Destiny of the Republic (2 page)

PART ONE
PROMISE

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CHAPTER 1
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T
HE
S
CIENTIFIC
S
PIRIT

The life and light of a nation are inseparable.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

E
ven severed as it was from the rest of the body, the hand was majestic. Sixteen feet tall, with long, tapered fingers holding aloft a twenty-nine-foot torch, it sat on the banks of a small lake in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876. It was all that existed of the Statue of Liberty, and it had been shipped in pieces from France for the United States’ Centennial Exhibition, a world’s fair celebrating the country’s first one hundred years. Ten years later, the complete figure, rising more than a hundred and fifty feet from its pedestal and with a bright skin of copper, would be installed in New York Harbor to the awe and admiration of the world. But in 1876, the Statue of Liberty, like the young country to which it would be given, was still a work in progress. A symbol of promise, perhaps, but not yet of triumph.

Across the lake from the statue, James Abram Garfield walked with his wife and six children under a flawless sky, the scent of a recent rain still hanging in the air. A tall man with broad shoulders and a warm smile, Garfield was, in many ways, the embodiment of the Centennial Exhibition’s highest ideals. At just forty-four years of age, he had already defied all odds. Born into extreme poverty in a log cabin in rural Ohio, and fatherless before his second birthday, he had risen quickly through the layers of society, not with aggression or even overt ambition, but with a passionate love of learning that would define his life. That love had brought him to Philadelphia, for the opening day of the centennial fair.

Although he was a congressman, Garfield traveled through the exhibition unaided by guards or guides of any kind. Except for his statuesque height and soldier’s posture, he was indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other fairgoers who swarmed the rain-soaked grounds and the eighty miles of asphalt walkways. In just a few weeks, these walkways would be transformed by the summer sun into hot, sticky, lava-like rivers, trapping shoes and small animals. But on that day they felt smooth and solid as the crowd surged through the fairgrounds, headed toward one destination above all others—Machinery Hall.

With fourteen acres of exhibits, Machinery Hall shivered with life. It pulsed and throbbed so irresistibly that the wooden plank floors vibrated underfoot. Conversations were either muffled by a heavy humming or forced to an early and violent end by a sharp, sudden clack. Exhibits included everything from a machine that could weave a customer’s name into a pair of suspenders while he waited, to an internal combustion engine that William Ford, Henry Ford’s father, had traveled all the way from his farm in Dearborn, Michigan, to see.

These exhibits were finely calibrated to appeal to no man more than James Garfield. A former professor of ancient languages, literature, and mathematics who had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter, Garfield’s interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad. In fact, so detailed was his interest in mathematics, and so acute his understanding, that he had recently written an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem during a free moment at the Capitol.
The
New England Journal of Education
had published the proof just the month before, transparently astonished that a member of Congress had written it.

Despite Garfield’s deep admiration for mathematics and the arts, however, he believed that it was science, above all other disciplines, that had achieved the greatest good. “The scientific spirit has cast out the Demons and presented us with Nature, clothed in her right mind and living under the reign of law,” he wrote. “It has given us for the sorceries of the Alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the Astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of Cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of Diabolism, the laws of God.”

After his first day at the exposition, back in the Philadelphia home he and his family had rented, Garfield sat down to write in his diary, just as he had done nearly every night of his life for the past twenty-eight years. With characteristic seriousness of purpose, he wrote that the fair would be a “great success in the way of education.” In Garfield’s experience, education was salvation. It had freed him from grinding poverty. It had shaped his mind, forged paths, created opportunities where once there had been none. Education, he knew, led to progress, and progress was his country’s only hope of escaping its own painful past.

In 1876, the United States, still reeling from a devastating civil war and its first presidential assassination, was far from the country it hoped to become, and faced daily reminders of the hard challenges that still lay ahead. While men like Garfield strolled the aisles of Machinery Hall in Philadelphia, marveling at the greatest inventions of the industrial age, George Armstrong Custer and his entire regiment were being slaughtered in Montana by the Northern Plains Indians they had tried to force back onto reservations. As fairgoers stared in amazement at Remington’s typewriter and Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph system, Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in a saloon in Deadwood, leaving outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid to terrorize the West. As middle-class families waited patiently in line for their chance to marvel at the Statue of Liberty’s hand, freed slaves throughout the country still faced each day in fear and abject poverty.

So incomplete and uncertain was the United States that, although it was a hundred years old, it did not yet have a national anthem. At the opening ceremony, the exposition’s hundred-piece orchestra, with a chorus of a thousand voices, dutifully performed the anthems of the forty-nine other countries participating in the fair. Only the host country had no official song with which to honor its people, and would not for another fifty-five years. With eight untamed territories and eleven states that still seethed with hatred and resentment and dreamed of secession, a national anthem seemed premature, even presumptuous.

