Guiteau appealed, but in May, he was sentenced to hang on June 30. Guiteau was angry at the judge, the jury, the press, the American people, and, not least, President Arthur, whom Guiteau regarded as ungrateful considering that Arthur owed his pay raise and promotion to Guiteau. Four days before his execution, Guiteau penned a bizarre little play in which “The Almighty” confronts Guiteau’s enemies and damns them.
The Almighty asks the newspapermen, “Why did you hound my man to death?”
“We did not believe he was your man.”
“No excuse. Go to Hell.”
The Almighty interrogates President Arthur as to why he did not pardon “my man Guiteau.” When Arthur replies that he thought a pardon would deny him the presidential nomination in 1884, the Almighty tells Arthur, “No excuse, you ingrate! Go to Hell. Heat up Mr. Devil!”
On June 30, Guiteau would hang. An old folk song tells the tale:
My name is Charles Guiteau, my name I’ll ne’er deny.
I leave my aged parents in sorrow for to die.
But little did they think, while in my youthful bloom,
I’d be taken to the scaffold to meet my earthly doom.
That song, “Charles Guiteau,” was long-rumored to have been written by Guiteau, and I can see why — the first-person narrative, the boasting line about his name. It wasn’t. Probably the myth that Charles Guiteau wrote “Charles Guiteau” comes from the fact that Guiteau did write a song that he chanted from the scaffold right before he was hanged on June 30, 1882. (Guiteau was executed on a scaffold outside the jail on the banks of the Anacostia River, on the site of what is presently the D.C. Armory, next to RFK Stadium, which isn’t worth the trouble of a trip Guiteau-wise, though the stadium might have sentimental meaning for fans of the Washington Redskins.)
Before reciting his weird poem, Guiteau said to his death witnesses,
I am now going to read some verses which are intended to indicate my feelings at the moment of leaving this world. If set to music they may be rendered very effective. The idea is that of a child babbling to his mamma and his papa. I wrote it this morning about ten o’clock.
Then, he chanted:
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,
I am going to the Lordy,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lordy.
I love the Lordy with all my soul,
Glory hallelujah!
And that is the reason I am going to the Lord,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lord.
I saved my party and my land,
Glory hallelujah!
But they have murdered me for it,
And that is the reason I am going to the Lordy,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lordy!
I wonder what I will do when I get to the Lordy,
I guess that I will weep no more
When I get to the Lordy!
Glory hallelujah!
I wonder what I will see when I get to the Lordy,
I expect to see the most glorious things,
Beyond all earthly conception,
When I am with the Lordy!
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah
I am with the Lord.
The Garfield Monument, a bronze sculpture by John Quincy Adams Ward, was commissioned by the slain president’s old army buddies. It stands at the bottom of Capitol Hill facing the Mall. The sculpture intends to present a late-nineteenth-century vision of dignified classicism. But the first thing a present-day visitor notices is that it’s exceedingly gay. A life-size, fully dressed Garfield stands on top of a giant shaft. At the foot of the shaft, at eye level, three skimpily clad male figures recline. Meant to portray three phases of Garfield’s life — the student, the soldier, the lawmaker — they could not be hunkier. The soldier is a glistening piece of meat with his shirt off, grasping for his sword. The student is supine, come hither, resting his hand on his face, lounging around reading a book. And Garfield looms over them, like a dirty old man pulling up in his car about to take his pick from a lineup of street hustlers.
That is one interpretation. I looked it up and the Office of the Curator of the Capitol sees the Garfield sculpture this way: “The toe of one shoe projects over the edge of the base, giving the work a sense of vigor and incipient movement.”
President Garfield does have a neighbor, and of course, it’s the man who overshadowed the final year of his life, Ulysses S. Grant. Grant doesn’t get a memorial so much as a sprawling plaza of praise. The sculptural general turned president is all movement, where Garfield is, vigorous toe notwithstanding, still. On horseback, hat about to fly off from his speed, Grant is blatantly hetero, a giant, a blur. He’s surrounded by his soldiers in battle, by four lions facing west.
Grant desperately desired the Republican nomination in 1880 and when it went to Garfield, Grant was demoralized. And so, until Garfield’s shooting, Grant did only the bare minimum to aid his fellow Republican. He deigned to make a single campaign speech for Garfield (in which he did not mention Garfield’s name). Grant made an appearance for literally two minutes at a reception for President Garfield in Long Branch, even though the two men were staying across the street from each other for days. And, to Garfield’s alarm, Grant divulged to the press the contents of a scolding letter from Grant to Garfield in which Grant denounced Garfield’s appointment to the New York Custom House, which Grant saw as a slap in the face for his supporters and therefore himself.
After the shooting, though Guiteau immediately announced himself as a Stalwart of the Stalwarts, which is to say a supporter of Grant’s, one of Grant’s first public comments was to wonder if it was the result of “nihilism,” the newfangled Russian nothingness that had only months earlier gotten Czar Alexander II killed.
