Assassination Vacation (18 page)

And Lincoln’s tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha

The nation’s flag will lose its stars

The stripes they’ll change to rebel bars

And we’ll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power

In other words, a vote for Hancock and the Democrats is a vote against the Republicans, which is a vote against the United States.

That song, by the way, is very Stalwart, which is to say very Conkling, very Grant. One of the slight variances between the Stalwarts and their fellow Republicans the Half-Breeds is that the Half-Breeds, partly out of frustration with the Civil War sainthood of Grant, were clean-shirt guys more interested in stumping for mild civil service reform — a platform whose merit would make for a less stirring campaign song.
A bureaucrat should pass a test, hurrah, hurrah!

Obviously, the Republican tactics worked. Garfield and Arthur won the election. I stroll south from Hancock’s statue toward the Mall. The Capitol looms to the left. It was there on the East Portico, on March 4, 1881, that the new president delivered his inaugural address.

Garfield had been tinkering with the speech for weeks, but he was still up all night the night before working on it. It is generally grand and solemn, with an admirable pledge to ensure black suffrage and an interesting mention of building a canal somewhere in Central America (a Republican goal not met until the administration of Theodore Roosevelt dug across Panama). But Garfield lets loose a few obstinate hints of spark and spite that suggest the old soldier still had some fight in him. He puts the Mormon Church on notice, allowing that while religious freedom will be defended, liturgical outfits breaking the law to practice bigamy in the name of theology will be legally dealt with. There is a seemingly innocuous section on the need for civil service reform, all the more hilarious considering that all night long, as Garfield tried to scratch out the final draft of the address, civil service reform’s archenemy, Senator Roscoe Conkling, was hovering in Garfield’s hotel room haranguing him about political appointments until the sun came up. Garfield must have giggled jotting down the admonition to remember that political offices “were created, not for the benefit of incumbents or their supporters, but for the service of the Government,” all the while Conkling was camped out oblivious, yakking about his preferences for the cabinet and the New York Custom House.

Now we’re on the south side of the Mall. Next door to the gloomy Smithsonian castle, the Arts and Industries building is a redbrick Victorian. The museum is currently closed for two years of renovations. I squint through the front doors. Though the ceiling is masked behind some sort of plastic sheeting, the marble tile floor is uncovered, and the bright botanical decorative panels are still cheering up the walls. Compared to the funereal marble of other Greek Revival government buildings around here, Arts and Industries is welcoming and quaint and decidedly unsenatorial.

A plaque to the left of the front door announces that the building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977 because “this site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.” No clue is given as to what that significance might be.

In his diary, Garfield was about as vague describing what was surely one of the most important nights of his life. It merits one sentence: “Inaugural reception at Museum building in the evening.”

Garfield’s inaugural ball was also the building’s inaugural event. The new president had been on the Smithsonian’s board. As a congressman in 1879, Garfield helped appropriate $250,000 to build this, then known as the National Museum. According to the Smithsonian, “The building was completed in 1881, on schedule and within budget. Per square foot, it was the cheapest permanent government building ever built. It had 80,000 square feet of exhibition space.” Eventually, as the other Smithsonian museums sprouted along the Mall, the institution turned this building into administrative offices. (When I was a twenty-three-year-old Smithsonian intern, this is where I reported to get my I.D. badge.)

Looking through the glass at the silent rotunda, I find it hard to picture it as it must have looked on the night of Garfield’s ball: decorated with flags and bunting, seven thousand people lit by the glow of three thousand gaslights. But on temporary wooden flooring where the black, brown, and white squares now lie, James A. Garfield danced with his wife. It would be one of their last waltzes. By the time this, the U.S. National Museum, opened its exhibits to the public the following October, Garfield would be dead.

Backtracking across the Mall to Sixth and Constitution — the back entrance of the National Gallery of Art — is where Garfield got shot. This museum building wasn’t erected until 1941. Before that, it was the site of the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station. James A. Garfield walked in here on July 2, 1881. He was carried out on a stretcher.

No plaque marks the spot where Guiteau gunned down Garfield — zip.

I am pro-plaque. New York is lousy with them, and I love how spotting a plaque can jazz up even the most mundane errand. Once I stepped out of a deli on Third Avenue and turned the corner to learn I had just purchased gum near the former site of Peter Stuyvesant’s pear tree. For a split second I had fallen through a trapdoor that dumped me out in New Amsterdam, where in 1647 the peg-legged Dutch governor planted a tree he brought over from Holland; until a fatal wagon accident, it bore fruit for more than two hundred years. To me, every plaque, no matter what words are inscribed on it, says the same magic informative thing: Something happened! The gum cost a dollar, but the story was free.

Therefore, it bothers me that an educational edifice like the National Gallery of Art, which, as the name suggests, is operated by the federal government, fails to commemorate the site of a presidential assassination. Especially considering that once, on vacation in Ireland, I noticed the city of Dublin summoned the wherewithal to erect a plaque on a coffee shop celebrating the place as the site where Bob Geldof wrote the song “Rat Trap.” And “Rat Trap” wasn’t even the Boomtown Rats’ biggest hit.

