How President Garfield Shaped America’s Destiny with Candice Millard | BRI Scholar Talks

0:06 For this episode of Scholar Talks, the guiding question is how did the assassination of President James Garfield change America’s destiny? Candice Millard is an author of four New York Times bestselling books and has won numerous book awards. Her latest book is River of the Gods, Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the

0:26 Search for the Source of the Nile. She has also written some fabulous narrative histories of Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. But today we will discuss her compelling book, Destiny of the Republic, Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. I am Tony Williams, senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, and I want to

0:47 welcome you to another episode of Scholar Talks in the Topics in American History series. Candace, I want to thank you very much for joining me. Hi Tony. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here. Sure, you know, I love your books, just compelling stories. And I know that you recently described yourself when I saw you speak, and you’re

1:10 also a compelling speaker. You described yourself as a narrative nonfiction writer, and I thought that really captured it perfectly. You’re writing these histories about these compelling people, these compelling stories, but with a great narrative. Right? With the human story really coming out. And it’s the kind of book, you know, you want to keep reading and don’t want to put

1:31 down. It’s the kind of book that, you know, you just want to stay up late reading. So yeah yeah great. All right. So Destiny of the Republic. So can you set the scene of all the possibilities, the promise for progress and what was going on in politics during the Gilded Age?

1:52 Yeah, I’d be happy to. I think the Gilded Age is interesting. You know, a lot of people, you think Gilded Age, you think corruption, you know, political corruption, and there was a lot of that going on. But there’s also, as you say, there was a lot of promise and a lot of progress happening. Obviously, this is, you know, the Civil War right after the Civil War. You have Reconstruction. You have the 15th Amendment, which was, you know, obviously game changing.

2:17 And James Garfield was right at the heart of that fighting for that. You also have the industrial age and so you have a rise in wages, but you also have a rise in the wealth gap. You also have an increase in immigration, both for skilled and unskilled labor. So there’s just a lot going on at this time.

2:39 And there’s, as you say, there’s a lot of possibility, but certainly some bumps along the way. sure, for sure. Now a lot of people don’t know about the subject of your book, James Garfield, right? What kind of one of those unknown sort of bearded late 19th century presidents. So can you tell us a little bit more about his very dramatic rise to the presidency

3:02 and the promise that he might have brought to the office? I would love to talk about Garfield because I, like most Americans, I didn’t know anything about him besides the fact that he had been assassinated. When I started looking into the story, I was just blown away. So he was our last log cabin president, our last president to be born in a log

3:23 cabin. He was born into desperate poverty. His father died before he was two. He didn’t have shoes living in Ohio until he was four years old. So to put himself through college, his first year he was a janitor and a carpenter. But he was so brilliant that by his second year, while he’s still himself a student, just a sophomore in college, that he made him an assistant professor of literature,

3:44 mathematics, and ancient languages. He was an incredible classicist. He knew huge sections of the Aeneid by heart in Latin. And while he was in Congress, he wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem. So. I’d love to hear of a congressman today who could do something like that. I don’t think one exists. So he was absolutely brilliant.

4:05 But to me, what was more interesting about him was his decency. He was really a good, kind, honest person. He was very progressive for his age. He had a runaway slave. He was a hero for the Union Army in the Civil War. He was instrumental in bringing you back about black suffrage.

4:26 Frederick Douglass stood next to him when he gave his inaugural address. And really his presidency really united the country in a way that it hadn’t been since the Civil War. You know, Lincoln’s assassination really divided the country. But I think the whole country felt like we all have, he’s our president, the North

4:47 and South, the pioneer and the immigrant, the former enslaved person and the former slave owner kind of came together in this way. one unique human being. Great yeah. So, yeah, you really brought out a lot about his character in the book and really made him just a very compelling figure, a very admirable character, someone sort of

5:10 worthy of the office, as you say, maybe unlike today. But alternatively, on the other side of things, his assassin, Charles Gatot, was certainly a colorful character. That’s what he wants. say the least, right? And how does this man become an eventual presidential assassin?

