Plain English with Derek Thompson - Plain History Volume 1: Who Killed President James Garfield?

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

This is the first episode of a little experiment we’re trying this year, a podcast within a podcast on history that we’re calling, simply enough, 'Plain History.' There are, I am well aware, a great number of history podcasts out there. But one thing I want to do with this show is to pay special attention to how the past worked. In this episode, for example, we're using the assassination of an American president to consider the practice of medicine in the 19th century. Our subject today is the bestseller 'Destiny of the Republic' by the historian Candice Millard, on the incredible life and absurd and tragic death of President James Garfield. In the summer of 1876, the United States celebrated its 100th birthday at the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Of the millions of people who walked through the grounds, one was Garfield, who attended the centennial with his wife and six children. In four years' time, he would be elected president at a shocking and chaotic Republican convention. But at the time, he was a 44-year-old congressman known in Washington for being a rags-to-riches genius. Garfield was a perfect match for the centennial grounds, which were themselves a gaudy showcase of genius. In Machinery Hall, visitors could pay for a machine to embroider their suspenders with their initials. They could gaze at one of the world’s first internal combustion engines, a technology that would in the next 50 years remake the world by powering a million cars, tractors, and tanks. They could see the first Remington typewriter and Edison telegraph system. In the Main Exhibition Building, a little-known teacher for the deaf caused a riot with his science experiment. In one room, the teacher held up a little metal piece to his mouth and read Hamlet’s soliloquy into a transmitter. In a separate room, the emperor of Brazil, sitting with an iron box receiver pressed against his ear, heard each word—to be or not to be—reverberating against his eardrum. The teacher’s name was Alexander Graham Bell, and the instrument in question had three months earlier received a patent as the world’s first working telephone. A few yards away, a scientist named Joseph Lister was having much less success trying to explain his theories of antisepsis to a crowd of skeptical American doctors. He claimed that the same tiny organisms that Pasteur said turned grape juice into wine also turned our wounds into infestations. Lister encouraged doctors to sterilize wounds and to treat their surgical instruments with carbolic acid. But American doctors laughed off these suggestions. Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and the most famous surgeon in America, said, “Little if any faith is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister.” American surgeons instead believed in “open-air treatment,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Here are three characters of a story: James Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, and Lister’s theory of antisepsis. They were united at the 1876 centennial. They would be reunited again in five years, under much more gruesome circumstances, brought together by a medical horror show that would end with a dead president. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Candice Millard Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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read on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel. In the summer of 1876, the United States celebrated its 100th birthday at the U.S. centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. Even at the ripe old age of 100, the American project at this moment was unfinished and unstable. The civil war had ended hardly a decade earlier, and freed slaves still lived in fear and poverty. In the West, settlers in infamous frontier towns like Deadwood were being terrorized by the likes of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Of the 50 countries represented at the 1876 Fair, the host, the United States, was the only one to not yet have a national anthem. But in Philadelphia, the mood was joyous.

Of the millions of people who walked through the grounds, one was James Garfield, who attended the centennial with his wife and six children. In four years' time, he would be elected president at a shocking and chaotic Republican convention, but for now he was just a 44-year-old congressman, known in Washington for being a bit of a rags-to-richs genius. Born in a law cabin, he had become a professor, an expert in ancient languages, and even published an original proof of the Pythagorean theory. which ran in the New England Journal of Medicine while he served in Congress. Sort of funny to imagine by comparison, AOC, Mike Johnson, publishing science papers in nature

in between cable newsheads. Garfield was a perfect match for the Centennial Grounds, which were themselves this gaudy showcase of genius. In the machinery hall, visitors could pay for a machine to embroider their suspenders with their initials. They could gaze at one of the world's first internal combustion and, and, you know, and engines, a technology which would in the next 50 years remake the world by powering millions of cars, tractors, tanks.

They could see the first Remington typewriter and Edison Telegraph System. In the main exhibition building, a little-known teacher for the deaf caused a riot at this centennial with a little science experiment. In one room, this teacher held up a little metal piece to his mouth and read Hamlet's soliloquy into a little transmitter. In a separate room, the Emperor of Brazil, sitting with an iron box receiver pressed against his ear, heard every word, to be, or not to be, reverberating against his eardrum. The teacher's name was Alexander Graham Bell, and the instrument in question had three months earlier received a patent for the world's first working telephone. A few yards away from Bell, a scientist named Joseph Lister was having much less success trying to explain his own theories of,

anticepsis to a crowd of skeptical American doctors. Lister claimed that the same little organisms that Pasteur had said turn grape juice into wine also turned our wounds into infestations. Lister encouraged the doctors around him to sterilize wounds and to treat their surgical instruments with carbolic acid. But American doctors laughed him off. Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and the most famous surgeon in America in the 1870s, said, quote, little, if any, faith has placed by enlightened or experienced surgeons on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister. American surgeons instead believed in open-air treatment, which is exactly what it sounds like.

