On July 2, 1881, at the Washington train station, the lawyer Charles Jules Guiteau, a finder of charges and perks disappointed by the firmness of James Garfield, who had not granted him a consular post he had requested, fired upon him. President, two bullets that did not injure any vital organ.
Wounded, Garfield remained in the White House for 70 days. The doctors, on the pretext of finding one of the bullets, were transforming a wound of a few millimeters into a serious wound. Alexander Graham Bell tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with a metal detector that he had improvised himself for the occasion, but the bed where he was lying was made of metal and that made the discovery impossible. On September 6 Garfield was taken to the coast of New Jersey. For a few days he seemed to have recovered, but on the 19th of that same month he died because of the infection and the internal bleeding caused by the doctors. The posthumous image of President Garfield was marked by ambiguity. His struggle against the spoil system and his subsequent murder at the hands of a stalwart who had denied him a public position made him a martyr in the fight against careerism and corruption.
After the death of Garfield, he tried to fight corruption. In 1883, through the Pendleton Act, the system of merit in the hiring of public employees was established in the United States. But the efforts did not prosper throughout society, since the law was limited to public administration.
