My
first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio.
When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of
1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the
descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute,
and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also
was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the
twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had
learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker"
and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.
That
was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War
Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army
during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have
picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes
and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a
lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography,
Garfield (Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty
colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.
Early
on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram
Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home
while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic
Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly
terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some
important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a
very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty
through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and
Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read the
book. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be
a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and
leadership. He wrestled with his students, and he debated itinerant
atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a
love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In
1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were
collected and edited by one of my colleagues on the Hiram faculty. Another produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.
Garfield
was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and
Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many
ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was
one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending
privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist
before the war and remained committed to full racial equality
afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of
humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition.
In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor,
though he was no goody two-shoes.
That Garfield was
“not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major
themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President.
The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive
research in what appear to be the most relevant sources. The madman at
the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The
practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older
physicians in the United States being strongly inclined to resist the
revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for
antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role
of germs in the spread of disease. As for murder, Millard endorses the
testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done
the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two
months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the
ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection when he and many others
repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the
bullet. Later, they failed to recognize the infection that had set
in, and then to stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the
temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally,
was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander
Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance
that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the
bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to
save the intended beneficiary.
This is a wonderful book, though in a recent
Washington Post
review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains
that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the
Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it
doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do,
however, have two reservations of my own.
The first has
to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as
a “disappointed office seeker,” and Millard shows that he lobbied
shamelessly to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no
question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as
Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was
convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the
enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform
to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage
system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire
assassination.
The second has to do with the book’s
title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake
during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so
incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one
thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the
presidency were circumscribed in the late 19th century, despite
Lincoln’s aggrandizement of the office during the Civil War. And in any
case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and
enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur,
the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse.
Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it
in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of
merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not
been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard
tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet rose to the occasion to
an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for
wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American
political history in any significant way.
If it seemed to some people at the
time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be
because the president of the United States, in addition to being chief
legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of
state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of
government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of
political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who
is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who
was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the
president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In
Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues,
which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so
conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of
Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.