So here are three characters of a story. James Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, Lister's theory of anticepsis. They were united at the 1876 centennial, and they would be united to, again in five years, under much more gruesome circumstances, brought together by a medical horror show that would end with a dead president. And that is the subject of today's episode. It's also the subject of the New York Times bestselling history, destiny of the republic, by the historian Candace Millard. Today's guest is Candace Mallard. In the first episode of a little experiment we're doing this year, a podcast within a podcast on history, which we're calling, simply

enough, plain history. There are, I am very well aware, a great number of history podcasts out there, but one thing that I wanted to do with this show is to pay special attention to how the past worked. How does the life and death of James Garfield teach us about what medicine was like in the 1870s? How health care functioned 150 years ago? What assumptions did experts make about the body and health and life and disease, and how can their assumptions, there's sometimes disastrously overconfident assumptions, inspire us to reevaluate our own sometimes overconfident assumptions about how the world works in 2025.

James Garfield once wrote beautifully of his faith in progress. Quote, the scientific experiment has cast out the demons that presented us with nature, he said. It has given us for the sorceries of the alchemist the beautiful laws of chemistry, for the dreams of the astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy, for the wild visions of cosmogany, the monumental laws of geology, for the anarchy of diabolism, the laws of God. And quote. Garfield believed in science above all things, which only deepens the irony and the tragedy that in the end, he was killed not by a madman's bullet, but by the hubris of doctors and of science. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain History. Candice Millard, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, thanks for having me. It is an honor to talk to you. Your book, Destiny of the Republic, is absolutely splendid. Let's start here. Your historian, you have written books about Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, giants in history, two of the most famous men maybe of the last 200 years. Why James Garfield, what drew you initially to this story? Well, it wasn't the fact that he was president, and it wasn't even the fact that I knew anything about him like most Americans, unfortunately, all I knew about him was the fact that he had been assassinated so early in his presidency. I was actually doing research on Alexander Graham Bell, and I wanted another book that had a lot of science in it.

I was just doing general research. And I stumbled upon the story of him trying to save Garfield's life after he was shot. And I thought, you know, why would he do that? I mean, obviously Garfield was president, but Bell was young. He had all this attention for the first time. He had a little bit of money for the first time. He had so many ideas. And he dropped absolutely everything he was doing to try to save birth.

And I thought, huh, I wonder what Garfield was like. So I started researching him and I was just blown away. You know, he was just an extraordinary human being who's been almost completely forgotten. And I just captured my heart and my mind and my imagination. And I really wanted to try to tell the story. In addition to being an extraordinary figure, Garfield is a beautiful writer. And each of your chapters begin with an excerpt from his papers, his diaries, his letters as you collected them and read them. And I'm going to try to do my best as we lead listeners through this story of James Garfield to seed this story with little quotes from your books that we can hear from Garfield himself because he really is an incredibly poetic, lyrical writer. Let's start at the very beginning. Tell me about James Garfield's birth, his rise to prominence from his child. childhood in Ohio?

So he was incredibly poor. He was our last president born-in-law cabin. His father died before he was two years old. He didn't have shoes until he was four years old in Ohio. And so he had an older brother and his mother who just saw very early on that he had a very unusual mind. And they worked really, really hard to save a little bit of money to try to send him to college. But he went, so he went to what was then called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute.

It's now Hiram University in Ohio. But to still, to help pay his tuition, his first year, he was a janitor and a carpenter. But he was so brilliant that by his second year, while he himself is still a student, he's just a sophomore in college, they made him a professor of literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He was an incredible classicist. He knew huge parts of the Aeneid by heart in Latin. By the time he was 26, he was a university president. In Congress, while he was in Congress, he wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem. So, I mean, I don't know if you could name a congressman today who can do that.

I can't. But he was just a genius. He really was just a brilliant, brilliant. He was also, I mean, as you said, he was an incredible writer. He was also an incredible. incredibly magnetic and persuasive and powerful speaker. And he was known early on in Congress for being that. But to me, what makes him more interesting, even than his mind, was his heart.

You know, he was really a decent, kind human being. You know, he wasn't, you mentioned I wrote about Theodore Roosevelt. He wasn't like Roosevelt, you know, he was sort of the hero of every drama, right? Garfield was sort of the calmest, wisest man in the room. So he hit a runaway slave. He was instrumental in bringing about back suffrage. He was a hero in the Union Army. When he gave his inaugural address, Frederick Douglass was standing next to him. So he was an incredibly progressive, again, just a decent human being. And the Rags to Riches story is almost a cliche in American history, and the concept of the American dream is dutifully controversial today.

