Review: President Garfield

August 3, 2023August 2, 2023 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, C. W. Goodyear. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Summary: A full-length biography of the twentieth president tracing his evolution from a Radical Republican to one who sought to unify his party and a country still riven by the Civil War.

I think for many of us, even fellow Ohioans, James A. Garfield is simply one of the mediocre presidents from our state. Largely, in Garfield’s case, it was because he was in office only five months, two of them spent slowly and painfully dying from a crazed assassin’s bullet and the unhygienic treatment of his doctors. Sadly, he spent most of his time in office dealing with office-seekers, leading, after his death, to the civil service reform he so ardently had sought. Left undone was so much work in solidifying Black civil rights jeopardized by the failures of Reconstruction, dealing with the rapid industrial expansion of the country and its economic institutions, and of course, leading in the extension of education opportunities.

This biography left me wondering “what if” Garfield had the opportunity to serve two terms. The arc of his life was one that combined capable leadership and the ability to bring people together across political differences. C. W. Goodyear’s account of Garfield’s life also reminded me of what a remarkable story was cut short by an assassin’s bullet. He was the last of our presidents born in a log cabin, in this case a rude one on Ohio’s Western Reserve. Growing up without the father who died in his infancy, he was raised by the strong-willed Eliza, who exerted an influence throughout his life and survived his death. At sixteen he left home to work briefly on the Ohio Canal before illness forced him to return home. His path lay in the direction of education, attending first the Geauga Seminary, and then after taking some teaching jobs, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which later became Hiram College, a Disciples of Christ school, the church body into which he’d been baptized. He met Lucretia Randolph while he was there, teaching her Greek. He then went on to Williams College, gaining the respect of students and faculty as he completed the final two years of his education.

On his return from a prestigious Eastern college in 1856, he was hired as a teacher, and a year later as the president of the Eclectic Institute. He also preached in churches throughout the Western Reserve, gaining the wide respect of local citizens. He married Lucretia in 1858, But even before then he’d married politics, supporting the candidacy of John C. Fremont for president. By 1860, he’d been elected a state legislator, while reading for the law, passing the bar exam in 1861.

The Civil War interrupted his political aspirations. He felt he had to lead by example, raising volunteers from the Western Reserve and his own Institute. As a colonel under Don Carlos Buell, he drove Confederates out of eastern Kentucky through savvy and courageous maneuvering and battlefield courage. He subsequently was appointed a Brigadier General. After service both in Mississippi and Tennessee, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Western Reserve, an office he did not seek but accepted, a pattern later to be repeated.

Garfield’s House career occupies the major part of this book. Goodyear traces the career of the emancipationist congressman from the abolitionist Western Reserve, his efforts to support Reconstruction, an increasingly futile fight with the rise of Southern Democrats, but one he never gave up. We see the rising leader, friend to all, even his political opponents, even more important in the Hayes administration, when Republicans were in the minority, and he gave up a Senate bid to serve as minority leader. Garfield even manages during this all to formulate a proof of the Pythagorean theorem, submitting it for publication in The Atlantic Monthly. The major blot on his career was a financial scandal, and Goodyear shows how Garfield, both needy of money for living expenses, and glad for help, got caught up in the Credit Mobilier scandal, for all of $329.

The other blot on Garfield, and a mark of Lucretia’s greatness, was Garfield’s affair with another woman during a time of separation. He confessed, she reconciled, and subsequently, as Garfield pursued legal practice to supplement his income, they moved to Washington during congressional sessions, along with Eliza. Goodyear portrays these two women as mainstays in his life, and Lucretia is described as “unstampedeable.” Garfield eventually realized what he had in her, but for a time, it appears he was trying to live free of her.

The last part of the book has to do with Garfield’s presidential campaign and brief presidency. In 1880, the two major candidates were James Blaine and Ulysses Grant, the latter supported by Boss Conkling of New York, with fellow Ohioan John Sherman an uninspiring third choice, but one Garfield supported. One has the sense in the deadlocked convention that Garfield was the one with presidential mettle, and after a string of ballots, the shift to Garfield, although he never sought the office. After the nomination, the challenge was to unify the party. Blaine was a friend who became his closest confidant and Secretary of State. The challenge was Boss Conkling. And here the question is how far Garfield the reformer would go to win Conkling, the epitome of machine politics in his age. His success brought dismay, but it was Conkling who was dismayed when, as President, Garfield refuses some key appointments, and Conkling overreaches in resigning, only to find the limb sawed out from under him.

Goodyear devotes briefer space to the assassination and death. He doesn’t name the assassin until after the deed, alluding to his delusional job-seeking several times before. He also describes the unhygienic treatment of Garfield’s doctors who probably introduced the infection that killed him. Candace Millard’s Destiny of the Republic (review), tells this part of the story in far more depth. In some ways the death paves the way for reforms enacted by Chester Arthur, that would have been far more difficult for Garfield–a surprise in some ways as Arthur was a product of the Conkling machine.

