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James Garfield: life of the week
00:56:15
CW Goodyear introduces US president James Garfield, the 20th man to hold the office, who died after being shot in 1881
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- [00:01]
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- [01:30]
Eleanor Evans
So good, so good, so good.
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- [02:00]
Podcast Host Introduction
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures, from ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. President James Garfield is having a moment as the subject of recent Netflix drama Death by Lightning, starring Michael Shannon and Matthew McFadden. But it's fair to say that among the pantheon of US Presidents, Garfield is very much forgotten, aside from his dramatic and tragic death following his shooting by an assassin in 1881. In this episode, Eleanor Evans is joined by C.W. goodyear, historian and biographer of the President, to explore Garfield's life.
- [02:54]
Eleanor Evans
Charlie, when you came to write your 2023 biography of James Garfield. It had been 40 years or so since the last birth to death biography written about the 20th president. Why is it do you think that he's been so lightly considered? And what brought you to his life story?
- [03:08]
C.W. Goodyear
That's a very good and very natural question. Because in the pantheon of US Presidents, James Garfield is, through no fault of his own, a very short entry. He was the second president to be assassinated and he was kill essentially within his first eight months in office. And there had been very good books, including Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic about the assassination of James Garfield. But that tended to be what most people knew about him, if anything at all, was how Garfield's life ended, how he died, how he was shot. It was very dramatic. And unfortunately the reason for that is when we look at the, the track record of US Presidents, we typically ask ourselves, well, what did this person accomplish while in office? And that's typically the barometer we use to determine whether somebody is worth remembering or not. And Garfield, again, through no fault of his own, that's a very short story of what this guy was able to accomplish in the White House. The greater arc of the life though is really an incredible rise through American society at a profoundly disruptive time in our history. You ask what drew me to James Garfield? I started writing this book in 2018 and I was struck by the politics of division in America at the time, something that seems to be continuing with aplomb to this day. And I was inspired by the idea of trying to find a previous time of division in American society. And I wanted to find a national leader who rose above that split, that stratification happening in American politics, its economy, society. And so I was drawn to Reconstruction in the Gilded Age, which is this post Civil War period in the United States, a very politically polarized and disruptive time in our history. And this character that emerged throughout this entire stretch of history, who was in every room that mattered, who was quietly influential and who was most distinctively remembered very positively by everybody who shared the proverbial stage with him, no matter their own politics, was James Garfield. And the deeper I dug into that life, the more I personally came to conclude that James Garfield's presidency and his assassination, it was just a small endnote to what was already one of the most impressive arcs of political triumph and rise through American society kind of in the nation's history. And so that's what drew me in. And there was a lot of material, it really set its hooks into me. And by the time the book actually came out. I was surprised that anybody was interested, but it really ended up kind of taking off, surprisingly. And I could go more into Garfield's specific accomplishments, but I have a sense that you're about to ask me about them.
- [05:51]
Eleanor Evans
Yes, just so. Absolutely. But I think this transformational aspect, I think we're really going to get into this today as well as your biography is called From Radical to Unifier. I think this gives a sense of the scope of his career and what we're going to be talking about. But if we start by looking at him as a young man, can you situate us in his environment early on? Because this part of his rise really is transformational, isn't it?
