A Treasury of Great American Scandals (33 page)

Intending to press the point in person, Guiteau traveled to Washington and joined the long line of office seekers winding through the White House office of the newly inaugurated president. When Guiteau finally reached Garfield, he handed the bewildered president yet another copy of the campaign speech with the words “Paris Consulship” scrawled on the cover. Frustrated by the lack of response to his request and growing increasingly belligerent, Guiteau appeared repeatedly at the White House demanding to see the president. His erratic behavior soon got him banned from the premises.

Guiteau became convinced that Garfield was deliberately foiling his rightful destiny and that, as he later stated, “if he [Garfield] was out of the way, everything would go better.” Garfield had been in office only three months when Guiteau began stalking him around Washington, awaiting the perfect opportunity. That came a month later, on July 2, 1881, when the president arrived at the Baltimore & Potomac railway station, then on Washington's Mall, to embark on a summer-long vacation. Guiteau had been lurking there all morning, anticipating Garfield's well-publicized arrival. “I had no ill will toward the president,” Guiteau had written in a note to the press earlier on the morning of the murder. “His death was a political necessity.”

Deep in conversation with Secretary of State James Blaine, the president was oblivious to his killer's presence. Guiteau rushed up behind him and, from just a yard away, raised a pistol and fired at Garfield's back. “My God! What is this?” the stunned president exclaimed, staggering from the shot. As Garfield crumpled to the ground, the assassin took two steps forward and shot him again. “I am a Stalwart,” he screamed, “and [Vice President Chester] Arthur is president now.” A police officer on the scene pounced on Guiteau, who was struggling to escape, while agitated onlookers demanded that he be lynched on the spot.

Garfield, meanwhile, lay on the station floor. One bullet had grazed his arm, but the other had penetrated deeply. At the time, rigorous sterilization was not yet commonplace, and a physician, seeking the bullet, probed the wound with his fingers. Believing that the president was hemorrhaging internally, the doctor nevertheless reassured him, saying, “I don't believe the wound is serious.” But Garfield, pale and quickly losing strength, knew otherwise. “Thank you, doctor,” he said with a weak smile, “but I am a dead man.”

The president was taken to the White House, where he lingered near death as a shocked nation kept vigil. Medical advice poured in from all over the country. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, made several appearances at Garfield's bedside with a primitive metal detector he had rigged to locate the bullet in the absence of X-rays, which would not be discovered until the 1890s. Though the bullet was never found, the president rallied enough to be taken to a seaside cottage in Elberon, New Jersey. Infection overtook him, however, and he died on September 19, 1881, two and a half months after being shot.

As Americans mourned the fallen president they never really knew, Garfield's murderer was put on trial in Washington. It was a spectacle from the beginning. Guiteau, who had pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity brought about by “divine power,” constantly disrupted the proceedings with his ranting. He called the prosecutor a “low-livered whelp” and prosecution witnesses “dirty liars.” At one point he jumped up and told the judge, “I had a very happy holiday,” and at the conclusion of the lengthy trial, he insisted on making his own summation before the jury. “God told me to kill,” he shrieked. “Let your verdict be that it was the Deity's act, not mine.”

Guiteau was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging at the Washington Asylum and Jail. He went to the gallows, thrilled to be the center of attention, reciting an epic poem he had written for the occasion. It was called, “I Am Going to the Lordy.”

 

 

Twenty years after Garfield's assassination, William McKinley met the same fate. Like Garfield, McKinley was from Ohio, served in the Civil War, and represented Ohio in Congress. Unlike his predecessor, however, McKinley served a full term and more in the White House before being murdered. During that time, the United States was emerging as a world leader, winning the Spanish-American War in 1898 and taking possession of Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and part of Samoa. American confidence was growing, big business was booming, and new technology was changing the nation. “We have prosperity at home and prestige abroad,” McKinley said as he was elected to a second term in 1900.

Although he had once favored growth of big business, McKinley modified that position at the beginning of his new term, fearing monopolies and the resulting high prices. He also changed his views on protective tariffs designed to help U.S. businesses against foreign competition. McKinley now favored reciprocal trade agreements with other countries and introduced the new policy in a speech at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 5, 1901. “By sensible trade relations which will not interrupt our home production, we shall extend the outlets for our increasing surplus,” he said. “The period of exclusiveness is past,” he concluded. It would be his last speech.

The next day, the president appeared at the exposition's Temple of Music for a mass reception. Always affable and outgoing, McKinley was eager to shake as many hands as possible. A dense crowd had assembled, erupting into great applause when the president arrived. Among the thousands was a twenty-nine-year-old anarchist by the name of Leon Czolgosz. He had come to kill.

A disaffected youth who had grown up in poverty in Michigan, Czolgosz became obsessed with anarchist literature of the day. He hated the American system of government and believed that killing anyone branded an “enemy of the people” by anarchist leaders was just. He was thrilled to learn that King Humbert I of Italy had been assassinated by an anarchist in 1900, and he soon set out to make his own mark. Reading that McKinley would be in Buffalo for the trade exposition, Czolgosz staked out the grounds there, including the Temple of Music, where he knew the president would be appearing. He purchased a small revolver and bided his time.

On the morning of September 6, Czolgosz arrived at the temple and joined the milling thousands waiting for the president. He had wrapped the revolver in a handkerchief, knowing he would have to pull it out unseen when the president greeted him. “Let them come,” McKinley said with a smile as he arrived at the temple amid a fanfare of music. Crowds immediately poured in, and the president began shaking hands in earnest. In the line moving forward, his face expressionless, was the assassin.

