Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President
Today for the first time ever on PML we are having a guest post (hold the applause). Here now is the debut from my partner in blogging, Pheebs. Although this is the first time, hopefully it won’t be the last.
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I recently was lucky enough to catch the tail end of a radio news broadcast interviewing author Candice Millard. She was speaking about her new book entitled, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. (Hereafter referred to as DOR for my sanity.) My curiosity got the better of me and I added this read to my Christmas wish list — and I have to say it was one of the best presents I received this year. In DOR is a seamlessly woven tale of three men – an assassin, a president, and an inventor – whose paths cross just long enough to change the course of US history.
Even most history buffs can’t really tell you much about the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield. He is often lumped together with his “Gilded Age” contemporaries — the “forgettable” presidents. Most ordinary Americans (myself previously included) might have an image of him sipping brandy out of a golden goblet with bff’s Johnny Rockefeller and JJ Astor. However, I learned from DOR that the exact opposite is true. The last US President to be born in a legit log cabin, Garfield came from abject poverty and a single mother household. His mom was a pretty wise lady and beyond the completely admirable feat of hacking it alone in that log cabin, she instilled Garfield with a love of learning. An overzealous reader and all around nerd (he knew Virgil’s Aeneid by heart…oh yeah, in English AND LATIN) Garfield put his way through school by working as the institution’s janitor. From the very start of her book Millard paints Garfield as a guy to respect — a humble book lover who works his way up from that janitor to the university’s president. I was amazed by the man’s versatility as well. Garfield not only pursued a career in academics, but dabbled in law, was nominated to congress, fought as a general on the side of the Union in the Civil War (he was adamantly anti-slavery) and even spent some time working on the Erie and Ohio canal. Talk about a résumé. It’s clear that Millard admires the heck out of the guy, and one of the best things about the book is that it’s incredibly difficult not to join her as a Garfield groupie.
Yet the thing that Millard makes quite clear is that Garfield was never particularly ambitious for the limelight and certainly never cutthroat. One of Millard’s most triumphant moments is her description of how the guy (somewhat comically) accidentally became nominated as a United States president. I read this book at quite a timely moment, feeling a powerful sense of déjà vu as Millard paints the crazy riot that was the 1880 Republican National Convention. Millard reminds readers that merely 15 years had passed since the end of the Civil War and even Lincoln’s grand old party had powerful factions. (think Tea Partiers VS Mitt Romney Repubs….. but more so) Garfield’s appearance was meant to be simply a small part of the circus, as he was scheduled to introduce candidate John Sherman to the raucous and sharply divided mob that gathered in Chicago. What Sherman didn’t count on was how eloquent Garfield really was. So the man stands up to introduce Sherman, and his speech is so good that the crowd starts screaming “we want Garfield!” Garfield, shocked and horrified by this turn of events is left wondering how exactly he ends up getting nominated (and subsequently elected) to the highest office in the land. What Millard makes clear in her re-telling, is that Garfield never intended or even wanted to be President. I found this one of the best things about Garfield. In contrast to a modern political atmosphere where ambition and a killer ego is needed for a presidential run, Garfield simply seemed to see it as his duty to serve the people who were so inspired by him.
