Knowing that Garfield wanted to have men from both factions of the party in his cabinet, Blaine tried everything in his power to convince him that this was not just a bad idea but a dangerous one. When Garfield asked Blaine what he thought about offering the position of secretary of state to Conkling instead, with the idea of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer, Blaine had been horrified. “His appointment would act like strychnine upon your Administration,” he promised, “first bringing contortions, and then be followed by death.” While Blaine was determined to keep Stalwarts out of Garfield’s administration, he knew that he had to resist the temptation to rush in as Sherman had. Conkling and his men were formidable adversaries. To succeed, an attack would have to be both clever and quiet. “They must not be knocked down with bludgeons,” Blaine brooded. “They must have their throats cut with a feather.”
Although he had dangerous enemies and problematic friends, Garfield’s biggest problem was his own vice president—Chester Arthur. Not only had the Republican nomination been thrust upon Garfield without his consent, but so had his running mate. Flush with victory, Garfield’s supporters had begun to plan the campaign while still at the convention hall, and without consulting their candidate. Knowing that without New York it would be difficult to win the presidency, and that without Conkling it would be almost impossible to win New York, they had decided to offer the vice presidential nomination to one of Conkling’s men. No one in the Republican Party was more Conkling’s man than Chester Arthur.
Politically, Arthur was wholly Conkling’s creation. The only public position Arthur had held before becoming vice president of the United States was as collector of the New York Customs House, a job that Conkling had secured for him and which paid more than $50,000 a year—as much as the president’s salary, and five times as much as the vice president’s. Even then, he had been forced out of office amid widespread allegations of corruption. “The nomination of Arthur is a ridiculous burlesque,” John Sherman had spat after the convention. “He never held an office except the one he was removed from.”
Conkling had at first been as furious as Sherman about Arthur’s nomination. After he was approached by Garfield’s supporters, Arthur had searched the convention hall for Conkling, finally finding him in a back room, pacing the floors in an apoplectic rage in the wake of Grant’s defeat. “The Ohio men have offered me the Vice Presidency,” Arthur told him. Conkling, with barely suppressed fury, replied, “Well, sir, you should drop it as you would a red hot shoe from the forge.” For the first time in his life, however, Arthur defied his mentor. “The office of the Vice President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining,” he said. “I shall accept the nomination.”
Although Conkling had stormed out of the room that night, it had not taken him long to realize that having Arthur in the office of vice president was nearly as useful as having Grant in the White House. Perhaps even more so. While Grant was very much his own man, Conkling had complete control over Arthur. Arthur was one of the two men Conkling sent to drag Levi Morton out of bed and force him to resign from Garfield’s cabinet—just days before Arthur’s own inauguration. A bachelor since the death of his wife five months before the Republican convention, Arthur even lived in Conkling’s home at Fourteenth and F Streets in New York. By the time Conkling witnessed his protégé’s swearing in, in a private ceremony that took place inside the Capitol just before Garfield’s inauguration, he was thrilled at the prospect of advising Arthur in his new role in Washington.
As strong a grip as he had on the vice president, Conkling was confident he would have little difficulty controlling the president. Even Garfield’s friends worried that he was an easy mark. He was too interested in winning over his enemies to be able to protect his own interests. “For his enemies, or those who may have chosen thus to regard themselves,” a friend had said of him, “he had no enmity—naught but magnanimity.” When challenged in Congress by men for whom “no sarcasm was too cutting, no irony too cold,” Garfield never rose to the bait. He would reply with such earnestness that, in the words of an early biographer, “a stranger entering the House after Garfield had begun his speech in answer to some most galling attack would never suspect the speech was a reply to a hostile and malignant assault.”
Nor was Garfield capable of carrying a grudge, a character trait that neither Conkling nor Blaine could begin to understand. Years before, Garfield had resolved to stop speaking to a journalist who had tried to vilify him in the press. The next time he saw the man, however, he could not resist greeting him with a cheerful wave. “You old rascal,” he said with a smile. “How are you?” Garfield realized that, in a political context, the ease with which he forgave was regarded as a weakness, but he did not even try to change. “I am a poor hater,” he shrugged.
What Conkling did not understand, however, was that while Garfield was a poor hater, he was a very good fighter. As president, he wrote in his diary, he was “determined not to be classified the friend of one faction only,” and he vowed to “go as far as I can to keep the peace.” That said, he had never before walked away from a fight, and he was not about to do so now. He had fought everyone from hardened canal men to unruly students to Confederate soldiers, and he knew that, whether he liked it or not, he now had another battle on his hands.
