Category: History

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Disappointed Office-Seeker, redux

HarrisonAs I mentioned in today’s post on the James A. Garfield assassination, the stock phrase used to describe his killer is “disappointed office-seeker.” Google turns up a bit that comedian Robert Klein once did based on that cliche. But Garfield wasn’t the only elected official of his era done in by someone who expected an appointment that didn’t come through.

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison was shot to death in October 1893, the day before the scheduled closing of the World’s Columbian Exposition in the city. The killer was an apparently mentally ill man named Prendergast who believed he he merited an appointment to a senior position for services rendered to Harrison. He didn’t get the job he fancied, general counsel for the city, so he went to Harrison’s home with a gun.

Harrison was a five-term mayor (though terms were just two years in his day). His death prompted an orgy of mourning. By one account, the day of his funeral, more than half a million people lined the route to the cemetery. Later, his son, Carter Harrison II, also won five mayoral elections (so the Richards Daley were not the first to pull off that feat).

The other day, when Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets to take a look at the new Haymarket statue, he mentioned he thought the original Haymarket sculpture, which depicts a cop trying to calm the waters of unrest, might be over in a park a few blocks to the west. We drove by, and found Union Park. On one edge is Spaulding Elementary School, where my mom’s mom, Anne O’Malley Hogan, taught back in the 1920s. We could see driving by that there was a statue in the park, but it was obscured by trees and I couldn’t see whether it was the Haymarket cop.

Dad went back down there today and called from the statue to report his findings. It’s a statue of Carter Harrison, who it turns out lived nearby when he was assassinated. (And, to connect back to Haymarket, was on the scene of the bombing before it took place. The Chicago Historical Society has a great writeup of the event, and Harrison’s part in it, here.)

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Infospigot: The Misinformation

Reading Minnesota Public Radio’s “Writer’s Almanac” today, I see a mention that today is the anniversary of the death, in 1881, of President James A. Garfield. Reading the item brings me face to face with the unpleasant truth that for years I’ve been spreading a spurious story about his death and in fact have confused certain details of Garfield’s assassination with the story of William McKinley‘s assassination 20 years later.

The story as I’ve told it: Garfield was visiting Buffalo. He was shot in the abomen by a “disappointed office-seeker” (the stock phrase) as he passed through a train station. Emergency surgery was performed by the only available doctor, who turned out to be a veterinarian. Garfield appeared to be recovering from his wounds, which included a damaged intestine; but the vet’s botched work led to infection, gangrene, and a horribly protracted death nearly three months after he was shot.

The “Writer’s Almanac” version of events was at odds with my tale, so I was compelled to check my “facts.” I discovered my story is an amalgam of the Garfield-McKinley events, with one wholesale fabrication thrown in. So from checking a couple of reliable-looking Web resources (here and here), here are the key points in the long and painful demises of the two presidents.

GarfieldFirst, Garfield:

–On July 2, 1881, Garfield was leaving Washington, D.C., on a trip. While preparing to board a train, the “disappointed office-seeker” — actually a nut job with a .44-caliber revolver, Charles Guiteau — shot him twice. One bullet grazed Garfield, the other struck him in the back.

–Garfield was taken back to the White House and doctors summoned. Not a veterinarian in the pack. The physicians believed it was crucial to determine where the bullet had lodged and whether it had struck any vital organs. To do this, and a veterianarian would have done just as well, they began sticking their unwashed fingers and other probes into Garfield’s deep back wound to see if they could feel the slug or damaged organs. They kept at that effort for days or weeks without finding the bullet. Their patient was conscious for most of the poking and gouging and subsequent pus-drainings.

–Despite initial optimism that Garfield would recover, the wound became infected, and the president died on Sept. 19, 1881, an astonishing and no doubt excruciating 80 days after he was shot.

–The most interesting detail of the efforts to treat Garfield is technological: At one point, Alexander Graham Bell was called in to use a metal detector he and aides had developed to try to find the bullet. The device was foiled, apparently, by an innovation in sleep technology: The test was conducted while Garfield was lying on a mattress equipped with newfangled metal springs.

MckinleyNow for McKinley:

–In September 1901, the president went to Buffalo to visit the city’s PanAmerican Exposition. After visiting Niagara Falls on the morning of Sept. 6, he returned to the fair to shake hands with the public.

–One of the people in the reception line was Leon Czolgosz. His abbreviated descriptor: anarchist. Call him a nut job with a .32-caliber pistol.

