“Destiny of the Republic” by Candice Millard- Review by Sydney Williams
Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated; three of them within a thirty-six-and-a-half-year period: Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, James Garfield in July 1881, and William McKinley in September 1901. The fourth, of course, was John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It was not until McKinley’s assassination that the president was assigned a secret service detail. Even then, ex-presidents were on their own. In 1953, President Truman and his wife Bess, famously, took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with passengers and without secret service protection.
Ms. Millard tells the story of James Garfield, his abbreviated tenure as President, his assassination, and the times in which he lived. It was on the 36th ballot, at the Republican convention in Chicago in early June 1880, that Ohio Congressman and former Union General James A. Garfield was nominated for the Presidency – a position he had never sought. On November 3, 1880, he was elected the 20th President of the United States, narrowly defeating Winfield S. Hancock. “Although he was by nature,” Ms. Millard wrote, “a cheerful and optimistic man, like Lincoln, he had long felt he would die an early death.” On September 19, 1881, Garfield did die of septicemia and dehydration brought on by a bullet wound, inflicted by a deranged Charles Guiteau on July 2 at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Millard has a talent for setting the stage on which her story unfolds. In this, which culminates in the assassination and its aftermath, we are given a brief biography of Mr. Garfield, along with a sense of his killer – “…highly intelligent…surprisingly articulate, but his mind did not work like that of a sane man.”. We are provided a window to see the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, especially in medicine, along with pictures of her choices for heroes and villains of the era. Among the former are Garfield, a talented student, soldier, politician – a kind and gentle man; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone in 1875 who was working on a metal detector when Garfield was shot; Joseph Stanley Brown, Garfield’s private secretary at age twenty-one and who three years later married his daughter Mollie; and Joseph Lister, a British doctor who developed the principle of antisepsis – the use of antiseptics to eliminate microorganisms that cause disease. Villains include Garfield’s personal doctor, D. Willard Bliss, a skilled surgeon, but a man who refused to accept new processes in sterilization, and New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, leading member of the “stalwarts,” the faction of the Republican Party that opposed James Garfield and supported political patronage. Chester Arthur, Garfield’s Vice President, was a stalwart, but he ended up signing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which Garfield had supported and which stated that federal government jobs would be awarded on the basis of merit, not patronage.
This is a well-written story of a man lost to history, and of the fledging nation that allowed him to rise from poverty to President. James Garfield’s untimely death proved a catalyst for the way healthcare is delivered, while it brought sorrow to a nation still recovering from the divisive effectss of the Civil War.
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