President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

 

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier – C.W. Goodyear

Several years ago I made a goal to read at least one biography of every United States president.  I soon became aware that many of the lesser-known presidents had very little, if any, volumes devoted to them.  For every Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln that literally had hundreds of volumes devoted to them, the minor chiefs such as Franklin Pierce or Benjamin Harris had little to nil.  James Garfield, being somewhat inconsequential, did actually have one biography written about him around 1978, and because he was one of the lesser-known presidents, I was a bit surprised.  So I was even more surprised when there was yet another biography written about 45 years later.  Did we really need another one? And if so, is there enough interest about the man to actually warrant one?

Being a dedicated reader to the subject, I obviously had no problem picking this one up and adding to my collection.  But I’m in the minority. I have a hard time understanding why many would want to read a bio of the 20^th United States president.  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading the book.  I enjoyed reading it immensely.  This book was well written and captivated my attention.  I have to honestly say that I wish EVERY U.S. president had such a volume devoted to them.  I would rapaciously snap it up and quickly devour it.  But for the masses of other readers?  Perhaps I’m overthinking things.  There’s an awful lot of books out there, and there are hundreds of millions of readers with a diverse set of tastes.

Like all well-written biographies, this book does what it should in the sequential department. We read about James Garfield as a child, a young man, a teacher, a local politician, a soldier in the U.S. Civil War (he achieves the rank of General), a U.S. Congressman, and eventually a President of the United States.  The main source of appeal that I found in this book wasn’t really about James Garfield the man, but rather the detailed paint strokes that the author gives us when creating a canvas of the time period in U.S. history.

I enjoyed reading about what life was like during Garfield’s 50 or so years of life (from about 1830 – 1880). I love the images of colonial America, the sweats and smells of the rather putrid city of Washington D.C., and most of all, the language of the educated populace that has been preserved through the multitudes of correspondence and diary entries.  The American language had not quite been infested with slang, so reading very astute observations by key political figures of the time always seemed more as though they came from the mouth of a William Shakespeare as opposed to a cable tv talk show host.

But Garfield the man, well, there simply isn’t that much here that is very interesting.  He was a rather quiet man who was thankfully an abolitionist, yet he never craved the spotlight nor had any searing ambitions to hold a high political office.  In fact, even though he achieves the rank of general in the Union army during the Civil War, I can’t really recall too much about anything vastly historical that Garfield ever achieved on the battlefield.  Yes, we do read of some important decisions he made and battles he fought, but it really does sort of have a rather a ho-hum feeling when discussing the escapades.

Once Garfield is elected to congress, the real joy in this book is reading not about him, but about the political system that exists.  This book is a reminder that politics has always been corrupt and politicians were mostly about power and rarely selfless altruism. For people disgusted with the political climate of the 2020s, please don’t think that things are now “much worse” than they ever have been.  No, the wretchedness has always been there, but in the days before sharing libelous Facebook posts and re-tweeting obvious lies, it took much longer for ignorance to breed and grow.  The real appeal of this book was to see Garfield interact with some of the more wretched elements of U.S. politics such as the infamous New York City power boss Roscoe Conkling.  Let’s just say that if you’re somewhat innocent like James Garfield, you need powerful friends to help you get elected.  Once you’re elected, the expectation is reciprocation, and if it doesn’t happen there are problems. Big problems.

What most modern readers don’t know is that the actual presidency of James Garfield was very short. He only held office for about six months before an assassin’s bullet cut his life short.  Because of this, the author spends a tad too much time talking about the primaries, the general election, and the attempted recovery of Garfield after he was wounded.  It seems as though Garfield remained alive (with heavy suffering) for about the same amount of time as president as before the assassination happened.  So read a LOT about Garfield on his sick bed, the nauseating details of the prolonged suffering, and the countless primitive medical techniques applied to him to try to keep him alive.

I did feel as though there were many parts of James Garfield’s life that were skipped over a bit. We don’t read a whole lot about his family life. Most of what we read about his wife ‘Crete’ we read from Garfield’s correspondence to and from her.  It rarely seemed as though the two were ever in the same room.  Their marriage didn’t seem to a particular joyous one either. In fact, we briefly read about an affair of Garfield’s fairly early in the marriage, yet the details provided in this book are incredibly sparse.

Speaking of incredibly sparse information, although we read ad-nauseum about the slow death suffered by Garfield after he his shot, we read almost nothing about his assassin, his background, nor his motives. In fact, we only read his name once.  (As you’re reading this review, do YOU know the name of Garfield’s assassin? I didn’t think so.)  So although this book was very well written, I confess that I thought maybe there should be more attention paid to some of the details that seemed a bit thin.

I should also point out that I did also read the biography of James Garfield that came out 45 years or so earlier (by Allan Peskin), but I read an awful lot, so I honestly can’t say that I remember much about it, nor can I give any sort of fair comparison.  If you like history, though, and do have the urge to read about James Garfield, this book will more than adequately scratch your itch.