5:34 So yes, Guttow was Garfield’s opposite in about every way. So he wanted to do everything and he tried everything, but he failed at everything. So he failed at being a journalist, he failed at being a lawyer, he even failed at a free love commune. He joined a free love commune and he was rejected.

5:55 The women there called him Charles and get out. And so, but he always had these dreams of greatness, right? And these delusions of greatness. And so one night he’s on a ship in the Long Island Sound. He’s standing at the deck, sort of dreaming big dreams. And out of the fog comes another ship that crashes into his, hundreds of people are

6:19 killed and he somehow survives. And he believes that this wasn’t an accident, this wasn’t a fluke, this is God choosing him for something great. And he comes to believe that that great thing is to kill the president. He had become… obsessed with Garfield when Garfield won the presidency, he decides that Garfield should give him the consulate in Paris or Austria or something.

6:44 He has no background, no qualifications for the job, but he thinks, I asked for it, so I should get it. And he quickly becomes dismissed, but then he has what he believes is a divine inspiration, that God wants him to kill the president and to make the vice president to make the vice president, Chester Arthur, president of

7:09 the United States in his place. Right, and as a follow up question, I think you know some sort of letters he’s writing and interactions. He’s just, as you said, expected to be handed these offices. I think he has an interaction with the First Lady. And can you tell us about these dramatic details of the actual assassination? Right. So he starts stalking the president.

7:31 And again, this is a different time. It’s hard for us to imagine. But, you know, President Garfield has no protection, even though there’s already been a presidential assassination. Lincoln was assassinated. But Americans think, oh, that’s just a product of war. This is our president. We’ve freely chosen him. There should be no danger to him. And there should be no distance between us and the president.

7:51 So Garfield has to meet with office seekers one on one in the White House on a daily basis. And he walks around the city by himself. He doesn’t have any protection. So there’s Garfield who’s become more and more obsessed with him. He’s waiting outside of the White House. One night, Garfield leaves the White House.

8:12 He walks down the street to his secretary of state’s house. The two men then walk through the streets of Washington by themselves with Gouteau following them the whole way, holding a loaded gun. And then he decides maybe he’s going to shoot him in the… and at church, so he follows him to church and he thinks maybe that’s not the best time. And he finally realizes or he reads in the newspaper that Garfield’s going to be at

8:36 this train station in Washington D .C., the Baltimore and Potomac train station, which is where the National Mall sits today. And he believes that’s the time to take the president’s life. So after Gatosh actually shoots Garfield, a doctor named Dr. Willard Bliss takes over the president’s care and as you described, sort of,

9:00 haughtily, very arrogantly, makes a few mistakes along the way. Very key and sort of in the end, deadly mistakes along the way. So what happens? So Dr. Bliss, whose first name is actually Doctor, Doctor, Dr. Willard Bliss, is one of these bizarre things in history. Like, I don’t know why his parents named him Doctor, but they did.

9:21 And he sees in this national tragedy after Garfield is shot an opportunity for personal fame and power. And so he wasn’t the president’s doctor. The president had a different doctor who happened to be out of town. But President Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln knew Bliss and called him into the train station where he was

9:42 shot. And so involved him that way. And he just immediately dismissed all the other doctors. And he really isolated the president in a sick room in the White House. Wouldn’t let anyone visit him. And repeatedly inserted unsterilized fingers and instruments in the president’s back where the bullet had gone.