“Of course I deprecate war,” he wrote, “but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”
• CHAPTER 8 •
BRAINS, FLESH, AND BLOOD
I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests
of men about men I greatly dislike.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
From an open window in his office in the White House, Garfield could smell the honeysuckle in full bloom on the southern portico, and he could see the broad stretch of the south lawn, dotted with diamond-, circle-, and star-patterned flower beds. In the distance was a lake, a glittering glimpse of the Potomac River, and the Washington Monument. Inside his office, which was on the second floor, just steps from his bedroom, a life-size portrait of George Washington hung on the north wall. “The eyes of Washington,” wrote a reporter who visited the new president, “look out upon the unfinished monument, and there is marked sadness in their expression.” Since Garfield’s inauguration, however, a derrick now sat on the flat top of the truncated monument—the promise of progress.
The White House itself was also about to receive some much-needed and long-awaited attention. Soon after she moved in, Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, “sat down to a good rattling talk over the dilapidated condition of this old White House” with two journalists, one of whom was Joseph Harper, a founding brother of Harper’s Magazine. With their help, she convinced Congress to appropriate $30,000 for renovation and restoration, funds it had withheld for four years from President Hayes. As the structure had slowly disintegrated around them, Hayes and his wife had used rugs to cover holes in the Brussels carpeting and steered visitors away from rooms with curtains that were stained and torn.
With a family to raise in a dangerously neglected house, Lucretia was eager to get started, but she refused to paint a wall or replace a curtain before she did her research. Garfield accompanied her on her trip to the Library of Congress so that he could see his old friend Ainsworth Rand Spofford. Spofford, who had been the Librarian of Congress since 1864, knew Garfield well, ranking him among the most diligent researchers he had ever met and marveling at how, in the midst of a hectic work schedule, Garfield managed to keep “abreast of current literature, allowing no good book to escape him.” Whenever Spofford received a box of books from New York or Europe, he would send word to Garfield so he could have the first look. Garfield enjoyed this proximity to knowledge so much that, when in Ohio one summer, he confided to a friend, “Every day I miss Spofford and our great Library of Congress.”
As much as Garfield loved books, however, he spent the great majority of his time between congressional sessions not reading but playing. He and Lucretia had f
ive living children: Harry, Jim, Mary—who was known as Mollie—Irvin, and Abe, who was named for his grandfather, Abram. While home in Mentor, Garfield had always made the most of his time with them, swimming, playing croquet, working on the farm, correcting their Homer recitations from memory, or simply reading to them by lantern light after dinner. With his daughter and four sons gathered at his feet, he read for hours without rest, eager to introduce them to his favorite works, from Shakespeare’s plays to The Arabian Nights to Audubon’s detailed descriptions of the woodchuck, the brown pelican, and the ferruginous thrush. His summers and holidays at home, however, always seemed too short, and he regretted deeply the time he was away from his family. “It is a pity,” he wrote, “that I have so little time to devote to my children.”
For Garfield, being able to work from home was one of the few advantages of being president. He could check in on Harry and Jim as their tutor prepared them to attend Williams College, their father’s alma mater, in the fall. He could give fourteen-year-old Mollie a quick hug before she scurried out of the house, books tucked under her arm, on her way to Madame Burr’s School, which she walked to alone every day. His youngest sons, Irvin and Abe, were more easily heard than seen, their laughter echoing through the house. While nine-year-old Abe liked to race his friends through the East Room on his high-wheeled bicycle, with its enormous front wheel, Irvin preferred to ride his bike down the central staircase and over the slippery marble floor, startling visitors and carving deep scratches into the wainscoting his mother was trying to carefully restore.
Garfield adored his children, but he was determined not to spoil them, or allow anyone else to. “Whatever fate may await me, I am resolved, if possible, to save my children from being injured by my presidency,” he wrote. “ ‘Hoc opus, hic labor est.’ Every attempt, therefore, to flatter them, or to make more of them than they deserve, I shall do all I can to prevent, and to arm them against.” In this endeavor, he had the help not only of his wife but of his practical and disciplined mother, Eliza, who had moved into the White House with the family. “I am the first mother that has occupied the White House and her son President,” she wrote to a friend. “I feel very thankful for such a son. I don’t like the word proud, but if I must use it I think in this case it is quite appropriate.”
Although Eliza found the White House “cozy and home like,” settling into it with her usual quiet confidence, she worried for her son’s safety. During the campaign, she had noticed two strangers in Mentor who looked suspicious to her and had warned James about them. “Dear old mother,” Garfield later told a friend, “she takes such an interest in her son.” The new president and first lady, however, were too overwhelmed by political battles and social obligations to worry about anything else. “Slept too soundly to remember any dream,” Lucretia wrote in her diary after her family had spent its first night in the White House. “And so our first night among the shadows of the last 80 years gave no forecast of our future.”
While living in the White House allowed Garfield to see his children more often, it made it impossible for him to escape the long lines of office seekers who waited outside his front door. A few hoped to impress the president with their skills or knowledge, but the great majority of them simply intended to wear him down with dogged determination and lists of influential friends. “This is the way in which we transact the public business of the Nation,” a New York newspaper had recently complained. “No man has the slightest chance of securing the smallest place because of his fitness for it.… If your streets are so unclean to-day as to threaten a pestilence, it is because those in charge were appointed through political influence, with no regard to their capacity to work.”
