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From the history of Guiteau's derangement to the reverberations of Whitman's bells, Garfield's assassination was caught in a web of technologies for producing, organizing, and transmitting information: an assassin's dreams of making the papers, Bell's telephonic search for the bullet, the news about Garfield's condition, the instant surge of national mourning and international sympathy after his death. The assassination of James Garfield has proved not merely an example of what happened to a news event once it entered the discourse networks of 1881, the system that included telegraph press, induction balance, and free verse poem; as we have seen, the assassination stimulated--indeed, its representation often amounted to--a strangely acute reflection on the dynamics of the system itself.
Figure 1. Posting Garfield's medical bulletins under the electric arc lamps of Broadway. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 3 Sept. 1981, p. 9. Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. With every transfer of information about the event, each translation from electrical impulse to printer's stereotype, this unwitting metacommentary seemed to make itself more apparent. It's as if, under the strain of the two-and-a-half-month-long Garfield assassination, the system that linked dissemination, technology, and social discourse began to register its own properties ever more emphatically, its feedback overwhelming the melancholy signal. The "brotherhood of men marches to its fulfilment"--the rhetoric is worthy of a theocratic daily. A feeling "so universal and so sublime as to be almost without a parallel in history": as they celebrated this sense of a simultaneous, shared response, the innumerable commentators on Garfield's death misread an emergent national and global media ecology--with its potential for recirculation and media convergence--as the sentimental unification of all humanity. The journalists, eulogists, and hack biographers of 1881 may have misinterpreted the response to Garfield's assassination, but they fully recognized its profundity. In the aftermath of the president's death, writers predicted that his personal history and last months would endure forever in the nation's collective memory. They were wrong; despite abundant assurances of his "deathless fame,"1 Garfield has long since been forgotten, his story quickly lost in the very cultural amnesia that helped generate it. But thanks to the public discourses and media that have succeeded the inscription systems of 1881 and multiplied their effects a thousand times, with every national crisis and media event we have reexperienced something like the assassination of President Garfield, live. 1Nathaniel Banks, "Eulogy," in City of Boston, Memorial of James Abram Garfield , p. 75. Even by the time of Guiteau's trial in late 1881, a certain forgetfulness seemed to be setting in. Punctuated by Guiteau's theatrical outbursts, correspondence with the press, and deluded appeals to a public he regarded as thoroughly sympathetic, the trial was widely treated as a ghastly burlesque whose outcome--a death sentence after the rejection of an insanity plea--was seldom in doubt. "Newspaper men are going to hell as a matter of course," Guiteau concluded in a final letter to the Washington Star before his 1882 hanging (quoted in Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin Guiteau , p. 233). Garfield's vertebrae had appeared as courtroom evidence, but Guiteau's body fared worse, as the previous year's mass-mediated unity gave way to dismemberment. At Guiteau's autopsy, his body parts were "inconsiderately handled and hacked to pieces and scattered indiscriminately," admitted one of the physicians who was there (quoted in ibid., p. 263). |
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