–Czolgosz, who would have changed his name to Lee Charles if he had had an agent, shot McKinley twice: one shot deflected off the president’s breast bone, the other struck him in the abdomen and tore through his stomach.

–McKinley was rushed to the rather poorly equipped hospital on the exposition grounds. Doctors were summoned, and they agreed immediate surgery was necessary to save McKinley’s life. Again, no veterinarians within scalpel’s reach of the presidential wounds. The doctor on the scene deemed most qualified to operate was a gynecologist, Dr. Matthew Mann. Contending with poor lighting in an improvised operating theater, he couldn’t find the bullet that had wounded McKinley, and settled for patching up the obvious damage and closing the president up again without draining the wounded area.

–Despite initial optimism that McKinley would recover, his wounds became infected, he developed gangrene, and died early on Sept. 14.

So it’s clear my Garfield story is mostly McKinley, with a dash of Garfield and a dollop of outrage — can you believe they let a veterinarian operate on the president?! One question I have for myself: Where did the fiction come from? I do make up stories occasionally — friends and coworkers will testify to that — but usually for the sophomoric pleasure of tricking someone or to make a point. I usually don’t knowingly pass off fanciful historical tales like this as truth; my guess is that, never really having read anything in detail about the Garfield and McKinley killings, I did something fairly common among us humans: jumble some vaguely remembered details together into a plausible narrative (and a narrative all the more entertaining for its key improbable element).

This all makes me wonder whether I’ve told my version of the Garfield story to someone who knew the actual details and thought, “What a load of crap!”

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Haymarket

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Saw in the Tribune on Wednesday morning that a new statue commemorating the Haymarket Riot (more politically correct designations, such as “Haymarket Affair,” have been adopted over the years) was unveiled the day before. It’s good to see that people in Chicago will still turn out to argue the disputes of 118 years ago:

At the dedication, angry calls of “Anarchists!” were heard as Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon read a list of men executed or sent to prison after the riot. And hecklers, some who waved anarchist flags, booed and uttered obscenities at (Fraternal Order of Police) President Mark Donahue.

Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets — the first time I ever visited the spot. The statue’s interesting, I guess: It’s an attempt to interpret the history of the moment rather than represent it literally. (An earlier statue on the spot, of a police officer holding up his hand and saying, “In the name of the people of Illinois, I command peace,” was attacked so frequently that it has been relocated to the city’s police academy). But I’m not an art critic. More interesting to me: An older couple showed up while we were out there. After a few minutes, I asked them what had brought them out. It turned out they have retired to the city and live on Randolph, over by the lake. They had seen the story in the paper, too, and decided to investigate. Cimg2023_1“When I read about this, I asked my kids, ‘What world-famous historical incident took place nine blocks west of where we live,” the man said. “One said, ‘It’s got somethng to do with labor.’ That was pretty good. Another one said, ‘Stop torturing your children.’ ”

Dad and I visited just in time. Chicago’s late-summer warm-wave was about to break, and thunderstorms had started to move across the city; five minutes after we were back in the car, it started to rain.

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Road Blog: Tolono 09.11.04

Dad and I headed south from Chicago, leaving the North Side about 9:30 a.m., going down Lake Shore Drive and the Dan Ryan before peeling off to the southwest on Interstate 57 with a destination of Cairo, all the way at the southern tip of the state. We stayed on that all the way down to Tolono, a small town that’s the subject of a railroad song by Utah Phillips (I wrote briefly about the song earlier this year).

The old Illinois Central (now Illinois Central Gulf) and Wabash (now Norfolk Southern) lines come together in town. In his song, Phillips describes the place as a flag stop — a place too small to have regular service. That looks like it was probably true, though there are so few passenger trains now that I’m sure it’s been decades since even a flag stop was made.

We got off the interstate just northwest of Tolono and drove into town on U.S. 45. I noticed while we were heading through that there was a sign for a historical marker. But as we passed the spot indicated — the entrance to a gas station — I didn’t see a marker. We drove out the south end of town, turned around, and tried again. We turned in at the gravel entrance to the gas station, but still didn’t see anything historic looking. But we did see a local constable parked in his Tolono squad car, apparently waiting for speeders . He lowered his passenger-side window as we rolled up.

“We were looking for that historical marker,” I said.

“What?” he answered.

“Do you know anything about the historical marker that’s supposed to be here?”

