So long as you go in understanding its limitations as history, Death by Lightning is an entertaining tour of American politics in 1880–81.
I recently finished watching the four-part Netflix series Death by Lightning, about the assassination of James Garfield. It is based on the wonderful 2011 Candice Millard book Destiny of the Republic.
Millard’s book, in addition to being a rollicking good story, advanced two major theses. One was that Garfield was underappreciated as a great man who could have been a great president if he’d had more than three months in office before being shot. On that score, Millard noted not only Garfield’s zeal to reform corrupt government and his sincere concern for black civil rights, but also his remarkable gifts of intellect and character. The other thesis was that Garfield’s death was an avoidable result of infection introduced by hidebound American doctors (mainly his chief physician, Dr. D. Willard Bliss) who probed Garfield’s wounds with unwashed hands looking for the bullet — in disregard of Joseph Lister’s theories (then taking root in European medicine) about germs, infection, and sanitary medical practice. Millard thus dismissed the common view that Garfield had been killed by the experimental device invented and used by Alexander Graham Bell (which used sound waves in a forerunner to the X-Ray) in a further futile effort to find the bullet, although certainly Bell did not help the situation.
I was, of course, going to watch this, and was all the more encouraged by the casting of Nick Offerman as Chester Arthur. The good news is that Death by Lightning is good, well-paced fun and captures the basic contours of the story: Garfield’s reluctant but honorable presidency; the perverse calculations that put the wholly unqualified and unsuitable New York machine politician Arthur on the ticket; assassin Charles Guiteau’s obsessive turn from Garfield booster to vindictive, disappointed office-seeker; New York Senator and spoils boss (and Arthur mentor) Roscoe Conkling outsmarting himself by resigning his seat in a grandstanding appeal for support against the president (Marjorie Taylor Greene, beware); Garfield’s fatally botched medical care; and (albeit dramatized only briefly) Arthur’s surprising turn to reform in Garfield’s honor. If Michael Shannon is given a starchy role as Garfield, the rest of the main cast is fantastic and full of familiar character actors, including the scene-stealing Offerman, Matthew Macfadyen in a hypnotic turn as Guiteau, Bradley Whitford as James G. Blaine, and Shea Whigham as Roscoe Conkling, Željko Ivanek as Doctor Bliss, Barry Shabaka Henley as Blanche K. Bruce, and Tuppence Middleton as Conkling’s calculating mistress, Kate Chase Sprague (although the series, for reasons of dramatic compression, never bothers to mention her background as Washington royalty, being the daughter of Salmon P. Chase and belle of the Civil War-era capital). Blaine is especially well-captured and entertaining.
The bad news is twofold. First, the show is far too full of sex and foul language to be family entertainment (which is a shame if you’d like to dramatize a great American story, and also highly unrealistic in how much 19th-century statesmen threw around the f-word). Second, there are too many departures from the real history, most notably Arthur being turned from a high-living bon vivant to a brass-knuckles street brawler. We also miss out on some great moments in the true story, from Guiteau deciding that he was fated for great things after surviving a fiery riverboat disaster to Arthur deciding to soldier on honorably in his one term after discovering he was dying, too. The show is also a bit unfair to Ulysses S. Grant — it’s fair to show that he was regarded by reformers in 1880 as a pawn of Conkling’s crooked machine, but he was nonetheless very important to delivering Garfield’s election by stumping for him that fall after Garfield defeated the great war hero (still just 58 at the time) at the convention.
On the whole, so long as you go in understanding its limitations as history, Death by Lightning is an entertaining tour of American politics in 1880–81. But then, go back and read the book.