Candice Millard

Review of: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard
by Stan Prager (6-2-24)

Four American presidents have died by assassination, the last when I was six years old. John F. Kennedy, who suffered a devastating head wound, was likely dead on arrival at Parkland Hospital. Nearly a century before, the first, Abraham Lincoln, was also shot in the head, but survived overnight. In 1901, William McKinley took bullets to the abdomen, and lived just slightly longer than a week, with hopes for his recovery rising and falling. But in 1881, James A. Garfield, shot in the back, lingered on the precipice of death—incapacitated and in excruciating pain—for an astonishing seventy-nine days before the end! When it was finally over, he had been president for only just a bit longer than six months, and nearly half of that time he spent very slowly dying. In the meantime, the entire nation, nearly paralyzed, watched and waited.
In Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President [2011], Candice Millard, certainly one of history’s greatest storytellers, splendidly captures the high drama of this event and its aftermath while skillfully recreating the milieu of an America—despite the brief interval in years—strikingly different than that which belonged to Lincoln or McKinley. 1880, the year Garfield was elected, was only fifteen years removed from Appomattox, but a time traveler from Wilmer McLean’s parlor would be astonished to find an entirely different version of this United States, marked by rapid economic expansion and the outsize wealth creation that characterized the Gilded Age—fueled by opportunity, ambition, and the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution. And it sat perched on the edge of even more wonders to come, the very dawn of the age of the great inventions that would so thoroughly transform American life over just three decades, with the incandescent bulb and widespread electrification, the phonograph, motion pictures, the automobile, and even manned flight!
But the first of these marvels—the telephone, which truly revolutionized communications—was becoming increasingly common. Patented in 1876, one was installed in the White House in 1879. (We can only imagine how eagerly Lincoln—who leaned so heavily on the telegraph for news of battlefield results—would have adopted this innovation and relied on it to talk strategy with McClellan, Meade, or Grant.) By 1880 there already almost 48,000 telephones in the United States; that number would nearly triple just a year later. Its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, has a part in this tale.
The Republican Party wasn’t the same either. A week after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was dead, replaced by grim Tennessean Andrew Johnson, who turned out to have far more sympathy for the rights of defeated rebels than the fates of millions of freedmen left to the sometimes vengeful “mercy” of their former masters. And Johnson had to contend with a Congress of “Radical Republicans” no longer tempered by Lincoln’s moderation. Impeachment failed, but soon Johnson was replaced by the great hero Ulysses Grant, who had the best of intentions but in the end made for a far better general than president. As time went on, Republicans cooled towards civil rights, and drifted into a rigid factionalism that saw few policy differences but was marked by an addiction to power and privilege fueled by corruption. That was the state of the party when Garfield won the White House, but to his credit in his very short tenure he took great strides towards crippling the power of the most corrupt faction in Congress, while asserting executive independence.
Garfield was a bright, amiable character, well-regarded by most, whose politics mostly chased consensus, and whose life’s trajectory bore some strange if uneven parallels to Lincoln’s. Each were born to poverty in a log cabin and were in their youths brilliant autodidacts, although unlike Lincoln, Garfield was to go on to formal education. Both had strong antislavery convictions, and during the Lincoln Administration, Garfield took the field as a major general before going on to the House of Representatives. But while prior to his presidency Lincoln had just a single term in Congress, Garfield served for nine terms, while also finding the time to practice law and publish a mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem! Both could be said to be “dark horse” candidates in their respective tries for the Republican Party’s nomination, but Garfield’s horse was far darker, so to speak: in 1860, Lincoln was everyone’s second choice; in 1880, Garfield was no one’s choice, not even his own, but was nevertheless nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot. Finally, in a truly odd coincidence, not only did each die by assassin, but Lincoln’s son Robert, who once sat at his father’s deathbed, happened to be walking towards Garfield when he was shot! For her part, Millard does not dwell much on Garfield’s life, nor does she need to; it is rather his long drawn out death that is the focus of Destiny of the Republic.