But Garfield's story is an incredible example of the American dream. And in fact, he wrote about the concept of social mobility in a way that I found absolutely gorgeous. He wrote, quote, there is no horizontal stratification of society in this country, like the rocks and the earth that hold one class below forevermore and let another come to the surface to stay there forevermore. Our stratification is like the ocean where every individual drop

is free to move and wear from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls. I mean, that is lovely, and clearly Garfield himself rose up from the sternest depths

of the mighty deep. I mean, no shoes in Ohio winters at four years old. 22 years later, he is the president of a college. So to your point, He makes his way to Congress briefly before we go to this famous moment at the Republican convention in 1880.

What was he like as a congressman? What did he fight for in Congress? Well, as I mentioned, he was instrumental in bringing about black suffrage. And you know, you just quoted something he wrote. If you have a chance, any of your listeners, have a chance to read the speech that he gave on the floor of Congress on behalf of black suffrage. I strongly encourage you to do that. It's so moving and powerful.

And you, I mean, today we think, you know, of course, who would be against that? But as we know, unfortunately, many people were against it. And it's just so powerful. He was a very, very strong abolitionist. He was also, he was a big finance guy. He believed very strongly in hard money, believing that should always have gold to back up paper money. He was very, very, very invested in the creation of the Department of Education, because education had obviously been his own salvation,

and he knew that it was the hope and promise of this young country. So those were the kind of things that he was involved in as a congressman. Let's bring the story to 1880 at the Republican National Convention. You write that James Garfield never had the presidential fever, not even for a day. And it wasn't because he was afraid of being killed in office, like his fellow Republican Abraham Lincoln, but rather because he had seen how the presidency had submerged many great men, like Ulysses S. Grant, the Union General, whose presidency was filled with accusations of corruption and facts of corruption. So he's there at the Republican National Convention of 1880, not as a potential nominee initially, but as a speaker on behalf of a nominee.

take us inside this room, inside this hall, and tell us how Garfield went from essentially being an endorser to becoming the Republican nominee for president. Right. So as you mentioned, so John Sherman, who was William to comes to Sherman's younger brother, he did have that sort of presidential fever that you mentioned and that Garfield always talked about and was worried about Garfield because everyone was interested in Garfield. thought, wow, he would be a great candidate. So Sherman, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, thought, okay, I'll have Garfield give my nominating speech. Then, you know, he's not really going to be a threat. So they go to this huge convention hall in Chicago. There are 15,000 people there. And

everyone believes that the person who's going to win again is Grant. And, you know, he's, He's going to run for a third term. He's hoping to run for a third term. And everybody believes he's absolutely going to get it. And so this man, Roscoe Conkling, gets up to give Grant's nominating address. And Roscoe Conkling is famous. He's sort of flamboyant. And he also, an incredibly powerful speaker, but in a very different way from Garfield.

And so he gets everybody worked up. So everybody in this huge hall is chanting, Grant, Grant, Grant. And so now it's Garfield's turn to go up and to nominate Sherman. And so he goes up and he begins to speak. And this speech that he gives is largely extemporaneous. You know, he was sort of worrying about it the night before. He never really fully wrote it. So he's just up there speaking from his heart.

And you know what? I can actually read from the opening of that speech. It's printed in your book and I pulled it into my notes here. This is how James Garfield begins. speech to the Chicago Convention extemporaneously. As I sat, and this is, I guess, the context here, and I'm taking from your book, is that Garfield is following up on this incredibly boisterous crowd that's been screaming about the previous speech. And he says, quote, as I sat in my seat and witnessed this 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. When the storm is passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when the sunlight bathes its peaceful surface, then the astronomer and surveyor take the level from which they measure all terrestrial heights and depths. So he just pulls from out of nowhere, this absolutely gorgeous, almost like Herman Melvillian description or metaphor for how the tempests of human nature are like the sea. And we have to make our most important decisions, not during the tempest itself, but rather when the tempest is passed and you can measure the distance from sea to land. It's a wonderful way, I think, of hearing how someone could take a rollicking crowd that's just heard like a rock star speech and juxtapose that with an eloquent demonstration of sober sensibility, which people, I think, attached to James Garfield. So tell me what the effect of this speech was.

Well said. So even just listening to you recited just gives me chills. I mean, it really is just so powerful. And you can just picture this hall. And so what happened is just what you're describing. So everyone have been screaming and stamping. And it's just these eyes are really rowdy. And they slowly become more and more quiet and still. They're just absolutely still. And they're sort of mesmerized by this beautiful speech and this powerful. speaker. And at one point, he says, so gentlemen, I ask you, what do we want? And someone in the crowd shouts, we want Barfield. And again, he wasn't a candidate. He didn't want to be the one. He was on there to give nominate address for someone else. But everybody goes crazy again. And so he has to, and you can, you can read it in the speech. He says, please, please, be still so I can finish. You know, so I can explain to you what I'm trying to tell you and trying to get everybody to calm down. But so then he finishes and he sits down and the balloting begins and it goes round after round. It ends up being the most ballots ever for Republican nomination 36 ballots.

