every train,” Garfield marveled, “and the interest increasing every hour.”
When Garfield finally reached the convention hall, he stood before one of Chicago’s most extravagant buildings. The Interstate Industrial Exposition Building, the city’s first convention center, had been built in 1872, on the heels of the great fire. Instead of wood, it was made of gleaming, fire-resistant glass and metal. It was a thousand feet long and seventy-five feet high, with elaborate ornamental domes inspired by the grand exposition halls of London and New York.
Leaving the warmth of a mild summer evening, Garfield stepped into the hall’s vast, richly decorated interior. Hundreds of red-white-and-blue flags papered the walls and swung from the arched, raftered ceiling. From huge, open windows, “the cool air of the lake poured in,” one reporter wrote. It “shook the banners, bathed the heated galleries, and then fought for mastery with the sewer-gas, which, in some mysterious way, seemed ‘entitled to the floor.’ ” In the center of the hall was a long, narrow stage bordered on one side by rectangular tables covered in heavy white cloths. On the other side of the tables, facing the stage, were tight rows of chairs arranged in alphabetical order for the more than 750 delegates. Above the delegates’ heads swayed enormous portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and along the hall’s curved back wall stretched a wide banner bearing the final words from the Gettysburg Address: “And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Although the hall could accommodate thousands of people, it was full to overflowing. Every seat was taken—both on the floor and in the balcony, which rose to the ceiling in steep, vertiginous layers—and every inch of standing room had been claimed. Mortal enemies sat shoulder to shoulder. Reporters hunched over six long tables, elbowing for room. Men even sat on the edge of the stage, their black, highly polished shoes dangling over the side, threatening to tear the bunting with every swing.
As crowded as the hall was, it sounded as if it held twice as many people as it actually did. Beyond the typical raucous, partisan singing and chanting that took place at every convention, a deafening vitriolic battle was being waged between the party’s opposing factions. The day before, a woman from Brooklyn, who, despite her great girth, had somehow managed to hoist herself onto the stage, had to be forcibly removed from the hall as she shrieked, over and over again, “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!” Whenever a Stalwart spoke, whether to argue a position or simply to note a minor point of order, he was met by angry hisses from the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts, in turn, greeted declarations from Half-Breeds with a chorus of boos so loud they drowned out every other sound in the hall, from the thunderous scuffing of wooden chairs on the wooden floor to the jarring screeches of trains along a track just a few blocks away.
As Garfield quietly found his seat on the convention floor, he took in the spectacle around him with weary eyes. Not only had he already spent four days in the crowded, roaring hall, but his hotel room offered no refuge at night. So crowded was the city that many people who wanted to attend the convention, and even some who were obliged to attend, found themselves with no place to sleep. At one in the morning following the convention’s opening day, just as he was finally about to collapse into bed, Garfield had heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find a friend with a favor to ask. He “asked me to allow his brother (a stranger) [to] sleep with me,” Garfield sighed in a letter home the following day. He could not bring himself to say no, but he wished he had. “My bed is only three quarter size and with a stranger stretched along the wall,” he wrote. “I could not [get]… a minute of rest or sleep.”
Perhaps even more to blame for keeping Garfield up at night was the nominating speech he knew he had to give for John Sherman. Before becoming secretary of the treasury, Sherman had been a powerful senator from Ohio, and he was keenly aware that there was more enthusiasm within his state for Garfield’s nomination than his own. Nicknamed the “Ohio Icicle,” Sherman had been determinedly working behind the scenes for years, waiting for an opportunity to win the White House. He was