- [06:13]
C.W. Goodyear
Yes, very much so. James Garfield was born essentially on a corner of the American frontier on the shores of Lake Erie, which is in the state of Ohio, in this area of Ohio called the Western Reserve, which was this wild, pretty much almost undeveloped, rural region of the United States. And Garfield was born to probably the lowest rung of American society that a white northern male in America at the time could be born to. This is in 1831, by the way. And he was born to a very poor family. His dad died when Garfield was only about 2 years old. And as a matter of fact, Garfield, James Garfield, future president, was also not the first James Garfield in his family. He was named after an elder sibling who had died before he was born. Talk about getting dealt a very, very rough hand in life early on. But fast forward to his late 20s, which was about the age I was when I was writing this thing. And he was a college president. He was a very prominent preacher, an abolitionist preacher in Ohio. And he was also the youngest state senator in Ohio, which was a pretty lofty title to win at the time. And he was all three of those things simultaneously at a very, very young age, which is an incredible triumvirate of things to have done by the time that little old me is reading more about him. Because, you know, again, we were about the same age when I was writing about this guy. And then you fast forward another year and change. And for a time, he's actually the youngest general fighting in the Union army during the Civil War. So that's just the first half of his ascent. He went course, as we'll get into, to accomplish an incredible host of other things. He went on to become a congressional leader during Reconstruction. While serving in Congress, he also earned his law degree or his law certification, and he ended up arguing cases before the US Supreme Court. He won his very first legal case as a lawyer before the U.S. supreme Court. He was a polyglot. He could speak multiple languages. He created the first U.S. federal Department of Education as a congressman. He could supposedly write Latin and Greek simultaneously, one with his left hand and the other with his right. And he also, when he was minority leader of the Republicans, and that's basically, I guess it would be leader of the opposition in one of our legislative chambers on the national level, he also wrote an authoritative proof, the Pythagorean Theorem, in his free time. So he was like this incredible American Renaissance man and a type of politician who we really don't see anymore, dare I say, on either side of the Atlantic. But he had that drive from a very young age. He would always say that he never wanted any advancement in life, that he was simply trying to work hard, be productive, and contribute to what he called, and this became the title of another book about him, the Destiny of the Republic. But the truth is, you don't accomplish everything that he did without having volcanic ambition. And he very much did. And that's what I found compelling about this whole rise and then murder of him was he basically was the embodiment of this thing that Americans continue to refer to as the American Dream. And he embodied that from a very young age, rising from the frontier in very dire straits and then ending up in the White House. It's a very compelling and poetic and tragic story all wrapped into one.
- [09:26]
Eleanor Evans
We're obviously dealing with a very impressive man here, a very impressive mind. It must have been fascinating to delve into. As a biographer, I would like to dwell on his military career for just a second, because I think this is perhaps important to understanding how he came to be so prominent in certain quarters and his reputation on that front.
- [09:42]
C.W. Goodyear