Agents guarding the president didn't notice anything unusual as Czolgosz repeatedly took out the handkerchief wrapped around the gun and pretended to wipe his forehead. When the killer reached the president, McKinley graciously extended his hand to greet him. In a flash, Czolgosz slapped it away and fired two shots into McKinley's midsection from inches away. As the president clutched his abdomen in shock, six agents rushed the the assassin and knocked him to the floor. Seeing this, McKinley weakly told an aide: “Don't let them hurt him. Be easy with him, boys.” Looking up at his secretary, George Cortelyou, McKinley whispered, “My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her—oh, be careful!”

The president was taken to a small hospital on the exposition grounds, where it was decided that an immediate operation was necessary. With no electricity in the makeshift hospital, physicians used a mirror to reflect the sun's dying rays as they worked. One bullet had grazed the president, possibly deflected by a button, but the other had pierced his stomach front and back. The doctors cleaned the peritoneal cavity and sutured the stomach. The wound was closed and covered with an antiseptic bandage, and McKinley was taken to a friend's home to recuperate.

Initially, it seemed that the fifty-seven-year-old president might recover. But gangrene set in, and doctors argued among themselves about whether McKinley was strong enough to withstand another operation. He grew progressively weaker and lapsed into a coma a week after being shot. McKinley revived briefly to say to those around him: “It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have a prayer.” The Lord's Prayer was recited, with the dying president silently moving his lips to the words. He then said, “Goodbye, good-bye, all,” adding, “It is God's way. His will, not ours, be done.” With death very near, the president drew his wife closer and whispered the words of his favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee.” After Ida McKinley was led away weeping, the president groped for a hand to hold. A doctor took it as McKinley drew his last breath on September 14, 1901.

“I killed President McKinley because I believed it was my duty,” Czolgosz told reporters from his jail cell. He was tried for the crime and never denied his guilt, maintaining that he followed the teachings of American anarchist leader Emma Goldman. Czolgosz was sentenced to death. Asked if he had any last words as he was being strapped in the electric chair, he responded, “I am not sorry for my crime.”

Although Americans grieved for the murdered president, crowding the funeral route and erecting memorials across the country, McKinley's death soon was overshadowed by the dynamic vice president who succeeded him, Theodore Roosevelt. It would be another six decades before a presidential assassin would successfully strike again. When he did, Americans thought back almost a century and remembered Lincoln.

Remains to Be Seen

For deceased Americans of renown, R.I.P. has always been more of a plea than a promise. Take Zachary Taylor, who lay peacefully buried for nearly a century and a half before someone got the idea that maybe it wasn't a surfeit of cherries on a hot day that killed the twelfth president, as has been commonly accepted, but a nefarious plot to assassinate him with arsenic. Armed with this theory, and little to back it up, an amateur historian succeeded in having President Taylor's corpse dug up and tested for poison. Although no arsenic was found, putting the kibosh on the conspiracy theory, it was noted that Old Rough 'n' Ready was still recognizable by his “protruding eyebrows.” The indignity of this exhumation was just one instance in a long, grisly tradition of discommoding the dead. Indeed, old Zach fared better than most, at least being treated to the formality of a flag-draped coffin. Disinterment has not always been so decorous.

Boiling “Mad”

 

 

 

“Mad” Anthony Wayne was not your run-of-the-mill Revolutionary War hero. He had an extra streak of boldness—sometimes bordering on recklessness—that earned him his “Mad” appellation, as well as the almost universal affection of his troops. Wayne's willingness to defy the odds helped him achieve one of the greatest American victories in the War of Independence when he attacked the nearly impregnable fort at Stony Point on the Hudson River and subdued the entire 700-man enemy garrison there. It was a devastating blow to British operations in the North, and gave sagging American morale a much needed boost. That Mad Anthony succeeded in this enterprise despite being wounded in the head by a musket ball only added to his luster. Because he was such a great man, his brethren in the Society of the Cincinnati naturally wanted to honor him with a memorial after his death in 1796. Yet if the general had had any notion of what this would entail, he no doubt would have preferred to be forgotten.

It was decided that the churchyard at St. David's parish in Radnor, Pennsylvania, would be the most appropriate place for the memorial, as generations of Waynes were buried there. The only problem was, Mad Anthony himself was buried all the way across the state in Presque Isle (now Erie), where he had died. So, in 1809, his son Isaac set out in a small carriage to bring his father's remains back to Radnor. When he arrived in Presque Isle, though, Isaac discovered that taking his dad's body away with him would not be so easy. Accounts differ as to what the problem was. Some say the locals, proud to have such a great American hero buried in their midst, were loath to have him removed; others maintain that Isaac Wayne discovered that his father's well-preserved corpse would not fit into the small, one-horse carriage he had driven across the state. Whatever the problem may have been, the solution was ghastly. Mad Anthony Wayne was removed from his burial place and his remains were boiled. After his flesh and bones were separated, the spoils were divvied up. Presque Isle kept the corpse soup, while Isaac Wayne took the lighter load of bones away with him for reburial in the family plot.

Tom Paine's Farewell Tour

 

 

 

“These are the times that try men's souls,” Thomas Paine wrote during what he later called “a passion of patriotism” at the onset of the American Revolution in 1776. Sadly for the British-bred Founding Father who wrote so eloquently against tyranny and for basic human dignity, the years after his death in 1809 were the times that tried his body.