In the end, impressed as I was with Garfield’s life before he was president, I found myself wondering how much of a reformer Garfield would have been. Garfield’s reformist passions always seem to conflict with his ability to be well-spoken of by all and to avoid making enemies, to unify. He helped negotiate the compromises that won Hayes the presidency and put the nails in the coffin of Reconstruction. Yet he was unyielding to Conkling. He probably would have advanced a vision for education in the country. Working with Blaine, we may have had an enlightened foreign policy. He made several key civil rights appointments and I suspect he would have resisted the worst of Jim Crow. But we shall never know…

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

Review: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

January 16, 2014January 16, 2014 / rtrube54 / 8 Comments

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James A. Garfield is the president virtually no one knows. I didn’t and never visited his home when I lived in nearby Cleveland. Because of this book, I hope to make that pilgrimage and learn more about a figure who may have been the greatest president Ohio produced, had he lived through his term. Candace Millard’s account of Garfield’s life and death is that good.

This is not a full biography but she sketches the outline of his literal rise from a log cabin boyhood and the early loss of his father, to his presidency of what later became Hiram College, to his political career (he never sought office, including the presidency) and his brief presidency and his fight against corrupt political patronage.

She interweaves her account of Garfield’s life and sufferings with the story of his insane assassin, Charles Guiteau, and his benighted physician, Dr. D. Willard Bliss, whose refusal to use the antiseptic procedures introduced by Joseph Lister and his repeated probing of Garfield’s wound introduced the infections that killed him. Left alone, Garfield would probably have recovered. We also see the efforts of Alexander Graham Bell to perfect a device to detect the bullet’s location (he would have had Bliss permitted him to search the left side of Garfield’s body.

As she concludes the books she looks at the way Garfield’s death transformed American politics. In some ways, it re-united a country still suffering the divisions of the Civil War. It motivated a crusade against political corruption and the introduction of the Civil Service, led by Chester Arthur, a product of Roscoe Conkling’s political machine, whose life and presidency was turned around by the letters of a mysterious correspondent, Julia Sand, who urged him to heed his better angels.

All in all, even though the subject was somber, Millard’s deftly written account was an engaging read and sparked my interest to know more about President Garfield, described after death by a friend as “a man who loved to play croquet and romp with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”

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That’s Insane!

January 14, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

That was the conclusion most people reached in trying to figure out why Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A Garfield. I’ve been reading Candace Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is a fascinating and well-paced account of Guiteau’s assassination attempt upon James A Garfield and the botched medical care that resulted in his death. There is much in Guiteau’s life that seems to parallel many of the contemporary “shooters” who are also mentally unstable.

James A Garfield

Guiteau was know to be unstable by family, friends, and the Oneida community of which he was a part for some time. He was a frustrated job seeker with associates of Garfield who all recognized him as unstable and ultimately barred him from the White House. Family members who knew him sought to institutionalize him without success. Part of the trouble was that he was not only unstable–he was wily as well. He took up lodgings but left just ahead of the rent collector. He proposed fantastic business schemes and borrowed from friends but nothing paid out and no one got paid back.

Like some shooters, he had never before acted out violently. After his frustrations with job-seeking in the Garfield administration and seeing Garfield’s friendship with Secretary of State James Blaine, who he considered evil, he concluded that God was telling him that Garfield must be removed. Even still, he wrote letters to the Garfield administration, which might have been a tip off. Barred from the White House, he learned that Garfield was leaving Washington on a train, and ambushed him in the train station. (These were the days when presidents still walked unaccompanied by Secret Service, who only pursued counterfeiting, something they still do.)

Guiteau thought the would be rescued from prison by a grateful country. His case was one of the first to use an insanity defense, unsuccessfully. Awaiting a verdict, he planned a lecture tour. He reputedly danced on the way to the gallows and recited a poem he wrote, I am Going to the Lordy as he awaited hanging.

Charles J Guiteau

What Guiteau illustrates for me is that we have yet, 130 years later to figure out how to care for our mentally ill. He never sought help nor thought he was ill, and he was functional enough that no one else could institutionalize him. He was an unrecognized threat until after the fact. As a country, we are loathe to impair civil liberties short of a criminal act. And we have very few facilities to care for the mentally ill who need more than outpatient treatment. Several things I wonder about though:

1. For those who cannot function well in society and need some type of ongoing care, often they end up living on the streets, if there are no family able or willing to care for them. Can’t we do better than that. And if government can’t, I wonder if the churches and other religious institutions can provide some kind of group housing and compassionate care.

2. I do wonder if there is also some way to require those who refuse care to be subject to some form of electronic surveillance that would include an alert feature to all gun sellers that would disqualify them from purchasing weapons. Such could also be used for screening in public settings to alert those protecting movie stars, political figures, and school children from harm. The challenge would be that there needs to be some kind of due process even here–two unrelated people and a medical professional attesting to their instability, for example. This would still allow such persons to be at liberty in society if they refuse treatment, and yet provide some degree of protection to the public.

I can hear the protests to such an idea, and it feels “big brother-ish” to me as well. There would need to be strong protections against using such technology against a whole class of people (an ethnic or religious group, for example). Except the fact is, big brother is watching via NSA surveillance, traffic cams and other closed circuit TV systems, and we voluntarily have given Google, Amazon, and others massive amounts of our personal data. Could this not be used to provide some measure of protection to society and even to the person themselves. In some ways this seems as great and present a danger as those who would engaged in acts of terror.

3. Finally, we do need to find ways to provide treatment to those who seek it, including war veterans with brain injuries. There are still mysteries in treatment of these things, but what a tragedy when those who need help can’t receive what help is needed.