Assassination Vacation (21 page)

O
ne day in November, my friend Bennett and I drive out to Long Branch, New Jersey, to see where Garfield died. Garfield, remember, was shot on July 2 in D.C. Anyone who has ever spent more than ten minutes in the nation’s capital between May and September knows how uncomfortable the former swamp can be, and that’s without a bullet in the back. Because President Garfield and his malarial wife were so fond of the vacation town of Long Branch, they and the doctors agreed trading steamy Washington for the sea air was in the president’s best interest. “I have always felt,” Garfield wrote in his diary, “that the ocean was my friend.”

Bennett parks the car near the water and we take an unbearable walk on the beach. I’m guessing that in the summertime, the place is crawling with children and partiers, but today the wind is so truly windy the frozen sea spray slaps us cold.

My only knowledge of Long Branch comes from reading about how it was in the 1880s, when it was the swankiest resort town on the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t know what I was expecting — probably a cross between the Hamptons and Colonial Williamsburg — but the waterfront is a shock. “There is no evidence of its past charm,” announces Bennett. Barren and blank, it has what he accurately describes as “an Eastern bloc vibe.” A bland concrete hotel that looks like a Soviet apartment building (and not in a good way) hovers over a boardwalk scattered with benches, which sounds cordial enough, except these benches, also concrete, look like you’re supposed to rest on them on the walk home from standing in a nine-hour bread line while being tailed by the KGB.

Bennett says, “The only thing that’s interesting to me about this place is the fact that it ever once appealed to anybody. I do find it interesting how a place or a thing or a person changes, loses what it was that once defined it, and how some struggle to retain the idea of it despite its passing.”

He thinks Long Branch is “cursed” and that the “hostile” windstorm is a warning to me. He advises me to take heed, because if I ever return, “I’m sure you’ll be hit by lightning. Or perhaps a tidal wave.”

On the beach, amidst the communist concrete, standing where logic dictates the statue of Lenin should be, is a life-size James A. Garfield staring at the sea. The area is called Presidential Park. Garfield’s statue, his left hand holding a patina-green hat, watches over a series of benches, each one dedicated to the presidents who vacationed here and decorated with small portraits and informational tidbits advertising Grant’s twelve years of sojourns while pointing out that Arthur “leased a cottage on Park.” This configuration is remarkable if only because it is the one place in the country where, in a lineup of presidents, Garfield wins. You have to die here to get a statue; otherwise, have a bench.

Shivering, we get back in the car and turn the heat all the way up, driving a mile or so down the shore to where Garfield died.
Harper’s Weekly
ran a poignant illustration of what he looked like in his final days here, propped up in a bed, looking out the window at his friend the water.

Back then, the ritzy neighborhood was called Elberon. Garfield’s cottage, along with Grant’s, has long since disappeared. But the homes that are here are more gracious and livable than the melancholy slabs up the beach.

The marker about Garfield’s death is clearly an afterthought, a little tombstone next to a hedge on the side of a garage. It’s possible to see what Garfield saw from his window. You just have to look past a white picket fence.

Across the way, Joan Schnorbus from the Long Branch Historical Association is waiting for us in front of St. James Chapel, where Garfield and the six other vacationing presidents went to church. For that reason, it is known as the Church of the Presidents. It was deconsecrated in 1953 and turned into a historical museum. It’s currently closed for renovations, though “renovations” seems too cosmetic a word for what’s going on here. The place was falling apart and the foundation has had to be stabilized, the interior gutted.

Joan unlocks the door of the white shingled building. The sanctuary is dark and strewn with piles of junk and rubble. She points at a wicker rocking chair, says it might have belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. “It’s kind of a grandma’s attic in here.”

She says, “Because the church was the primary church for the well-to-do who vacationed here, and Garfield did die across the road, when he passed away they brought him here before they took him back to Washington.”

I tell her we just looked at Garfield’s death marker and ask if it was the historical association’s doing.

“Actually,” she says, “it was a twelve-year-old kid. In the late fifties, early sixties, he decided that it should be there and petitioned the local government to put something there.”

I say, “It’s kind of —”

“Right next to a garage. I know. It’s really such a shame. There’s so much history in the area. That’s why I’m so adamant about this place because this truly is all we’ve got. Presidential history in Jersey is so sketchy. Cleveland was born here, but left when he was a toddler. And of course we had Washington, but not as a president. So this is the strongest facility we have in terms of presidential history.”

