#438 James Garfield's Extraordinary Rise

The host introduces Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, after previously covering her books on Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He says he knew little about James Garfield before reading it, despite Garfield becoming the 20th president of the United States. Garfield served only 199 days before being assassinated, and the book argues that he might have survived if doctors had understood modern infection control. Garfield was born in extreme poverty in a log cabin in rural Ohio and lost his father before he was two. His father’s cabin had one room, three small windows, and a rough plank floor, while his mother Eliza was left to support four children and pay debts. Garfield later became a teacher, college president, Civil War general, congressman, and president. The host emphasizes that education was Garfield’s salvation: it freed him from grinding poverty, shaped his mind, and created opportunities that had not existed before. Garfield kept a diary for 28 years, giving Millard access to unusually direct descriptions of his life and thinking.

Garfield refused to romanticize poverty. He said, “Let us never praise poverty,” even though his rise from fatherlessness and deprivation later made him an embodiment of the American dream. He did not own shoes until he was four, and his mother had to sell much of the family’s land. When young Garfield asked to attend school, he told her that if he completed his studies, nobody would ask what kind of coat he had worn—and if they did, he would not be ashamed to say it was ragged. At 16, he left home to work as a canal man among rough and violent laborers. He fell into the water, nearly drowned, contracted malaria, and returned to the family cabin barely able to walk. After two months bedridden, he used the $17 his mother and older brother had saved for him to go to school. Unable to pay tuition, he worked as a janitor, sweeping floors, hauling wood, and making fires. His effort quickly changed his prospects: by his second year, the school promoted him from janitor to assistant professor of literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. Garfield wrote, “The ice is broken. I am resolved to make a mark in the world.”

Garfield’s workday began at 5 a.m. and continued with classes, janitorial work, teaching, and studying until nearly midnight. He treated his classmates’ achievements as a challenge, writing that if he began to flag, he was motivated by the thought that someone else might master the subject before him. His goal was not merely to beat competitors but to “conquer and surpass” himself. At Williams College, where other students had better preparation, he calculated that 37 of the 42 members of his class would stand behind him within two months. The prediction reflected how rapidly he advanced. By age 26, Garfield was president of the school where he had studied. Politics and war then redirected his career. In 1859, he won election to the Ohio Senate, and when the Civil War began he became a Union lieutenant colonel and then a colonel. Although inexperienced and outnumbered in Kentucky, he divided his small regiment into three groups and attacked Confederate forces from three directions, making the enemy believe a much larger army had surrounded them. The stratagem worked, secured Kentucky for the Union, and earned Garfield promotion to brigadier general.

The Kentucky victory made Garfield famous, but seeing dead soldiers changed him permanently. He later said that the sight made something leave him that never came back: his sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it. He nevertheless remained an ardent abolitionist and believed rebellion had to be defeated. Ten months after the battle, he was elected to Congress but refused to take his seat until Abraham Lincoln asked him to leave the army. Garfield explained that Lincoln told him he could not risk a single House vote and needed people who understood the army’s needs. Garfield said he did not feel entitled to consult his own preference in that situation. The host presents this as part of Garfield’s larger reluctance to pursue personal advancement. He would not seek appointments or promotions and wrote that he was “morbidly sensitive” about references to his achievements. After 17 years in Congress, he had watched presidential ambition damage people’s careers and character, so he resolved not to catch the “presidential fever.” The host identifies Garfield as an example of a leader compelled to serve rather than someone seeking power for himself.

Garfield attended his party’s convention intending to help nominate John Sherman. He gave a speech for Sherman so compelling that the delegates began abandoning Sherman and the other candidates. When Garfield asked, “What do we want?”, the crowd answered, “We want Garfield.” His friends warned him that the convention was considering his nomination. Garfield replied, “My God, I know it, I know it and they will ruin me,” insisting that he would vote for Sherman and that his name must not be used. Garfield objected repeatedly as votes were announced, saying no one had the right to nominate him without his consent. The objections did not stop the process. On the final ballot, he received 399 votes—20 more than needed—and became the nominee despite having actively resisted becoming a candidate. When a friend congratulated him, Garfield answered, “I am very sorry that this has become necessary.” He viewed the presidency as “a bleak mountain” he was obliged to climb and felt sadness running through the apparent triumph. The host connects this reluctant nomination to Garfield’s later death: he became president against his will and was killed only 199 days after inauguration.

Garfield’s private passions were books, scholarship, and his farm. Books filled every room of his home, and the librarian of Congress ranked him among the most diligent researchers he had known. Garfield also wanted to study agricultural chemistry and experiment with soils. Instead, the presidency brought political conflict, requests for favors, and people seeking government appointments. He described the office seekers filling the White House as “beast at feeding time” and complained after one exhausting day, “What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?” The host says Garfield was not a hater, but he was a fighter. He could not carry a grudge against rivals such as Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine, yet he would not retreat when attacked. Garfield wrote, “I detest war, but if it is brought to my door, the bringer will find me at home.” He also worried about how the presidency would harm his children and tried to protect them from its effects. Although Americans could still walk into the White House and potentially speak with the president, there was no presidential protection. Garfield knew assassination was possible and said it could be no more guarded against than death by lightning, even as he experienced recurring premonitions of an early death.

The episode then connects Garfield’s story to Joseph Lister and Alexander Graham Bell. Lister had spent years arguing that doctors’ hands and instruments carried germs and that antiseptic procedures could prevent infection. Many American physicians dismissed him, calling antisepsis absurd or harmful. One of those skeptics was Dr. Frank Hamilton, who later treated Garfield. Hamilton favored leaving wounds open rather than using Lister’s methods. When Garfield was shot at a train station, the bullets did not immediately threaten his vital organs. Dr. Smith Townsend inserted an unsterilized finger into the wound while Garfield lay on the station floor, almost certainly introducing a more dangerous infection. Dr. Bliss then repeatedly searched for the bullet with an unsterilized probe, pushing it three inches into Garfield’s back. The probe became caught between fractured ribs, and Bliss had to press on the broken rib to remove it before exploring the wound again with his finger. The host stresses that Garfield probably would have survived even with the bullet left in place. Civil War veterans were living with bullets inside their bodies, and the bullet in Garfield’s fatty tissue was eventually walled off by fibrous tissue. Without the doctors’ repeated interventions, he likely would have recovered.

Garfield’s condition deteriorated over the weeks after the shooting. The host says that an X-ray, unavailable at the time, would have located the bullet; antiseptic surgery could have treated the wound; and with modern care he might have spent only a few nights in the hospital. Even 15 years later, he might have survived. Instead, the infection caused by medical treatment killed him 79 days after he was shot, at age 49. Garfield understood that he might die but was more troubled by the suffering his death would cause his family. His fatherless childhood made him especially concerned about his children. When he tried to discuss plans for them with his wife, she refused to let him speak about death. Only to her did he admit his exhaustion, asking whether fighting for death was worth the small amount of life he might have left. His last letter was to his mother, written in a thin, shaky hand. After his death, public grief produced pressure to prevent another tragedy, but Americans still considered presidential protection too imperial and un-American. The Secret Service was not officially assigned to protect presidents until after William McKinley was shot in 1901. The host closes by urging listeners to read Millard’s account of a remarkable man whose life was cut short by medical ignorance and malpractice.