rumors linking Chester Arthur and Roscoe Conkling to Guiteau. Too weak to read the newspaper himself, he often listened as Lucretia read to him. One day, she stumbled upon a paragraph that directly blamed the vice president and former senator for the shooting. Hearing this, Garfield vehemently shook his head. “I do not believe that,” he said.
Although Garfield rarely mentioned the man who had tried to assassinate him, he could not help but wonder why anyone would do something so strange and inexplicably cruel. Finally, turning to Blaine, he asked, “What motive do you think that man could have had?” His old friend replied quietly, “I do not know Mr. President. He says he had no motive. He must be insane.”
• CHAPTER 17 •
ONE NATION
There is no horizontal Stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our Stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
For the first time in their memory, certainly since the earliest beginnings of the Civil War, Americans facing the shared tragedy of Garfield’s ordeal felt a deep and surprising connection to one another. Divided by vast stretches of dangerous wilderness and stark differences in race, religion, and culture, there had been little beyond severely strained notions of common citizenship to unite them. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sixteen years earlier had only deepened that divide. But the attempt on Garfield’s life aroused feelings of patriotism that many Americans had long since forgotten, or never knew they had.
The waves of emotion that swept over the country, moreover, were fed not only by the fact that America’s president had been attacked in the train station that morning, but that that president had been Garfield. To his countrymen, a staggeringly diverse array of people, Garfield was at the same time familiar and extraordinary, a man who represented both what they were and what they hoped to be. Although he had been elevated to the highest seat of power, he was still, and would always be, one of their own.
A nation of immigrants, the United States found in Garfield a president who knew well the brutal indignities of poverty, and the struggle to overcome them. Between 1850 and 1930, the country’s foreign-born population would rise from more than two million to more than fourteen million. This flood of people, known as the “new immigrants,” came from a broader range of countries and with a greater number of languages than ever before. In Garfield’s humble origins, remarkable rise, and soaring erudition, they found justification for their sacrifices, and hope for their children.
In the West, those Americans who had endured the perils and hardship of the frontier to find a better life knew Garfield not only as a child of poverty but as the son of pioneers. Although it was still a long and difficult journey from any part of the West to Washington, Garfield himself was a powerful link to the world of covered wagons and dirt farms. Since he had taken office, settlers, living on land they had cleared themselves and which, every day, they fought to defend, had felt secure in one thing at least, that they would not be forgotten in their nation’s capital.
For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.”
Even in the South, where he had once been hated and feared as an abolitionist and Union general, there was a surprising pride in Garfield’s presidency. Although he had made it clear from the moment he took