"Destiny of the Republic"

[fiefoe]

Given the book title, little did I know that the book is mostly about a medical tragedy of a saintly president. Candice Millard is a lively writer but wasted too much ink on the deeply delusional assassin.

• As the Stonington recoiled from the blow and tried to pull astern, it compounded the disaster by tearing away the starboard wheelhouse and wheel of the oncoming ship—its sister steamer, the Narragansett, which had been headed at full speed in the opposite direction.
• A tall man with broad shoulders and a warm smile, Garfield was, in many ways, the embodiment of the Centennial Exhibition’s highest ideals. At just forty-four years of age, he had already defied all odds. Born into extreme poverty in a log cabin in rural Ohio, and fatherless before his second birthday, he had risen quickly through the layers of society, not with aggression or even overt ambition, but with a passionate love of learning that would define his life.
• he had recently written an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem during a free moment at the Capitol. The New England Journal of Education had published the proof just the month before, transparently astonished that a member of Congress had written it.
• As fairgoers stared in amazement at Remington’s typewriter and Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph system, Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in a saloon in Deadwood, leaving outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid to terrorize the West.
• passionate speech for black suffrage. Is freedom “the bare privilege of not being chained?” he asked. “If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion, and it may well be questioned whether slavery were not better. Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.”
• Bell’s principal work was not inventing, but teaching the deaf. He had inherited this work from his father, but he loved it with a passion that was all his own... Even the emperor of Brazil, on a recent break from the Centennial Exhibition, had visited Bell’s classroom in Boston.
• it was arguably the least desirable location in the entire hall. Instead of being taken to the electrical exhibits, Bell had been led upstairs to the Massachusetts educational section
• he turned to find Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, ... he immediately recognized him as the talented teacher of the deaf whom he had met in Boston.
• While Bell’s technological innovation caught fire in an instant of understanding, on the same fairgrounds, in a building just yards away, Joseph Lister’s discovery, one of the most important advances in medical history, was lightly dismissed. Standing before a crowded hall at the centennial fair’s Medical Congress, the British surgeon struggled to convince his audience, a collection of the most experienced and admired physicians and surgeons in the United States, of the critical importance of antisepsis—
• (Garfield) pulled a copy of Shakespeare’s Othello off the shelf and began to read the tragedy aloud. “The children were not pleased with the way the story came out,” he admitted in his diary, but he hoped that they would come to “appreciate stories that [do not] come out well, for they are very much like a good deal of life.”
• In the early 1800s, Ohio was the American frontier. Wild and largely unmapped, it had not joined the Union until 1803, becoming the country’s seventeenth state. Ohio was the first state to be created out of the Northwest Territory. Iroquois and Shawnee tribes were still scattered throughout the Ohio Valley, fiercely fighting for the little land they had left, but time was running out. They had lost their British allies after the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson would pass the Indian Removal Act less than twenty years later,
• Garfield wondered why he was still alive. The rope was not secured to anything on the boat. When he had pulled on it, it should have fallen off the deck, slipping to the bottom of the canal and leaving him to drown. “Carefully examining it, I found that just where it came over the edge of the boat it had been drawn into a crack and there knotted itself,” he would later write.
• So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages... By the time he was twenty-six, he was the school’s president.
• Despite the Confederate force’s size and artillery, Garfield refused to wait for additional troops. Instead, he divided his already small regiment into three even smaller groups. The plan was to attack the rebels from three different sides, thus giving the impression, Garfield hoped, of a regiment that was much larger and better equipped than his. <> Incredibly, Marshall believed everything Garfield wanted him to, and more.
• Although Garfield had chosen a life of calm, rational thought, when it came to abolition he freely admitted that he had “never been anything else than radical.”
• he had done nothing to promote his candidacy. Before the results were even announced, he had set out for Washington—not to prepare himself for Congress, but to seek his next military appointment. <> Garfield would not take his congressional seat until more than a year later, when Abraham Lincoln asked him to... Garfield soon learned that he could fight more effectively, and win more often, on the floor of Congress. He introduced a resolution that would allow blacks to walk freely through the streets of Washington, D.C., without carrying a pass.
• Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace. -- JAMES A. GARFIELD
• either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation with the South; or the men whose values Garfield shared, a determined group of reformers who would become known as the Half-Breeds.
• Less than ten years earlier, Chicago had been devastated by the worst natural disaster in the country’s 104-year history—the Great Chicago Fire. Since then, the city had not only recovered, but had literally risen from the ashes to become one of America’s most modern metropolises.
• At one point, he recited from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which he had not read in many years. “We have but faith: we cannot know; / For knowledge is of things we see / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.”
• Conkling was not only a famously charismatic speaker, but arguably the most powerful person in the country. Ten years earlier, then President Grant had given Conkling, his most fiercely loyal supporter, control of the New York Customs House, which was the largest federal office in the United States and collected 70 percent of the country’s customs revenue.
• In front of the entire House of Representatives, Blaine had attacked Conkling as no man had ever dared to do, ridiculing “his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut.”.. “The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion.”
• “Nothing touches my heart more quickly than a tribute of honor to a great and noble character; but as I sat in my seat and witnessed the demonstration, this assemblage seemed to me a human ocean in tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured.”
• sending out a clear and unwavering message to the South: “This is our only revenge—that you join us in lifting into the serene firmament of the Constitution … the immortal principles of truth and justice: that all men, white or black, shall be free, and shall stand equal before the law.”
• They could not have helped but be dismally reminded of the Democratic convention of 1860, which took not only fifty-nine ballots but two conventions in two different cities before it had a nominee—a nominee who would go on to lose to the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln.
• The tension in the hall continued to grow until Maine, before a shell-shocked crowd, utterly abandoned Blaine, its native son. “Slowly came the call of the State of Maine,” the reporter wrote, “and [Senator] Eugene Hale, white of face but in a clear, sharp, penetrating voice replied, ‘Maine casts her fourteen votes for James A. Garfield.’ ”... The last state was called, and Garfield was left with 399 votes, 20 more than were needed to win. Having never agreed to become even a candidate—on the contrary, having vigorously resisted it—he was suddenly the nominee.
• Noyes believed that he had reached perfection and was anointed by God to help others shed their own sins. With this goal in mind, he had founded his commune, the Oneida Community, named for the town in which it was established in 1848. Oneida would last more than thirty years, becoming the most successful utopian socialist community in the United States. <> Like most of Noyes’s followers, Guiteau moved into the “Mansion House,”
• Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised Garfield to do the same. “Sit crosslegged,” he said, “and look wise.”
• When the secretary of war sat down to breakfast one morning, 329 was scrawled on his napkin. The secretary of the treasury found the numbers on a piece of mail addressed to him, the secretary of agriculture on a beet someone had placed on his desk, and the secretary of state on his hat and, incredibly, the headboard of his bed. <> When dredging up an old scandal proved ineffective, zealous Democrats invented a new one.
• Douglass went on. Garfield, he said, “has burst up through the incrustations that surround the poor, and has shown us how it is possible for an American to rise. He has built the road over which he traveled. He has buffeted the billows of adversity, and to-night he swims in safety where Hancock, in despair, is going down.”
• Bell had little hope of competing with this behemoth. Not only did it have seemingly limitless financial resources to fund experiments and improvements, but it had an existing network of wires that stretched across the country. To add insult to injury, Edison, who was partially deaf, developed a telephone transmitter for Western Union that was better—both louder and clearer—than Bell’s... With Western Union’s defeat, stock in the Bell Telephone Company skyrocketed from $50 a share to nearly $1,000. The fighting, however, continued. In the end, Bell would face more than six hundred lawsuits, ten times as many as Morse.
• Garfield had swept aside all these drafts, dismissing them as “the staggerings of my mind,”
• Two days later, on the morning of his inauguration, Garfield lost yet another cabinet member to Conkling.
• “The Senate,” Henry Adams would write a few years later in his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, “took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs and Malvolios,—endless varieties of human nature nowhere else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed.”
• Although he had dangerous enemies and problematic friends, Garfield’s biggest problem was his own vice president—Chester Arthur. Not only had the Republican nomination been thrust upon Garfield without his consent, but so had his running mate...  they had decided to offer the vice presidential nomination to one of Conkling’s men. No one in the Republican Party was more Conkling’s man than Chester Arthur... A bachelor since the death of his wife five months before the Republican convention, Arthur even lived in Conkling’s home at Fourteenth and F Streets in New York.
