Assassination Vacation (17 page)

At Oneida, Charles Guiteau’s turns at Mutual Criticism scrutiny repeatedly elicited accusations of “egotism and conceit.” This is easy to believe considering that Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur would later inspire him to write a book with the immodest title
The Truth,
to say nothing of his belief that President Garfield would appoint him as ambassador to France even though at the time he was a dotty unemployed zero.

One learns more about the Oneida Community by considering Charles Guiteau than the other way around. There are Oneida traits in Guiteau for sure. He always credited the community with inspiring his abstinence from liquor and profanity. He plagiarized Noyes in some of his loony later speeches, especially the bits about the second coming of Christ in
70 A.D.
But really, the fact that the commune put up with such an exasperating egomaniac for five full years speaks volumes about the Oneida Community’s capacity for tolerance. Pondering this, Valesky says, “That’s an interesting part of my understanding of what went on here. If that kind of an individual could be accepted and maintain a relationship here as long as he did, it’s remarkable.”

One impulse Guiteau shared with his Oneida fellows was a yearning to be part of a group, to commune. Even his most deliriously selfish act — overturning the will of the electorate by shooting the president — was conceived and executed as a tribute to the Stalwart faction within the Republican Party. After he did it he proclaimed, “I am a stalwart of the Stalwarts.”

As we stand in Oneida’s family hall, Joe Valesky tells me that when he first volunteered as a guide here, he spent a lot of time thinking about the men and women who came here to lead such eccentric lives. “What was it like when these people were born in that generation of Americans?” he wondered, continuing, “So at that point I came across Jonathan Edwards and his sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ Do you know it?”

Do I ever. Written in 1741, Edwards’s sermon describes us sinners as spiders the Creator dangles over the mouth of hell. “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow.” I love this sermon as literature because its diabolical lingo is so grim, so harrowing that it’s almost cute. Wasn’t so cute in yesteryear. Valesky says, “Your first definition of you as a woman, me as a man is that we are sinners. You are a sinner. I’m a sinner. You look at God. What are you seeing? An angry god — ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ ”

Valesky says that thinking about that sermon and its notion that human beings are arachnids God is about to flip into a fire helps him understand that the ways of the Oneida Community, in which heaven is already here, “was like this incredible shot of oxygen. Because we’re not so evil. That is behind us. God doesn’t have to be angry.”

Interesting. I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I’ll admit, that’s what I was expecting to find at Oneida — the nineteenth-century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch, a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of “needles nourishing the earth.” The week before I went to Oneida I had that claustrophobic dream again, that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be muffin day even though tomorrow was never muffin day — it was muffin day maybe once. But Valesky inspired me to think about the claustrophobia of American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how women like me would have given anything for a freewheeling life with Drifter Magnet and Muffin Day instead of being doomed to a choice between Mother Superior and Husband Your Parents Picked. How reassuring it must have been to have this place, to know that it was here. If I had never gone to Oneida and talked to Joe Valesky, if I had simply read a book about the community and bought my Oneida teapot at Macy’s Herald Square, I might have thought about fornicating utopians as I brewed Earl Grey, but now, when I watch the steam rise from the yellow spout, I like to pretend I’m seeing people breathe.

W
hen James Garfield, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, left the 1880 convention to return to his farm in Mentor, he was under the impression that he was running against Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. His true opponent, however, was his fellow Republican, Senator Roscoe Conkling. Garfield had barely been home long enough to hire extra help for his beet harvest when Conkling was summoning him to New York for a meeting of the Republican National Committee.

“I am very reluctant to go,” Garfield complained to his diary on July 28, 1880. “It is an unreasonable demand that so much effort should be made to conciliate one man.” But New York was 1880’s battleground state. Garfield couldn’t win without New York and he couldn’t win New York without Conkling. So, for the good of the party, he swallowed his pride and reserved a room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel, on the corner of Twenty-third, housed the New York Republican Party headquarters. It was there Chester Alan Arthur kept his office. It was there the party faithful assembled throughout the 1880 campaign, including the eccentric political gadfly Charles J. Guiteau. The building was torn down in 1908. These days, the site is home to the International Toy Center. A plaque noting the location’s former glory is all that’s left of Garfield and Arthur.

The hotel would become famous, if you can call anything related to Garfield famous, as the site of the Fifth Avenue Summit, a private meeting among Garfield and various squabbling Stalwarts, including Roscoe Conkling’s lieutenants, VP nominee Chester Arthur and New York’s junior senator, Tom Platt. What the men agreed to has been lost to history. Three things, however, are clear: Garfield left the room believing he had not mortgaged his future to the Stalwarts, the Stalwarts left the room believing Garfield had agreed to let them control the Treasury appointment in the cabinet (and thus the almighty New York Custom House), and Roscoe Conkling had the audacity to never step foot in the room at all. At the end of the day, Garfield’s diary reports, “The absence of Senator Conkling gave rise to unpleasant surmises as to his attitude. His friends were embarrassed and somewhat indignant.” In other words, Conkling commanded the future commander in chief to New York so as to boss him around and then, though Conkling was staying in the same hotel, he didn’t have the courtesy to boss Garfield around in person.

