The most stirring moment in the campaign came in late October, when the members of a singing group from an all-black university in Nashville, Tennessee, stood before Garfield’s modest farmhouse and sang for him. “As the singers poured out their melodious and at the same time vibrant but mournful spirituals, the little audience became increasingly emotional,” Garfield’s private secretary later recalled. “Tears were trickling down the cheeks of many of the women, and one staid old gentleman blubbered audibly behind a door.” When the performance ended, Garfield stood to address the group. Squaring his shoulders and straightening his back, he said, in a voice that rang through the still night, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.”
A few weeks later, on the afternoon of November 2, a bright, cloudless day, Garfield traveled down the dusty road from Lawnfield to the town hall to cast his vote. Aside from this one concession to the election, and an occasional trip to the office behind his house to see what news had come over the telegraph, he went about his normal routine. He wrote some letters, made plans for a new garden near the farm’s engine house, and settled his dairy account in town. That evening, he visited with neighbors.
Although Garfield did not show a great deal of interest in the election, the rest of the country did. Voter turnout was 78 percent, and as the results began to come in, it quickly became clear that it was going to be a close race. Interest was particularly high in the wake of the previous presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes was widely believed to have stolen the presidency from Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden, the governor of New York, had won the popular vote by a clear and undisputed margin, and, with all but four states accounted for, had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. However, when the remaining four states reported two different sets of returns, Congress formed an electoral commission to distribute their votes. The commission, a highly partisan group made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, awarded all twenty of the disputed votes to Hayes, handing him the presidency by one electoral vote.
In 1880, no commission threatened to steal the presidency, but so close was the race that there was uncertainty until the final hours. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 3, with the nation still anxiously waiting to learn who its next president would be, Garfield went to bed. When he woke up a few hours later and was told in no uncertain terms that he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States, he was, one reporter noted with astonishment, the “coolest man in the room.” Later that day, Garfield gave his election to the presidency little more mention in his diary than he had the progress of his oat crop a few weeks earlier. “The news of 3 a.m.,” he wrote, “is fully justified by the morning papers.”
In the days that followed, surrounded by celebrations and frantic plans for his administration, Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring him only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured—his time with his children, his books, and his farm—abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. Sitting down at his desk in a rare moment to himself, he tried to explain in a letter to a friend the strange sense of loss he had felt since the election.
“There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,” he wrote, “which I can hardly explain.”
PART TWO
WAR
• CHAPTER 6 •
HAND AND SOUL
To a young man who has in himself the magnificent possibilities
of life, it is not fitting that he should be permanently commanded.
He should be a commander.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
As Garfield tried to accept the new life that lay before him, Alexander Graham Bell, working in a small laboratory in Washington, D.C., struggled to free himself from the overwhelming success of his first invention. Only five years had passed since the Centennial Exhibition, but for Bell, everything had changed. While the telephone had lifted him from poverty, made him famous, and won him the respect of the world’s most accomplished scientists, it had also robbed him of what he valued most: time.
Bell had always believed in the telephone, not just its inventiveness but its usefulness. But even he had not anticipated how quickly and widely it would be embraced. “I did not realize,” he would admit years later, “the overwhelming importance of the invention.” By the summer of 1877, more than a thousand telephones were already operating in Philadelphia, Chicago, and as far west as San Francisco. That same year, President Hayes had one installed in the White House, and Queen Victoria requested a private demonstration at her summer retreat on the Isle of Wight. “A Professor Bell explained the whole process,” she wrote in her diary that night, “which is most extraordinary.”
With astonishing speed, the telephone won over not just presidents and queens but skeptics and Luddites. Even Mark Twain, who complained that “the voice already carries entirely too far as it is,” talked his boss at the Hartford Courant into putting a telephone in the newsroom. Then, still grumbling that “if Bell had invented a muffler or a gag he would have done a real service,” he had two installed in his own home, one downstairs for his family and a second in the third-floor billiard room just for himself.
Requests for public demonstrations poured in, and Bell’s audiences never failed to be amazed and delighted by what they heard. One night, while giving a presentation in Salem, Massachusetts, Bell directed his audience’s attention to the strange, wooden box before them. Suddenly, they heard the voice of Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson coming from the box—thin and tinny but unmistakable and, incredibly, speaking directly to them. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Watson said, “it gives me great pleasure to be able to address you this evening, although I am in Boston, and you in Salem!” The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.
Bell would quickly learn, however, that a successful invention, especially one that held as much financial promise as the telephone, attracts not only admirers but bitter competitors. Had Samuel Morse been alive to witness the birth of the telephone, he could have warned Bell of the legal nightmare that awaited him. After Morse developed his telegraph in 1837, more than sixty other people claimed to have invented it first. Morse, whose long life was marked by a series of painful disappointments, spent nearly a quarter of a century fighting dozens of lawsuits.
