Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,83
“You can’t imagine anything so vile as Washington,” Harriet Blaine wrote in disgust. “It seems like a weed by the wayside, covered with dust, too ugly for notice.” The temperature hovered at 90 degrees. “Scarcely a breath of air was stirring,” one reporter moaned, “and the air was heavy and sultry.” The little breeze there was, moreover, came from the north, never reaching Garfield’s room on the White House’s southern side.
The oppressive heat, and the misery they knew it must be causing the president, prompted many Americans to write to the first lady, suggesting ways in which she might help her husband. “Sitting to day on my piazza, suffering from the great heat, my mind turned to Mr. Garfield,” one man wrote from Georgia, “and it occurred to me that the air of his sick room might be cooled to any degree you wish by having sufficient ice in [the] room over his room, and let cold air down by pipes.” Others suggested hanging sheets that had been dipped in ice water in Garfield’s room, piling ice on the floor, and even placing large pieces of marble on the furniture.
Finally, a corps of engineers from the navy and a small contingent of scientists, which included Garfield’s old friend, the famed explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, stepped in and designed what would become the country’s first air conditioner. To cool Garfield’s room, which was twenty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and eighteen feet high, the men determined that they would need at least three tons of ice. In the president’s office, they set up an elaborate system comprised of a thirty-six-inch electric fan that forced air through cheesecloth screens that had been soaked in ice water and placed in a six-foot-long iron box. The cooled air was then conducted into the president’s room through a series of tin pipes.
Although the system worked, cooling the air to a miraculous 55 degrees as it entered the pipes, the first trials brought Garfield more misery than relief. The damp cheesecloth made the air not just cool but heavily humid. Worse, although the air conditioner was in the president’s office, its perpetual grinding and whirring filled his bedroom with an ear-splitting racket. So deafening was the sound that Garfield, summoning the little strength he had, finally called out for someone to turn the contraption off.
Unbowed, the engineers set to work to fix the problems. First, they placed a 134-gallon icebox between the iron box and the pipes, which, one scientist happily reported, produced air that was “cool, dry, and ample in supply.” Then, realizing that the tin pipes amplified the noise, they quickly replaced them with ones made of canvas-covered wire, which absorbed the sounds, leaving Garfield, at long last, in relatively cool, quiet peace.
No one appreciated all that was being done to ease his suffering and save his life more than Garfield himself. Despite the fact that his health, his work, and quite possibly his life had been suddenly and senselessly taken from him, he remained unfailingly cheerful and kind, day after day. His doctors marveled at him, calling him a “wonderfully patient sufferer.” Bliss would later recall that, throughout Garfield’s illness, he “never approached him without meeting an extended hand, and an expression of thankful recognition of the efforts being made for his comfort and recovery.” Each time, after the doctors had dressed his wounds, a long and painful daily process, Garfield would always say, in a hearty voice, “Thank you, gentlemen.”
While Garfield’s body had begun to fail him, his courtesy never did, nor his sense of humor. He had always been “witty, and quick at repartee,” a former college classmate recalled, “but his jokes … were always harmless, and he would never willingly hurt another’s feelings.” Garfield now used humor to put those around him at ease. He gave his attendants affectionate nicknames, teasingly referring to one particularly fussy nurse as “the beneficent bore.” “The vein of his conversation was … calculated to cheer up his friends and attendants,” a reporter wrote, recalling how, when a messenger sent to buy a bottle of brandy returned with two, Garfield joked that he would now have to receive a “double allowance.”
Garfield was painfully aware of the widespread fear and suffering on his behalf, and he wanted desperately to lighten the burden, even on those who had made themselves his enemies. Although they had done their best to destroy his presidency, Garfield made it clear that he did not for a moment believe the