Garfield understood as well as any man what the Civil War had accomplished, and what it had left undone. When he was still a very young man, he had hidden a runaway slave. As commander of a small regiment from Ohio, he had driven a larger Confederate force out of eastern Kentucky, helping to save for the Union a critically strategic state. In Congress, he fought for equal rights for freed slaves. He argued for a resolution that ended the practice of requiring blacks to carry a pass in the nation’s capital, and he delivered a passionate speech for black suffrage. Is freedom “the bare privilege of not being chained?” he asked. “If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion, and it may well be questioned whether slavery were not better. Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.”

Garfield knew, however, that there was some suffering that no one could prevent, and whose reach no one was beyond. Throughout the centennial fair—in hall after hall, exhibit after exhibit—this suffering was unflinchingly apparent. There were rows of coffins of every variety. There were, in the words of one reporter, “instruments for the curing of diseased and deformed bodies and limbs.” An entire exhibit was devoted to a scene of a mother huddled over a crib, crying over the child she had just lost.

Nearly every family Garfield knew had suffered the death of a child, and his own family was no exception. His first child, a bright-eyed little girl named Eliza, had died of diphtheria when she was just three years old. Garfield had adored her, marveling at her precociousness and nicknaming her Trot, after Elizabeth Trotwell in
David Copperfield
, one of his favorite books. Thirteen years had passed since Trot’s death, but for Garfield, the pain of losing her was still fresh.

Although he worried for the health of his surviving children, Garfield himself seemed uniquely out of place among the fair’s somber scenes of death and disease. He had always been poor—and, even as a congressman, continued to live a simple and frugal life—but he had never been frail. On the contrary, he was the picture of health and vitality. With his quick, crisp stride, he was a striking contrast to the men and women at the fair who, rather than walk, chose to pay the exorbitant price of sixty cents an hour to be pushed through the halls in a cushioned “rolling chair” by a uniformed attendant. In many ways, Garfield had less in common with these people—a group that included the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—than he did the man from Joplin, Missouri, who had loaded a wheelbarrow with minerals from his home state and, over a period of three months, pushed it all the way to Philadelphia for the fair.

It was this kind of gritty determination that impressed Garfield most. He admired men who seemed not to notice even the most insurmountable of obstacles. He saw that caliber of man all around him at the centennial fair, tinkering with an engine or worrying over the strength of a blade. Among this group, eclipsed by the vast shadow of hundreds of other inventors, were two men whose ideas would not only change the world, but had the unique potential to save Garfield’s life.

Next door to Machinery Hall, where Garfield spent his first day at the fair, was the Main Exhibition Building, a twenty-one-acre, glass-enclosed behemoth. Inside, at the far east end of the building, past row after row of dazzling exhibits from far-flung nations, was a small staircase that led upstairs to a quiet, easily overlooked gallery. In one corner of that gallery, bent over a rough, wooden table that held a collection of mysterious-looking brass-and-wood instruments, was a serious young Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell.

The invention Bell had brought with him from Boston was “a new apparatus operated by the human voice”—the telephone. He had won a patent for it just three months earlier, and he knew that the fair was his best opportunity to prove that it really worked. He had come to Philadelphia, however, with great reluctance, and with each passing day he had only grown more convinced that he should have stayed home.

Bell’s principal work was not inventing, but teaching the deaf. He had inherited this work from his father, but he loved it with a passion that was all his own, and he was astonishingly good at it. Even the emperor of Brazil, on a recent break from the Centennial Exhibition, had visited Bell’s classroom in Boston. Bell’s school would administer its annual exams the next day. It was the most important day of the year for his students, and not being there to help them prepare made him miserable.

From the moment Bell had stepped off the train, he had encountered one disaster after another. He suffered from debilitating headaches brought on by extreme heat, and Philadelphia was in the grip of a brutal heat wave. To his horror, when he examined his luggage, he discovered that some of his equipment had been lost in transit. Worse, what had arrived was damaged.

When Bell had finally reached the fairgrounds and entered the Main Exhibition Building, he realized that not only was his telephone broken and incomplete, but his exhibit would be nearly impossible to find. Because of his reluctance to attend the fair, he had missed the official deadline for registering. His fiancée’s father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who was a member of the Massachusetts Centennial Committee and who had been urging Bell for months to enter his invention, had secured an exhibit space for him at the eleventh hour, but it was arguably the least desirable location in the entire hall. Instead of being taken to the electrical exhibits, Bell had been led upstairs to the Massachusetts educational section, his small table wedged between an exhibit of pipe organs and a collection of educational pamphlets. His invention would not even be listed in the fair’s program.

Bell’s only hope lay in the cluster of exhausted, sweat-soaked judges that wearily made its way through the Main Exhibition Building one morning, examining a seemingly endless array of inventions. For days, Bell had worked feverishly on his equipment, desperately trying to repair the damage that had been done on the journey from Boston. There was little he could do, however, to make it seem exciting. In comparison to the colossal engines and locomotives in Machinery Hall and the rows of whirring contraptions in the electrical aisles, his small, battered machines seemed hopelessly unimpressive and inconsequential.