At that moment, I become a lot more interested in Joan than I am in the church. She knows about Grover Cleveland’s childhood. I ask her how she got interested in such things.

“I like presidential history,” she says. “Have since I was a kid.”

“Who’s your favorite president?”

“Jackson, actually.”

“Jackson?” I blurt, “Oh my lord. You know my ancestors were on the Trail of Tears?”

“My god. I’m sorry.” She really is. It’s endearing. The unforeseen pleasant surprise about traveling around the country researching historical ugliness is that I seem to luck into a lot of present-day kindness, making the acquaintance of an embarrassment of knowledgeable nice people like Joan who are generous with their time, happy to share what they’ve learned.

“When I was a little subdued kid,” she explains, “Jackson gave me courage. I was nine when I saw a show about him when he was a kid and fought the British. So it’s not his politics, it’s more that he, when I was timid, gave me strength.”

“That’s nice you could get something from a genocidal monster,” I joke, asking her if she’s been to the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate outside of Nashville. She has. She was fifteen.

Garfield, stately, starchy Garfield, though in some ways a better man than Jackson, is unquestionably less dramatic. I ask Joan if she was always keen on the president who died here or if it was living in the area that sparked her. The latter, she says. Because I find Garfield such a blurry figure, so hard to get to know, I ask her if she has a sense of who he was. Yes, she’s been reading books about him for a while now.

“What’s your favorite thing about him?”

“I never thought of it in that vein.” Understandable. “I guess his versatility. He was pretty versatile with his teaching, and he’s got that military background. I think there would have been more to him had he stuck around. I think we would have gotten more out of him. I know that Grant did not like him.”

“No,” I agree.

“When Garfield was ill, Grant did go see him here.”

“But Garfield had to get shot first.” I bring up that story I like, about Grant showing up at Lucretia Garfield’s door to comfort her, that I thought that said a lot about Grant’s basic decency, that he would go say hi.

“Yes, I think Grant was a good guy basically. And Arthur, a very impressive man, actually, the way he went against — let me think of the word…the guys that put him in office?”

“The Stalwarts?”

“Yes, the Stalwarts. Arthur did his own thing. He did not toe the line for them.”

I ask Joan about the Long Branch Historical Association’s plans for the church. She says they’re trying to raise $3 million. They’re not only trying to turn it back into a museum. They want it to become a community center, hold concerts and events.

“It really has so much potential,” says Joan, looking around. “We could use it for exhibits, weddings, musicals, plays —”

“Bar mitzvahs,” Bennett adds.

She points at a huge bell. “It was in the tower. The belfry was so unstable.” It’s the bell that rang for Garfield when he died.

She takes us outside, shows us the yard, which contains a small shed so cute it is referred to as a teahouse. It looks like dolls would live in it, dolls or teddy bears. Painted red with white trim, it’s nailed together out of railroad ties. Specifically, the ties from the dying Garfield’s rail spur to the sea.

The citizens of Long Branch, in a moving act of neighborly devotion, volunteered to build a special spur from the train station so as to more comfortably transport the president to his oceanfront cottage. They laid 3,200 feet of railroad track. And when the president’s train stalled at the end of its seven-hour journey, the townspeople pushed Garfield’s car all the way to its destination by hand. And then, after Garfield’s death, after the rail spur was torn out, some sentimental local, someone like Joan, gathered the wood and built a little house out of it.

Souvenir coaster based on the logo for Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, where Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901. The fair aimed to promote trade and friendship among the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The Spanish-American War of 1898 hastened a need for such hemispheric PR, which is almost laughably illustrated by Miss North America’s bare foot, poised to stomp on Cuba.

Chapter Three

A
few days after my sister Amy got home from the Oneida-to-Canton, Garfield-McKinley dream vacation I roped her and my nephew Owen into, she phoned me, saying, “I asked Owen what he wanted to do today and he said, ‘Go look at stones with Aunt Sarah.’ Do you know what he’s talking about? What these stones are?”