Despite all that, however, there is one touching story about Grant that Kenneth Ackerman recounts in his book Dark Horse. Lucretia Garfield, who was vacationing in Long Branch when her husband was shot, had only just heard the news when there was a knock on her door. In walked Ulysses S. Grant, who held her hand, told her he had seen the same wound many times in battle and those men had lived. At that moment, all his rivalry, resentment, and bitterness toward the president was forgotten and concentrated into comforting the president’s wife.
One day in November, my friend Bennett and I drive out to Long Branch, New Jersey, to see where Garfield died. Garfield, remember, was shot on July 2 in D.C. Anyone who has ever spent more than ten minutes in the nation’s capital between May and September knows how uncomfortable the former swamp can be, and that’s without a bullet in the back. Because President Garfield and his malarial wife were so fond of the vacation town of Long Branch, they and the doctors agreed trading steamy Washington for the sea air was in the president’s best interest. “I have always felt,” Garfield wrote in his diary, “that the ocean was my friend.”
Bennett parks the car near the water and we take an unbearable walk on the beach. I’m guessing that in the summertime, the place is crawling with children and partiers, but today the wind is so truly windy the frozen sea spray slaps us cold.
My only knowledge of Long Branch comes from reading about how it was in the 1880s, when it was the swankiest resort town on the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t know what I was expecting — probably a cross between the Hamptons and Colonial Williamsburg — but the waterfront is a shock. “There is no evidence of its past charm,” announces Bennett. Barren and blank, it has what he accurately describes as “an Eastern bloc vibe.” A bland concrete hotel that looks like a Soviet apartment building (and not in a good way) hovers over a boardwalk scattered with benches, which sounds cordial enough, except these benches, also concrete, look like you’re supposed to rest on them on the walk home from standing in a nine-hour bread line while being tailed by the KGB.
Bennett says, “The only thin
g that’s interesting to me about this place is the fact that it ever once appealed to anybody. I do find it interesting how a place or a thing or a person changes, loses what it was that once defined it, and how some struggle to retain the idea of it despite its passing.”
He thinks Long Branch is “cursed” and that the “hostile” windstorm is a warning to me. He advises me to take heed, because if I ever return, “I’m sure you’ll be hit by lightning. Or perhaps a tidal wave.”
On the beach, amidst the communist concrete, standing where logic dictates the statue of Lenin should be, is a life-size James A. Garfield staring at the sea. The area is called Presidential Park. Garfield’s statue, his left hand holding a patina-green hat, watches over a series of benches, each one dedicated to the presidents who vacationed here and decorated with small portraits and informational tidbits advertising Grant’s twelve years of sojourns while pointing out that Arthur “leased a cottage on Park.” This configuration is remarkable if only because it is the one place in the country where, in a lineup of presidents, Garfield wins. You have to die here to get a statue; otherwise, have a bench.
Shivering, we get back in the car and turn the heat all the way up, driving a mile or so down the shore to where Garfield died. Harper’s Weekly ran a poignant illustration of what he looked like in his final days here, propped up in a bed, looking out the window at his friend the water.
Back then, the ritzy neighborhood was called Elberon. Garfield’s cottage, along with Grant’s, has long since disappeared. But the homes that are here are more gracious and livable than the melancholy slabs up the beach.
The marker about Garfield’s death is clearly an afterthought, a little tombstone next to a hedge on the side of a garage. It’s possible to see what Garfield saw from his window. You just have to look past a white picket fence.
Across the way, Joan Schnorbus from the Long Branch Historical Association is waiting for us in front of St. James Chapel, where Garfield and the six other vacationing presidents went to church. For that reason, it is known as the Church of the Presidents. It was deconsecrated in 1953 and turned into a historical museum. It’s currently closed for renovations, though “renovations” seems too cosmetic a word for what’s going on here. The place was falling apart and the foundation has had to be stabilized, the interior gutted.
Joan unlocks the door of the white shingled building. The sanctuary is dark and strewn with piles of junk and rubble. She points at a wicker rocking chair, says it might have belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. “It’s kind of a grandma’s attic in here.”
She says, “Because the church was the primary church for the well-to-do who vacationed here, and Garfield did die across the road, when he passed away they brought him here before they took him back to Washington.”
I tell her we just looked at Garfield’s death marker and ask if it was the historical association’s doing.
“Actually,” she says, “it was a twelve-year-old kid. In the late fifties, early sixties, he decided that it should be there and petitioned the local government to put something there.”
I say, “It’s kind of —”
“Right next to a garage. I know. It’s really such a shame. There’s so much history in the area. That’s why I’m so adamant about this place because this truly is all we’ve got. Presidential history in Jersey is so sketchy. Cleveland was born here, but left when he was a toddler. And of course we had Washington, but not as a president. So this is the strongest facility we have in terms of presidential history.”
At that moment, I become a lot more interested in Joan than I am in the church. She knows about Grover Cleveland’s childhood. I ask her how she got interested in such things.
“I like presidential history,” she says. “Have since I was a kid.”
“Who’s your favorite president?”
“Jackson, actually.”
“Jackson?” I blurt, “Oh my lord. You know my ancestors were on the Trail of Tears?”
