Assassination Vacation (20 page)

(You can learn even more about how Arthur is or is not remembered by stopping by his Lexington Avenue house, where he took the presidential oath the day Garfield died. The moment does warrant a plaque, though not necessarily a plaque people are supposed to be able to see. The plaque hangs
inside
what is now an apartment building’s foyer. If you look hard through the glass security door, you can kind of make out a sign above the mailboxes that says something about Arthur and civil service reform.)

In Washington, the District of Columbia Court Building at 451 Indiana Avenue NW was built as the old city hall, becoming a courthouse in 1873. A statue of Abraham Lincoln, erected three years after his assassination, stands in front of the steps.

Today, the dignified columned structure looks abandoned, surrounded by a perimeter of chain-link fence. But in 1881–82, this is where Charles Guiteau’s murder trial took place.

Guiteau’s trial was a sensation — a laugh riot well attended by the ladies of Washington, who packed picnic baskets to catch his act. Newspaper accounts describe the proceedings as a circus. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast in
Harper’s Weekly,
entitled “From Grave to Gay,” pictured an elfin Guiteau, perched on Garfield’s grave in the middle of the courtroom, surrounded by grinning lawyers and jurors. Slogans littering the ground include “Anything for a laugh” and “ ‘Funny’ Insanity by Guiteau.”

Appointing himself co-counsel in his defense, Guiteau constantly interrupted his own attorneys, including the beleaguered George Scoville, his brother-in-law. Guiteau repeatedly pointed out that in shooting Garfield he was only carrying out the command of God. Finally, the exasperated prosecutor asked him, “Who bought the pistol, the Deity or you?” Then, after the prosecutor brought up the minor matter of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Guiteau asserted that God the Father grandfathered Guiteau past this rule. Guiteau then went on to compare himself to Napoleon, Jesus, the apostle Paul and Martin Luther. Guiteau pointed out that like them, he was “a man of destiny.” Guiteau pulled stunts such as lobbying the judge to be able to read aloud his autobiography because it would be an oration on par with Cicero’s that “will go thundering down the ages.” It was a crowd-pleaser, especially since Guiteau read excerpts from admiring letters received from his fellow lunatics. “No one,” he said, “wants to shoot or hang me save a few cranks, who are so ignorant they can hardly read or write. High-toned people” — Guiteau’s highest praise — “are saying, ‘Well, if the Lord did it, let it go.’ ”

Except for the dead-serious details of his assassinating President Garfield and being in all likelihood clinically insane, Charles Guiteau might be the funniest man in American history — a guy so relentlessly upbeat, so unfailingly optimistic about his place in the world, so very happy for others lucky enough to have made his acquaintance, such a sunshiny self-important glass-all-full sort of fool that he cannot open his mouth or take out his pen without coming up with one unintentionally hilarious gag after another.

The Garfield assassination is always described, on the rare occasions it is described, this way: James Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker who had wanted to be appointed ambassador to France.

It is surprising that Guiteau would go down in history as a “disappointed office seeker,” because the adjective “disappointed” implies the guy was capable of registering disappointment. Even though he was, at the time of the assassination, a divorcé, a college dropout, ia failed lawyer, preacher, and writer. Even though, during his youthful residence at the sexed-up Oneida Community he was the one guy in a free love commune who could not get laid. When Charles Guiteau looked in the mirror he did not see a raggedy homeless man, a wife beater, a dud. He saw the ambassador to France. He wasn’t out of work. No, sir. Charles J. Guiteau was “in the employ of Jesus Christ & Co.”

In his musical
Assassins,
Stephen Sondheim plays up the inherent humor in Guiteau’s unwarranted self-love and sugary outlook. Compared to Hinckley, a downbeat creep, or the McKinley assassin Czolgosz, a sad son of immigrants always dragging down the room with laments about the unfairness of factory working conditions, Guiteau is the audience’s goal-oriented golden boy who smiles while he sings perky lyrics like “look on the bright side.”

During Guiteau’s trial, one horrifying but effective stunt by the prosecution involved passing around Garfield’s spine, which had been removed during the autopsy. Seeing the president’s vertebrae being pawed by the jury made the ladies present cry. But this was an uncharacteristically somber exception. Mostly, the attendees ate up Guiteau’s entertaining outbursts. (Everyone except for Harriet Blaine, the wife of Secretary of State James G. She made a point of showing up every day
not
to laugh, out of respect for her late friend Garfield. When the trial ended she wrote of Guiteau, “I want it impossible for that hoarse, cracked voice, ever to raise itself again.”)

Scoville mounted a convincing insanity defense, assembling expert witnesses, including a former doctor of Guiteau’s who had examined him years earlier right after Guiteau threatened his sister with an axe. Also, Guiteau’s own babbling, always eccentric and frequently delusional, reads today like classic crackpot. But in 1882, the insanity defense was new and controversial; add a dead president to the mix and the country’s thirst for revenge makes an insanity acquittal all the more unlikely. On January 5, 1882, the jury reached a guilty verdict.

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.

T
he 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.