• During Hayes’s administration, Conkling had taken every opportunity to belittle the president’s efforts at civil service reform, which he jeeringly dubbed “snivel service.” “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling told reporters, “he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.’ ”
• news of assassinations continued to come in from across the sea. In 1812, the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot and killed while he was standing in the House of Commons. A series of assassins had tried to kill Queen Victoria at least half a dozen times. Emperor William I of Germany survived an assassination attempt in the spring of 1878, only to be seriously wounded in another one just a month later.
• She was “the continent, the solid land on which I build all my happiness,” he had once told her. “When you are sick, I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes. They lose all faith in the eternal order and fixedness of things.”
• The letter was addressed to Arthur, and it read, “Sir, Will you please announce to the Senate that my resignation as Senator of the United States from the State of New-York has been forwarded to the Governor of the State. I have the honor to be, with great respect, your obedient servant, Roscoe Conkling.”... The reaction that followed, however, was not at all what Conkling had envisioned. After recovering from their initial shock, Stalwarts in the Senate merely mumbled their support, while delighted Half-Breeds, hardly believing their luck, immediately went on the attack... As the final, fatal blow had been self-inflicted, Conkling’s long political career came to a shockingly swift end...  “Stung with mortification at his inability to control the President, and believing that the people of this State shared his disappointment,” wrote the New York Times, Conkling “has thrown away his power, destroyed his own influence.”
• The plan was to meet up with Lucretia and Mollie and then go on to Massachusetts, where they would attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Williams College and help Harry and Jim settle in for the upcoming academic year.
• The most prominent of the Stalwarts was Robert Todd Lincoln, Garfield’s secretary of war and Abraham Lincoln’s oldest and only surviving son.
• What Townsend did next was something that Joseph Lister, despite years spent traveling the world, proving the source of infection and pleading with physicians to sterilize their hands and instruments, had been unable to prevent. As the president lay on the train station floor, one of the most germ-infested environments imaginable, Townsend inserted an unsterilized finger into the wound in his back, causing a small hemorrhage and almost certainly introducing an infection that was far more lethal than Guiteau’s bullet.
• Secretary Lincoln watched the events unfolding around him with an all-too-familiar horror. His memory of standing at his father’s deathbed sixteen years earlier was vivid in his mind, and he was shocked and sickened by the realization that he was now witnessing another presidential assassination.
• Bliss’s approach to medicine had changed dramatically after his battle with the Medical Society. Now, like most doctors at that time, he was a strict adherent to allopathy, which often involved administering large doses of harsh medicines that, they believed, would produce an effect opposite to the disease.
• Pressing the unsterilized probe downward and forward into the wound, Bliss did not stop until he had reached a cavity three inches deep in Garfield’s back. At this point, he decided to remove the probe, but found that he could not... He finally had to press down on Garfield’s fractured rib so that it would lift and release the probe.
• Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks... Even had Garfield simply been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below and behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger to the president.
• Instead, Garfield was the object of intense medical interest from a menagerie of physicians, each with his own theories and ambitions, and each acutely aware that he was treating the president of the United States.
• Not only did many American doctors not believe in germs, they took pride in the particular brand of filth that defined their profession. They spoke fondly of the “good old surgical stink” that pervaded their hospitals and operating rooms, and they resisted making too many concessions even to basic hygiene.
• Four years earlier, while struggling to fend off interference from nearby telegraph wires, which were cluttering his telephone lines with their rapid clicking sounds, Bell had found an ingenious solution. The problem stemmed from the telegraph wires’ constantly changing magnetic field, which created, or induced, corresponding currents in the telephone wires. Bell realized that if he split the telephone wire in two and placed one wire on each side of the telegraph line, the currents would cancel each other out... The technique, known as balancing the induction, left the line silent.
