Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [33]
In 1880, no commission threatened to steal the presidency, but so close was the race that there was uncertainty until the final hours. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 3, with the nation still anxiously waiting to learn who its next president would be, Garfield went to bed. When he woke up a few hours later and was told in no uncertain terms that he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States, he was, one reporter noted with astonishment, the “coolest man in the room.” Later that day, Garfield gave his election to the presidency little more mention in his diary than he had the progress of his oat crop a few weeks earlier. “The news of 3 a.m.,” he wrote, “is fully justified by the morning papers.”
In the days that followed, surrounded by celebrations and frantic plans for his administration, Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring him only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured—his time with his children, his books, and his farm—abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. Sitting down at his desk in a rare moment to himself, he tried to explain in a letter to a friend the strange sense of loss he had felt since the election.
“There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,” he wrote, “which I can hardly explain.”
PART TWO
WAR
• CHAPTER 6 •
HAND AND SOUL
To a young man who has in himself the magnificent possibilities
of life, it is not fitting that he should be permanently commanded.
He should be a commander.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
As Garfield tried to accept the new life that lay before him, Alexander Graham Bell, working in a small laboratory in Washington, D.C., struggled to free himself from the overwhelming success of his first invention. Only five years had passed since the Centennial Exhibition, but for Bell, everything had changed. While the telephone had lifted him from poverty, made him famous, and won him the respect of the world’s most accomplished scientists, it had also robbed him of what he valued most: time.
Bell had always believed in the telephone, not just its inventiveness but its usefulness. But even he had not anticipated how quickly and widely it would be embraced. “I did not realize,” he would admit years later, “the overwhelming importance of the invention.” By the summer of 1877, more than a thousand telephones were already operating in Philadelphia, Chicago, and as far west as San Francisco. That same year, President Hayes had one installed in the White House, and Queen Victoria requested a private demonstration at her summer retreat on the Isle of Wight. “A Professor Bell explained the whole process,” she wrote in her diary that night, “which is most extraordinary.”
With astonishing speed, the telephone won over not just presidents and queens but skeptics and Luddites. Even Mark Twain, who complained that “the voice already carries entirely too far as it is,” talked his boss at the Hartford Courant into putting a telephone in the newsroom. Then, still grumbling that “if Bell had invented a muffler or a gag he would have done a real service,” he had two installed in his own home, one downstairs for his family and a second in the third-floor billiard room just for himself.
Requests for public demonstrations poured in, and Bell’s audiences never failed to be amazed and delighted by what they heard. One night, while giving a presentation in Salem, Massachusetts, Bell directed his audience’s attention to the strange, wooden box before them. Suddenly, they heard the voice of Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson coming from the box—thin and tinny but unmistakable and, incredibly, speaking directly to them. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Watson said, “it gives me great pleasure to be able to address you this evening, although I am in Boston, and you