44 pages • 1 hour read
Candice MillardDestiny of the Republic
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Tradition Should Not Always Be Blindly Followed
This is an unmistakable conclusion from the story Millard tells. A main focus of the book is that Garfield need not have died from the wounds inflicted by Guiteau’s bullet, if only modern medical treatments had been followed. Dr. Bliss, the doctor in charge of the president’s care, clearly represents the old guard of the medical establishment, rejecting Joseph Lister’s ideas about antiseptic methods. Lister and Alexander Graham Bell represent the newer generation, each of whom presented evidence of something that could have saved Garfield’s life. Lister was rejected outright while Bell was limited in scope of service.
Good Can Come from Bad
The result of President Garfield’s murder was in fact a change in something that had contributed to it: the spoils system. In his mind, Charles Guiteau thought he deserved a job in Garfield’s administration based on what he saw as his great contribution to the success of Garfield’s campaign. (Actually, he had done next to nothing.) This was common at the time under the spoils system, though not without its detractors. Garfield had been part of the faction of the Republican Party that had sought to change this system. Before he died, he had bucked the system by appointing his own head of the New York Customs House without consulting Senator Roscoe Conkling, of New York. This resulted in an outcry from Conkling and the Stalwarts, showing that if a push had been made to abolish the system outright, it would have met strong resistance. Once Chester Arthur became president after Garfield’s death, however, he had a personal transformation and fought the spoils system–despite having once been one of its greatest beneficiaries–by signing the Pendleton Civil Service Act into law in 1883. As Millard writes about Garfield’s death, “Out of this common sorrow grew a fierce resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again” (288).
Garfield as the Personification of the United States
Millard alludes to this early on when she describes Garfield at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876:
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 (7-8).
The comparisons there between man and country are several. Both are young, both had defied the odds to rise from virtually nothing, both had a passion for absorbing new things. In addition, we learn later in the book that Garfield was strongly opposed to slavery and in favor of racial equality. While this was a work in progress nationwide, the country had just fought a civil war over this issue and had abolished slavery; racial equality was an ideal that many hoped would soon follow.
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By Candice Millard