10:03 And refusing any other help. And… And you know, it’s one thing I think some people know, they know that President Garfield was a fascinate and some people even know that it was actually the doctors who killed him and not the bullet. I mean, the bullet didn’t hit his spinal cord. It didn’t hit any vital organs. Today he would have spent a night in the hospital. But because they kept inserting these unstabilized fingers and instruments, he

10:28 was just riddled with infection. But the fact is also he should have known better. Joseph Lister, you know, we know Listerine. He was a renowned British surgeon and he had discovered antisepsis 16 years earlier and he had been widely adopted in Europe and he had come to the United States and been invited to speak to doctors in the United States, but they just didn’t trust

10:51 it. They’re like these invisible germs and that’s a whole lot of trouble to go to, to fight these invisible germs. And so because of that, the president not only died, but he died a horrible death. Right right. Now this makes for a tragic story. But as if all of this wasn’t sort of compelling and interesting enough, is

11:17 dramatic enough, Alexander Graham Bell even makes an appearance, right? He’s even involved in the attempt to save the president’s life. He is, and in fact, I started with Alexander Graham Bell. You know, again, it’s not that I wanted to write another book about a president or that I wanted to write about Garfield. I was researching Alexander Graham Bell, and I just came upon the story of him

11:39 inventing something called an induction balance, which is basically the first metal detector to try to find the bullet in Garfield. So Alexander Graham Bell was still a young man. He was 34 years old. He had invented the telephone just to… five years earlier. So he had, he was already a little bit famous. He had a little bit of money because he had won some prizes.

12:00 He had a million ideas that he wanted to work on. He was one of these feverish workers who never stopped to rest or eat and just kind of was working himself to death. And then he hears that Garfield’s been shot. And now this is several years before the invention of the medical x -ray. And so they didn’t have any way to find a bullet besides probing.

12:21 And so he thought, science should be able to do better than that. And so he realizes he has this induction balance that he had actually developed to try to get rid of static and the telephone line. And he thinks I can adapt this. So he just starts working night and day to develop something. And it does work. It actually goes on to help, you know, during the Russo -Japanese War.

12:45 And it really did save lives. It didn’t save Garfield’s life. for two reasons mainly first because they had Garfield on what was very kind of fancy and unusual at that time which was a Bed that had metal coils in it metal springs, which of course is going to affect a metal detector and then secondly

13:07 Bliss had publicly announced that the bullet was on the right side of Garfield’s body Which is where it went in but it actually had moved to the left. It was behind his pancreas and and he would only let Bell run the metal detector over the right side. So they’re like, oh, we’re just not getting anything. But it would have worked. And I mean, mainly they just needed to stop probing.

13:29 They just need to know it’s okay, leave it alone. But they didn’t. So I guess I’ll add that to Bliss’s, Dr. Bliss’s mistake. Well, I mean, it’s just such an interesting and dramatic story. And I guess my last question is this, you know, what were the lessons of Garfield’s

13:50 death and what impact did it have, you know, on our country, on our future, on, as I said in the beginning, on our destiny and as you subtitled the book? Well, I think the most immediate and one of the most dramatic effects is that our country did adopt sterilization after that, medical sterilization, and that, as

14:12 you can imagine, saved countless lives. So what happened is after Garfield died, they did an autopsy. That autopsy report was released, and everyone understood that the president didn’t have to die, and they understood why he did. And so, yeah. Antisepsis was adopted across the country. But also, you know, it changed our understanding of the presidency.

14:36 I think it changed. Well, like I said, first of all, it brought the country together again. You know, this was a common grief. This wasn’t, you your side killed our president. This was a shared grief, and it really did bring the country together in a way it hadn’t been since the Civil War. But it also changed our understanding of the presidency and it made us realize we

15:00 were still a very young country at that point, but we had to get serious about protecting our presidents and building some layer. I will say though, it didn’t go far enough because 20 years later, we had another presidential assassination, as you know, McKinley and that’s what brought Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. But in there, it still wasn’t Secret Service protection.

15:22 for the president. So there were more layers in with Garfield, but still not a Secret Service protection until finally after McKinley’s assassination. Right, well, Candice Millard, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Also, congratulations on your magnificent new book, River of the Gods. And I encourage everyone to go out and get Destiny of the Republic if they haven’t

15:45 already. It’s a best -selling book, but if you’re one of the few people in America who read it yet, it’s really, really magnificent. So excellent. Thank you. much. It’s been such an honor and such a joy to talk with you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of Scholar Talks. And please check out the other interviews in our series, Topics in American History.