Made In America - Bill Bryson [55]
The nation waited breathlessly for news of the President’s recovery. Newspapers all over the country posted frequent, not to say strikingly candid, bulletins outside their main offices. ‘The President was somewhat restless and vomited several times during the early part of the night. Nutritious enemata were successfully employed to sustain him,’ read a typical one on the façade of the New York Herald office.1
As the President slipped in and out of consciousness, the greatest minds in the country were brought to his bedside in the hope that someone could offer something more positively beneficial than rectal sustenance. Alexander Graham Bell, at the peak of his fame, devised a makeshift metal-detector, which he called an ‘induction balance’ and which employed his recently invented telephone as a listening aid. The intention was to locate the bullets lodged in the President’s frame, but to Bell’s considerable consternation, it appeared to show bullets practically everywhere in the President’s body. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the bed springs.
The summer of 1881 was one of the sultriest for years in the nation’s capital. To provide some relief for the stricken President, a corps of naval engineers who specialized in ventilating mine shafts was summoned to the White House and instructed to build a cooling device. They rigged up a large iron box filled with ice, salt and water, and a series of terry-cloth filters which were saturated by the melting ice. A fan drew in warm air from outside, which was cooled as it passed over the damp terry-cloth and cleansed by charcoal filters, and was propelled onwards into the President’s bedroom. The device was not terribly efficient – in fifty-eight days it consumed a quarter of a million tons of ice – but it worked up to a point. It cooled the President’s room to a more or less tolerable 81 °F, and stands in history as the world’s first air-conditioner.2
Nothing, alas, could revive the sinking President, and on the evening of 19 September, two and a half months after he had been shot, he quietly passed away.
The shooting of President Garfield was significant in two ways. First, it proved once and for all the folly of the spoils system, a term inspired by the famous utterance of New York politician William E. Marcy sixty years earlier: ‘To the victor belong the spoils.‘3 Under the spoils system it fell to a newly elected President to appoint hundreds of officials, from rural postmasters and lighthouse keepers to ambassadors. It was a handy way to reward political loyalty, but it was a tediously time-consuming process for a new President and – as Charles Guiteau conclusively demonstrated – it bred dissatisfaction among disappointed aspirants. Two years later Congress abolished the practice. But the shooting of the President – or more precisely the response to the shooting – was significant in another way. It underlined the distinctively American belief that almost any problem, whether it be finding a bullet buried in soft tissue or cooling the bedroom of a dying Chief Executive, could be solved with the judicious application of a little know-how.
Know-how, dating from 1857, is a quintessentially American term and something of a leitmotif for the nineteenth century. Thanks to it, and some other not insignificant factors like an abundance of natural resources and a steady supply of cheap immigrant labour, America was by 1881 well on its way to completing a remarkable transformation from an agrarian society on the periphery of world events to an economic colossus. In the thirty years that lay either side of Garfield’s death America enjoyed a period of growth unlike that seen anywhere in history. In almost every area of economic activity, America rose like a giant, producing