“A drunk took it down last winter. State still hasn’t put it back up.”

“Do you know what it was for? What the marker was for?

“I don’t know. State’s supposed to put it back up again.”

I had my camera out, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask whether I could take the officer’s picture. I also didn’t ask how long he’d been living in the area that he had no idea what this marker was about. Inquiries like that could be a threat to homeland security and speed-zone enforcement. Instead, Dad and I drove off to see Tolono; I was hoping there’d been an old station or stop of some kind I could photograph so I can send a shot to my old friend Gerry, who used to play the song so well. But there’s not a whole lot happening in town, certainly no evidence of a rail-passenger platform anywhere. I shot a couple scenes along the Norfolk tracks anyway. Then we headed back to U.S. 45 to go south for a few miles and get back on I-57.

We passed the historical marker sign again, and going by the gas station I finally saw the monument. It was a tablet set into a boulder in among some sort of ever-greenery. The bushes kind of looked like landscaping for the gas station, and the boulder hadn’t been visible when we were consulting local law enforcement about markers of historical significance. The police officer had been parked no more than 100 feet from the spot.

We halted again, and it turned out to be worth it this time. The marker commemorates what is said to be Lincoln’s last speech in Illinois, on February 11, 1861, during a brief stop on his journey east to be inaugurated. One site notes that Lincoln stopped further east, too, in Danville, and spoke to a crowd there. A railroad-centric account of the journey mentions Tolono, but not Danville.)

Lincoln’s brief Tolono speech is on the marker:

“I am leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended as you are aware with considerable difficulties. Let us believe as some poet has expressed it, ‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’ I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

Monument commemorating Lincoln’s stop in Tolono, Illinois, (just south of Champaign) in February 1861.
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Faulkner’s Take

Here’s an oft-quoted passage from William Faulkner (from “Intruder in the Dust,” which no, I have not read) that grabs a lot of people:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….

As a northerner and as someone who grew up believing (and who still believes) that the Civil War was fought in the most just of causes — ultimately, to end slavery — it’s probably impossible to fully appreciate the feelings Faulkner’s evoking there. Yes, history’s full of moments of barely missed opportunity, of heroes thwarted, of big “what if” moments. What if Lincoln hadn’t been at Ford’s Theatre? What if Bobby Kennedy had lived? But what Faulkner is talking about is where history blends into myth. In some important way, it doesn’t take into account a moral dimension of the event it interprets. What if Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg (that’s the premise for a series of historical novels being written by Newt Gingrich, by the way)? Yeah — and what if the Soviets hadn’t stopped Hitler at Stalingrad? Sure, we have a wish that true valor had some reward beyond a glorified version of “nice try” and a bullet in the chest. But part of the reason we can look back and daydream about these episodes is because they came out the way they did. The Faulkner quote reminds me of another that kicks around in my head, from Grant’s account of Lee’s surrender at Appamattox:

“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the
sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”

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Three July Days

If you’re of a certain persuasion, the first three days of July mean Gettysburg. And by “certain persuasion,” I don’t mean a Civil War “buff,” whatever that is, or a re-enactor type. At least not necessarily. I mean someone who might be struck sometime at this time of year by the events of those three days and what they mean still, and the fresh meaning the history has in light of what we’re going through today.

There’s a good piece at Salon.com — which you can’t read in full unless you pay for it — a Q and A with Mario Cuomo about his book on Lincoln and Lincoln’s relevance in our war-on-terrorism world. An excerpt:

Would Lincoln have had anything to say about President Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war?

Yes. He specifically condemned preventive war on the grounds it would allow a leader to start a war cynically or unwisely. He thought it better to allow constitutional devices to work, which means going to Congress and obtaining a declaration of war. Lincoln also made it clear that you should avoid at all costs doing two wars at once. During the course of the Civil War, he was tempted by everyone around him to intervene with the British on the Trent affair [sparked by the Union’s capture of two Confederate diplomats aboard a British mail steamer] and with the Mexicans [who were fending off a French attack aimed at installing a puppet government]. But he avoided it, saying we needed to concentrate our effort, which is precisely the critique that [Florida Sen.] Bob Graham was making of Bush during the Democratic primary elections.