Years later, statues of Chester Arthur and Roscoe Conkling were erected across the street in Madison Square Park. Arthur, who became president after Garfield’s assassination, is designated as President Chester Alan Arthur on the base of his monument so as to jog the memory of the joggers passing by — Chester who? Conkling’s statue, by comparison, wears no such name tag. “Roscoe Conkling” is all that’s chiseled at his feet, as if to taunt, “Don’t you know who I am?” He ran this town, this state, the whole country sometimes, and now, standing catty-corner from a Dunkin’ Donuts, the only attention he is paid is from the dogs and drunks peeing at his granite shoes.

Garfield, more than anyone, would get a kick out of Conkling’s twenty-first-century anonymity. On the other hand, Conkling would be similarly delighted with the dimming of Garfield’s star. Conkling’s convention speech for Ulysses S. Grant — the one right before Garfield’s ode to calm seas — correctly prophesied that Grant’s famous name would outlive every man in the room. Conkling would have loved the colossal domed monstrosity uptown known as Grant’s Tomb, especially compared to the dinky New York City Garfield remembrances — a tree planted in a cemetery in Queens (it died) and a playground in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with the dignified name Garfield Tot Lot, which my friend Kate, a Park Slope mother of two, describes as “cute but uninspiring.”

J
ust for fun, I decided to take a self-guided walking tour of Garfield’s Washington, D.C. The prospect is more titillating than one might think, in that to stroll the nation’s capital in search of Garfield sites, most of which are either unmarked or torn down, is to feel as if I know a secret. Though, as Washington secrets go, knowing where Charles Guiteau bought his handgun isn’t in the same league as Deep Throat’s identity. It’s just a small, pleasant buzz to amble around and watch the city come alive with forgotten men.

As good a starting place as any is the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street, at the equestrian statue of Garfield’s Democratic opponent in the 1880 presidential election, Winfield Scott Hancock. The bronze Union general grasps binoculars and stares across Pennsylvania at the National Archives’ backside. A homeless man in a soiled blanket reclines on the statue’s base.

Staring up at Hancock is a handy way to ponder the swampy subtleties of Gilded Age presidential politics. Of the six presidents elected after Andrew Johnson finished serving out Lincoln’s second term, five of them — Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley — were Union veterans of the Civil War. Only President Grover Cleveland, who, coincidently, dedicated this monument to Hancock in 1896, did not serve. (He paid a Polish immigrant $150 to replace him in the draft.) The lingering resentment about the Civil War would not fade as an election issue until after McKinley, the last Civil War vet president, militarily reunited North and South for the first time to join forces against Spain in Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

In the 1880 election, however, 1865 wasn’t so much history as news. The Northeast and Midwest, largely Republican, controlled the Electoral College and thus the election — Garfield trounced Hancock there 214–155. But in the popular vote, Hancock lost by a mere ten thousand ballots, which says something about his appeal.

Hancock was a crafty idea for a Democratic nominee. Here was a Democrat who was one of the most beloved, admired Union generals. He fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and most notably at Gettysburg, where he was wounded, leading the fight that staved off Pickett’s charge. (This Hancock statue does adhere to Civil War sculptural tradition in that one of the horse’s hooves is raised, which indicates the rider was wounded in battle.) Garfield, by comparison, though a Union general of mild distinction, had actually resigned from the army (with Lincoln’s blessing — he needed friendly congressmen) to run for the House of Representatives in 1863.

Republicans thought of themselves
as
the Union, which is to say
as
the United States. One would be tempted to assume that pitting Garfield against a fellow Union general of greater merit might ward off the inevitable post–Civil War Republican campaign tactics of “voting how you shot” — that the old saw about a vote for the Democrats being a vote for reviving the old Confederacy would not, in Hancock’s case, wash. Wrong. Even though Hancock was a Pennsylvanian, even though he was known as a hero of Gettysburg, even though he had in fact overseen the execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators in 1865, his Yankee reputation was rebelled-up considerably in 1867–68 when, commanding Reconstruction Texas and Louisiana, he was mercifully soft toward his fellow local Democrats, which is a nice way of saying he conspired to impede black suffrage and return ex-Confederate whites to political power. Being a defender of the North who was lenient to the South made Hancock an attractive candidate in the biggest battleground state — New York. Democratic-leaning New York City especially had always been ambivalent at best about the Union cause, a fact embodied in the infamous draft riots of 1863, a bloody rebellion against what citizens saw as Lincoln’s greed for bodies — theirs.

All of the above makes the Republicans’ strategy in 1880 more interesting in that they blatantly ignored Hancock’s Civil War bravery. Take, for example, Garfield’s campaign song, “If the Johnnies Get into Power.” Set to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” it goes:

Jeff Davis’s name they’ll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha