Getty PhotosMakowsky’s essential job was to sift by Millard’s detailed dive into the historical past of the assassination and assemble a story interesting to TV viewers. Future of the Republic consists of sections on Republican Occasion factionalism, the antiseptics most popular by British surgeon Joseph Lister and Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of an early metallic detector, used finally to seek for the bullet in Garfield’s physique. Makowsky selected to give attention to the contrasting journeys of Guiteau and Garfield. “Each males cared very a lot about being identified,” he mentioned. “One propels himself to the very best workplace within the land, whereas the opposite courts greatness and by no means achieves it.”
The killer’s motivation
By turns Guiteau failed as a lawyer, a journalist and an evangelical preacher. He even flopped on the free love commune he joined; no girl would sleep with him, as Millard recounts. But he all the time believed God meant him for a grand objective. Guiteau grew to become obsessive about Garfield after the congressman’s unlikely nomination, and travelled to New York in the summertime of 1880, decided to play a vital function guaranteeing his victory within the common election. Guiteau harassed the workers at Garfield’s New York marketing campaign workplace till he was allowed to provide a single rambling speech endorsing the candidate.
Garfield vocally opposed the spoils system of handing out profitable posts to supporters, but Guiteau believed in it fiercely. He anticipated that, in alternate for his backing, Garfield, now president, would give him a key publish. Ambassador to France was his first selection. The deluded man travelled to Washington, and appeared on the White Home on daily basis with hordes of different insistent workplace seekers. Guiteau even got here nose to nose along with his hero as soon as, within the president’s workplace, the place he handed Garfield a replica of his election speech, with “Paris Consulship” scrawled on it, and a line connecting these phrases to his title. Â
Garfield, in the meantime, launched into an bold agenda for his presidency, together with upgrading the US Navy, aiming to develop commerce with Latin America, and advocating for civil rights. He appointed the once-enslaved social reformer Frederick Douglass as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, the primary African American to carry a outstanding federal workplace. On the identical time, Garfield additionally needed to face down Roscoe Conkling, Republican senator from New York, arguably essentially the most highly effective politician within the nation, due to his oblique management of the profitable customs income flowing into the port of New York. Conkling did not like Garfield’s progressive instincts nor his opposition to the spoils system. He’d already imposed on candidate Garfield his affiliate Chester A Arthur, to be vice chairman. Now Conkling sought to dam Garfield’s Cupboard picks.