But suddenly someone stands up and gives their ballot to Garfield. And he's shocked and appalled and he stands up and he, he, he, He says absolutely not. You know, I'm not a candidate, but he's sort of shouted down. He has to sit down. And another round comes more votes, more votes. And sort of what begins is sort of a trickle. Comes a stream and a river.

And suddenly this flood of votes. And before he knows it, Garfield finds himself the Republican nominee for president of the United States. So Garfield wins the Republican nomination to scoff. skip through the end of this election. He goes up against another union general, Hancock, wins a election with 9 million votes cast by a margin of 2,000 votes. I believe it is the closest election in American history by popular vote margin. So he wins by just a whisker. And he enters Washington. And at this point, I think we have to introduce the second major character of this story, except this character is not a person but a system. What was the

spoil system and how central was it to Washington politics in, say, the 1870s and 1880s? So it ran everything. At that time, the Republican Party was divided. There were the stalwarts who believed very much in the spoil system, giving jobs to your friends or to people who had done favors for you, basically giving away government positions. And then there were what they called the half-breeds, the reformers. Garfield was among the reformers. But this man, Roscoe Conkling, I had mentioned earlier, who gave the nominating address for Ulysses S. Grant. He was like the president of the stalwart.

I mean, he was king of the stalwarts, right? And he was a very, very powerful man. He was a senior senator from New York, and he controlled the New York customs. and which is, you know, it bought in more money than really anything else. And so he was incredibly powerful. And so, and he was going to be kind of the man behind this loan, as he believed and most people did, if Grant were to get the nomination. And so he was not just angry.

He was apoplectic that Garfield had been given the nomination instead. And he made himself, he decided at that moment to make him. himself, Garfield's enemy. And he had a person in place to help him do that. And that person was Chester Arthur. So Chester Arthur was also a stalwart because he was completely Conkling's creation. So the only job that he had ever had was given to him by Grant because of Conkling. And so right after Garfield's given the nomination, he's told, guess what Chester Arthur is going to be your running mate? He didn't have any say in the matter, but they knew that they needed Conkling's help to win. And they obviously, they were right.

They needed that. And to make Conkling happy, they said, okay, Chester Arthur will be your running mate. And so they win and they get into power. And so from the very beginning, Garfield's own running mate is his very open, adversary. So there's this marriage of convenience that creates the tickets and in office, maybe just go a little bit deeper on how the spoil system worked as it related to Garfield staffing his administration. Like for someone who's more familiar with the, we're in an interesting moment right now, but the somewhat more meritocratic way that positions like, you know,

Secretary of State or Secretary of Health and Human Services, the more meritocratic way it's typically been done in the previous 50, 100 years. How did the spoil system create government in the late 19th century? So, for instance, when Garfield was trying to make his own administration, he, you know, every person he would go to would eventually back out because they They were afraid of angering honkling. So usually it was just a new administration would come in. They would fire everybody. They would put their friends in place.

I mean, we, as you mentioned, and for reasons that we'll find later on, we're used to, okay, you get someone who's actually qualified, crazy idea. Someone who's actually, they've had the education, they have the experience for the job. Depending on the job, maybe they'll take the test to prove. that they are qualified for the job. And it's not just a political appointment. But the spoils system was obviously all about, okay, to the victor goes to spoils, right?

And so you get all of your people in place and you run it that way. I believe to the victor goes to spoils is a quote from a legislature from the 1820s or 1830s because it was with Andrew Jackson becoming president that the spoils system really blossomed into view in American politics. There is one gentleman who's hoping to take advantage of this spoil system, and that's a man who's absolutely crucial to the story named Charles Guteau. Who was Charles Guteau?

Charles Guteau was really Garfield's opposite in every way. While Garfield sort of worked hard and was educated and succeeded, succeeded, succeeded in his life. Guteau failed everywhere he went. He tried to be a lawyer and he failed at that. He tried to be a journalist and he failed at that. He even joined a free love commune. And he was rejected by the women at the free love commune. They nicknamed him Charles Get It Out. So nothing really worked for him. But he believed he had sort of these visions of grandeur, right?

He was very, very delusional and he was mentally ill. And at one point, he became obsessed with Garfield. And so it was during the right before, actually, the Republican convention. He believes another man is going to win. He believes Grant is going to win. And so he writes a speech, and he believes that he can give this speech, and it's going to put the president in the White House, and the president will be grateful to him, and then we'll give him a high office.