Yes, yes, it absolutely was. So he was already a rising figure in state politics, Ohio's politics before the Civil War. And, you know, this won't surprise any of your listeners, the issue that was festering like an awful wound in the heart of the American Republic for many decades before the U.S. civil War was the issue of slavery. It had been allowed to become malignant, really, since the time of our founding. It was this great unresolved issue because many of America's founding fathers found the issue of slavery and the future of slavery, especially as our nation grew, to be the ultimate elephant in the room. Such a divisive and explosive subject that really could not afford to be resolved at the very creation of our republic. There is this great sectional divide, so this geographic divide between the north and south over the economic necessity of slavery from the Southern standpoint, from a political power standpoint, the south relied on slavery very heavily. The north did not. And as the US expanded westward and it gained more and more territory, the issue of slavery and its need for some kind of resolution just metastasized and grew. And it had become just the premier flashpoint in all kinds of American society. Before the Civil War, it was splitting literally different types of American church. You had the Methodist split, the Baptist split. Northern states were becoming overridden with growing anti slavery political beliefs among the grassroots of voters. And James Garfield was, from a very early point in his life, he came a region of the American north which was quite literally militantly abolitionist, who believed that the cause of freeing the Republic of slavery and eliminating that institution wherever it was, it was not just a political necessity, it was quite literally a religious one. When you read James Garfield's speeches as a state senator, as a preacher, talking about the necessity of ending the institution of slavery, he is a unique blend of radical progressive who is also infusing biblical, biblical rhetoric, you know, holy language into these fierce progressive speeches. And it's very compelling and interesting reading. And when we eventually reach the outbreak of the US Civil War, which is after Abraham Lincoln was elected, Abraham Lincoln was not as hardcore of an abolitionist as James Garfield and his other brand of Republicans was. You had the south, you know, firing upon Fort Sumter. Garfield is writing to friends from the Ohio State Senate house. He talks about the idea of the south creating a new country based on what he describes as the monstrous injustice of human slavery. He says if the Union allows a nation based on the monstrous injustice of human slavery to exist, it will be a cane among the nations of the earth. Cain being c a I n. It leaps off the page when you're looking at this from an archival standpoint. And that is what James Garfield goes to fight the Civil War kicks off. And his opportunity to serve in uniform in the Northern army is not just an opportunity for him to become this literally crusading anti slavery warrior going south. It's also a good opportunity for political advancement. This happened a lot with early American politicians and it still happens to this day. There's no better way to make a good name for yourself than going to war on behalf of your country and leading members of your own community to war, which is what happened in the Civil War and it's what happened with James Garfield. I mentioned earlier that he was the president of a local college, he was a prominent politician, he was a preacher that gave him a Lot of opportunities to recruit young men to go fight for him in the Civil War. So when he got this commission to head south and join the Union army, he was able to bring a lot of his own constituency with him. And I tell you what, he had very good instincts because James Garfield ended up becoming this early celebrity of the US Civil War. He got a front page profile in the New York Times very early in the war, which is not bad for your own publicity back home. He fought at very bloody battles like Shiloh and Chickamauga. The war made him, and the war was his opportunity to practice the politics he believed in and also to get to higher ground. He ended up actually being elected to the US Congress, the National Congress, partway through the Civil War, in big part because he had made such a name for himself on the battlefield. And this goes back to that point I was raising earlier about that there was calculus within him. He would like to believe, and he later would, that this incredible career that he had had in public life and all of his accomplishments were just the result of happenstance and hard work. No, he was a political animal. And he was very savvy about how to both tie his own advancement and the nation's advancement together. And he was able to practice that very well. And the Civil War happened to be a very good opportunity for him to do that.
