Destiny of the Republic: Garfield

Candice Millard, “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” Doubleday, 2011, 260 pp.

This book is about James Garfield, who had been a Civil War general and a nine-term member of Congress from Ohio and was shot in the third month of his presidency. A series of medical errors resulted in his death even though the bullet wounds, had they not been treated,  were not fatal. The author blends the stories of Garfield and Alexander Graham Bell along with the assassin Charles Guiteau.  You get a real sense of being there.  (Bell was working hurriedly to create a device that would pinpoint the location of the bullet.)

Garfield’s path to the presidency is unique.  He never sought the nomination or election.  While presenting the nominating 1880 speech at the Republican convention for Senator John Sherman (Gen’l Sherman’s brother), one person nominated Garfield and kept at it until a locked convention finally turned and elected Garfield to break the deadlock.  Reading this book convinces me that Garfield was probably the most decent man, as well as a very intelligent and courageous man, to have ever been elected. 

I will always remember Garfield’s doctor: Dr. Willard Bliss (as in ‘Ignorance is Bliss*) who essentially caused Garfield’s death.  In his treatment of Garfield, ignorance, though maybe blissful, was criminal.  Bliss along with most Doctors in the US dismissed Lister’s findings and ridiculed the idea of invisible germs.  (Lister had promulgated his findings back in 1867).

*From Thomas Gray's poem, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742): "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." 

My Notes:

Pg. 31:  In 1880 the Republican Party was sharply divided into two factions: the Stalwarts, who were fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as well as fiercely opposed to reconciliation with the South; the other faction contained men whose values Garfield shared, they would become known as the Half-Breeds. 

The Stalwarts had nothing but contempt for President Hayes who had tried to replace government patronage with a merit system, a contempt so great that Hayes did not seek a second term.  Of all the candidates at the convention, Grant (seeking a third non-consecutive term) seemed the best bet.  The other leading candidates were John Sherman (Hayes Secy. Of the Treasury) and James G. Blaine (Speaker of the House).

Pg. 63:  Rutherford B. Hayes was widely believed to have stolen the presidency from Samuel J. Tilden.  Tilden, the governor of New York, had won the popular vote by a clear and undisputed margin, and with all but four states accounted for, had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165.  However, when the remaining four states reported two different sets of returns, Congress formed an electoral commission to distribute their votes.  The highly partisan commission made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, awarded all twenty of the disputed votes to Hayes, handing him the presidency by one electoral vote. 

Pg. 82:  Not only had the Republican nomination been thrust upon Garfield without his consent, but so had his running mate—Chester Arthur.  Arthur had been selected by Garfield supporters because without Roscoe Conkling’s support it would be almost impossible to win New York and Arthur was Conkling’s man.  The only public position Arthur had held before was as collector of the New York Customs House, a job that Conkling had secured for him and which paid more than $50,000 a year—as much as the president’s salary.  Even then, he had been forced out of office amid widespread allegations of corruption. 

Pg. 89:  The Secret Service had been established just a few months after Lincoln’s assassination, but it had been created to fight counterfeiting, not to protect the president.  The year before Garfield became president, Congress cut the Secret Service’s annual budget nearly in half, to just $60,000, and restricted its agents, once again, to investigating counterfeiting cases.  This was in spite of reported assassinations abroad.  In 1812, the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot and killed while he was standing in the House of Commons.  A series of assassins had tried to Kill Queen Victoria at least half a dozen times.  Emperor William I of Germany survived an assassination attempt in 1878, only to be seriously wounded in another one just a month later.  Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 after several other attempts had failed.

Pg. 90:  Americans felt somehow immune to presidential assassinations.  Lincoln’s assassination was widely believed to have been a tragic result of war, not a threat to the presidency.  Americans reasoned that, because they had the power to choose their own head of state, there was little cause for angry rebellion.  In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in 1901.  (Incidentally, Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation’s four presidential assassinations.)

Pg. 151:  Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery.  With modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.  Also, had he just been left alone he almost certainly would have survived.  Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below hand behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger.

Pg. 156:  Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgery in Europe in 1867 and it had fundamentally changed the way British and European doctors practiced medicine, and had saved countless lives.  In Lister’s own London hospital, he had not seen a single case of hospital gangrene or pyaemia, a particularly virulent and common form of septicemia, since he had begun using antisepsis.  Yet many American doctors still dismissed his discovery as well as Louis Pasteur’s.  They found the notion of ‘invisible germs’ to be ridiculous.  Many American surgeons walked directly from the street to the operating room without bothering to change their clothes.  (The unnecessary death of Garfield finally brought to light the American arrogance and stupidity on this issue but not a need to protect the president).

Pg. 194:  On July 22, 1881, nearly a month after the shooting, after Garfield had shown improvement, he began to lose all the ground he had gained.  A large quantity of pus escaped his wound carrying with it fragments of cloth that the bullet had dragged into his back and a piece of bone that was about an eighth of an inch long.  Bliss and his team of doctors were still probing Garfield’s wound with their germ-laden fingers trying to find the bullet.  Each time they inserted an unsterilized finger into Garfield’s back they introduced bacteria, which not only cause infection at the site of the wound but entered Garfield’s bloodstream. Garfield’s body became so riddled with infection that he was literally rotting to death. Although Bliss closely tracked the spikes in the president’s temperature, the chills, restlessness, vomiting, pounding heart, and profuse sweating, he either did not know, or refused to acknowledge, that they were symptoms of severe septicemia.   

Pg. 212:  Alexander Graham Bell invented a device he called an ‘induction balance’ that he believed would locate the bullet in Garfield’s back.  Bliss agreed to let him use the device but only on Garfield’s right side where Bliss surmised the bullet was (of course as the bullet was on the left hand side, Bell found nothing). 

Pg. 219:  The Constitution was of no help in determining when the Vice President should take over.  In any event, Arthur refused even to return to Washington, concerned that it would appear as if he were preparing for his own inauguration.  Only three other presidents had died while in office.  Lincoln had lived only a few hours after being shot;  Zachary Taylor (1849-’50) had succumbed to cholera in just a few days; and William Henry Harrison (March-April 1841) had survived only one month after contracting pneumonia while giving the longest inaugural address in history on a cold rainy day.

Pg. 236:  The legal standard for determining insanity—known as the M’Naghten Rule (1843)—had been established when a Scottish wood-worker was tried for his attempt to assassinate prime minister Robert Peel.  He successfully argued that he was insane, and so not responsible for his actions.  Likewise, Charles Guiteau’s plea stated that he was insane and not responsible.  His first and primary defense was ‘Insanity in that it was God’s act and not mine The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.”  In fact, Guiteau insisted, “General Garfield died from malpractice.’  ‘According to his own physicians, he was not fatally shot.’  They ought to be indicted for murdering Garfield, and not me.’

Pg. 254:  After Garfield’s death, Bliss refused to be cowed.  He present Congress with a bill for $25,000—more than half a million dollars in today’s currency.  Congress agreed to pay $6,500, and not a penny more.  Bliss refused to accept it, bitterly complaining that it was notoriously inadequate as a just compensation. Seven years later Bliss would die quietly of a stroke, having never recovered his health, his practice or his reputation.