So he had his sights on being the ambassador to France. Even again, he had no experience, no education in that way, but he didn't think he needed it, right, because it was the spoil system. So instead of Grant, Garfield wins, and Dutot becomes obsessed with him. And he, again, believes, genuinely believes that because he wrote the speech and he was able to give it one time and then kind of fled the stage. And then Garfield wins, he believes that he had put Garfield. in the White House. And so Garfield owes him this position, and he starts stalking him.

And if I'm not mistaken, Gattot meets with Garfield at least once, maybe more than once, which is remarkable when you think that some fundamentally unemployed person who might be suffering from what we today would call, you know, schizophrenia, certainly delusions of grandeur, is meeting with the president to talk about a potential position. The job of the presidency in the 1870s, 1880s is very different than it is today because you don't have this meritocratic buffering around you, this, you know, a seat of cabinets who have, who all have their own bureaucracies around them. It's a very different job where the president is meeting directly or responding directly to hundreds of petitions for jobs today. Before we get into this

fateful day on July 2nd, 1881, can we just be? pause here on what was the job of the American president like in 1880? What was a day in the life of James Garfield in, say, April of 1881 as he's just beginning to staff his administration? So it's really extraordinary. I mean, it's hard for us to imagine, but Garfield had to meet with office seekers from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at absolutely every single day. So, anybody coming in like, hey, I'd really love to run the post office. You know, they would have a right to come meet with the president and make their case directly to the president of the United States.

And it drove Garfield crazy. You know, as you said, I mean, he never really wanted this position, but now that he had it, he wanted to do something serious with it. He needed time to think and to work. And he said he wondered why anyone would ever want to be president. It just made him miserable. but this was a big part of the job. And another reason, I mean, obviously the spoil system was part of the problem.

But another reason was the fact that Americans were very proud of the fact that we had chosen, we choose our own leaders, right? And so, you know, in Europe, there were a lot of assassinations going on. But the idea in the United States was, well, that's because those leaders are foisted on those people and they're unhappy. But we get to choose our own leaders. And guess what? he's not a king. He worked for us, so we should have access to him. There shouldn't be a buffer

between us and the president of the United States. And there was no one to protect the president, and there was no one to tell him, no, you don't have to spend your time this way. Yeah, it should be noted before we get to this next chapter of the story that there is no Secret Service in existence. And as I understand it, there won't be anything like the Secret Service until about 20 years later when the next president, William McKinley, is assassinated. So it took us a few assassinations once every 20 years to recognize that maybe we should surround the most important person in the United States with one or two armed guards. But in any case, that's a part of McKinley's story in the 20th century.

The date is July 2nd, 1881, were just months into Garfield's tenure. and this man Charles Gatot, who, as you said, has been stalking President Garfield around Washington, D.C. for weeks, follows him into a railroad station at the southern corner of 6th Street, Northwest, and what is now Constitution Avenue, which is where the National Gallery of Art is currently located. At the time, it was a grand railroad station. Garfield walks into this railroad station with, I believe, one of his cabinet members. He's fully exposed to the riff-rassad. around him. He again, he's a democratically elected man of the people. And tell me what happens when Gatot and Garfield are united inside this Washington, D.C. railroad station. So just really quickly to follow the point, you said, so Guto has been stalking the president for weeks. I mean, at one point, he even followed the president. Garfield left the White House. He walked down the street to his secretary of state's house by himself. And the two men walked through the streets of Washington, D.C., with Guto following them the entire way, holding a loaded gun. So Guto

had been thinking at different points. He even thought about shooting Garfield in church. He followed him to his church. So he'd been finding different ways and sort of considering what would be the best place. And so he finds out that Garfield's going to go on this trip and he goes, he follows him, or he's waiting for him at the Baltimore and Potomac train station, as you said, in Washington, D.C. and he watches his Garfield walks in, and he steps out of the shadows, and he immediately shoots him twice. He shoots him once in the arm, and then he shoots him a second time in the back. And what's incredible here is this bullet, it goes through his back, but it doesn't hit any vital organs. It doesn't hit his spinal cord. It goes to the left and behind his pancreas,

and it stops there. But he is in this train station. Obviously, it erupts and just screams. And Guto is immediately captured. And the president falls to the ground of this train station. And you think, like, I mean, I can't imagine a more germ-infested environment than a train station. But that's where he's lying. And he has with him, as you say, his secretary of state,

is with him and they're calling for help. And there are several doctors who come to his aid and they put him on this old horsehair and hay mattress and they take them upstairs to this quieter room just above the train station. He doesn't die. He doesn't lose consciousness. He is transported on this bed of hay

to the top of the train station. And fortunately, at least it seems, to Garfield and his backers, there's an experienced doctor who is available to take over his care. Dr. Dr. Willard Bliss. And when I say Dr. Doctor, that's because the man's name is doctor. His first name is doctor. So you'd think he would know what he's doing. Before we answer the question of whether or not he knew what he was doing, just give us a little bit of background.

who is Dr. Bliss? So Dr. Bliss was actually, you know, a well-respected doctor. The reason he ends up being there is Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son, was also there. He was in Garfield's cabinet, and he thinks of this Dr. Dr. Willard Bliss immediately because Bliss had been at his father's deathbed. so and he had known Bliss. And so he, so he calls him to come help. But Bliss himself is a very interesting character.