On the other hand, many pages are given to another main character, the unlikely assassin Charles J. Guiteau, who stalked Garfield at a distance for an extended period of time before gunning him down at a railroad station on July 2, 1881. Guiteau, likely insane, was overcome with visions of grandeur that had him convinced that he was personally responsible for Garfield’s election and thus deserved the Paris consulship as a reward. Prior to this, Guiteau had tried his hand in a number of avenues in life, including law, theology, bill collecting, and utopianism, only to fail spectacularly in each. Virtually homeless, he stayed at a series of boarding houses and fled when the bills came due. When it finally sunk in that Garfield—who was of course unaware of Guiteau’s mad fantasies—would deny him the grand recognition he believed himself due, he persuaded himself that the president was instead a villain who must be murdered for the good of the country. Guiteau’s lack of competence in every arena remained consistent with assassination, as well: pistol shots fired point-blank at Garfield’s back yet missed his spine and all major organs.
This is when the story really gets interesting, for based upon the extent of his injuries, according to most modern appraisals Garfield should have recovered. Why he ultimately does not survive, and how heroically he endured persistent, agonizing pain for the eleven weeks of life that remained to him—while doctors fed the nation wildly inaccurate reports of his alleged recovery—is the central theme of this book. It is a tribute to Millard’s talent with a pen that the reader truly winces along with Garfield throughout his suffering.
More than anything else, Garfield was the victim of a medical community that did not yet believe in the existence of invisible germs. Much of Europe had adopted Joseph Lister’s antiseptic methods, which were mostly belittled in the United States. Thus, multiple doctors on multiple occasions inserted unwashed fingers into the wound site, probing for a bullet which could not be located. Ironically, this bullet which had skirted all critical internal targets was now essentially harmless. Following a duel, Andrew Jackson had lived another thirty-nine years with a spent bullet lodged just two inches from his heart. Numerous Civil War veterans of both armies carried bullets in various parts of their bodies for the remainder of their lives. But, unfortunately for Garfield, in the search for the missing bullet, one of those unwashed fingers introduced an aggressive infection that slowly and painfully killed him despite numerous attempts to save his life.
From the start, Garfield’s torment was exacerbated by his own doctor—actually his entire medical team—who naively waxed optimistic over his eventual recovery while stubbornly seeking the bullet that no longer posed a threat. One of these attempts involved the now celebrated Alexander Graham Bell, who had pioneered a prototype for the first metal detector that in this case promised the perfect marriage of technology and medicine, yet proved to be an epic fail that puzzled the renowned inventor and sent him back to the drawing board more than once. Only later did it emerge that the mattress of Garfield’s sickbed was constructed of internal metal springs that drove the detector’s sensors off the charts.
Meanwhile, as Garfield lingered, the entire country held its breath. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the population of the United States stood at just thirty-one million. In 1880, it was more than fifty million, swelled by immigration. And it was far more networked than ever before with transcontinental railroads, the telegraph, and Bell’s telephone, so that communication was now near instant, at least in more populated regions. News of Garfield’s “progress” was broadcast daily, and crowds gathered around public bulletin boards hungry for updates. Much of it was misleading. The president was dying. Since his doctors could not acknowledge that to themselves, it is perhaps less surprising that they could not say it out loud. On September 19, James A. Garfield was no more. The author succeeds brilliantly in recreating the America of 1881 that daily watched breathlessly until Garfield breathed no more.
Millard, who is not a trained historian, puts many seasoned academics to shame by combining meticulous research with a gift for compelling prose that grips the reader from the first paragraph to the final pages. Her first book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, won national acclaim for its appeal to both a popular and a scholarly audience. Its success was closely rivaled by the more recent Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. For her readers, it is perhaps no surprise that Destiny of the Republic earns similar accolades. Like many other terrific books that I purchase and set aside for later consumption, this one sat on my shelves for many years. I eventually turned to it just after closing the cover of another author’s biography of Garfield that succeeded masterfully in its study of the man but was marred by a too superficial treatment of his era. Millard proved the perfect remedy! For fans of American history: do not skip this one.