As harassed as Morse had been, his troubles paled in comparison to what Bell would endure. The challenges to Bell’s patent began almost immediately, although few of his accusers had anything to support their claims beyond their own fantasies. One man filed suit not only against Bell for the telephone, but against Thomas Edison for the transmitter and David Edward Hughes for the microphone. Another man eagerly hauled his invention into court to prove his claim against Bell. When it simply sat there, silent, his frustrated and humiliated lawyer exclaimed, “It can speak, but it won’t!”
Although Bell deeply resented these accusations and the time and thought the lawsuits demanded, three years after his patent was issued, he entered a courtroom for the first time as a plaintiff rather than a defendant. In late 1876, he had offered to sell his patents to Western Union for $100,000, but had been soundly rejected. Just a few months later, the powerful company, worth an estimated $41 million, realized it had made a disastrous mistake. Instead of approaching Bell, however, and striking a deal, it decided to become his direct competitor. After establishing the American Speaking Telephone Company, Western Union bought the patents of three leading inventors in telephony, one of whom was Thomas Edison.
Bell had little hope of competing with this behemoth. Not only did it have seemingly limitless financial resources to fund experiments and improvements, but it had an existing network of wires that stretched across the country. To add insult to injury, Edison, who was partially deaf, developed a telephone transmitter
for Western Union that was better—both louder and clearer—than Bell’s.
In a court of law, however, Bell had two things that Western Union did not: irrefutable evidence that he had developed the first working telephone and, more important, a patent. When the company began to attack Bell personally, suggesting in the press that not only did he not have the skill necessary for such an invention but had stolen the idea, he set aside his hatred of lawsuits and fought back. The legal battle lasted less than a year, beginning in the spring of 1879 and ending in the fall, with Western Union admitting defeat and agreeing to shut down the American Speaking Telephone Company. In the end, it would hand over to Bell everything from its lines and telephones to its patent rights, receiving in return only 20 percent of the telephone rental receipts for just seventeen years.
With Western Union’s defeat, stock in the Bell Telephone Company skyrocketed from $50 a share to nearly $1,000. The fighting, however, continued. In the end, Bell would face more than six hundred lawsuits, ten times as many as Morse. Five of them would reach the U.S. Supreme Court. One rival in particular, a brilliant inventor named Elisha Gray, would insist to his dying day that the telephone had been his invention. Years later, Gray’s own partner would sigh, “Of all the men who didn’t invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest.”
While hundreds of men fought to be recognized as the inventor of the telephone, Bell feared he would never again be anything else. This one invention, he was convinced, would consume his life if he let it. “I am sick of the Telephone,” he had written to his wife in 1878, just two years after the Centennial Exhibition. He yearned for the freedom he had lost, for time to think about other things. “Don’t let me be bound hand and soul to the Telephone,” he pleaded. Not only did Bell chafe under the yoke of his invention, complaining bitterly that the business that had sprung up around it was “hateful to me at all times” and would “fetter me as an inventor,” but he worried that it would prevent him from helping those who needed him most.
His “first incentive to invention,” he would often say, had been a neighbor’s “injunction to do something useful.” Rising to the challenge, Bell, just fourteen years old, had built a contraption that used stiff-bristled brushes mounted to rotating paddles to scrape the husks off wheat. To his delight, the machine had worked, and, in the thump and thwack of his first invention, he had witnessed the potential of his own ideas.
Bell soon realized that, through invention, he could change things, make them better. It was clear to him, moreover, that the world needed to be changed. In a time of widespread illness and early death, he understood grief and suffering as well as any man. Before his twenty-fourth birthday he had lost both his brothers to tuberculosis, leaving him an only child and the sole object of his parents’ dreams and fears. “Our earthly hopes have now their beginning, middle and end in you,” his father had written him after his older, and last, brother’s death. “O, be careful.”
From painful personal experience, Bell also knew how difficult life could be for those fortunate enough to survive disease or injury. His mother, who had homeschooled him and his brothers and had taught him to play the piano, was almost completely deaf. Eliza Bell had spent most of her life separated from the world around her by the ear trumpet she relied on to hear even faint fragments of words. Her second son, however, refused to be distanced from his mother by her handicap. Instead, he would put his mouth very close to her forehead and speak in a voice so low and deep she could feel its vibrations.
While Bell’s mother had been left with some whispers of sound, his wife could hear absolutely nothing. Mabel Hubbard, whose father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, had been Bell’s earliest backer, had lost her hearing after contracting scarlet fever when she was five years old. As a teenager, she had been one of Bell’s first students, and he had quickly fallen in love with her. Although Mabel was then only seventeen years old, ten years younger than Bell, he knew with an unshakable certainty that she was the only woman he wanted to marry. “I should probably have sought one more mature than she is—one who could share with me those scientific pursuits that have always been my delight,” he had written to Mabel’s mother. “However, my heart has chosen.”
