it was finished. Bell and Tainter were certain it could be made into something practical, and valuable. “Edison was completely absorbed in the work of perfecting the electrical light, and seemed to have lost all interest in the phonograph and had failed to appreciate its importance,” Tainter wrote. “But we had faith in its future.”
Since he had freed himself from the telephone, Bell had been desperately looking not just for a new project, but for work that would capture his heart and imagination, work that had meaning. When Mabel had complained that a school for the deaf he had founded in Scotland took too much of his time, Bell, frustrated that she could not understand what seemed so obvious to him, had snapped, “I trust you will … see that I am needed.” Nothing, not fame or wealth or even international recognition of his work, was as important to him as this. “I have been absolutely rusting from inaction,” he tried desperately to explain, “hoping and hoping that my services might be wanted somewhere.” The work he was now doing in the Volta Laboratory might not ease suffering or save a single life, but in this cramped and cluttered little building he knew that, if he were needed, he would be ready.
• CHAPTER 7 •
REAL BRUTUSES AND BOLINGBROKES
Tonight, I am a private citizen. To-morrow I shall be called to assume new responsibilities, and on the day after, the broadside of the world’s wrath will strike. It will strike hard. I know it, and you will know it.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
At 2:30 in the morning on March 4, 1881, the day of his inauguration, Garfield sat at a small desk in his boardinghouse in Washington and wrote the final sentence of his inaugural address. Although he had been thinking about the speech since his election and had read the addresses of every president who had preceded him, he had not put pen to paper until late January. Over the past month, a friend recalled, he had written “no less than a half-dozen separate and distinct drafts of the address in whole or in part, each profusely adorned with notes, interlineations, and marginalia.” Then, three days before, Garfield had swept aside all these drafts, dismissing them as “the staggerings of my mind,” and had begun again. When he finally finished, just hours before his inaugural ceremony, he laid down his pen, pushed back his chair, and prepared to bid “good-by to the freedom of private life, and to a long series of happy years.”
Not long after Garfield climbed into bed that morning, tens of thousands of people left their homes and hotels and began walking toward the Capitol, determined to see the inauguration despite falling snow and bitter cold. With very few exceptions, presidential inaugurations had been held on the same day in March for nearly ninety years, since George Washington’s second inauguration in Philadelphia. The four-month delay between the election and the inauguration was then thought necessary to allow the president-elect sufficient time to travel to the capital. As transportation improved dramatically, however, and circumstances such as the Civil War made the delay not just difficult but dangerous, the date had not changed, and would not for another fifty-two years.
By the time a crowd had gathered on the National Mall for Garfield’s inauguration, the snow lay an inch and a half thick over the broad greensward and on the buildings that stood, in various stages of completion, along its edges. To the east lay the Capitol, which, waylaid by two wars, one fire—set by the British during the War of 1812—multiple architects, and bad reviews, had taken seventy-five years to complete. Farther west, on the Mall’s southern side, was a building of great interest to Garfield—the National Museum, now known as the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. Although the roof had only recently been finished and the museum would not be open to the public until October, its temporary pine floors had been laid and waxed months earlier, in anticipation of the inaugural ball it would host for Garfield that night.
Just beyond the Mall stood the painfully incomplete Washington Monument, which, in the words of Mark Twain, looked like “a factory chimney with the top broken off.” Although it had been proposed in 1783, construction had not begun until sixty-five years later. By 1854, when the monument had risen to just 152 feet, the project ran out of money, and before work could begin again, the country was plunged into civil war.