• Bell realized that he could turn his system for reducing interference into an instrument for finding metal—the induction balance. He would loop two wires into coils, connecting one coil to a telephone receiver and the other to a battery and a circuit interrupter, thus providing the changing current necessary for induction. Then he would arrange the coils so that they overlapped each other just the right amount. He would know he had them perfectly adjusted when the buzzing sound in the receiver disappeared. If he then passed the coils over Garfield’s body, the metal bullet would upset the balance, and Bell would literally be able to hear it through the receiver.
• Harriet Blaine wrote disdainfully of Arthur. “He can quote a verse of poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackery, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed, and very soon he has given out his all.”
• In a desperate effort to ward off malaria, they gave him five to ten grains of quinine every day. Unfortunately, the dangers of the drug are many. Not only can quinine be toxic if taken in large doses, but it can also bring on severe intestinal cramping, thus causing further trauma to Garfield’s already ravaged digestive system.
• With Garfield in the White House, the New York Times wrote, Southerners “felt, as they had not felt before for years, that the Government … was their Government, and that the chief magistrate of the country had an equal claim upon the loyal affection of the whole people.” <> Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, a contemporary of Garfield’s wrote, the nation was “united, as if by magic.”
• Bell had never hesitated to use unorthodox test subjects. Seven years earlier, while working on a phonautograph, a distant cousin of the phonograph, he had used a dead man’s ear, soaking it in glycerin and water to make it pliable.
• it had to detect lead, which, among the metals, is one of the poorest conductors of electricity. What Bell yearned for was, quite literally, a silver bullet. “If people would only make their bullets of silver or iron,” he complained, “there would be no difficulty in finding them in any part of the body!”
• Unbeknownst to his doctors, cavities of pus had begun to ravage the president’s body. One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile.
• Sand, Arthur would later learn, was an unmarried, thirty-two-year-old invalid. For the past five years, she had felt “dead and buried,” but the attempt on Garfield’s life and Americans’ complete lack of faith in Arthur had inspired her to attempt to inspire him. She was as brutally honest in her assessment of the situation as she was galvanizing. “... Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform!”... “It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong,” Sand assured him, “but it is a proof of it … to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it.”
• So toxic was the infection in Garfield’s body that it was a danger even to those who were treating him.
• “enemata,” or rectal feeding. He mixed together beef bouillon—predigested with hydrochloric acid—warmed milk, egg yolk, and a little bit of opium, to help with retention. The solution, which, if absorbed, would provide protein, fatty acids, and saline, was injected into the president rectally every four hours, night and day.
• William Henry Harrison had survived only one month after contracting pneumonia while giving the longest inaugural address in history on a cold, rainy day.
• Perfecting the induction balance was a personal and scientific obligation, and he was not about to abandon it now, whatever the cost. “Heartless science,” he would write years later, “seeks truth, and truth alone, quite apart from any consequences that may arise.”
• The day McKinley was shot—he would die from his wounds eight days later—Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation’s four presidential assassinations.
• In his first official address as president, Arthur called for civil service reform. Just one year later, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. This act, named for the Ohio Senator who sponsored it, transformed government appointments from what men like Conkling and Guiteau believed them to be—gifts given at the pleasure of powerful officials to those who had been most useful to them—into positions won on the basis of merit. Pendleton had introduced the bill two years earlier, but Congress had ignored it. It took Garfield’s assassination, the resounding defeat in 1882 of several congressmen who had publicly opposed reform, and President Arthur’s support to finally make it law.
• Conkling never forgave him. For years after their falling-out, he nursed a bitter grudge, jeeringly referring to Arthur as “His Accidency”
• In the years to come, the induction balance would lessen the suffering and save the lives not just of Americans but of soldiers in the Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War. Even during World War I, doctors would often turn to the induction balance when they could not find an X-ray machine, or did not trust its accuracy.
• The induction balance, however, was not the only medical invention that would come out of this difficult time in Bell’s life. The death of his son also inspired him to build a machine that would essentially breathe for those who, like Edward, could not breathe for themselves. The invention, which he called a vacuum jacket, consisted primarily of an airtight iron cylinder that encircled the patient’s torso, and a suction pump that forced air into his lungs. The vacuum jacket was a precursor to the iron lung, which would help thousands of people breathe during the polio epidemic of the 1940s and early 1950s... In 1888, he and a small group of like-minded men would found the National Geographic Society.