112: Ladies and Germs
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Consider, please, this White House scandal from the year 1881. No treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors against the state. But the president still did not survive an office for four years. Of course, he had a much bigger problem than any faced by our current president, specifically a bullet in the back. President James A. Garfield was shot by an assassin in July of 1881. But here's the strange thing. Here's where the scandal begins. As he lingered, sick in bed from his infected wound, rumors began. But possibly leaks from within the White House. So it's fairly clear from a modern perspective that the man was suffering from infection from the wound. Nancy Toms is a historian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. What's fascinating is that the wound itself was not sufficient to explain what was wrong with him. There was such a long history of popular belief that the White House was a very unhealthy place because of its bad plumbing. The rumor began to circulate that what really was wrong with Garfield was the state of the White House toilets, that they weren't properly hooked up to the sewer system and that he was being poisoned by sewer gas. In the 19th century, as indoor plumbing was becoming more and more widespread, it just sort of freaked people out that there was something inside their own houses, this pipe that connected them to a huge public sewer. It just seemed filthy. And they believed that gases rose from the decaying matter in the sewers came back up the pipes and made you sick. And because our nation is of course crazy when it comes to the presidency, because the White House is among other things a national movie screen onto which we project a whole array of fears and misplaced idealism, we projected our national fear of sewer gas onto the presidency. The fear was so profound that in June of 1882, the Senate actually voted $300,000 to build a second White House, a second one, a sanitary one, free of filth right next door to the original White House, and the idea was the first family could just move right in there. One of this was the work of Chester Arthur who succeeded Garfield and who wouldn't live in the White House. He was so convinced that it was unhealthy that he lived in a soldier's home to avoid exposing himself and his family to this danger, the sewer gas. One of the things it's really amazing reading about this is the way that you write about the press coverage, the equivalent to current tabloids, a paper called the New York Herald, and at one point they interview what they call a well-known plumber, and you just think a well-known plumber, an unnamed source who asserts about Garfield, "The real trouble is sewer gas which is ten times as bad and even more poisonous than foul air," and this same unnamed source claims there is not a perfect working sewer trap in the executive mansion. Indeed, in the whole concept of a sewer trap, that was to prevent that sewer air from backing up into your home so an untrapped toilet was the portal of death. Naturally, this being the United States government, an independent investigator had to be brought in, in this case a sanitary engineer named George Waring who made a reputation for himself years before as an expert in these sort of plumbing issues to be trusted to issue a nonpartisan
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