Moments ago, I finished reading Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. That title is not hyperbolic: a mad man shot the president, medicine failed him, and as a result he was assassinated. It is a book I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in history. James Garfield is not exactly a well-known president and on the surface, it's easy to understand why. He was only in office for six months before getting killed and the last two months, he was so debilitated that he was useless. So he was an active president for effectively four total months.
I feel like more people should know about him though. That's why you should read that book. It's well-written, full of details, and thoroughly explains important background details. However, I am also aware that most of you will not buy a book because of my word. This book has had such a great effect on me that I feel compelled to at least share with whomever reads this about the amazing tale.
First off, James Garfield is maybe - without hyperbole - the greatest man who ever became president. I use maybe because I do not have the necessary knowledge of the character of all presidents to be able to declare it with certainty. He was raised dirt poor, who believed in the power of education above all else, and inexplicably rose to the presidency without ever actually wanting it. He was a staunch supporter of civil rights for black citizens, believing them to be equal to all men at a time when that was not even close to the prevailing opinion. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Most presidents, you need some sort of scale upon which to grade their character: they owned slaves, they were philanderers, they were alcoholics, they were incompetent, they needlessly caused wars, or they committed mass genocide (ok so we don't even really need to pretend Andrew Jackson was in anyway a good person).
You don't need to do this with Garfield. There's a saying that I'm going to butcher, but I'll get the basic meaning right: The people who are attracted to the power that politics brings are typically not the people you want in power. Garfield did not power. He had no plans to become president. However the Republicans were deeply divided leading up to the Election of 1880. The two factions were the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds.
This is where it gets a bit confusing. The main issue that divided the parties was political patronage. Stalwarts were heavily corrupt, rewarding jobs based off loyalty and support, not merit. The Half-Breeds were against that. Seems simple right? Except that Half-Breeds mostly wanted civil service reform so they could keep black people out of power. The man responsible for the eventual civil service reform act argued against the Thirteenth Amendment for instance. So the politics of the time were pretty fucked up. Glad we've moved past that though!
This division led to nobody having the necessary votes for 30+ ballots. They could not agree on former president Ulysses S. Grant, a Stalwart, and James Blaine. There was a third candidate, John Sherman, who also had significant votes. Garfield had been picked by Sherman to give a rousing speech to promote the candidate. And what happened is nothing short of amazing. He was so good with his speech that he inadvertently caused the crowd to want him and not the three candidates running. When it became clear that they would not agree among the three candidates, Garfield's name was slowly but surely making ground - completely against Garfield's wishes. He had NO desire to be president. When the inevitable happened, he was not happy, but in shock. He accepted the presidency because he felt an obligation to do so.
Due to the fact that the party was deeply divided, he picked a mixture of Half-Breeds and Stalwarts. His pick for vice president, Chester A. Arthur, was a joke. He was a puppet for Roscoe Conkling, who sure sounded like a miserable human being. Nobody took Arthur seriously as he was wholly unqualified for his position and was openly working with Conkling while VP. Conkling was willing to work against the president if the president didn't bow to his every command and Garfield was having none of that shit so effectively the vice president was working against Garfield in helping Conkling.
The spoils system brought many people to the White House in search of a job. This led to some crazies, including Charles Guiteau. I believe Guiteau was genuinely insane. He would fixate on something and would give it his absolute all and would fail at it. Every time. He failed at everything he ever tried to do. In a near death experience, he was convinced God saved him for a special purpose and that special purpose was politics. So he wanted to use the spoils system to become ambassador to Paris. He was truly deranged. He was relentless, to the point where Secretary of State Blaine claimed he had seen him up to 10 times before the assassination attempt. Eventually, when his efforts kept getting rejected, he thought he needed to kill Garfield in order to save the country. So he shot him on July 2.
This is where the story turns surreal. The shot was evidently non-fatal as it missed his vital organs. Doctors didn't know this. They also didn't believe in germs. They couldn't see them so they refused to believe them. Joseph Lister had successfully convinced Europe about the importance of antiseptic surgery by 1881, but he had made very little progress in America. So when Garfield was shot, he was on a dirty train station floor and up to 10 doctors used their unsanitized hands while treating the wound and even searching for the bullet.
A truly horrible doctor, Doctor Bliss - that's his actual name, took charge and everybody kind of accepted it. He was an egotistical doctor who would rather be right than save someone's live. If that's not true, at the very least, he would not entertain the notion that he was wrong. You'll have to read the book to get at his misdeeds and just how ego-driven he was, but the theory is that if Garfield were left alone, he would live. (This includes the 10 or so doctors who may have infected him).
Not knowing the bullet hit no major arteries, Doctor Bliss needed to find the bullet. And one man was convinced he could find the bullet and that man was Alexander Graham Bell. Holy shit was he another amazing person. You probably only know him as the creator of the telephone - which sure is kind of a big deal - but he did that at the age of 28. He lived to be 75. He effectively created the metal detector in order to find the bullet. Another fact: his newly born son died while he was trying to perfect the metal detector because he couldn't breathe. So he created an early version of a breathing tube that breathed for the child. (He was also connected to the Eugenics movement later in his life, soooo not everything is perfect here)
Bell tried his invention on Garfield, but there were two problems: Bliss was so confident that the bullet was on his right side that he wouldn't even let Bell check the left side. The bullet was of course on the left side of his body. He was also on a bed with metal springs so all in all, the metal detector could have theoretically worked if they did anything right. So the bullet wasn't found until after his death, which happened after he suffered mightily for two months. He lost over 100 pounds from not eating, puss was coming out of him constantly (no need to worry about that, assures Doctor Bliss), and he was likely dehydrated (which the doctor helped out with by giving him alcohol of course). He died a slow, agonizing death that he apparently never showed as he remained his normal, genial self. So that's depressing.
The death did bring about change. Chester A Arthur became president and basically modeled his presidency after Garfield, abandoning Conkling and becoming a respected president against all odds. He was apparently motivated in part by letters from Julia Sand, a woman who felt inspired to write to Arthur to encourage him and give him political advice. Arthur saved all 23 letters she sent to him. The autopsy on Garfield revealed a horrifying truth that led Bliss to be disgraced, and antiseptic surgery to eventually be accepted. Unfortunately, they still didn't think presidents needed protection as it felt "un-American" so it took until William McKinley was assassinated for the Secret Service to be established.
Conkling was basically forced out of politics after making a power play that backfired. Arthur abandoned him and he died being his stubborn self. He walked three miles in one of the most severe recorded blizzards in American history, which led to his eventual death. The American people were joined together by Garfield's death in collective mourning. When Garfield wanted to visit the sea before he died, they took him on a special train. The train didn't have enough power to go over a hill so 200 people help carry the train over the hill. I'm not sure there's ever been a president as beloved as Garfield was when he was president, besides probably George Washington. (I'm going to read a biography of him next for sure)
The frustrating part of it all is that Garfield didn't want the presidency. Guiteau would be allowed nowhere near him in modern times. He would have sufficiently shown he was unstable and a threat well before he ever committed to assassinating him. He would have lived just 20 years later with medicine improving. And yet, he died because he got shot in the wrong year. And he suffered one of the most humiliating, horrible deaths I've ever read about (at the end, he was was fed through his rectum). And he sounded like a genuinely good, caring person! Life's not fair clearly.
