Chapter 1 - A Message on All Channels

Summary

In 1881, the United States President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, an insane man partly inspired by criticism of Garfield in newspapers. From the parallel histories of Guiteau and Garfield as vernacular media theorists, to the involvement of Alexander Graham Bell in the search for the bullet in Garfield’s body, to Walt Whitman’s memorial poem “The Sobbing Bells,” the incident and its representations were thoroughly enmeshed in the media systems of the era. By the time Garfield died weeks later, journalism, sermons, biographies and other tributes proclaimed a shared grief such as the world had never known, a mourning that seemed to exceed the bounds of history and of the nation—mistaking the convergence across an astonishing array of old and new media for the sentimental unification of all humanity.