Although, in the public mind, Bell was now an inventor, he still thought of himself, and would always think of himself, first and foremost as a teacher of the deaf. Not only did he teach, but he trained new teachers. This work, which he knew would never bring him wealth or fame, meant more to him than anything else he had ever done. “As far as telegraphy is concerned,” he confided to Mabel, “I shall be far happier and more honoured if I can send out a band of competent teachers of the deaf and dumb who will accomplish a good work, than I should be to receive all the telegraphic honours in the world.”
What concerned Mabel, however, was not what her husband worked on, but the feverish intensity with which he worked. Soon after their engagement, she had written to her mother that the endless hours Bell devoted to the telephone frightened her. “He has his machine running beautifully,” she wrote, “but it will kill him if he is not careful.”
Bell’s parents, terrified that they would lose their only surviving child, had long pleaded with him to slow down. In the summer of 1870, just a month after the death of their oldest son, they had convinced Bell to emigrate with them from Scotland to Canada, where, they hoped, he would live a quieter life. To their frustration and despair, he had only worked harder, conceiving the telephone and then moving to the United States, where he worked day and night to give substance to his ideas. Ten years after they had left Scotland, Bell’s mother wrote to him to ask if, now that he had accomplished so much, he would finally rest. “I wish very much … that you would for a time, turn away your thoughts altogether from the subject you have so long been poring over, and give your mind a rest,” she wrote. “I am dreadfully afraid you are overstraining it.”
Bell, however, wanted nothing more than to strain his mind, and could not bear to be interrupted when in the thrall of his thoughts. Now that he was married, he begged his wife to let him work as long as he needed to, even if he disappeared for days at a time. “I have my periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody,” he wrote her in 1879. “Let me alone, let me work as I like even if I have to sit up all night or even for two nights.… Oh, do not do as you often do, stop me in the midst of my work, my excitement with ‘Alec, Alec, aren’t you coming to bed? It’s one o’clock, do come.’ Then … the ideas are gone, the work is never done.”
When struggling with an invention, the only respite Bell would allow himself was to play the piano deep into the night. Although he had been taught by a mother who could not hear the music, he had quickly learned to play by ear, picking up tunes and then changing them, making them his own. As a boy, he had even dreamed of becoming a composer, but his father had discouraged him from pursuing a profession that, he believed, would reduce his son to little more than a “wee bit fiddler.” Although he followed his father’s advice, Bell never gave up music, clinging to it with a particular ferocity in times of stress and anxiety. It was a habit that may have given him some release but little rest, as he succumbed to what his mother described as a “musical fever.”
Even to Bell’s father, a highly regarded elocutionist who for years had worked in his study until two in the morning, developing a universal alphabet, his work habits seemed not just extreme, but dangerous. “I have serious fears that you have not the stamina for the work your ambition has led you to undertake,” Alexander Melville Bell wrote his son. “Be wise. Stop in time.… I feel so strongly that you are endangering your future powers of work, and your life, by your present course, that I can write on no other subject.… Break your pens and ink bottles.… Wisdom points only in one direction. Stop work.”
As much as he loved his wife and his parents, Bell either would not stop or could not. He tried to explain to Mabel why he worked such long hours, refusing
to stop to eat or rest. He had, he said, a “sort of telephonic undercurrent” in his brain that was constantly humming. “My mind concentrates itself on the subject that happens to occupy it,” he wrote, “and then all things else in the Universe—including father—mother—wife—children—life itself—become for the time being of secondary importance.”
By 1880, so frustrated had Bell become with the Bell Telephone Company—the time it stole from his laboratory work and the battles that he now realized it would always be fighting—that he simply quit. “I have been almost as much surprised as grieved at the course you have taken,” his father-in-law, who had become the company’s president, wrote him that summer. “My mortification and grief are only tempered by the hope that you do not realize what you have done.” Bell, however, understood exactly what he had done, and he would never regret it.
Renting a small house in Washington, D.C., where his parents had settled, Bell at first tried to write a history of the telephone, to at least acknowledge the singular role it had played in his life. To no one’s surprise, however, the temptation to return to his work quickly became too strong to resist. “However hard and faithfully Alec may work on his book,” Mabel wrote, “he cannot prevent ideas from entering and overflowing his brain.” Before long, Bell had opened a new laboratory.
In February of 1881, just a month before Garfield’s inauguration, Bell eagerly moved his equipment and notebooks into a small, two-story brick building that stood in the middle of a large, open stretch of land on Connecticut Avenue. He christened the building the Volta Laboratory, in honor of the science prize that Napoleon Bonaparte had created at the beginning of the century and that Bell had won that past summer. Along with the prize had come a substantial sum—50,000 francs, or $10,000. With the money, he was able not only to lease the building but to hire an impressive young inventor named Charles Sumner Tainter. Bell had found Tainter in Charles Williams’s electrical shop in Boston, the same shop where he had met Thomas Watson six years earlier. Watson had left the Bell Telephone Company about the same time Bell did, announcing his intention to travel and enjoy his modest wealth, and leaving Bell in great need of a man like Tainter.