Book Review: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard (2011)

Cover of Destiny of the Republic, by Candice Millard, 2011.

Author Candice Millard.

James A. Garfield is one of the more obscure presidents in the history of the United States. He was president for slightly less than four months when he was shot in the back by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office-seeker. Garfield still lived for two and a half months after Guiteau’s assassination attempt, before dying on September 19^th, 1881. In her 2011 book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, author Candice Millard gives us a fuller picture of the life and death of James A. Garfield. Destiny of the Republic is not a full-scale biography of Garfield, but there is enough background material to get a sense of his personality, and Garfield emerges from the shadows of history as a noble, intelligent, hard-working man who might have gone down in history as a fine president were it not for Guiteau’s bullet-or, rather, the constant interference of Garfield’s doctors. 

Throughout the book, Millard switches between Garfield, Guiteau, and Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone who attempted to invent an “induction balance” that would help the doctors locate the bullet inside of Garfield. Like Erik Larson, Millard is able to convey a tension in the narrative, despite the fact that we know how the story will end. Millard thoroughly immerses the reader in the political battles of the 1870’s and 1880’s, at a time when the Republican Party was tearing itself apart over patronage and the “spoils system.” Men like James A. Garfield, who were against patronage, were nicknamed “Half-Breeds,” while “Stalwarts” like Chester A. Arthur supported the status quo. At the Republican National Convention in 1880, the fight was between former President Ulysses S. Grant, the favorite of the Stalwarts, and James G. Blaine, the leading Half-Breed candidate. Garfield was not a candidate for president, and he gave a nominating speech for John Sherman, the younger brother of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. However, Garfield’s speech proved to be such a hit that the deadlocked convention ended up turning to him as the party’s nominee. To placate the Stalwarts, Chester A. Arthur was chosen as the Vice-Presidential candidate. 

After Garfield won the 1880 election, Charles Guiteau thought that he should become the ambassador to France. Guiteau had a long history of erratic behavior, and absolutely no qualifications for holding an ambassadorship. After he was rebuffed numerous times by Garfield and Blaine, who was now Secretary of State, Guiteau decided that, as a committed Stalwart, he really needed Chester A. Arthur in office so he could take up his rightful position. Guiteau stalked Garfield for weeks, and since the president didn’t really have any security, it was not difficult for Guiteau to wait for Garfield at the Washington, D.C. train station and shoot him in the back. Interesting tidbit: the Baltimore and Potomac train station where Garfield was shot has been torn down, and the National Gallery of Art is now on that spot.

Unlike all of the other successful presidential assassins, who were all in their 20’s when they committed their crime; Guiteau was 39 years old when he shot Garfield. Guiteau was a longtime scam artist who traveled from town to town giving religious speeches and leaving town before his hotel bills were due. Guiteau was under the mistaken impression that Americans would thank him for shooting Garfield, and he also thought that he was being taken to jail for his own protection, and would eventually be released. Of course, that didn’t happen. After Garfield’s death, Guiteau went on trial for his murder, was found guilty, and was hanged on June 30, 1882.

So, how did Garfield die? Well, back in those days, American doctors didn’t believe in the germ theory, or Dr. Joseph Lister’s ideas about having a sterile operating room. Because of this, multiple doctors probed Garfield’s wound in his back with their unwashed hands in their futile search to find the bullet. This introduced an infection, and it was this infection that eventually killed Garfield. Not a pleasant way to go. The main culprit was Doctor D. Willard Bliss, who proclaimed himself in charge of Garfield’s care. (The D in his name actually stood for Doctor.) Bliss was, well, blissfully unaware of Dr. Lister’s ideas, and kept insisting that he knew what was best for Garfield, even as the president was dying. Millard does an excellent job of detailing all of the medical malpractice surrounding Garfield’s illness.

Millard paints a vivid picture throughout the book of James A. Garfield as a man of great principle. However, one of the surprises of Destiny of the Republic is that Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, who in the beginning of the book has all of the backbone of a chocolate éclair, ends up coming into his own as president. Arthur became a strong supporter of civil service reform, leading to the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act in 1883. 

Destiny of the Republic is an excellent book if you’re interested in an overlooked period of American history. Unfortunately, the book sheds no light on why Garfield loved lasagna so much, or his seemingly irrational hatred of Mondays.

Book Review: In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson (2011)

Cover of In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, 2011.

Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts.