- [14:45]
Eleanor Evans
I think this is something we'll come on to when we talk about his eventual nomination to the Republican ticket for the presidency. But get to that. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us now. So we've had the end of the Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction begins. What's the context of the Republican Party, of which Garfield was a part, that we need to understand about this time? What sort of political world was he moving in?
- [15:07]
C.W. Goodyear
The first thing that I would like to say is kind of a foundational standpoint. And this is something you have to say to a lot of Americans as well. This period of our history, the post Civil War period, is this delightfully gray, obscure, and confusing time, both when you're actually examining the events and then also when you're trying to remember it. American popular memory tends to work based off of wars. You know, we use wars almost as, like, pinpoints and ways to clarify our own past. And that's how we remember eras, is who we were fighting at that time. How that's a reflection on our nation. I leave that up to you. And in Reconstruction, in the Gilded Age, you had really very few conflicts other than our westward expansion. But also you had a confusing Medley of political parties, including Republicans and Democrats. Those names, they really don't apply as we understand them today. You're talking about a very different group of people on both sides when it comes to understanding who was in these parties. Not only that, all of our presidents at the time, they all became these bearded old men who didn't serve in the White House for very long. Which is terribly ironic because, you know, they put all this effort into this facial hair only to be indistinguishable from each other. The way I would describe it is in the aftermath of the civil War, the Republican party, which was founded to be an expressly anti slavery party, as a big tent anti slavery party, it splintered into all of these myriad different factions based on a pretty sound dilemma, which was with the south destroyed, and the south was utterly destroyed after the civil war domestically, and then in terms of its economy, all those things, how do you want to rebuild the republic from the ashes? Are you trying to create the system as it existed before, or was this an opportunity to, as some Republicans said, to have a second American revolution, to build the republic as it was supposed to be in the first place? And the factions of Republicans that emerged, you had moderate Republicans who were interested in pretty much letting the south go back to being what the south was before the Civil war, albeit minus the institution of slavery. To leave southern states to manage their domestic affairs alone and to return to economic concerns and issues in the north. To go back to normalcy, to go back to peace, for lack of a better term, and don't overthink it, for lack of a better term, in terms of trying to change, you know, the south from what it was. Being on the other side of the spectrum, you had this faction called the radical Republicans who were a absolute herd of cats, very difficult to organize. But the best thing way to describe the radicals and Garfield was a radical, was they were not satisfied with the end of the institution of slavery. They wanted to institute full civil and political and legal equality between the races in America immediately after the Civil War. They wanted to exile or disenfranchise or even execute leading confederates and rebels who had fought the civil War. They wanted to break up all of the southern plantation land where these slaves had worked and confiscate it from the plantation owners and then give it to former slaves and who they described as loyal whites who had believed in the northern cause during the civil War. You know, I was describing earlier the post war opportunity for a second American revolution. The radicals believed that Reconstruction was an opportunity for a Second American Revolution. The opponent during that time was the Democratic Party which was mainly a Southern rural Jeffersonian party at that time. It was Klan violence from, you know, Southern insurgents to targeting black Americans and also northern sympathizers in the South. And then also it was just entropy. You know, you're just fighting the wind. And so over this course in time the coalition fractured and you had a much more muddled and complicated and chaotic political situation for the Republican Party after the Civil War. And they held on to power for as long as they could. And Garfield of all people became emblematic of the initial promise of Reconstruction and its inevitable collapse and imperfect achievements and its failure. He was one of the very few American politicians, especially one of the very few radicals who survived politically survived the comings and goings of that political tide. When he went into Congress halfway through the Civil War just about he was described as being as wild a radical as ever walked the halls of Congress. That's a quote from a Democrat. And then you Fast forward to 10 years later and he is the most legislatively experienced Republican still on the House floor. And he is a very different man. He is less combative. He is militantly focused on getting Republicans to get along. He is open minded and very friendly and charitable and seen as this very well meaning and very impressive but ultimately weak willed figure who only picks political battles when they absolutely must be waged. He was this pragmatic, conciliatory, consensus based figure in a very divisive time and in a very divided Republican Party.