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Anniversary: Third-Rate Burglary

It’s June 17, the thirty-second anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Man, does Nixon look good now. But I digress. To mark the occasion, a minor-league baseball club in New Hampshire called the Nashua Pride is sponsoring a giveaway: The first 1,000 fans through the gates will get Richard Nixon bobblehead dolls. And that’s not all! Anyone named Woodward or Bernstein will be admitted free, public-address announcements will be suspended for 18 and a half minutes. (This news by way of a segment on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

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Bill and Ivan in WWII

On the Mother Jones site today, there’s a mini-essay that makes the point about the Soviet role in defeating Hitler much more clearly and completely (if also more shrilly) than I did (it’s the part titled “Remembering Bill and Ivan, about halfway down the page):

“… It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried on the Russian steppes not in French fields. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately forty ‘Ivans’ died for every ‘Private Ryan.'”

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D-Day Remembered

We all know what happened 60 years ago today. The Allies — really the Allies, not some jury-rigged “coalition” — launched a massive, risky, daring invasion of France, the key stroke in the western offensive against Nazi Germany that would help bring down the Third Reich just 11 months later. That seems like a lot, right? But it’s not enough for the president or nearly anyone else who lives under the Red, White and Blue. Here’s the prez, in part, from his speech in Normandy earlier

today:

“The generation we honor on this anniversary, all the men and women who labored and bled to save this continent, took a more practical view of the military mission. Americans wanted to fight and win and go home. And our GIs had a saying: The only way home is through Berlin. That road to V-E Day was hard and long, and traveled by weary and valiant men. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.”

And here’s another stirring example, from the beloved Andy Rooney on “60 Minutes” tonight:

“What the Americans, the British, and the Canadians were trying to do was get back a whole continent that had been taken from its rightful owners by Adolf Hitler’s German army. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.”

That’s all great. We’re heroes who saved the world then and are still busy doing it, one Iraqi militant, one Iraqi soccer ball at a time. But you got to wonder what those helpless liberated Europeans — who happen to include Russians, by the way — make of this renewed reminder that we saved their butts.

Yeah, D-Day was huge. But anyone who’s got any idea of the course of the war knows there was an Eastern Front on which Hitler wrecked his armies (but only after inflicting horrific casualties on both civilians and enemy forces); anyone who knows the course of the war knows that American GIs might have talked about Berlin, but that it was the Red Army that fought its way to the German capital; anyone who knows the course of the war knows that U.S. forces were on the sidelines as Germany invaded Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Greece, the Balkans, the Baltic states, Russia and the rest; anyone who knows the course of the war knows that it took the Japanese attack on

Hawaii to kick our sense of selflessness into high gear, a full year and a half after France had fallen to the blitzkrieg.

It’s fitting to celebrate heroism and sacrifice and the nobility of citizen soldiers answering the call to duty. It’s dishonest to rewrite history to defend, implicitly, current policies that have nothing to do with the heroes’ sacrifice. And it’s tiresome and kind of boorish to keep reminding the world of all the great stuff we’ve done on its behalf.

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Reagan’s Dead

Now is no time to be uncharitable. Ronald Reagan died a long, lingering death that was doubtless heartbreaking for everyone close to him. I never thought I’d find myself saying so, but I admire Nancy Reagan for responding to her husband’s decline by taking on the fundamentalists and flat-earthers (like Bush and cronies) to demand more aggressive embryonic stem-cell research that might lead to treatments for Alzheimer’s. Good for her.

As for the former president himself, it must be noted from the Infospigot perspective that he became the answer to a big presidential trivia question: Which former chief executive lived to the greatest age? (I think John Adams, who remained lucid to the end, was the former title holder; he died at age 90, but that’s a well-known story).

Standing apart from the instant canonization and overnight hagiography of Reagan the Great, the Pious, the Good-Humored, the Brave, the Handsome, the Rugged, the Well-Spoken (who looks especially good when compared with the resident White House squatter), let us remember the Ron who (short list, and everyone has their own favorites):

–Played war heroes and talked tough, but never served in the ranks himself.

–Declared with relish that he would “loose the dogs of war” on

protesters at the University of California, which led to National Guard

helicopters gassing the campus.

–Ran up a deficit higher than an elephant’s eye, then shrugged and walked away from it (an obvious role model for Bush).

–Signed off on, then slept through, Iran-contra.

–Appointed James Watt secretary of the Interior.

–Made ketchup a vegetable.

–Pointed with pride to his union-busting (remember PALCO)?

–Invited the Bush dynasty into the White House.

But hey, he loved macaroni and cheese. What a guy.