The 21st Century Destiny of the Republic
What a book about 1881 teaches us about 2024.
The hard-vacationing staff here at Drezner’s World is preparing to return from vacation to the last month of winter in New England. Once there, I look forward to catching up on the state of world politics. Well, maybe not “look forward” so much as “prepare to digest the mix of bad news and bad vibes that seems to be our daily gruel.”
Before returning to topic of international relations, however, let me share some thoughts from my vacation reading. Continuing my tour of American history that I wish was not so damn trenchant, I read Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Destiny of the Republic details the rise of James Garfield from backbreaking poverty to the White House. Four months later, Garfield was shot twice by Charles Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced office-seeker with delusions of grandeur. Garfield survived the assassination attempt but died two and a half months later from medical malpractice complications.
Millard’s book is a fantastic read. It is unsurprising that Netflix optioned the book for a drama series called Death by Lightning starring Michael Shannon as Garfield and Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau. Some of the details surrounding the Garfield assassination are amazing:
The famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell tried furiously to develop a means to locate the bullet that was still lodged in Garfield’s body;
Charles Purvis, one of the doctors to treat Garfield immediately after the shooting, was one of the few African-American surgeons in the country at the time. The first lady Lucretia Garfield’s personal physician was Susan Edson, one of the few female doctors in the country at the time.
Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s oldest son, was Garfield’s Secretary of War. He saw Guiteau shoot Garfield and was therefore one of the few men closely associated with the first two assassinations of U.S. presidents. Twenty years later, Lincoln was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York when Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley in September 1901.
Guiteau was so delusional that he believed General Sherman would rescue him and that Vice President Chester Arthur would be so grateful for what Guiteau had done that he would be declared a hero. He anticipated going on a book tour after his release.
These facts are peppered throughout the book. However, three larger themes stand out. The first is the tragedy of Garfield’s death — not so much due to Guiteau’s bullets but the incompetent medical treatment he received after the shooting. European doctors had by then embraced Joseph Lister’s arguments on the need for sterile instruments and surgical suites as the best way to reduce the chances of post-operative infection. Most American doctors, however, stubbornly rejected Lister’s extension of the germ theory of disease. They exulted in the “surgical stink” of U.S. operation wards and believed that pus surrounding a wound was a sign of health. This proved to be fatal to Garfield. He died not from the bullet lodged in his back, but from the massive infections caused by his doctors using their unwashed hands to try to find the bullet in his torso. Had Garfield been shot 15 years later, an X-ray and proper surgical suite would have saved his life without much fuss.
The second striking element of the story is the tragedy that was James Garfield’s missing legacy. By all accounts he was an extraordinary human being — he published an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem while he was a sitting member of Congress.1 He was a spellbinding orator who won the 1880 Republican presidential nomination in no small part because his nominating speech for his Ohio colleague John Sherman was electric enough to convince the GOP delegates at a deadlocked convention that he might be the solution to their problems. Millard suggests that Garfield was the first post-Civil War president to inspire anything close to national unity. Even though the former Confederate states did not vote for him, they also did not despise the former Union general, and were shocked by his assassination.
Finally, Garfield’s assassination so rocked the country that it led to a political transformation of his vice president and successor. Until Guiteau shot Garfield, Chester Arthur was viewed, correctly, as the political creature of Roscoe Conkling. The senator from New York was a vainglorious figure, obsessed with political intrigue, personal vendettas and his personal appearance. He was also the king of the spoils system, the structure of patronage embraced by the Stalwarts, Conkling’s faction of the Republican Party. According to one Garfield historian:
Under the patronage system, the winners of congressional and presidential elections had the power to appoint whomever they chose to fill numerous federal jobs. Experience and qualifications mattered little (if at all). Powerful politicians loved the so-called “spoils system” because it allowed them to put friends and relatives into lucrative positions and ensure loyalty from everyone they appointed…. Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York was the undisputed king of the patronage system, and the key weapon in his spoils arsenal was the position of Collector of the Port of New York.
Arthur’s only previous political position prior to the vice presidency was…. the Collector of the Port of New York. Garfield’s signal achievement during his brief time in office was to install a new Collector of the Port of New York without any ties to Conkling.
After the assassination attempt, Garfield described Guiteau as a “disappointed office seeker.” When seized after shooting Garfield, Guiteau told police, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts…Arthur is president.” According to Millard, Arthur was so shocked by the assassination that he spurned his mentor Conkling and, upon succeeding Garfield, imposed civil service reforms that put an end to the spoils system — reforms that a certain vainglorious New York politician obsessed with his physical appearance wants to eliminate if elected in 2024.
Destiny of the Republic is a good read. If the Netflix adaptation adheres to the actual history, viewers will not believe many of the twists and turns that actually happened. Unfortunately, Millard’s history is also a reminder that American political development does not follow a straight line. Sometimes, important achievements can be reversed.
Oh, he also graduated from Williams College.
If you want to read a fascinating history of how the medical world resisted germ theory, read Lindsey Fitzharris's book "The Butchering Art". His mention of Europe's acceptance of Lister's ideas, but it took years and years for that to take place. It's amazing what hindsight gives us to appreciate how stupid we can be.
Millard's book is fabulous and full of memorable details. Another point is that they tried to use a primitive form of air conditioning -- by blowing air over ice -- to cool the President's room during the typically sweltering summer days of Washington.
I often think how it was very possible to have lived through the assassinations of three presidents, not to mention the Civil War, if you were born in the 1850s and lived into the early 20th century. Plus railroads, the telephone, the car, and electric lights.