- [20:17]
Eleanor Evans
That is great context to have as we move forwards of the backdrop in which Garfield is operating politically and seeing the world. I want to pick up on one of the things you mentioned, the warring factions within the Republican Party. I wonder if we can hear from you about the stalwarts and the half breeds and the situation here as we go towards the 1880 Republican Convention and what happens. I'll let you pick up the story.
- [20:39]
C.W. Goodyear
Yeah, of course we know how to name them, don't we? So the Republican Party had by the time period of 1876 to 1880, so you're talking about 11 to 15 years after the Civil War it had fractured into two very vividly named groups, two different tribes on one side you had the stalwarts and the stalwarts were. The way I've described them since is they identified themselves as being unrepentant Republicans. They were hardliners on the old issues that the Republicans, the radical Republicans had once believed in. The stalwarts were hardcore on trying to relitigate reconstruction in the south, which had by now completely failed in terms of its reconstruction policies. They were a very inclusive group racially, the stalwarts. Unfortunately, the other distinguishing feature of them was the stalwarts were expert practitioners of what I would call, in what has been widely called spoils based politics in this time in American history, the civil service, the federal government, people who staff the federal government, all of the jobs in the federal government, or at least a hefty, hefty majority of them, you know, from your tax collectors to your customs collectors, to your sheriffs and post office workers, all of these jobs were awarded by politicians to their cronies. They were up for political appointment. So you didn't have professional bureaucrats who just stayed on, no matter who was in charge in congress. There was this partisanship controlled every aspect or most aspects of the American civil service at that time. And what that created was this opportunity for corruption, for partisan interference in elections. And it created something called the spoils system, where you would have politicians basically rig elections, bribe people, then get into office, and then reward places on the public payroll to their loyalists, which would then allow these loyalists to like, skim money from the public to enrich themselves, to give money back to the political patron, their boss. It created machine based politics. And the stalwarts were unrepentant practitioners of spoils based politics. They thought, in other words, in order to succeed politically, a key part of holding on to political power and then using it effectively was to play dirty. And the stalwarts were emblematic of this in the republic party. And they were led by a guy, a very colorful bantam rooster of a politician named Roscoe Conkling, who was a senator from New York. And Roscoe Conkling, they don't make him like this anymore. He was a senator extraordinaire, Somebody who was described by another historian as if you saw Roscoe Conkling walking through the halls of congress, he would look like a bird of paradise amid a barnyard of duskier foul. He was a ladies man who always dressed in this myriad of, like, bright colors and polka dots and stripes and matching socks. He had his pages follow behind him in a single file like he was a priest. He styled his hair very distinctively. He had this hyperion curl, this single lock of hair, though it kind of split his forehead. And he was a florid, eloquent and incredibly brutal boss of the stalwart system. And going into the election of 1880, the stalwarts hated the President Rutherford Hayes, who was trying to clean up the civil service in the United States. And so going into 1880, Roscoe Conkling and the stalwarts wanted to put Ulysses Grant back into the White House for a third term. Ulysses Grant had won two terms and then taken some time off. And the stalwarts thought if they could go back to Grant, not only could they relitigate reconstruction, but also they would be able to access and tap into all of the official professional bureaucrats who just stayed on offices of power and they would be able to basically extend their style of corruption to all branches of the federal government. So those are the stalwarts. Fascinating group of people. The other side were the half breeds. You know, again, what a name. The half breeds are hard to summarize, but the easiest way to unify them is to say they didn't like the stalwarts. And they were all in allegiance to one man, James Blaine, who was a senator from Maine. So the rhymes wrote themselves. And James Blaine I've since described, I wish I put this in the book, was the first American politician to run on charisma and nothing else entirely. He was a pure political animal, somebody who everybody assumed, and this happens every generation of American, by the way, everybody saw him in the Senate and was like, that guy's going to be president one day. What magnetism, what charisma, what charm, you know, what ability to hold the floor. But it never happened. James Blaine reigned for the presidency five times and he never won. But his nickname in American politics was the magnetic man because of his charm, because he was just such a ensnared, daring figure. And by the way, beyond their political rivalry, you know, half breeds versus stalwarts James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling personally hated each other. They had hated each other long before these factions became a thing. And the half breeds also dabbled in spoils politics. Blaine was seen as being a very corrupt figure as well. And so you had this nasty situation. The half breeds didn't like Rutherford Hayes either. And then you had all these independent reformist Republicans who were saying, gosh, we need to clean up the civil service, we need to get rid of the style of politics that has led to people like Conkling and Blaine. We need to create regulations around American civil servants and, you know, their tenure in office and where they can make money, all those things. And those are the reformists. And so going into 1880, everybody on the Republican side wanted a new president, a new Republican president. But they knew that if any of these Factions nominated their figure, then they would surely lose in the fall to the Democratic candidates. So they needed to find somebody who could unify all of these factions somehow who was be agreeable to everybody. And a lot of these independent observers all settled on the same name. They said, you know who everybody likes, who is good at like keeping our party together in tough times and who has this good reputation around town. This very impressive man I know, James Garfield, Minority Leader in the House. That guy, we got to get him to somehow run for the Republican nomination. And that was the second setup going into the Republican Convention of 1880.
- [27:21]
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- [27:56]
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- [28:26]
C.W. Goodyear
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- [28:36]
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- [28:38]
C.W. Goodyear
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- [28:41]
Eleanor Evans
So returning then to what you said a little earlier about his character. This sort of aura of humility that he projected, this seeming lack of ambition you mentioned that might be sort of political maneuvering. Savvy political tactics there. What's your take on how he comes by this nomination for the Republican ticket? And how does he act once he's got it?
- [29:01]
C.W. Goodyear
Well, the series of circumstances that aligned to hand Garfield the presidency were bizarre. And it makes you think that there is an author of all this happening somewhere. Which makes it fun when you're an actual author and you're reconstructing events. So back in this period of American history, right now in America you have primary based elections, state based primary elections. So these days, when Republicans or Democrats want a presidential nominee, all the states vote in order, and then when the convention comes around, the official gathering to nominate a presidential nominee, the outcome is already decided. That was not how things worked for a hefty proportion of our nation's history. Back in Garfield's time, when you had a Republican a party nominating convention happening, the only thing that occurred was there was a designated spot that everybody who was interested in the competition had to be at a certain time. And then you're off to the races and you're all arguing with each other and having all these procedural votes and you're, you know, saying terrible things. You know, you're rousing all the dogs of each party and you're getting the to fight each other. And then whoever comes out on top wins. And it's this glorious combat. Very fun, very theatrical. The way I've described it is like gladiatorial kabuki theater. Very fun to watch. And I wish we could go back to it because I think it would actually resolve a lot of issues. But. So what happened was Garfield had been approached before the Republican Convention in 1880. He had been told, hey, guess what? Our party is screwed. Unless you can bring all these factions together. You know, the stalwarts, they're going to nominate Grant, the half breeds are going to nominate blame. These reformists who have no political sense at all are going to waste their votes. We need somebody who can get everybody together. That's you, buddy. And Garfield is terrified at the prospect because he has already said that he's going to vote for another candidate, John Sherman, who is one of these alleged reformists. And he says to himself, Garfield has by now been in the House of Representatives, Congress for eight terms by this point, which is almost a record breaker. And he had decided that, that wanting to get the presidency, deciding that you wanted to become president, was ensuring your own doom. He wrote this multiple times in his career. He said he has seen countless colleagues of his possessed by the presidential fever, which was this illness that infected people, and it made otherwise good politicians realize that they could be presidency one day if they play their cards right. And by realizing that they could be president, they therefore ruined their own political career and it ends up being the doom of them. So Garfield writes to himself, after all these people approach him ahead of the convention. He says, you know, I have seen the vicious effects of the presidential fever among so many of my friends. I decried these efforts to have myself be nominated. And he goes, I would be appalled if I thought that there was any chance of me being nominated and put in the White House. There is so much work left in me to achieve. It would be a shame for me to set so near an end to it all. And I was like, oh, man, if this guy only knew how true those words were with his assassination coming up. But he has to go to the convention because he agrees to be the floor manager for another candidate, John Sherman. And throughout the convention, which is again, this lovely theatrical scene in Chicago where you have literally a giant dome that all the Republicans are standing up and having parliamentary arguments in front of Garfield throughout proceedings, things happens to be in the right place at the right time saying the right thing to convince enough fellow delegates that he is the rightful dark horse, that he is the reluctant prince who is smoothing over divisions between Republicans, who is saying nice things to people, who is trying to ensure that everybody has the right to speak, the right to vote, the right to be present. He ends up sort of accidentally being in a position to. When the voting actually begins at this nominating convention, once you have enough deadlocked ballots, there's this spontaneous movement to vote Garfield. All of a sudden, 20 votes from Wisconsin, one of these states, goes to Garfield at the nominating convention. And he does the thing that I would argue seals his doom in many ways. He stands up as soon as these votes get spontaneously given to him, after him not really receiving any over, like, 35 prior battles, ballots. And he says, you know, Mr. Chairman, no candidate can receive votes without their consent because Garfield has not told anybody to nominate him. And he gets shut up on a technicality because, you know, the Chairman says, the gentleman is not raising a point of order. Sit down. And if you want to be cynical about it, that was the exact thing that Garfield needed to say to convince people that, aha, you know, we've had all these nasty people elbowing for the nomination and trying to get nominated, you know, and this, it's been so much nasty partisan rancor. Here's a nice guy who everybody likes and knows who is saying, please don't vote for me. And at the next ballot, he wins a majority of the votes. So he comes out of the gate swinging. And this is actually, I believe, where the TV series kicks off, Death by Lightning, with that nomination that comes to him pretty much unexpectedly. But that he, you know, again, if you read the tea leaves correctly, you can see there was calculus in there with a lot of the things he did, some of which I've mentioned here and some of which I have not. But then the challenge, of course, becomes, how do you win the election? That Follows.
- [34:25]
Eleanor Evans
I'd love to pause on that because it's such an evocative image of this Republican Party maelstrom swirling and Garfield stepping up as this sort of calm, humble voice of reason. And you can see why that was such an attractive moment, attractive picture, both for us to look back to in history and for the drama to begin with as well. I wonder if it's almost a nice moment to pull back a bit to Garfield the man as well, because is it right that once he secures this nomination, he doesn't really go out on the campaign trail? He sort of asks people to come to him, him and to his Ohio home. I wonder if we can look at that and his family life and what that means on the campaign.
- [34:57]
C.W. Goodyear
Yes, yes. So in this time in American history, it was seen as when you have been nominated, when you have won the party nomination, it was seen as being disqualifying for a candidate for the presidency to go out and ask people to vote for him. That was seen as if you are interested in the job, it is not for for you. And it is seen as being desperate and kind of pathetic for, like a presidential candidate to go rally voters. That was seen as being beneath the office. And so at the time, Garfield gets nominated in Chicago and he immediately has to flee back to his farm in Northeast Ohio. And there he begins what goes into the history books as kind of what's called a front porch campaign, which is when the candidate sits at home and has voters come to him rather than vice versa. But what's interesting about this is this is the first front porch campaign in American history. And so what happens is voters show up on Garfield's farm and he has to show them courtesy, he has to give them food because they've come so far to see him. It's, you know, legions of black voters, wannabe women voters, they don't have the right to vote yet. Industrial groups, workmen who are coming to him in both him in his house. And Garfield goes out onto his front porch and he has to give all these impromptu speeches to these visitors. And that was seen as being very revolutionary and it was not uncontroversial. James Blaine, who was the leader of the Half Breeds, who went on to be Garfield Secretary of State, would later write and say, until this point in history, to have a presidential candidate comment, even comment on current events and issues and his own opinions on them was seen as being disputed, demeaning, and beneath the office. But Garfield was able to kind of get around this by insisting that, look, I'm not going out to talk to these people. I'm not asking them to vote for me. They are knocking on my front door. They are pilfering my fence posts and stealing crops from my fields. Like, what am I to do? Just shut the door and put guards and get the people to get away from me? I can't do that. That's not polite. And so he runs essentially what's one of the first active presidential campaigns in U.S. history. In his home life you asked about, he had a very, very outwardly happy home life. Garfield had married a woman named Lucretia Rudolph. Lucretia Garfield, of course, is what she became. And they had, as somebody else has described, what was at one point the worst marriage in presidential history. And then what eventually became the best when he married her, he didn't really love her. He did it out of necessity more than anything else, as a matter of fact. You know, and this pierces the veneer of Garfield being this, you know, holy saintly figure. He had actually cheated on her in at least one point of their relationship, and that ended up being the turning point. By the time he ran for the presidency, he famously had one of the happiest marriages in Washington. And he would say to people who asked about it, he would say, I have been wonderfully blessed in the disposition of my wife. She is unstampedable. That's the word he would use. And unstampedable, as I've said it, implies reason to stampede, which Lucretia definitely did at multiple points. Their love was very deep and strong and true. By the time he ran for the presidency, they also had a lot of young kids, five kids who lived to adulthood, two who did not. And they went on to accomplish pretty impressive things themselves. But he had this very halcyon, bucolic home life at his farm. And I'm not sure if you're ever going to get a chance to visit, but it's run by the National Park Service in the US Now. It's a pretty wonderful site that they've maintained very well.
- [38:33]
Eleanor Evans
Well, fingers crossed. I'd love to go there one day. And I hope that many listeners will proceed there after hearing this conversation.
- [38:38]
C.W. Goodyear
Oh, well, you guys can try. It might be a bit of a haul.
- [38:41]
Eleanor Evans
Very good. So we're getting to know Garfield the man. He does accede to the presidency. It's a fleeting presidency, and we'll get to that. But before that, we should just touch on his running mate. How does he choose?
- [38:51]
C.W. Goodyear
Yes, when he is nominated, it is by surprise. He is Very worried. By the way, if you read the accounts of him immediately after getting nominated he is asking people if he can leave the hall early before he actually gets nominated. He turns ghostly pale. He does seem to have premonitions as he rose about ahead of the convention that this might actually be the end of him and boy, if he ain't right. But his challenge immediately after getting nominated is how do I knit this terribly divided Republican party back together? And the answer that gets told him is the stalwarts run by Roscoe Conkling are very mad and you need to do something to offer them an olive branch. Here's a good idea. Have your vice president be a stalwart. Pick one of them. What a lovely way to salve wounds. And Garfield ends up up having this foisted upon him. This wasn't his direct choice. Chester Arthur, who was one of the most, dare I say, notoriously corrupt stalwarts of the time. He was an underboss in the stalwart machine. He was a crony to Senator Conkling. He had never been elected to anything in his entire life. His job before getting nominated for the vice presidency was he had been the customs collector of the Port of Manhattan. I know that sounds innocuous, but it's one of the jobs that the stalwarts and other spoils politics were able to monetize very well. I was saying that there was very few regulations around civil servants at the time. One of the benefits of being customs collector of the Port of Manhattan is for a while you were able to personally pocket a proportion of whatever taxes and fees were imposed on imports to the United States through the port of Manhattan. So that made Chester Arthur a very wealthy man. And he had been kicked out of that role by Rutherford Hayes. It had become a big political fight. President Hayes trying to kick Chester Arthur out of that job. And he did so. But then, you know, what does Garfield do when he's a nominee? He decides to, you know, swallow his pride and allow Chester Arthur to be his vice presidential running mate. And it was a very odd pairing. They didn't get along very well. But privately people were pretty appalled when Garfield did this. You know, I mentioned one of the factions that supported Garfield was these reformers who wanted to clean up the American civil service, make it apolitical, make it professionally run. And when Garfield picked Art Arthur as his running mate or had Arthur be selected as his running mate, all these reformers were appalled. They're saying, oh man, Garfield's just going to cave to the stalwarts he's not going to accomplish any reforms, yada, yada, yada. And then this reformist writer, El Godkin, wrote this great, the opposite of prescient paragraph. And he said, those of us not unnaturally disgusted with Chester Arthur's elevation to the vice Presidency may take refuge that nothing will surely befall James Garfield and therefore put Arthur in the presidency. And I, I, maybe he jinxed us, I'm not sure. I have a very soft spot in my heart for him, as a lot of people do, and that'll become clear as we get through the rest of this interview.
