After the president at the center of a heated political debate on the nature of America’s republic is shot, doctors and scientists fight each other to save his life.

Now That Should Be A Movie

It is called Destiny of The Republic

It is a political thriller

In the vein of Jackie.

It is like The Current Wars met JFK.

It follows wounded statesman James A. Garfield

And passionate inventor Alexander Graham Bell

As they fight political corruption and to save Garfield’s life.

Problems arise when Garfield is shot and a prominent doctor insists that he and he only is responsible for the president’s life.

Together their sacrifices will lead to reform in the Unites States Government and life-saving inventions.

The idea came to me when in my studies of American history I read about Chester Arthur’s character arc regarding the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

My unique approach would be the intersecting of three stories involving the developing sciences of health, electricity and criminal investigations as the very nature of the American Republic is on the line.

A set piece would be when the train carrying President Garfield arrives at a seaside cottage. Along the tracks Americans stood in silent respect. When the train reaches the cottage it continues on 3,200 feet of track laid the night before by 2000 people so the president can be taken to the door of the cottage where he would stay. However, the train cannot reach the cottage due to its steep hilltop location. A crowd has waited all day for the president’s arrival. As soon as the problem becomes apparent, two hundred men run forward. They grab ahold of the train cars and silently roll the train up the hill.

Target audiences would be men and women, 20-70, history buffs, science nerds, and fans of medical and legal dramas and political thrillers.

Audiences would want to watch it because of the fascinating story of medical history, scientific advancement, historic importance, political thrills, romance, and positive message about our nation overcoming our differences peacefully.  

Today’s book I would like to pitch as a movie is Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard, from Anchor Books, a division of Random House.

A contentious issue of the 1880 Republican National Convention was that of patronage, dividing the party along the lines of Stalwarts vs. Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts had political machines and believed in the spoils system which allowed elected officials to appoint family members, friends, and supporters to government jobs. The Half-Breeds, called half-Republicans by the Stalwarts, believed in civil service reform and meritocracy. The convention settled on James Garfield, a Half-Breed not actively seeking the nomination.

Like the Roman leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Garfield spent most of his campaign sitting on his front porch on his farm in Ohio greeting the voters who came to visit. Having been born in a log cabin, he was able to connected with the common people. When a group of German immigrants appeared, he  gave a speech in their native language, the first for a presidential candidate.

The leader of The Stalwarts was Roscoe Conkling, a senior senator from New York. As the controller of the New York Customs House, the largest federal office in the land and collector of 70% of the country’s custom revenues, Trump, I mean Conkling, was so powerful that he had turned down President Ulysses S. Grant’s offer to nominate him to the Supreme Court. The source of his power was the spoil system as he gave jobs at the Custom House out only to those who swore loyalty and obedience to the Republican Party of New York and himself. During the nomination process he passionately backed Grant against Garfield.

After Garfield was nominated, Conkling tried to corner him into appointing the men of his choosing to the president’s cabinet. One Stalwart that made it into Garfield’s administration was Chester Arthur as vice president. The recently widowered “Chet” Chester had held only one public office, collector of the New York Custom House. While he was Garfield’s vice, he was very much Conklin’s man.

No sooner had Garfield been inaugurated than the issue of patronage was front and center. Before he had even finished breakfast on his first Monday as president, a line had already begun snaking from the White House down to and along Pennsylvania Avenue. Of the hundred callers that he received each day, only a few had qualifying skills and experiences. Most just listed off their personal acquaintances in powerful political positions.

Despite the gaggle of office seekers wondering around the White House, no one worried about the safety of the president. The assassination of  Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth just 15 years earlier was considered an act of war, therefore not something to be feared in peace time. Even with a recent slough of assassinations both attempted and successful on monarchs in Europe, Americans considered themselves immune due to the nature of their representative republic. Why should the people go through all the trouble of assassinating an elected official when the people can just vote them out next election?

One of the few people guarding the president was Garfield’s twenty-three-year-old private secretary, Joseph Stanly Brown. The consequences of this lack of security would become plainly obvious on July 2, 1881, when Garfield, just like any other private citizen, entered the Baltimore and Potomac Station to catch a train to visit his recently ill wife, Lucretia. He was followed by an office seeker named Charles Guiteau.

Guiteau had been in Washington since Garfield’s inauguration and had been seeking a job from him ever since Election Day, 1880. He had basically stalked the president, sending him a congratulatory note in November asking for an appointment in the State Department. Once the president moved into the White House, Guiteau was among the many visitors, coming early and often. He even met the president face to face. At a White House reception open to all, he had given Lucretia his card and carefully whispered his name in her ear.

When Garfield entered the train station, Guiteau was shuffling back and forth between the ladies and gentlemen’s rooms. The matron of the ladies waiting room noticed Guiteau nervously taking his hat on and off and wiping sweat off his face. He was in a position that gave him a clear shot at president’s back. He raised his revolver with an outreached, unwavering arm and pointed. 

Garfield was just three feet away when Guiteau pulled the trigger. The first bullet struck Garfield in the right arm and passed through his coat. As he turned to see who had shot him, Guiteau fired a second time. The bullet ripped into the back of the president, the impact thrusting him forward. His legs buckled and his hands reached out to break his fall as he sank to the station’s carpeted floor. Guiteau tried to flee but was caught by a ticket agent who had exchanged a tip of the hat with him just a few minutes before. Garfield would linger until September 19 before succumbing to infection of his wounds.

Some may wonder how a movie about a man lying in bed until he dies could be interesting. But this is no English Patient that would cause Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes to yell during a theatrical showing, “Just die already! Die!”

There are multiple plots and subplots woven together.

Main Plot: Doctors and Scientists Fighting Each Other Over How To Save Garfield’s Life

The bullet that had entered Garfield’s back missed his spinal cord, vital arteries and major organs. After entering his back four inches to the right of his spine, it traveled 12 inches before resting next to his pancreas after breaking two ribs and grazing an artery. The first doctor to inspect him, arriving five minutes after the shooting, was Dr. Smith Townsend, the health officer of the District of Columbia. He stuck an unsterilized finger into the president’s wound, causing a small hemorrhage. He would be the first of nine doctors to examine the president.

The second doctor upon the scene was Surgeon-In-Chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital, Charles Purvis. He was one of the first black men in America to receive medical training at a university and one of the first black men to serve on the faculty of a medical school. When he suggested wrapping Garfield’s body in blankets and placing hot water bottles on his feet and legs, he became the first black man to treat a president of the United States.

One of the men at the scene of the assassination was Robert Todd Lincoln. He called for Doctor Willard Bliss, one of the doctors who had tried to save his father from the wounds of an assassin’s bullet. Bliss and Garfield already had a past, having been neighbors in Ohio. Garfield had even supported him after he was expelled from the District of Columbia Medical Society for disagreeing with the barring of African American doctors. When Bliss arrived, he briefly questioned Purvis and Townsend before plugging his unwashed finger into Garfield’s wound. Without any anesthesia, Garfield had to endure Bliss’ deep probe, which included the doctor’s finger getting caught between fractured bone fragments and the end of a rib. This caused Purvis to protest, a gutsy move for a black man in that day and time. Bliss ignored him and plunged a probe of inflexible silver into the wound.

The next doctor arrived after Garfield had been moved to the White House. Jedediah Hyde Baxter, chief medical purveyor of the army and Garfield’s personal physician, had been out of town at the time of the shooting. When he arrived at the Executive Mansion, a war of words erupted between him and Bliss over who would be better to examine the president. Realizing that a shouting match would not be healthy for the president resting in the next room, Baxter left. Afterwards Bliss sent letters to Townsend and Purvis thanking them for and informing them that their services were no longer needed. Instead of it being a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, it was one cook making the heat unbearable so the other cooks would get out of the kitchen.

Doctors who could stand the heat were Lucretia’s personal physician, Dr. Susan Ann Edison, one if the first female doctors in America, and the president’s first cousin, Dr. Silas Boynton. After insulting their education and professional experience as compared to his, Bliss let them stay as long as they confined themselves to the duties of nurses.

It is important to note that doctors and medical professionals were battling over Dr. Joseph Lister’s germ theory and the importance of handwashing in 1881. Many young, inexperienced surgeons and doctors from rural areas espoused Lister’s theory. A Doctor E. L. Patee from Kansas wrote Lucretia advising that doctors should not probe the wound and to soak everything with carbolic acid. Patee and his colleagues of similar persuasion held little sway in the face of the eastern medical establishment. David Hayes Agnew of the University of Pennsylvania and Frank Hamilton of Bellevue Medical College in New York had openly opposed Lister a few years before at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Their views were the same when they arrived to assist Dr. Bliss.

While not a doctor, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell knew that in the case of a gunshot wound it was impossible to predict if the patient would live or die if the location of the bullet was unknown. He also knew the doctors were blindly searching for the lead in Garfield with knives and probes. Surely, he thought, science could “discover some less barbarous method.”

Then the proverbial lightbulb went off in his head: Electric Currents. A few years earlier he was trying to find a way to stop the interference of nearby telegraph wires from cluttering his telephone line with their rapid clicking sounds. He found that by cutting telephone wire in two and placing wires on either side of the telegraph line, the currents canceled each other out in a technique known as balancing the induction.

To find the bullet in Garfield, he would loop two wires into coils, connect one coil to a telephone receiver, and the other to a battery and a circuit interrupter. This changed the currents into those required for induction. Next, he would arrange the coils in positions that overlapped each other at the right amount. Then when he passed the coils over Garfield’s body, the metal bullet would upset the balance. Bell would literally hear the bullet.

Two weeks after the assassination attempt, Bell arrived at the White House. Surprisingly, Bliss agreed to meet him. It would create a bad public image to turn down a famous inventor. Despite the Executive Mansion being surrounded by soldiers, a sight considered un-American, scores of people with picnic baskets and blankets were camping on the lawn, awaiting news of the president’s health.

With the president’s temperature rising, Dr. Fauci, I mean Dr. Bliss, was willing for outsiders to assist. Garfield was laying on his bed, soaked in sweat as pus flowed freely from a drainage tube inserted by surgeons. The president was in deep pain and vomited frequently. Dr. Bliss, to the dismay of Dr. Boynton, had been serving the president a variety of foods, changing diets frequently. He refused to allow Garfield to be taken to a hospital, believing them unhealthy.

The White House was not a healthier alternative. Damp and rat infected, it had been built on the edge of a tidal marsh. The inadequate, half a century old plumbing collapsed under the daily intake, pipes disintegrating and saturating the basement with fecal matter. Washington was polluted with foul air and the July heat was insufferable.

In efforts to keep Garfield cool, the United States Army Corps of Engineers stepped up and designed America’s first ever air conditioning. They set up a thirty-six-inch electric fan that forced air through cheesecloth screens soaked in ice water and placed in a six-foot-long iron box, cooling the room down to 55 degrees.  At first the machine did not work, making the air heavy and filling Garfield’s room with an ear-splitting racket. Garfield eventually asked them to turn it off. The undaunted engineers fixed the problems and soon the president was resting in relative cool and quiet.

It was in these conditions that Bell set about his work with the coils. After weeks of whitling away, he had an instrument before him that he believed would save Garfield’s life. The exploring arm of the invention consisted of a handle attached to a disk. On the other side of the disk were the exploring coils, stacked on top each other. The primary coils were against the disk. The secondary coils against the primary. Four wires from the coils had been threaded up through a hole hollowed into the handle. Wires stretched out like tentacles, connecting to the telephone receiver and a balancing coil and others to a battery and an automatic circuit interrupter. He and his assistant had already tested it over a board covered with animal tissues and organs into which they had fired a bullet. The machine had worked! However, the machine was good for finding metal, not a lead bullet.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci, I mean Dr. Bliss, had started releasing bulletins to the public.  They contained positive headlines like “On the Road to Recovery” and “More and More Hope.” Garfield made few complaints, other than being lonely due to Dr. Bliss denying him visitors. He did write to one friend the words “Strangulatus pro Republic” ~ Tortured for the Republic.

His temperature was rising. Doctors Agnew and Frank Hamilton arrived and inserted more unsterilized fingers and instruments in his back. They pulled out fragments of muscle, connective tissue and bone, but still could not find the bullet. Using the tools he had just learned in medical school, a young doctor named Frank Baker, drew a remarkably accurate course of the bullet. However, he never shared it with Dr. Bliss, believing it would be “improper to urge views which were dramatically opposed to the gentlemen of acknowledged skill and experience.” Even doctors who were invited by Dr. Bliss to examine the president were discouraged from disagreement.

Bell arrived at the White House to test the machine on the president. When Garfield woke up, Bell had to explain why so many wires were hanging around him. Bliss declared that he himself would be the one to examine the president. As the doctor waved the wand up and down the president’s body, Bell listened. All he heard was a sputtering that appeared without warning. The doctors turned Garfield over and tried a second time. More sputtering. With the president exhausted, the experiment was discontinued. When Bell returned to his laboratory he discovered the fault was with how he had set up the machine.

With Garfield’s condition worsening Bliss became nervous and began mistrusting even the doctors he had personally handpicked. One doctor, Robert Rayburn, had been solely responsible for checking the president’s temperature and therefore called Old Temperature by Garfield, saw his job taken over by Bliss. Bliss continued to release positive bulletins, which the other doctors were expected to sign without examining the president themselves.

Bell returned to the White House for a second try a new and improved inductor balance. He had used it on a Civil War veteran and found the bullet. He was confident of success this time.

But Bliss would not let Bell waste his time and the president’s energy on experiments. Bell was to search the right side and that side only. The strange sound was still there, but this time Bell heard something else. The First Lady confirmed that she heard the same thing. But it was right where Bliss expected the bullet to be, so Bell hesitated. Without wasting any time, Dr. Bliss issued a bulletin claiming they had found the bullet. Still the unknown source of that other strange sound bugged Bell.

The next day Bell returned. He asked the surgeons to remove all metal from the area around the bed. They found a mattress of metal wires. The wires were interfering with the induction balance. He asked the White House to send a mattress to his laboratory for tests. When he arrived at his office, he was met with a telegraph informing him that his pregnant wife had fallen ill. He rushed to be with her in Boston.

Garfield continued to rot away. Bliss refused to admit that the president’s fever, vomiting, pounding heart and profuse sweating were symptoms of septicemia. Pus-filled lumps and abscesses appeared. One on his parotid gland ruptured, flooding his mouth with so much pus that he nearly drowned. Even after developing “pus fever” when he cut his finger on a surgical tool, Bliss continued to focus on other issues, such as the president’s dehydration and weight loss.

After nearly two months in the White House, Garfield had had enough. He wished to go to the sea. Bliss at first refused, but Garfield prevailed after insisting that as president he still had control over what was left of his life. With even his sycophants Agnew and Hamilton beginning to question him, Bliss relented.

The train ride to Elberon, New Jersey was peaceful. All the engineers and conductors in the region switched off their engines and waited for the president to pass so that no sound of bell or whistle would disturb him. Along the train tracks thousands of ordinary men and women stood in silent respect. When the train reached Elberon it continued on 3,200 feet of track laid by two thousand people the night before so the president could be taken to the door of where he was staying, Franklyn Cottage. However, the train could not reach the cottage due to its steep hilltop location.

A crowd had been waiting all day for the president’s arrival. As soon as the problem became apparent, two hundred men ran forward. They grabbed ahold of the train cars and silently rolled them up the hill.

Bell was unable to join the president at Elberon due to his own tragedy. His wife had given birth prematurely, the baby boy living only three hours. Devastated, Bell threw himself into his work, successfully testing a new inductor balance. But Bliss refused to allow it to be tested on the president. Bell would not give up on his invention, but even he knew that the president’s time had runout.

Garfield passed at 10:35 PM, September 19^th, 1881. An autopsy was performed. It was discovered that the bullet was encysted on the opposite side of his body then that which the doctors had been searching. Furthermore, they discovered that the president’s body was riddled with septic poisoning and had infection-induced pneumonia in both lungs. Then they found a rent nearly four-tenths of an inch long in the splenic artery. The hemorrhage had flooded his abdominal cavity with blood. The doctors realized that they had made a mistake and it was them, not the assassin’s bullet, that had killed Garfield.

Bliss was roundly condemned by the medical profession, including doctors he had allowed into his domain. When he presented a bill of $25,000 to Congress for his services and compensation for his own failing health, he received only $6,500. His medical career was at an end.

Bell was devastated by the president’s death. Yet he didn’t give up. Just a month later he successfully tested the inductor balance and discovered the bullet on a patient. His invention would go on to save the lives of soldiers in wars for decades to come. When doctors did not have an X-ray during World War I they used the induction balance.

Triumph also arose out of the tragedy of his son’s death. It inspired him to create a machine that would breathe for those who could not. His vacuum jacket, as he called it, would be the  precursor to the iron-lung.

Guiteau’s backstory could be shown in flashbacks as detectives interview him to see if there’s a possible conspiracy with Conkling.

