From the printing press to the personal computer, numerous inventions have transformed our world. However, considering the degree to which it has altered the playing field between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, the big and the small, none can claim a greater impact on human civilization than the gun. Prior to its introduction, strength and skill were required to kill. After all, the deed had to be accomplished with blade or projectile, both of which demanded extensive training to be used properly. But the gun makes no such claims on its user. It needs only to be aimed and fired to make it as lethal a weapon for the fool as for the genius. Rarely has this truth been better demonstrated than in the arena of political assassination where the deranged can now, with a single shot, bring low the great. And of the histories documenting such incidents, few are the equal of this latest effort from Ms. Millard.
Though he would live on for two more months, the life of James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was effectively ended on July 2, 1881 when Charles Guiteau, a mentally disturbed American, approached him in a Washington D.C. train station and shot him in the back. Garfield, Ohio's version of Abraham Lincoln, was a self-made man who, having pulled himself up from impoverished beginnings, went on to serve with distinction in the American civil War before ascending to a seat in the House of Representatives. His career reached its zenith in 1880 when, despite not seeking out the office, the honor of the Republican nomination for president was bestowed upon him in spite of both his stiff resistance and a crowded field of other, overeager claimants. He was, in every respect, a man in whom his country and his state could be proud. Guiteau, meanwhile, was a lifelong shyster. Having been rejected by the University of Michigan, he turned, as a young man, to a utopian cult in New York for solace. But when even they tired of him, he fell back on the steadfast charity of his sister to keep a roof over his head. A man who bounced from scheme to scheme, Guiteau represented himself as a respectable lawyer in order to grift money from generous dupes until the electoral season of 1880 when he fixed upon the notion of aiding the Republican nominee to victory. When Garfield and his advisors failed to recognize or reward him for his dubious efforts, Guiteau took his revenge and, in doing so, consigned James Garfield to 80 days of feverish torment until, on September 9, 1881, he died in Ohio, having been president for a mere 200 days.
Destiny of The Republic recounts the lives of these two, disparate men, couching them in the America of the 1880s. Only 15 years after the civil War, Ms. Millard describes the deep wounds which yet divided the nation even after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. But as much as that conflict still weighed on the national psyche, America was, in 1881, a country of burgeoning technology. Advancements both in communications and the practice of medicine would go on to catalyze and shape the 20th century. And yet these innovations would come too late for James Garfield who, in spite of the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, and because of the ignorance of backward-thinking doctors, died at the dawn of a transformation in medical thought which may well have saved his life if Guiteau's bullets had come even a year later.
Ms. Millard is a first-rate historiographer who never fails to inform or entertain. Her biography of Theodore Roosevelt's journey along the River of Doubt was gripping, but she has outdone that effort with this compelling history of two very different men who, in one fateful moment, came together and changed a country's future. Though she is perhaps a bit too eager to paint Garfield as the noble hero and Guiteau the disreputable villain, the manner in which she imbeds these men and their moment in the accelerating, technological change of the 1880s leaves even the skeptical reader defenseless against a fascinating narrative which flows with the smoothness of liquid gold. Her descriptions of the medical torments to which Garfield was senselessly put are as riveting as Bell's efforts to save him were novel. The reader is left with little doubt that he has not only witnessed the cost of ignorance, but the beginning of a new era of innovation that would quickly consign the 19th century to the dusty annals of history.. (4/5 Stars)
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