You might not think there'd be much point to a book about James Garfield. His
was the second-shortest Presidency, after all, at a mere 200 days, and almost
half of that was spent in his death bed after being shot by Charles Guiteau. But
Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic makes the story of Garfield's
assassination more interesting than I'd ever have expected it to be.
Garfield was the savior of a sharply divided Republican party in 1880; his
nomination speech for one of the declared candidates was so riveting that a
deadlocked convention eventually turned to him as its nominee, very much against
his wishes. He was a fine candidate with surprisingly broad appeal in a nation
still suffering from the aftermath of the Civil War; he was a strong supporter
of civil rights for black Americans, and an advocate of creating a civil service
system instead of handing out every government position to one's cronies.
Guiteau was a lunatic, convinced that he was a power player in Republican
politics who had played a great role in getting Garfield elected, and thought he
should in exchange be given the ambassadorship to France. When he was
inexplicably (to his mind, at least) passed over for the job, he could see no
solution but to kill the President, for which he expected to be hailed as a hero
and rewarded by Garfield's successor.
The tragedy of Garfield's death is that 20 years later, he almost certainly
would have survived. There would have been X-ray technology, allowing his
doctors to locate the bullet and to see that it could be left where it was
without doing further damage. The principles of antiseptic medicine, recently
articulated by British surgeon James Lister, would have taken hold in American
medicine.
But in 1880, there were no X-rays, and American doctors not only didn't take
Lister's ideas seriously, they thought those ideas were foolish, maybe even
dangerous. Garfield's doctors, desperate to find the bullet that lay somewhere
in his abdomen, thought nothing of poking into the wound with their bare fingers
while he lay on a filthy mattress on the floor of the train station where he was
shot. It was the infections, not the bullet wound, that eventually killed him.
This was so clearly the case that Guiteau's lawyers briefly considered arguing
that he wasn't responsible for Garfield's death and that the blame should fall
entirely on the doctors' malpractice.
There are marvelous characters floating around the background of the story.
Alexander Graham Bell works frantically to develop a metal detector strong
enough to find the bullet within the President's body. Garfield's physician, Dr.
D. Willard Bliss, refuses to let anyone else near the president. (The "D,"
improbably enough, is for "Doctor," which was his given name.) Vice President
Chester Arthur, a little-respected political hack (sort of a
19th-century Sarah Palin, but with even less experience) who is on the ticket only out of the desire to placate
a powerful Senator, is horrified when he and his patron are suspected of being
involved in the assassination.
Garfield has become one of the blurry group of minor presidents we don't
often think about, but Millard makes a strong case that his assassination was a
great loss, and he might have gone on to achieve important things; if nothing
else, he would likely have been a tremendously unifying leader during the
difficult Reconstruction era. It's a marvelous story, an obscure corner of
American history which Millard uncovers for us in fine style. The writing is
crisp and clear, and the parallel stories of Garfield and Guiteau draw sharp
portraits of both men.
