Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [24]
Garfield quickly made his way to his room, although he knew that if it had offered no refuge in the past, it certainly would not now. The small room in which, just the night before, he had struggled to sleep as he shared his three-quarter-size bed with a stranger, was already filled with six hundred telegrams and seemingly as many people. As men talked excitedly all around him, Garfield, “pale as death,” sat down in a chair and stared at the wall, absentmindedly holding a GARFIELD FOR PRESIDENT badge that someone had thrust into his hands.
• CHAPTER 4 •
GOD’S MINUTE MAN
Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Four days after the Republican convention, and a day after he had stepped aboard the ill-fated Stonington, Charles Guiteau arrived in New York. While the other survivors of the deadly steamship collision in Long Island Sound huddled with family and friends, wondering at the twist of fate that had spared their lives, Guiteau walked through the city alone, unburdened by guilt or doubt. To his mind, which had long ago descended into delusion and madness, the tragedy was simply further proof that he was one of God’s chosen few.
From an early age, Guiteau had been confident of his importance in the eyes of God. Motherless by the time he was seven years old, he had been raised by a zealously religious father, a man so certain of his relationship with God that he believed he would never die. “My mother was dead and my father was a father and a mother to me,” Guiteau said, “and I drank in this fanaticism from him for years. He used to talk it day after day, and dream over it, and sleep over it.” Charles’s own fanaticism grew until, when he was eighteen years old, he left the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to join a commune in upstate New York founded by his father’s religious mentor, John Humphrey Noyes.
The central tenet of Noyes’s doctrine—and the idea that appealed most to men like Guiteau’s father—was perfectionism. Noyes believed that, through prayer and the right kind of education, a person could become intellectually, morally, and spiritually perfect, and so would be free from sin. Noyes believed that he had reached perfection and was anointed by God to help others shed their own sins. With this goal in mind, he had founded his commune, the Oneida Community, named for the town in which it was established in 1848. Oneida would last more than thirty years, becoming the most successful utopian socialist community in the United States.
Like most of Noyes’s followers, Guiteau moved into the “Mansion House,” a sprawling brick Victorian Gothic building that, over time, would grow to ninety-three thousand square feet. It held thirty-five apartments for the nearly three hundred members of the commune. Although the private rooms were small and unadorned, the property had a wide variety of fairly elaborate communal amenities—from theaters to a photographic studio to a Turkish bath.
Guiteau’s father dreamed of living in the Mansion House, but his second wife refused to follow him, perhaps in part because of the community’s practice of “complex marriage,” or free love—a concept that Noyes had developed himself, and practiced liberally. According to Noyes, monogamous love was not only selfish but “unhealthy and pernicious,” and the commune’s members were encouraged to have a wide variety of sexual partners in the hope that they would not fall in love with any one person.