On March 5, Garfield’s first day at work, a line began to form before he even sat down to breakfast. By the time he finished, it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. When he learned what awaited him, he was dismayed but not surprised. Office seekers had begun showing up at his home in Mentor the day after the election, parking themselves on his front lawn, his porch, and, if they could get in the door, even his living room sofa. Most painful to Garfield was the fact that, within the throng, he often found his own friends. “Almost everyone who comes to me wants something,” he wrote sadly, “and this embitters the pleasures of friendship.”
Those who waited outside the White House, moreover, did not want simply to apply for a position. They wanted to make their case directly to Garfield himself. As the leader of a democratic nation, the president of the United States was expected to see everyone who wanted to see him. In 1863, a journalist close to President Lincoln and his wife had given his readers a tour of the White House. “Let us go into the Executive mansion,” he wrote. “There is nobody to bar our passage, and the multitude, washed and unwashed, always has free egress and ingress.”
Garfield realized with a sinking heart that a large portion of his day, every day, would be devoured by office seekers. His calling hours were 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and he faced about a hundred callers every day. “My day is frittered away by the personal seeking of people, when it ought to be given to the great problems which concern the whole country,” he bitterly complained. “Four years of this kind of intellectual dissipation may cripple me for the remainder of my life. What might not a vigorous thinker do, if he could be allowed to use the opportunities of a Presidential term in vital, useful activity?”
For Garfield, who treasured time not just to work but to read and think, the situation was untenable. “My God!” he wrote after a day spent wrestling with office seekers. “What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?” So voracious were the people who prowled the halls of the White House searching for a job, that they sounded to one member of the administration like nothing more than “beasts at feeding time.” “These people would take my very brains, flesh and blood if they could,” Garfield wearily told his private secretary.
Nor was the White House the only point of attack. In the opening days of Garfield’s administration, so many people came to see Blaine at the State Department, asking for an appointment, that before the week was out their audacity no longer surprised him. “Secretary Blaine is especially sought after,” reported the Washington Post, “and it requires all the paraphernalia of messengers and ante-rooms for which the State department is noted, to protect him.”
Conkling, naturally, was delighted. The annoyance that the spoils system caused Blaine and Garfield only made him more determined to defend it. Not that he needed any encouragement. During Hayes’s administration, Conkling had taken every opportunity to belittle the president’s efforts at civil service reform, which he jeeringly dubbed “snivel service.” “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling told reporters, “he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.’ ”
Although Garfield found the relentless flow of office seekers maddening and time-consuming, he did not consider them dangerous, and he brushed off any suggestion that he might need protection. Even had he wanted bodyguards, he would have had a difficult time finding them. The Secret Service had been established sixteen years earlier, just a few months after President Lincoln’s assassination, but it had been created to fight counterfeiting, not to protect the president. Over the years, the agency’s duties had broadened to include law enforcement, but no particular attention was given to the White House. Then, the year before Garfield took the oath of office, Congress cut the Secret Service’s annual budget nearly in half, to just $60,000, and restricted its agents, once again, to investigating counterfeiting cases.
While the president of the United States was allowed to walk the streets of Washington alone, as Garfield often did, news of assassinations continued to come in from across the sea. In 1812, the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot and killed while he was standing in the House of Commons. A series of assassins had tried to kill Quee
n Victoria at least half a dozen times. Emperor William I of Germany survived an assassination attempt in the spring of 1878, only to be seriously wounded in another one just a month later. Soon after taking office, Garfield sent a “strong dispatch of sympathy and condolence” to Russia following the assassination, on March 13, of Czar Alexander II. The czar, despite the fact that he had abolished serfdom in his country twenty years earlier, had been the target of several previous assassination attempts.
Americans, however, felt somehow immune to this streak of political killings. Although in his dispatch to Russia, Garfield made “allusion to our own loss in the death of Lincoln,” Lincoln’s assassination was widely believed to have been a tragic result of war, not a threat to the presidency. Americans reasoned that, because they had the power to choose their own head of state, there was little cause for angry rebellion. As a result, presidents were expected not only to be personally available to the public, but to live much like them. When President Hayes had traveled to Philadelphia five years earlier for the opening ceremony of the Centennial Exhibition, he had bought a ticket and boarded the train like everyone else.
The general consensus in the United States, moreover, was that if the president did happen to be at a slightly greater risk than the average citizen, there was simply nothing to be done about it. “We cannot protect our Presidents with body guards,” an editorial in the New York Times read. “There is no protection with which we can surround them that will ward off danger or disarm it more effectively than our present refusal to recognize its existence.” Garfield, unwilling to forfeit any more of his liberty than he had already lost to political enemies and office seekers, could not have agreed more. “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he wrote, “and it is best not to worry about either.”