“My god. I’m sorry.” She really is. It’s endearing. The unforeseen pleasant surprise about traveling around the country researching historical ugliness is that I seem to luck into a lot of present-day kindness, making the acquaintance of an embarrassment of knowledgeable nice people like Joan who are generous with their time, happy to share what they’ve learned.
“When I was a little subdued kid,” she explains, “Jackson gave me courage. I was nine when I saw a show about him when he was a kid and fought the British. So it’s not his politics, it’s more that he, when I was timid, gave me strength.”
“That’s nice you could get something from a genocidal monster,” I joke, asking her if she’s been to the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate outside of Nashville. She has. She was fifteen.
Garfield, stately, starchy Garfield, though in some ways a better man than Jackson, is unquestionably less dramatic. I ask Joan if she was always keen on the president who died here or if it was living in the area that sparked her. The latter, she says. Because I find Garfield such a blurry figure, so hard to get to know, I ask her if she has a sense of who he was. Yes, she’s been reading books about him for a while now.
“What’s your favorite thing about him?”
“I never thought of it in that vein.” Understandable. “I guess his versatility. He was pretty versatile with his teaching, and he’s got that military background. I think there would have been more to him had he stuck around. I think we would have gotten more out of him. I know that Grant did not like him.”
“No,” I agree.
“When Garfield was ill, Grant did go see him here.”
“But Garfield had to get shot first.” I bring up that story I like, about Grant showing up at Lucretia Garfield’s door to comfort her, that I thought that said a lot about Grant’s basic decency, that he would go say hi.
“Yes, I think Grant was a good guy basically. And Arthur, a very impressive man, actually, the way he went against — let me think of the word…the guys that put him in office?”
“The Stalwarts?”
“Yes, the Stalwarts. Arthur did his own thing. He did not toe the line for them.”
I ask Joan about the Long Branch Historical Association’s plans for the church. She says they’re trying to raise $3 million. They’re not only trying to turn it back into a museum. They want it to become a community center, hold concerts and events.
“It really has so much potential,” says Joan, looking around. “We could use it for exhibits, weddings, musicals, plays —”
“Bar mitzvahs,” Bennett adds.
She points at a huge bell. “It was in the tower. The belfry was so unstable.” It’s the bell that rang for Garfield when he died.
She takes us outside, shows us the yard, which contains a small shed so cute it is referred to as a teahouse. It looks like dolls would live in it, dolls or teddy bears. Painted red with white trim, it’s nailed together out of railroad ties. Specifically, the ties from the dying Garfield’s rail spur to the sea.
The citizens of Long Branch, in a moving act of neighborly devotion, volunteered to build a special spur from the train station so as to more comfortably transport the president to his oceanfront cottage. They laid 3,200 feet of railroad track. And when the president’s train stalled at the end of its seven-hour journey, the townspeople pushed Garfield’s car all the way to its destination by hand. And then, after Garfield’s death, after the rail spur was torn out, some sentimental local, someone like Joan, gathered the wood and built a little house out of it.
Souvenir coaster based on the logo for Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, where Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901. The fair aimed to promote trade and friendship among the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The Spanish-American War of 1898 hastened a need for such hemispheric PR, which is almost laughably illustrated by Miss North America’s bare foot, poised to stomp on Cuba.
Chapter Three
A few days after my sister Amy got home from the Oneida-to-Canton,
Garfield-McKinley dream vacation I roped her and my nephew Owen into, she phoned me, saying, “I asked Owen what he wanted to do today and he said, ‘Go look at stones with Aunt Sarah.’ Do you know what he’s talking about? What these stones are?”
I do. “He means tombstones,” I told her. “When you were off parking the car at the cemetery in Cleveland, Owen and I walked around looking for John Hay’s grave. Owen climbed on top of it and hollered, ‘This is a nice Halloween park!’ ” (That’s what he calls cemeteries.)
James Garfield’s tomb stands on top of Lakeview Cemetery’s highest hill. Owen calls it “Aunt Sarah’s castle.” The mausoleum, a colossal Gothic tower completed in 1889, features a chapel, a burial chamber, and stairs opening onto a balcony looking out across Cleveland — the downtown skyscrapers, a gray-blue blotch of haze that might be Lake Erie. From Garfield’s perch, trees outnumber the smokestacks. Two individuals can’t help but stick out from this view — architect Frank Gehry, whose unmistakable roof wiggles in the distance, and industrialist John D. Rockefeller, whose exclamation point of an obelisk thrusts up a few yards down the hill.
Inside the mausoleum’s dome, the liturgical light of stained glass illuminates a larger-than-life-size statue of Garfield. Amy, Owen, and I march downstairs to the burial chamber to look at the flag-draped coffin of James Garfield and the one belonging to Lucretia, his wife. Owen peers closely into every cranny of the room. Frowning, he makes one of his verb-free proclamations, “There no skeletons in the crypt.”
Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He’s three. He knows maybe ninety words and one of them is “crypt”? Amy says, “Remember, Owen? The skeletons are inside the coffins.”