Assassination Vacation

President James A. Garfield is an obscure US president, whom Vowell describes as “faceless” (123). Still, given the toll the shooting took on Garfield, Vowell remarks, “it seems tacky that we forgot him” (125). 

Vowell describes the abandoned building, Regent Wall Street, a disused hotel. It used to be the New York Custom House, which at the time “collected an astounding two-thirds of the federal government’s revenue,” with the customs collector “allowed” and “even encouraged” (127) to embezzle profits for himself. This led to a scandal when President Rutherford B. Hayes defied Senator Roscoe Conkling, the head of New York’s Republican political machine, and fired future president Chester “Chet” Arthur for corruption.

In retaliation, Conkling played a key role in the Republican Party not accepting Hayes’s bid to run for reelection in 1880. By then, the Republican Party was split between two factions: Conkling’s faction, the Stalwarts, who supported running former president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant for “an unprecedented third term” (129), and the Half-Breeds, who were represented by Conkling’s political rival James G. Blaine and opposed Grant’s nomination due to the “administrative corruption and abandonment of civil service reform” (130) that took place during his two terms.