I mean, he had both been sort of at, on the cutting edge at one point with medicine. And he had also come up, he used to sell something called Kundarongo, which he claimed could cure anything. It could cure cancer, it could cure syphilis,

whatever is ailing you, Cundarongo, could fix it. He was actually in, prison for a short time, for taking bribes. So he was a little, a little bit of a controversial character, but Robert Todd Lincoln trusted him and believed that he would be the right man to come. And so what he does, though, Bliss steps in and he immediately takes over, and he starts probing the wound in Garfield's back with unsterilized fingers and instruments. And obviously, there's no pain kill or anything for Garfield as he's lying in this German-infested environment.

Before we get to the treatment that Garfield receives at the hands of Dr. Bliss, I do just want to pause and dilate on the character of Robert Lincoln because your book makes the unbelievable observation that not only was Robert, who was Abraham Lincoln's, I believe, oldest son and only surviving son after the 1860s, present at his father. assassination, present at James Garfield's shooting inside this DC railroad station, and then 21 years later, or two decades later, a member of McKinley's cabinet when McKinley is shot. So this is one of those situations where if you wanted to be president between 1860 and 1910, you wanted Robert Lincoln as far away from you as possible. This poor guy was the angel of death.

No, truly. Going back to Garfield, so he's been shot twice, one bullet is still inside of him. Go into a little bit more detail and feel free to be as gross as necessary when describing how over the next few weeks Dr. Bliss applies his so-called expertise. So, first of all, they decide to take Garfield to the White House because at that time, the last place you'd want to be if you were sick, if you could afford it at all. would be the hospital because they're so overcrowded. They're just disgusting. They're just places to go to die. So they take him back to the White House, but the White House is actually not that much better. At that point, it was falling apart. There were rats everywhere. But they put him in his bedroom at the White House. And Bliss immediately, completely isolate. He sends every other doctor, including Garfield's own doctor, who had been out of town and came racing back, he dismisses him

without any, I mean, he just takes over with no one's given him that responsibility, but he takes over. He won't let Garfield see anyone, even his own Secretary of State, so he totally isolates him in this room in the White House. And

what he does to Garfield over the next several weeks are just unbelievable. I mean, it's just heartbreaking. He believes, so he's sort of afraid of anything that's new and he believes is controversial, including antipsis. So Joseph Lister, you know, we know Listerine. It was named for him. So he was a very highly

respected surgeon in England who discovered antipsopsis. And he went around the world, everywhere he could, explaining the importance of it, used carbolic acid at that time to sterilize instruments and hands. And he even came, he was invited to the United States, before Garfield became president to 1876's big symposium in Philadelphia to explain to doctors that if you don't sterilize your hands and instruments, you run the very real risk of killing your patients. But nobody was really listening to him, at least in the United States, even though in other parts of the world, especially Europe, the death rates had just plummeted after using anticepsis. So Bliss especially doesn't really believe it.

And he believes that he must find this bullet. So day after day after day, he's inserting unstyarized fingers and instruments in this bullet, probing in this wound, probing for the bullet. He's also giving Garfield a gunshot victim rich foods and alcohol. So he's not giving him nearly enough water. horribly dehydrated and he's um he's start he's just unbelievably sick and he's starving to death he's losing so much weight i mean if you can see if you ever any of your listeners ever have a chance to go to the garfield home they have his death mask there and it would break your heart i mean he's so

thin and he was basically being tortured to death in fact garfield himself at one point when he could Still Wright wrote Strangulatus pro-Republica tortured for the Republic. I really do want to dial it on this as horrifying as it is because this part of the book was among the most moving parts. I want people to imagine. Don't imagine being shot. That's too ghoulish. Just imagine being sick in the environment that James Garfield was sick. He's brought back to the White House because, as you said, the situation in late 19th century is the inverse of today. You don't go to hospitals to be cured. You go to hospitals to die.

And if you're a member of the elite, you stay home and you let the doctors come to you. But the White House is a disaster. There are rats everywhere. The home is falling apart. The walls are keeling. The sewage system is a disaster. It smells horrendous throughout the residence. And it's July in Washington in the swamp.

