Candace Millard Archives

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James A. Garfield is the president virtually no one knows. I didn’t and never visited his home when I lived in nearby Cleveland. Because of this book, I hope to make that pilgrimage and learn more about a figure who may have been the greatest president Ohio produced, had he lived through his term. Candace Millard’s account of Garfield’s life and death is that good.

This is not a full biography but she sketches the outline of his literal rise from a log cabin boyhood and the early loss of his father, to his presidency of what later became Hiram College, to his political career (he never sought office, including the presidency) and his brief presidency and his fight against corrupt political patronage.

She interweaves her account of Garfield’s life and sufferings with the story of his insane assassin, Charles Guiteau, and his benighted physician, Dr. D. Willard Bliss, whose refusal to use the antiseptic procedures introduced by Joseph Lister and his repeated probing of Garfield’s wound introduced the infections that killed him. Left alone, Garfield would probably have recovered. We also see the efforts of Alexander Graham Bell to perfect a device to detect the bullet’s location (he would have had Bliss permitted him to search the left side of Garfield’s body.

As she concludes the books she looks at the way Garfield’s death transformed American politics. In some ways, it re-united a country still suffering the divisions of the Civil War. It motivated a crusade against political corruption and the introduction of the Civil Service, led by Chester Arthur, a product of Roscoe Conkling’s political machine, whose life and presidency was turned around by the letters of a mysterious correspondent, Julia Sand, who urged him to heed his better angels.

All in all, even though the subject was somber, Millard’s deftly written account was an engaging read and sparked my interest to know more about President Garfield, described after death by a friend as “a man who loved to play croquet and romp with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”

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That was the conclusion most people reached in trying to figure out why Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A Garfield. I’ve been reading Candace Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is a fascinating and well-paced account of Guiteau’s assassination attempt upon James A Garfield and the botched medical care that resulted in his death. There is much in Guiteau’s life that seems to parallel many of the contemporary “shooters” who are also mentally unstable.

James A Garfield

Guiteau was know to be unstable by family, friends, and the Oneida community of which he was a part for some time. He was a frustrated job seeker with associates of Garfield who all recognized him as unstable and ultimately barred him from the White House. Family members who knew him sought to institutionalize him without success. Part of the trouble was that he was not only unstable–he was wily as well. He took up lodgings but left just ahead of the rent collector. He proposed fantastic business schemes and borrowed from friends but nothing paid out and no one got paid back.

Like some shooters, he had never before acted out violently. After his frustrations with job-seeking in the Garfield administration and seeing Garfield’s friendship with Secretary of State James Blaine, who he considered evil, he concluded that God was telling him that Garfield must be removed. Even still, he wrote letters to the Garfield administration, which might have been a tip off. Barred from the White House, he learned that Garfield was leaving Washington on a train, and ambushed him in the train station. (These were the days when presidents still walked unaccompanied by Secret Service, who only pursued counterfeiting, something they still do.)

Guiteau thought the would be rescued from prison by a grateful country. His case was one of the first to use an insanity defense, unsuccessfully. Awaiting a verdict, he planned a lecture tour. He reputedly danced on the way to the gallows and recited a poem he wrote, I am Going to the Lordy as he awaited hanging.

Charles J Guiteau

What Guiteau illustrates for me is that we have yet, 130 years later to figure out how to care for our mentally ill. He never sought help nor thought he was ill, and he was functional enough that no one else could institutionalize him. He was an unrecognized threat until after the fact. As a country, we are loathe to impair civil liberties short of a criminal act. And we have very few facilities to care for the mentally ill who need more than outpatient treatment. Several things I wonder about though:

1. For those who cannot function well in society and need some type of ongoing care, often they end up living on the streets, if there are no family able or willing to care for them. Can’t we do better than that. And if government can’t, I wonder if the churches and other religious institutions can provide some kind of group housing and compassionate care.

2. I do wonder if there is also some way to require those who refuse care to be subject to some form of electronic surveillance that would include an alert feature to all gun sellers that would disqualify them from purchasing weapons. Such could also be used for screening in public settings to alert those protecting movie stars, political figures, and school children from harm. The challenge would be that there needs to be some kind of due process even here–two unrelated people and a medical professional attesting to their instability, for example. This would still allow such persons to be at liberty in society if they refuse treatment, and yet provide some degree of protection to the public.

I can hear the protests to such an idea, and it feels “big brother-ish” to me as well. There would need to be strong protections against using such technology against a whole class of people (an ethnic or religious group, for example). Except the fact is, big brother is watching via NSA surveillance, traffic cams and other closed circuit TV systems, and we voluntarily have given Google, Amazon, and others massive amounts of our personal data. Could this not be used to provide some measure of protection to society and even to the person themselves. In some ways this seems as great and present a danger as those who would engaged in acts of terror.

3. Finally, we do need to find ways to provide treatment to those who seek it, including war veterans with brain injuries. There are still mysteries in treatment of these things, but what a tragedy when those who need help can’t receive what help is needed.