for president, a decision he believed the American people would not only welcome but actively encourage. “For twenty years, I have had an idea that I should be President,” he wrote. “My idea is that I shall be nominated and elected as Lincoln and Garfield were—that is, by the act of God.… My object would be to unify the entire American people, and make them happy, prosperous and God-fearing.”
While Guiteau sank deeper into delusion and the country staggered under the weight of shock and grief, a thin ray of hope shone late into the night, every night, in a small laboratory on Connecticut Avenue. From the moment he had left the White House, Alexander Graham Bell had begun work in earnest, thrilled to be back in his own laboratory, where there was little danger of interruption or distraction. He had often worked under intense pressure, under the threat of humiliation, even professional and financial ruin, but he had never before felt the weight of another man’s life in his hands.
Bent over a long, rectangular work bench made of unpainted wood, Bell stared at the latest incarnation of his induction balance, modified to find a bullet in a man’s back. He had been wrestling with the design for weeks and had solicited advice from some of the world’s most respected scientists. He was in contact with everyone from the British inventor David Hughes to the renowned mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb to inventors at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Scientific American. “Alec says he telegraphed all leading physicists here and in London and all here at least have answered with suggestions and expressions of interest and desire to help,” Mabel wrote to her mother. “No one thinks they can do enough to help the President.”
At this point in his experiments, Bell had made some significant changes to his original design, most of which revolved around the coils. He had tried winding the primary coil into a conical shape. He had adjusted the coils’ size, making them “enormous” at one point, and as small as a bullet at another. Most important, he had decided to borrow an idea from Hughes and use four coils—two exploring and two balancing—rather than two. He was concerned that if he used his original instrument to search for a bullet, especially over a broad area such as the president’s back, the movement might upset the coils’ delicate balance. By using Hughes’s four-coil design, he could rigidly attach the two exploring coils to each other. Any necessary adjustments could be made to the balancing coils, which would sit on a nearby table, undisturbed.
The result of Bell’s experiments was the instrument that sat before him now. The exploring arm of the invention consisted of a handle, rounded at the top and narrower at its base, attached to a disk carved from walnut. On the other side of the disk were the exploring coils, which he had stacked on top of each other—the larger, primary coil against the disk and the smaller, secondary coil against the primary. Four wires from the coils had been threaded up through a hole Bell had hollowed into the handle. The wires stretched out like tentacles, connecting one coil to the telephone receiver and a balancing coil, and the other to a battery, the second balancing coil, and an automatic circuit interrupter.
Bell and Tainter had already begun testing the design. Before each test, they would fire a bullet against a board, to ensure that it was flattened like the bullet inside Garfield, and then conceal it in their subject. Bell had never hesitated to use unorthodox test subjects. Seven years earlier, while working on a phonautograph, a distant cousin of the phonograph, he had used a dead man’s ear, soaking it in glycerin and water to make it pliable. Now, for Garfield, he used everything from a bag stuffed with wet bran to mimic the electrical resistance of a human body to a massive joint of meat that he had bought from a butcher in an effort to “more nearly approximate the dreadful reality.”
On July 20, as promised, Bliss visited the Volta Laboratory, as had Joseph Stanley Brown the day before. Bliss, who had brought for the inventor two lead bullets exactly like the one lodged in Garfield, watched in silence as Bell repeated a number of his tests. Gripping the induction balance’s handle in one hand, Bell carefully ran the instrument over his subjects. Every time, it found its mark, emitting its now-familiar buzzing through the telephone receiver.
Just days after Garfield’s shooting, Bell had begun carefully detailing his work on the induction balance in a laboratory notebook. He used a modest, bound book with a pebbled cover and a white label that, in handwriting that shook and swerved with each bump in the leather, read “Volta Lab Notes.” On July 9, before he had even returned to Washington, he had expressed his confidence in his invention, scrawled over half an unlined page. “Ball can certainly be located by Induction Balance,” he had written. “See it clearly.”
There was no question that the invention worked. The problem was that it did not yet work well enough. Not only did the induction balance have to detect metal, it had to detect lead, which, among the metals, is one of the poorest conductors of electricity. What Bell yearned for was, quite literally, a silver bullet. “If people would only make their bullets of silver or iron,” he complained, “there would be no difficulty in finding them in any part of the body!”
In its earliest form, the induction balance could detect lead buried only slightly more than an inch deep. After weeks of struggle, Bell had been able to increase that range to just over two inches. His fear was that the bullet in Garfield lay deeper than that.
Convinced that he could stretch the range even farther, Bell rarely left his laboratory, and the strain was apparent. He had dragged his fingers through his black hair and beard so many times, they stood out at sharp, odd angles, like untrimmed trees. Always a serious young man, he had never managed to look youthful. Even when he had fallen in love with Mabel, her family had assumed that he was nearly ten years older than he was. Six years later, as he hunched over the induction balance, his face seemed to be set in a permanent scowl of concentration. No one would have guessed that the dour scientist had only recently celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday.
The Volta Laboratory, moreover, was far from an ideal work environment. Despite Bell’s renovations, the building seemed less like a laboratory than a horse stable, which is what it had been. Bell used the saddle posts that still hung from the walls as coat hooks, but there was little he could do about the smell. No amount of scrubbing could free the small building from the stubborn odor of manure, which seemed to cling to the walls, attracting clouds of flies that drove Bell and Tainter to distraction with their soft, buzzing hum. So unhealthy was the laboratory, in fact, that just a few weeks earlier it had been reported to the board of health.
Bell hardly noticed the clutter or even the smell, but he could not ignore the heat. For a man who suffered blinding headaches brought on by heat, spending the hottest days of summer in Washington, D.C., was excruciating. The summer before, he had complained that his “headache has taken root in my left eye and is flourishing!” Even when he could not bear the sound of a slamming door or ringing telephone, however, he had refused to stop working. “Alec says he would rather die than leave work,” his exasperated wife had written to his mother.
So engrossed had Bell become in his work that he had little time to think about anything else, even his wife, who was pregnant and miserable in sweltering Boston. After not writing to her for more than a week, he apologized for his “epistolary silence,” but then quickly lapsed back into it. Mabel, on the other hand, wrote frequently—both to Bell and about him. “Alec says he is well and bearing the heat well,” she wrote to her mother. “Still I shall be glad to have him home again and his work accomplished. I fear he won’t have the rest he so much needs after all.”
Mabel understood the importance of her husband’s work, but she also knew that he would literally work himself to death before he would give up. She had seen him sick with worry and determination too many times before, and it frightened her to know that this invention, and the good it could accomplish, meant as much to him as anything he had ever done. “I want to know how you are personally,” she wrote to Alec a few days after he had left for Washington. “I fancy you are so eager and excited that you don’t feel the heat as you otherwise would. Only for my sake do take care and don’t wear yourself all out. I … would think the President’s life a poor exchange for yours.”