So here’s my paper Garfield plaque. On July 2, Garfield was in the sort of jolly good mood enjoyed by anyone about to escape the inferno that is a Washington summer. Accompanied by his sons Hal and Jim and Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Garfield was on his way out of town, first to attend the graduation ceremony at his alma mater, Williams College, followed by a vacation in Long Branch on the New Jersey shore; Mrs. Garfield, whose malaria made sweaty D.C. especially unbearable, was already in Jersey, enjoying the sea air. (The president had already accompanied his wife to Long Branch earlier in the summer, returning to the White House to work. In fact, even then Charles Guiteau was stalking Garfield at this station as he and Lucretia departed for that trip, but Guiteau later confessed he could not bring himself to shoot the president with his sickly wife looking on. He had chatted with her at a White House reception and liked her.)

Guiteau fired two shots. The first one grazed Garfield’s arm. Guiteau lunged forward, pulled the trigger again, aiming at his victim’s back. Garfield fell. Guiteau fled toward Sixth Street. A D.C. police officer, having heard two shots, grabbed the assassin and took him into custody.

The wounded president was moved onto a mattress, his head held in the hands of a washroom attendant. But, as Laurie Anderson once put it, “It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.” Garfield might have survived the shooting but for what happened next. Namely, that various physicians summoned to the scene, especially Dr. D. W. Bliss, searched for the bullet’s location in Garfield’s back by poking their grimy fingers into the wound, rooting around in the presidential innards. This despite the advances and inroads of Joseph Lister and his soon-to-be-popular theories about germs. Besides his plea of insanity, Guiteau would in fact capitalize on this medical bungling at his defense trial, arguing that the doctors killed Garfield, “I just shot him.”

One witness to the event, who was at the station to see off his boss, was Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late president. Seeing the shooting would have been traumatic for anyone, but Lincoln, who shuddered for the bleeding president, must have cringed further for Hal and Jim Garfield, the president’s sons. Lincoln, remembering the death of his own father a few blocks away sixteen years before, confided to a reporter, “How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

Robert Lincoln, by the way, would continue to run the War Department for Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur. In the 1880s, this mostly entailed managing the dwindling Indian Wars out west, with one ghastly exception. The same week Garfield was shot, one of Lincoln’s charges, a twenty-five-man Arctic scientific expedition, was en route to Lady Franklin Bay. Robert Todd Lincoln, writes Leonard F. Guttridge in
Ghosts of Cape Sabine,
“could not have cared less about the North Pole.” Underprovisioned, thanks mostly to Lincoln’s indifference toward the project, the men arrived in the North Pole and set up a base, expecting a relief ship the following year. It never came. After two years went by without supplies or rescue, the starving party abandoned their camp and retreated home. Only six survived. The survivors ate the dead men. It was a fiasco of planning and leadership, a national embarrassment and disgrace, and as the bureaucrat in charge, Robert Lincoln had frozen blood on his hands. When the rumors of cannibalism surfaced, Lincoln and his counterpart the secretary of the navy conspired to cover it up by announcing that the reason the bones of the dead had been mangled by knives was that the survivors cut up their comrades’ flesh to use as “shrimp bait.” That’s how ugly the scandal was — that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was the positive spin.

T
he Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a handful of Garfield assassination mementos on display in the third-floor presidential exhibit. The very tile from the train station floor, the one Garfield was standing on when Guiteau shot him, was “donated in 1909 by James Garfield, son of the president.” It is surprisingly colorful, a mosaic in beige, black, white, brown, blue, and pink that wouldn’t be out of place in a baby’s room. (Omitted is word on the identity of the ghoul who gave the tile to Garfield junior in the first place.)

In the same display case, a desk calendar belonging to the president ominously rests on the number 2, as “the date has not been changed from the day he was shot.” Also nearby: a railroad spike from the special spur built to transport the ailing president to the Jersey shore where he went to recuperate, one of the “valued souvenirs sold to a public desperate for any tangible remembrance of the fallen leader,” and a quotation from soon-to-be-president Chester Arthur insisting, “I am an American among millions grieving for their wounded chief.”

Rounding out this alcove of presidential death are displays devoted to the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations; the attempt on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, including the bullet-dinted page of the speech he insisted on delivering after getting shot; and the mourning for the sudden death of FDR. Poor William McKinley, assassinated in 1901, does not warrant a display of his own, only a mention in an exhibit devoted to a brief history of the Secret Service, which contains, said one teenage boy to another, “Dude, guns!” By contrast, thanks to the generous lenders at Planet Hollywood, actor Harrison Ford’s presidential suit from the movie
Air Force One
does get its very own Harrison Ford–sized display case, with a text panel explaining, “The bloodstain and tear are a result of the movie’s fight scenes,” I guess because otherwise, a visitor might wonder if a Planet Hollywood patron had accidentally smeared it with ketchup.

N
ear the corner of Fifteenth Street and E, little generals are crawling all over the monument to General William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding their moms. All action halts as a squirrel with a napkin in its mouth circles the statue; it’s hard to explain why a squirrel with a napkin in its mouth is riveting, but it is.