My review of: Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, by Candice Millard

My review of: President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, by C.W. Goodyear

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"I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat." James A. Garfield

Without a doubt, "Destiny of the Republic" is one of the most interesting and thought provoking non-fiction books I've read in quite some time. Author Candice Millard does an extraordinary job of enlightening readers about the life of James A. Garfield, and the political, scientific, and medical theories and practices of the day.

Garfield is one of those Presidents that many Americans (including me prior to reading this book) just don't know much about. Most probably don't even recall that he is one of the four sitting Presidents who have been assassinated. Millard introduces us to this remarkable man.

Born into absolute poverty (he didn't own a pair of shoes until he was 4 years old), Garfield did have the advantage of being born into a family which gave him love, and showed him the value of education and hard work -- values he would hold through his entire life.

It's history book, so there are lots of names and dates, but Millard makes the story come alive (I would say it's nearly a page-turner!) as she leads us though Garfield's life as a student, Civil War General, and politician. During the extremely contentious Republican Convention of 1880, after many days of casting ballots for the Party's Presidential candidate, Garfield would emerge as the nominee -- surprising everyone, including himself. "This honor comes to be unsought. I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day." (James Garfield)

After only four months in office, Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a mentally unstable man who had been trying to receive a political appointment from Garfield.

History, medicine, and science all have an interesting, and tragic, collision here. While the gunshot wounds harmed Garfield, had proper medical procedures been followed, he almost certainly would have survived. What killed Garfield was not the gunshot, but the raging infection caused by unsanitary medical practices coupled with the arrogance and hubris of his doctor. Sadly, Garfield died from infection 2 1/2 months after he was shot.

Nearly 20 years prior to Garfield's shooting, Dr. Charles Lister of England had developed a theory about germs and the necessity of sterilization in medical procedures. He would use carbolic acid to sterilize his medical tools, and was fastidious about only allowing sterilized tools to be used in surgery. He presented his research throughout Europe (where sterilization was largely adopted) and at Expos throughout the U.S. Unfortunately, most doctors and scientists in the U.S. utterly dismissed Lister's claims and thought it "ridiculous" that there were "invisible germs" in the air that humans needed to protect themselves from.

Garfield's doctor, Dr. Charles Bliss, not only ignored advice about sterilization, but refused the advice of other doctors and scientists who wanted to help Garfield's recovery. Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell even tried to aid in Garfield's recovery by inventing an "induction balance" machine to locate the missing bullet which was still lodged in Garfield's body. However, Dr. Bliss was so arrogantly stubborn he only allowed Bell to search one small part of Garfield's body for the missing bullet -- the side where Bliss was sure the bullet must be lodged. The autopsy revealed that the bullet was located on the opposite side of Garfield's body and had never damaged any organs.

Garfield came to office at a time when the U.S. was still healing from the Civil War. Millard describes him as a man of integrity who truly was a unifier -- the first post-war President who had the support of the entire U.S. (even though he was a Union General and a life-long abolitionist) In his short time in office he tried to do away with the Spoils System (where political jobs were handed out as political favors) and move to a merit-based system. Personally, he had qualities which are admirable. Even as his lay dying, he remained "kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful."

When I read history, I can't help of think both of what has changed and what hasn't changed. It's easy to see the advances in transportation, telecommunications, and medicine. But some things stubbornly refuse to change. In 1881 Charles Guiteau, a man who was clearly mentally unhinged and who had an extensive criminal record, had unfettered access to go and buy a gun. In 2016, with few exceptions, that is still the same case.

In the mid 1800s, Charles Lister brought forth theories based on scientific evidence and proof -- and was mocked. Irreparable damage was done in the process. The same thing happens today when people don't want to admit what is right in front of their eyes (climate change, anyone?) When Lister finally saw his ideas not only "vindicated, but venerated" he said "I regard all worldly distinctions as nothing in comparison with the hope that I may have been the means of reducing in some degree the sum of human misery."

5 solid stars AND I look forward to reading more by Candice Millard
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