I do. “He means tombstones,” I told her. “When you were off parking the car at the cemetery in Cleveland, Owen and I walked around looking for John Hay’s grave. Owen climbed on top of it and hollered, ‘This is a nice Halloween park!’ ” (That’s what he calls cemeteries.)

James Garfield’s tomb stands on top of Lakeview Cemetery’s highest hill. Owen calls it “Aunt Sarah’s castle.” The mausoleum, a colossal Gothic tower completed in 1889, features a chapel, a burial chamber, and stairs opening onto a balcony looking out across Cleveland — the downtown skyscrapers, a gray-blue blotch of haze that might be Lake Erie. From Garfield’s perch, trees outnumber the smokestacks. Two individuals can’t help but stick out from this view — architect Frank Gehry, whose unmistakable roof wiggles in the distance, and industrialist John D. Rockefeller, whose exclamation point of an obelisk thrusts up a few yards down the hill.

Inside the mausoleum’s dome, the liturgical light of stained glass illuminates a larger-than-life-size statue of Garfield. Amy, Owen, and I march downstairs to the burial chamber to look at the flag-draped coffin of James Garfield and the one belonging to Lucretia, his wife. Owen peers closely into every cranny of the room. Frowning, he makes one of his verb-free proclamations, “There no skeletons in the crypt.”

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He’s three. He knows maybe ninety words and one of them is “crypt”? Amy says, “Remember, Owen? The skeletons are
inside
the coffins.”

I have not been particularly shocked by how much I love Owen, but I am continually pleasantly surprised by how much I like him. He’s truly morbid. When he broke his collarbone by falling down some stairs he was playing on, an emergency room nurse tried to comfort him by giving him a cuddly stuffed lamb to play with. My sister, hoping to prompt a “thank you,” asked him, “What do you say, Owen?” He handed back the lamb, informing the nurse, “I like spooky stuff.”

“That was fun, Mama,” says Owen as Amy straps him back into his car seat to leave the cemetery. Before we do, I make her drive around for the longest time, trying to locate Mark Hanna’s tomb. A little motion sick from winding her way around the hills while scanning for Hanna’s name, Amy asks, “Now
who
is this guy?”

I answer that he was an Ohio senator, that as William McKinley’s campaign manager in the 1896 presidential election he raised six or seven million dollars when the opponent only scraped together about 600K, that Hanna’s nickname was “Dollar Mark,” that after he heard about McKinley’s assassination and realized Theodore Roosevelt would be sworn in, he’s the one who famously quipped, “Now that damn cowboy will be president of the United States,” and that the current president’s political guru, Karl Rove, claims Hanna as his campaign strategy hero. Hearing this, Amy sighs theatrically, which, in twin language, I understand as a hint that sleazy innovations in election finance and quips about TR are shaky reasons to drag out this car-sickening visit when she would very much like to return to our air-conditioned hotel room downtown for room service and a nap.

I try to sweeten the deal, remembering, “Oh! And Hanna’s tomb was designed by Henry Bacon, the architect of the Lincoln Memorial!”

“Wow. Henry Bacon. Yay.”

“We’ll just wait in the car,” Amy says after I spot it. I run up to Hanna’s Parthenon, crossing between fluted columns to peek in at Mr. and Mrs. Dollar Mark.

Normally, my sister has bottomless patience for looking at things having to do with the dead people and extinct dinosaurs Owen and I are interested in, but it’s been a long day. We’ve already been to Canton and back, having wasted nearly two hours sidetracked in a mall parking lot where we had stopped for lunch and gotten waylaid by a deranged woman who called the cops, alleging that our rental car was responsible for the apostrophe-size scratch on her Pontiac Grand Am. So Amy had to hash it out with the woman in the back of a patrolman’s squad car while Owen and I sat in the hundred-degree heat staring at ants frying on the asphalt, all because I wanted to see the tomb of yet another assassinated Ohio president. (Of course the officer sided with Amy, who, gloating as she got out of the police car, sneered at the Pontiac driver, “My sister is writing a book about our trip and I bet she’s going to put you in the McKinley chapter.”)

Like Garfield’s, the McKinley National Memorial in Canton is a domed edifice on top of a hill. It’s a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass. A wide staircase connects the mausoleum to the parking lot. Halfway up the stairs, a statue of McKinley stands watch. An inscription describes him as “good citizen, brave soldier, wise executive, helper and leader of men.” My guess is that the statue is inspirational for the visitors, but since all of them are joggers bounding past him up the steps and back, up the steps and back, I bet it’s McKinley’s portly girth more than his good citizenship that inspires them, if only to endure more laps.