And it's super hot, right? It's 95 degrees on some day. I think they experiment with some early use of air conditioning technology by putting a bunch of ice around his home and around his room and blowing air over it. But it's not until I think about 15 years later that carrier patents the first working air conditioning service. So you are just talking about one of the most miserable places to possibly be sick. 95 degrees. And what is your doctor feeding you like rich, creamy French foods, and he's pouring brandy down your mouth while he's probing his disgusting dirty hands inside of your wound and not understanding what part of your body

the bullet is in. I mean, truly torture. And I believe, tell me if this is wrong, Garfield, before being shot, weighed 220 pounds. By the time he finally passes, he weighs under 130 pounds. He loses 90 pounds in a matter of months. There is a noble last-ditch effort here to save the president. And it comes from the person who inspired this entire book for you, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

What did Bell build in the 11th hour to try to save the president? Bell is just 34 years old at this time. He had just invented the telephone five years earlier. and he happens to have a little laboratory there in Washington, D.C. And so he knows right away what's happened. And he gets this idea right away because he says to himself, you know, Bell, interestingly, Bell just wanted to help people. So both of his brothers had died before he was 24 years old.

Both his mother and his wife were deaf. And in fact, he was a teacher of the death. And he thought that science should be able to do better than what he knew Bliss was doing. torturing the president in the White House at this time. And so he has this idea. He had invented something before called an induction balance. And it was try to keep the static off of the telegraph line and of the static caused by telegraph lines creating static in telephones. And so it's basically the first metal detector. And, you know, this is 15 years before the invention of the medical x-ray. So nobody knows where the bullet is.

But the bullet, all they know is the bullet went in the right side of the president's back. And so he starts testing this induction balance. And he does everything. You know, he goes to this veterans home. And because this is after the Civil War, right? Not long after the Civil War. So all these people walking around with bullets in them doing just fine. In fact, the man who captured Goucault at the train station had a bullet in his head.

still. So he would go to this veteran's home and he would test it out on these people who had bullets in them. And he would buy huge slabs of meat and very bullets in them and test out. And it was working. Everything was working. And so he contacted the White House and he talked to Bliss and Bliss invited him to the White House to test it out. And he tested out, but it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work. Is it because the machine itself was not capable of finding the bullet? It absolutely was. There are two reasons. One, seems very obvious to us. But at that time, it was very unusual for someone to have a mattress with metal coils in it. But this was the president of the United States. He had a mattress with metal coils. Of course, that's going to affect a metal detector. And the second

reason, though, is really heartbreaking because Bliss, who saw in this national tragedy, sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for himself, for fame and recognition, had openly said to the

American people that the bullet was in the right side. So he would only let Bell run the metal detective induction bounce over the right side of the president's body, but the bullet in fact had gone to the left. So on top of all these mistakes that Bliss has made, he also essentially bullies Alexander Grandbelle

into not testing out his early metal detection technology on the part of Garfield's body that actually has the piece of metal lodged into it. It's just such an incredible and tragic irony. So Garfield is moved to the New Jersey Beach in his final days. He's withering away. He is starving to death. He finally dies in front of an open window looking out at the Atlantic Ocean. And after his death, doctors finally cut him open and look at what's inside performing an autopsy. And I just want to read before I throw it to you here from your work. This is page 268 of the paperback version of your book. This is describing Garfield's body. Quote, what was perhaps as stunning to the doctors as the location of the bullet was the infection that had ravaged Garfield's body. Evidence of the

proximate cause of his death, profound septic poisoning was nearly everywhere they looked. There were collections of abscesses below his right ear, in the middle of his back, across his shoulders, and near his left kidney. He had infection-induced pneumonia in both of his lungs, and there was an enormous abscess measuring half a foot in diameter near his liver. The immediate cause of Garfield's death was more difficult to determine. They remove most of his organs, as you say, but they finally find it the hemorrhage that flooded Garfield's abdominal cavity with a pint of blood had coagulated into an irregular form nearly as large as a man's fist. This, they realized, had been the cause of the terrible pain that forced him to cry out to his assistant just before

his death. End quote. At a higher level, what kind of a president do you think James Garfield would have been. I mean, this is an era of, to be honest, extremely forgettable names. Garfield's brief presidency is bookended by Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur, right? One-term presidents who are among the least celebrated men to ever hold that office. Right. Do you think Garfield would have distinguished himself? I do. I mean, it's impossible to say, but again, if you think about the things that were important to him at the time and the things that he was able to accomplish in his long period

in Congress in a short time as president, you know, again, bringing up black suffrage, fighting for the Freedmen's Bureau, believing in the importance of education and trying to have that available to as many Americans as possible. He was also thinking very much about the wider world. And so I think that he would have been one of our great presidents. And one of the main reasons, though, I think that he would have been great is that he came into this not owing anything to anyone. And I think that's, it's obviously very, very rare, but he may be really our only president to be in that position because he didn't want the presidency. It was sort of foisted on him.