Berlin. The name of the city conjures up numerous visions-the decadent nightlife of the Weimar Republic, immortalized in Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, the bombed-out ruins of Hitler’s bunker, the drab gray concrete of communist East Berlin and the infamous Berlin Wall. Erik Larson’s excellent 2011 book In the Garden of Beasts gives us a riveting account of Berlin at the very start of Hitler’s rule. The main character of In the Garden of Beasts is William E. Dodd, the ambassador of the United States to Germany from 1933-1937. 

Dodd was an odd choice for ambassador, as he was a history professor at the University of Chicago. He had become a good friend of Woodrow Wilson’s during Wilson’s successful run for President in 1912, and he later wrote a biography of Wilson. Dodd was not well suited to the job of ambassador. He didn’t enjoy the social obligations that were a large part of being an ambassador, and he doesn’t seem to have gotten along well with anyone on his staff. Because he wasn’t independently wealthy, Dodd didn’t fit in with the other U.S. diplomats, and many of his colleagues undermined him in their letters and reports. 

When Dodd arrived in Germany in July of 1933, Hitler was Chancellor, but he was not yet the all-powerful dictator he would later become. At that time Paul von Hindenburg, the elderly President of Germany, still had the power and authority to remove Hitler as Chancellor and declare martial law. But it was obvious to Dodd and other foreign observers that the Nazis were the dominant faction in Germany. 

In the beginning of his service in Berlin, Dodd did not see the danger that the Nazis represented, and like many other observers thought that either Hitler’s government would quickly collapse, or that the Nazis would eventually moderate their extreme views. Obviously, as we know all too well, neither of those things happened.

In the Garden of Beasts focuses on Dodd’s changing attitude as he sees more of the brutality of the Nazis’ rule, and he gradually understands that Hitler is not a man who can be dealt with rationally. The book also deals with Dodd’s family, who accompanied him to Germany. Specifically, it focuses on his spirited daughter Martha, who was 24 when the Dodds arrived in Berlin. Martha was quickly entranced by the Nazis, as she only saw what she interpreted as good things, like a renewed sense of national pride in Germany. Martha attracted many suitors, and she had a close relationship with Rudolf Diels, who was then the head of the Gestapo. While she was in Berlin, Martha also fell in love with Boris Winogradov, a Russian who was a member of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. Martha only needed to sleep with a member of Stasi, the brutal East German secret police, to complete her trifecta of notorious authoritarian secret police forces. 

The climax of In the Garden of Beasts is Hitler’s June 1934 purge of the SA, the brown-shirted “Storm Troopers” led by Ernst Röhm, who had been a long-time ally of Hitler’s. Röhm’s brown shirts tended to be a rowdy bunch who were likely to randomly beat up American citizens for not giving the Hitler salute during parades. (This behavior, and the German police’s reluctance to punish the SA members, led to many headaches for Ambassador Dodd.) Hitler was facing pressure from President Hindenburg to reign in the excesses of the SA, or else Hindenburg would strip Hitler of his title and declare martial law. Röhm was at the same time pressuring Hitler to let him take control of the German army. Hitler’s purge of the SA, known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” led to the murder of many key SA leaders, including Röhm. The official Nazi story was that Röhm was trying to overthrow Hitler, which was untrue. Hitler claimed that the purge was necessary to protect Germany from traitors. In purging the SA, Hitler satisfied Hindenburg, and at the same time did away with a key rival within his own party. When Hindenburg died in August of 1934, Hitler persuaded his cabinet to pass a law merging the offices of President and Chancellor, and thus when Hindenburg died, the last real threat to Hitler’s power died too. Hitler and the Nazi party now had total control of Germany. 

Larson is able to craft a non-fiction book that also has a fast-paced narrative, which is a difficult feat to pull off. He creates vivid portraits of the many fascinating and bizarre characters that populated the early days of the Third Reich. I have only two criticisms of In the Garden of Beasts. One is that, like Larson’s previous book The Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts doesn’t have a separate picture section. Larson paints such great portraits of Berlin and the people who inhabited the city at the time that I wanted to see more pictures of what these people looked like. My other criticism is that Larson skates over the fact that Martha Dodd was a spy for the Soviet Union after she returned to the United States in 1937. She and her second husband Alfred Stern were indicted on charges of espionage in 1957, and they fled the United States and never returned. Larson does not say that Dodd was indicted on charges of espionage; he merely writes “as pressure from federal authorities increased, they moved again…” (In the Garden of Beasts, p.361) But that omission doesn’t detract from the many pleasures that In the Garden of Beasts provides the reader. I learned a lot more about a fascinating time in world history, a brief window in which Adolf Hitler might easily have been removed from power, which would have changed much of the history of the 20^th century.