Next to the tomb, the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum displays William McKinley’s ice skate; his bank book from 1892–1893, “the period of his personal financial crisis” (from which Mark Hanna bailed him out); photos of McKinley hosting visitors here in Canton during his front porch campaign; an “Iver Johnson .32 caliber revolver identical to the one used by anarchist Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley in September 1901”; a sullied white nightshirt believed to have been worn by McKinley as he lay dying; and a pair of slippers crocheted by Ida, McKinley’s wife.

The McKinley museum displays the silk bag where Ida kept her yarn and knitting needles, complete with a photograph of her dead husband affixed inside. That is how she passed her widowhood. She sewed a picture of her murdered spouse into her knitting bag and then spent the rest of her life in a rocking chair, crocheting four thousand pairs of bedroom slippers, seeing her dead husband’s face staring up at her every time she reached for a new ball of yarn.

I think about Ida, the constant looping of her hook through the yarn, every time I play with my souvenir from the museum that I keep on my desk — the McKinley Memorial yo-yo. It is the only yo-yo I’ve ever seen decorated with the picture of a mausoleum.

Quarantined on that Canton hilltop, McKinley’s tomb is as opulent as it is abstract. It’s where his bones are, his skeleton, as Owen would say, but I can’t say that looking at his coffin beneath the coffered dome made me feel like he was close.

On the other hand, the simple marker of his assassination on a residential street in Buffalo gets to me. It’s just a plaque bolted to a big rock on the ground. You would miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Yesterday in Buffalo, we were looking for it and we missed it twice. After Amy has driven up and down Fordham Drive a couple of times without spotting the thing, I finally flag down a dog walker — they seem to know these things — and he points up the block, says it’s a few houses in from Lincoln Parkway.

Lined with earthy bungalows, the street is American-dreamy, all sidewalks and green lawns. The McKinley marker sits inside the grassy center median that makes the middle of the road into a long, skinny park. We get out of the car, read the plaque. Sponsored by the Buffalo Historical Society, it says, “In the Pan-American Temple of Music which covered this spot President McKinley was fatally shot Sept. 6, 1901.”

At four o’clock that afternoon, McKinley hosted a receiving line, shaking the hands of exposition-goers and kissing babies as an organist played Bach’s Sonata in F. One of the people waiting in line was James Parker, a black waiter from Georgia who worked at the fair but had taken the afternoon off to meet the president. In front of him, a man extended his bandaged hand to McKinley. But that was no bandage. The assassin Czolgosz had wrapped his revolver in a handkerchief. When Czolgosz shot McKinley in the stomach the handkerchief caught fire. Czolgosz, who never said a thing, shot McKinley once again. One of McKinley’s guards, Private Francis O’Brien, tackled the assassin before he could fire a third shot. Then James Parker punched Czolgosz in the head. O’Brien extracted the gun from Czolgosz’s hand. McKinley, who seemed to care less about what the bullets were doing to his insides than what the news of the bullets would do to his notoriously frail wife, told his secretary not to tell her.

All of which took place right here where this marker is. I wonder how many times that dog walker has allowed his pet to pee on it. McKinley’s death is part of this neighborhood’s life. My dad knows a woman who grew up here, and her brother has had a scar on his face since they were kids; he got it crashing his bike into the rock with the plaque — one of Leon Czolgosz’s lesser victims. Hunkered down in the everyday midst of the families on the block, McKinley’s death seems more personal and thus more sad, the loss of a husband, a friend. This rock calls to mind Mark Hanna’s lament at his dying chum: “William, William, speak to me!”

The architecture of the Pan-American Exposition was built to be torn down. The temporary structures, including the Temple of Music, were modeled out of staff, a kind of plaster reinforced with hemp. The New York Building was the only one they put up for keeps. Now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, it’s nice that it’s still here but too bad that they saved the one building that’s least representative of what the fair looked like. In 1901, the New York Building’s marble and columns was a bleached island of Greece in a colorful ocean of colonial Spain.

