Monday, April 9, 2018

Michael Ceraolo writes


July 7, 1881

Garfield:

"Any man sitting here, during the evening,"
"can feel his skull and brain going through
the slow process of roasting"
                                            so
men of science have used their ingenuity
and found a way to cool the room
They use fans connected to a generator
to force air through sheets kept damp
by melting ice dripping from above

My brain and body are no longer roasting
and that will aid in my recovery

Guiteau:

"I remember distinctly"
"that I felt I was on my way"



[Michael has composed "Eighty Days," dramatic monologues for each day from July 2, 1881 through September 19, 1881 (from the day president James Garfield was shot until the day he died).

2 comments:

  1. Brigadier general James A. Garfield of Ohio was elected to the House of Representatives in 1862 while he was on medical leave but, since the legislature would not convene until December 1862, he returned to active duty as chief of staff under major general William S. Rosecrans and distinguished himself at the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Two months later he finally took his seat. By 1875 he was the body's minority leader. In 1880 the Ohio legislature elected him to the Senate, but a deadlocked Republican convention nominated him for president instead on the 36th ballot. In the fall elections he defeated fellow general Winfield Scott Hancock by 1,898 votes. He was inaugurated on 4 March 1881. As he was leaving for vacation on 2 July he was shot twice at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station in Washington DC by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker. Taken to the coastal village of Elberon, New Jersey, Garfield died on 19 September, 2 months shy of his 50th birthday.

    Little more than three months later, on the morning of July 2nd, 1881, President Garfield and most of his cabinet were about to leave town from Washington's Baltimore and Potomac Railway station when a disgruntled office seeker, Charles Guiteau, pulled a small revolver and shot the president twice, once in the back, and again in the arm. He was quickly apprehended and executed the following year. Among those at the station was Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln who, sixteen years before, had watched his father die from an assassin's bullet. An artist working for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper visualized the chaos which ensued (below).

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  2. While Garfield lay suffering in one of the hottest Washington DC's summers, the Navy Corps of Engineers devised a cooling method. Cotton screens were soaked in ice water and hung over blocks of ice, and electric fans blew the cold air over the stricken president.

    rigged up an early version of the modern air conditioner. Fans blew air over a large box of ice and into the President's sickroom; the device worked well enough to lower the temperature twenty degrees

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