So he hadn't, I mean, usually I think when presidents get to where they are, they've had to make compromises, whether they want to or whether they think that they ever will have to, they end up making compromises that they maybe didn't want to make. And Garfield didn't have to. You know, he came saying, this is what I believe, this is what I want to do, and he was made president. So I think that's a very, very powerful, very rare position to be in. I think he could have accomplished a lot had he been able to serve out his firm. And even in death, he accomplished something. I mean, Garfield's death really did change the country. The top of page 289 in the paperback, you write that, quote, to Americans in 1881, the principal danger, the president

faced was not from assassins, but from political corruption, end quote. There really was truly a sense that what had killed Garfield, maybe before the dirty fingers of his quack doctor, was the excesses of the spoil system. And Gautaut was a manifestation of those excesses. Tell us a little bit about how the death of Garfield and the obvious blame put on the man who shot him, Charles Gatot, led us to the end. of the spoil system with the Pendleton Act? So I mentioned Chester, Arthur, earlier, being sort of a creation of conglings, being very much a stalwart, being a creation of the spoil system himself.

Every position he had gotten was because of the spoil system. I mean, really quickly, like, you know, he would show up for work around noon. He loved dinner parties and fine wine. He even pretended his birth date was a year later than it actually was to seem more youthful. So this is the kind of person he was. And so when Garfield was dying, everyone was horrified at the thought that Chester Arthur would become president and believe that that's what he wanted and that Conkling would control the White House. What happened was actually very, very different from that. Chester Arthur sort of became the man that he never thought he would be.

He was horrified by what had happened to Garfield. He refused to go to Washington. He stayed in New York. He didn't want it to look like he was waiting in the wings. He was absolutely grief-stricken. And when Garfield did die, Chester Arthur really stepped up. I mean, he never became a great president, but he became an honest president. He tried to become kind of president that Garfield would have been had he lived. And he passed the Pendleton Act, which was the beginning of the end of the spoil system, the system that had created him. I want to end this discussion close to where I began it in my open with the centennial. I'm totally dazed and dazzled by the 19th century and the speed with which the world changed.

And not just the fact that you see in this 25-year period the invention of practically everything that we see when we look outside of the major city. I mean, the internal combustion engine, elevators, skyscrapers, all of it comes from this like 40-year stretch of ingenuity in the late 19th century. But that ingenuity also extends to medicine. And it is so rich and ironic and even tragic that had Garfield been shot 15 years later, the bullet in his back would have been discoverable by X-ray and invention of the 1890s and cured by antiseptic surgery, which, if not invented the 1890s, because you mentioned that James Lister, shoot, Joseph Lister was having these technical breakthroughs in antiseptic technology in the 1870s,

1880s was nonetheless implemented much more in the 1890s. And so, you know, even if Garfield had been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Like that's, that to me is like this really interesting thing. And it contains within it a lesson maybe about technology and science. It's like his death was this little window of critical ignorance in which doctors were prideful enough to try to cure Garfield, but ignorant enough to understand exactly how to do it. I guess I would just love you as both a political historian

and a science historian. Just dilate a bit on what you think are the most interesting, scientific and technological conclusions of this episode of American history. Well, actually, to me, what's most striking is something that you mentioned. It's the fact that ignorance and arrogance always go hand in hand,

and they are always the most dangerous foe that we face. And that's absolutely what happened here. It was a combination of one man's madness, Charles Gutot, but really another man's ignorance, chosen ignorance, and arrogance that led to the death of one of our most promising leaders. And it is heartbreaking. And I think at the time, people knew not only was it just this horrible sorrow for them as a country, although it did bring the country. That's another thing that came out of it. It brought the country together for the first time since the Civil War, really,

because Lincoln's death, the North obviously blamed the South. But Garfield was president of everyone, right? North and South, freedman, former slave owner. pioneer, immigrant. And really, his death really brought the country together for the first time since the civil war. And so there was that good that came out of it. And I do think as heartbreaking as Garfield's death was and as needless as it was, as tragic as it was, it did bring about so much good for our country for a huge number. I mean, it obviously, without question, saved countless lives simply with the invention

or the acceptance of antiseptis and the invention of the induction balance before the medical x-ray. I want to end this conversation with Garfield's words, two quotes that you begin two different chapters with in the book. And both of the quotes, I think, really beautifully echo the themes that you help to land us on. Here's the first one. I sometimes think that we cannot know any man thoroughly while he is in perfect health. as the ebb tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea,

so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the character of a man. And you talk in the book about, you know, what a gentleman and even a comedian James Garfield was on his deathbed, you know, very much retaining the spirit that he carried through his life. And one last quote on, I think, that very spirit, quote, I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities might be unbuttoned under his coat, end quote. James Garfield was a really extraordinary man, and I was very, very glad to meet him in your book.

So Candice Millard, thank you so much for writing the book and for talking me about it. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.