In fact, the Pan-American Exposition was called “The Rainbow City” to distinguish it from the neoclassical “White City” that was the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Still, the Pan-American used color as an argument
for
whiteness. In one of the more bizarre manifestations of the turn-of-the-century social Darwinism fad — which employed Darwin’s theory of evolution to argue that Anglo-Saxon culture was the fittest and therefore the best, a claim made on stomachs full of steak and kidney pie by men who never tasted the glory that is the taco — the Pan-Am appointed a “director of color” who cooked up a thematic scheme in which “primitive” pursuits and societies’ buildings were slathered with summery paint and “civilized” advancements were pastel. Thus, the buildings devoted to horticulture or ethnology (i.e., things growing in dirt and nonwhites living in the dirt) were painted shades of orange, whereas the expo’s most important building, the four-hundred-foot-tall Electric Tower, was “ivory-white” with capitalist accents of green and gold.

According to Buffalo attorney and Pan-Am president John G. Milburn, in whose home McKinley would die, the point of the exposition, its guiding principle, was one “grand idea — the bringing closer together of the peoples of this hemisphere in their social, political, and commercial relations. That aspect of it has been the inspiration of the enterprise and the source of the enthusiasm which has carried it forward to completion.”

President McKinley had actually come to Buffalo back in 1897 to break ground for an exposition. But something got in the way: 1898. The fair was postponed due to the Spanish-American War. Because of the Cuban combat, the United States was suddenly a world power almost overnight. In fact, during one twenty-four-hour period in August, we conquered Manila Bay in the Philippines
and
seized control of Puerto Rico. McKinley also annexed Hawaii and Guam. So what better way to calm the nerves of our hemispheric neighbors, thought the Buffalo exposition planners, than ask the Latin American and Canadian governments to join us in putting on a show? The exposition’s secret theme?
We’re Not Going to Shoot You (Especially If You Buy Our Stuff).

At the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, I buy a coaster of the Pan-American’s logo, the best possible picture not just of the exposition and its aims of hemispheric friendship, but of the McKinley administration itself. It is an allegorical picture of the Western Hemisphere. North America is a blond woman, South America a brunette. Both of them are white. Swimming between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific, the two women clasp hands in friendship. The handshake takes place in Central America on the future site of the Panama Canal. Miss South America smiles, unaware that two years later, the U.S. Navy would swoop in and hack her arm off at the elbow so that cargo ships could sail through the blood of her severed stump.

In the logo, most of the United States and Canada is blanketed in Miss North America’s billowy yellow dress. But one delicate bare foot pokes out of the southeastern edge, shaped like the state of Florida, as if she’s poised to step on Cuba.

The Cuban people suffered at the hands of the Spanish in the 1890s, especially those who were rounded up into concentration camps. American newspapers, especially Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World
and William Randolph Hearst’s
New York Journal,
sensationalized Spanish atrocities, stirring up an idealistic fad for
Cuba libre
among the American people. The clincher, the hard proof of Spanish evildoing was one of those acts that, in retrospect, might not have happened at all. Historians still disagree. On February 15, 1898, the American battleship the
Maine
exploded in Havana Harbor, killing around 260 men. Remember the
Maine
? War boosters like Hearst accused the Spanish of bombing the ship and shrieked for a declaration of war. In fact, the evidence was inconclusive then and remains so today. Some historians believe it may have been a freak accident, a coal fire that ignited explosives on board the ship.

Four days after the
Maine
went down, Hearst called on the public to contribute to the construction of a monument to the fallen in New York. Dedicated in 1913, the
Maine
memorial, a forty-foot-tall tower decorated with allegorical sea people and inscribed with the names of the dead, guards the southwestern entrance to Central Park at Columbus Circle. Nowadays it looks like it was always there; on sunny afternoons citizens sit on or near it, eating sandwiches and watching break-dancers in yellow tracksuits perform acrobatics for spare change. At the time it was erected, the
Maine
memorial was criticized as a park-spoiling monstrosity — a “cheap disfigurement” for which trees were cut down to make room. Like the obnoxious William Randolph Hearst himself, it seemed to take up too much space. Good thing all those people who hated it were dead by the time the eighty-story Time Warner Center went up across the street; that thing makes the hulking
Maine
memorial look like an adorable little birdbath.