Motherless by age seven and raised by a religious zealot of a father, Guiteau had dropped out of University of Michigan and joined a commune, which he then left and/was kicked out due to his “egoism and conceit.” His failed pursuits included a newspaper called The Theocrat, a marriage ended in divorce, a swindled inheritance, a fourteen year-long law career, and traveling evangelism. He left behind a trail of unpaid boarding house bills, train tickets and shattered relationships. Finally, his forbearing sister Frances decided to commit him to an asylum. But he escaped before she could have him declared legally insane.

Now where else was there for a failed lunatic to turn but to politics? After all, his life was like that of Garfield, starting off at a disadvantage and striving by pluck and luck to achieve greatness. Guiteau threw his lot in with the Republican Stalwarts. He believed presenting a speech to them could win him their good graces and an important government job. After writing the speech, he boarded a paddle steamer of the Stonington line on July 11, 1880. That night the steamer collided with the SS Narragansett. Over 50 people went down with the ships. Guiteau survived, proof to him that he had been chosen for greatness.

 A reason there would be an investigation in a possible Conkling-Guiteau link would be Garfield’s defiance of the patronage system. The President had defied Conkling by appointing a political enemy of his to the New York Customs House. On May 16^th Conklin resigned from the Senate. He left Washington for New York, hoping that the legislature would reelect him. They had not. He was losing control of his spidery empire over the Empire State’s politics. Would having the presidential threat to the spoils system removed protect what was left?

As the investigation into Guiteau goes deeper, there is testimony from a White House staff member. They recall Guiteau using up stationary to write the president. When the staff member refused to give him anymore, he slammed his hand down and declared, “Do you know who I am? … I am one of the men that made Garfield president.” The chief clerk at the State Department testified that Guiteau sent so many notes that he instructed the messenger not to forward them. Dozens of Washington, DC., landlords testify that he left unpaid room bills. Garfield’s mentor James G. Blaine recalls being pursued by Guiteau’s dogged requests. He had instructed the president’s secretary to warn the president of that “wicked man…[there will be] no peace till you get rid of him.” Finally, after Guiteau became belligerent with an usher, Brown ordered him to be kept away.

There’s a possible connection between Guiteau and Conkling. As the “war’ between Garfield and Conkling intensifies, he wrote the president advising him to give into Conkling’s demands. He also encouraged him to dismiss Conkling’s enemy, James G. Blaine. It is unknown if Garfield ever saw the letters since Brown had begun relegating them to the eccentric pile. After shooting the president, Guiteau had yelled “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president!” This was enough to convince many of a conspiracy involving Conkling and Arthur. The two men were hounded by private citizens and reporters wherever they went during July-September 1881. Even major newspapers like the New York Tribune ran headlines suggesting a plot.  

Finally, it becomes apparent to investigators that Conkling was not behind the assassination. It was Guiteau’s own delusions. He believed that he had been chosen by God for a special task and that task was to “rescue the Republic” by killing President Garfield. He believed that the Stalwarts like General William T. Sherman would come to his rescue, even writing him a letter informing him of the assassination. The general did arrive with troops, not to support Guiteau but to guard his prison cell against rumored lynch mobs. In the end, it was not Conkling but Guiteau’s own warped creation of “God” that led him to shoot Garfield.

Guiteau was tried and, despite making the case that the doctors like Bliss killed Garfield, was convicted of murder. Guiteau wrote Arthur, now president, asking for a pardon, but the president refused. He was executed by hanging June 30, 1882.

Subplots: Romantic Relationships

James Garfield’s relationship with his wife Lucretia had blossomed from awkwardness into a passionate romance. She had been sick for most of 1881 and Garfield was going to see her when he was shot. When he heard that, despite her own health, she was coming to see him at the White House, he insisted on staying awake despite his condition to greet her. When he heard her carriage on the White House driveway, he turned to his doctors with a broad smile and declared, “That’s my wife!”

Another one would be between Garfield’s private secretary Joseph Stanley Brown and his daughter, Mary Mollie Garfield. Although the relationship did not fully bloom until a few years after the events of Destiny of the Republic, a movie could show the planting of the seed. Joseph had tried remaining positive throughout Garfield’s ordeal, but as the president’s condition worsened, the normally quiet, reserved young man began to become visibly emotional. He and Mollie would comfort each other during this time and later marry in 1888.

Even Bell’s relationship with his deaf wife Mabel could be a subplot. She writes him encouraging letters. “Be worthy of your patient,” she says. “From failure comes success.”

Third Plot: The Character Arc of Chester Arthur

In Destiny, Millard paints Garfield as a near Christ-like figure. Despite Americans being separated by geography, race, religion and culture, the assassination attempt aroused a new sense of patriotism. Immigrants, freed slaves, frontier pioneers and Southerners devastated by the war waged by northerners like Garfield found the rise of the Last Log Cabin President from poverty to power an inspiration for them all. Even Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy and whom Garfield tried to indict as a war criminal, said the assassin attempt had made “the whole nation kin.” Another southerner wrote Lucretia that “from the depth of their grief-stricken hearts all Americans can and will thank God that there is no North, no South, no East, no West.”

Nowhere else is this sanctifying nature of Garfield’s death more evident than in the character arc of Chester Arthur. Not only was “Chet” Arthur Conkling’s creation, but he was also good friends with him, sharing hotel rooms and fishing trips. He took every opportunity possible to criticize Garfield. Unlike Garfield, he had been a lackluster student and had fancy tastes in clothing and wine. He was with Conkling when news of Garfield’s shooting arrived. Conkling took him under his wing during the turbulent summer of 1881.

Arthur hid himself away from the public. Whenever there was news of Garfield’s worsening condition, public anger toward him grew. As the possibility that he would become president became real, rumors spread that he was born in Kenya, I mean Canada. Police departments readied themselves for riots. Some citizens even declared they would arm themselves and march on Washington to prevent Arthur becoming president if Garfield passed. A reporter who managed to get close to him noticed that he was shabby and had been crying.

During this time, Arthur began receiving letters from a total stranger named Julia Sand.  An invalid spinster, somehow her letters were able to reflect his own tortured thoughts. Like many other Americans, she thought he might be in conspiracy with the assassin. Somehow, she found it in her heart to encourage him not to resign, but that as president his better nature might shine. “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.” After Garfield’s death, she wrote him that nation did not need action but compassion. “If a doctor could lay his finger on the public pulse, his prescription would be, perfect quiet.”

Arthur owed his career to the spoils system. But in his first official address as president, he called for civil service reform. No longer did he do Conkling’s bidding, refusing to remove Garfield’s appointee from the New York Customs House. Then in 1883 he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which mandated that government employee selection would be based on merit and competitive exams. Arthur’s political career was over, but election integrity would no longer be threatened by politicians bribing voters with potential jobs.

Conclusion: Reasons for a Movie

There are several reasons that Destiny of the Republic should be a movie. The intertwining stories have elements of political thrills and romance. It is a fascinating look at the progress of  medicine, science, and criminal investigation. The importance of the 1880 election and other surrounding events from that period of American history has been neglected by publishers and filmmakers in the past few decades. The assassination of Garfield is not as well known as that of Kennedy and Lincoln. Even Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Series has skipped on Killing Garfield to focus on well covered aspects of American history, like the “killing” of the Japanese Empire at the end of World War II.

The election of 1880 and Garfield’s death are important for every civic minded American. The Pendleton Act safeguards our representative republic and democratic elections from cronyism and nepotism. It might surprise some that the “spoils system” was even an issue. That hole in our American awareness should be filled with the story of Garfield’s assassination because of the hopeful message contained therein. Despite the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds being at each other’s throats over the issue of patronage, not only did they not resort to violence to settle the issue, but human decency championed. Garfield’s young sons were traveling home the day he was shot. Railroad officials along the train yard sent word ahead that no one was to discuss the shooting since the boys had not heard the news about their father. Railway officials and passengers agreed and let the train pass in peace and silence. Despite the violance of one madman, the issue was peacefully settled through legitimate civil channels.

And yes, I do believe that Garfield’s death at the hands of Dr. Bliss should be a reminder to not put blind, unquestioning trust in medical professionals like the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tying that in with the above positive message about settling political differences peacefully, Garfield’s death is a reminder that society can remain respectful despite the actions of one madman, be he a New York real-estate mogul or the head of the CDC.

Because it is a fascinating story full of political intrigue, scientific experiment, and romance that contains important lessons in civics, civil behavior and personal integrity is why Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard should be a movie.