- [41:47]
Eleanor Evans
So let's return to Garfield for a second, then he's got office. How would you characterise the policies and measures that he pursued in his short time?
- [41:54]
C.W. Goodyear
As you could expect if you knew his congressional career, he fought battles, subtle, pragmatic ones. He wasn't going to make sweeping changes, he wasn't going to dramatically change the destiny of the republic. But he still believed in his heart, in a lot of what he initially did. He won, wanted the United States to be a more fair, just, egalitarian place. He knew that there are tremendous injustices happening in the South. In his inaugural address, he says to deprive a race of the right to vote, you know, if in a monarchy to make a threat to the life of the king should be considered a capital crime, we must consider that at the same level here, the attempt to disenfranchise a race. But he believed at that point in time that federal policy could only do so much. So he was very subtle in the ways he tried to guide his domestic policy. He appointed a lot of African Americans to senior jobs in the administration, including Frederick Douglass and Blanche Bruce. He endorsed, for the first time ever, he endorsed universal public education in America. He did that in his inaugural address. It had been such a transformative force in his own life. He said that that was something that our nation needed to embrace. Embrace. Weirdly enough, in his inaugural address, he says the US needs to build a canal across north and South America. So he kind of called the creation of the Panama Canal, which was interesting. He also ushered in the creation of the American branch of the Red Cross, of all things. He worked with Clara Barton on that and he also worked with Frederick Douglass to try to appoint the first black American diplomats to Europe. So you can see what he's aiming at. But that's in his domestic policy. When it comes to political calculations, he runs into a very predictable problem, which is how do you balance all these factions? He was very much dancing on the heads of snakes. And he had to try to keep the half breeds happy and the stalwarts happy. And the predictable happens, which is the stalwarts don't get the jobs they want. And Roscoe Conkling, this embroidered turkey of a politician, basically wages war against Garfield. It results in this very, very nasty political split, literally within the administration because so many of Garfield's cabinet were stalwart sympathizers, including his vice president. And Conkling says, I will refuse to have the Senate confirm Garfield's appointments to these offices unless I get to approve the people I want. So he's basically trying to use veto power to put his own cronies in the jobs he thinks Garfield promised him. And that leads to a predictable outcome, which is this Republican civil war that Garfield eventually won. Wins. Believe it or not, Roscoe Conkling and one of his cronies, Tom Platt, resign from the Senate in a huge miscalculation. And that allows Garfield to appoint the people he wants. And that sounds great. You know, everybody's happy except for the stalwarts. And that was one outcome. There is a less predictable outcome, though, which is Garfield had a stalker who identified with stalwart politics and who, in the aftermath of this fight between Garfield and Conkling stuff, said, oh, I see what's going on. Garfield is trying to wage war against the stalwarts. If I kill Garfield, then the new president, Chester Arthur, who is a stalwart, will be so grateful to me, the assassin, that President Arthur will give me the assassin, whatever job in the civil service that I want. And I want to be ambassador to France. And what happens is this person stalks Garfield and then shoots him in downtown D.C. in a train station.
- [45:28]
Harmonic Security Advertiser
Station.
- [45:29]
C.W. Goodyear
And that's really where the assassination drama begins. But talk about an unpredictable and tragic course of events.
- [45:36]
Eleanor Evans
Yes, absolutely. This man you've mentioned, Charles Guiteau, he's inspired by this machine politics that you've so clearly outlined for us through this episode. We will get onto the full legacy in just a little while. But if we can linger on this moment for just a second, it really is a dramatic moment and it's overtaken a lot of Garfield's stories. What's your take on what happened and its importance?
- [45:59]
C.W. Goodyear
Yeah, it's, It's. It's interesting. So my take on what happened is, again, it was a series of events because this happened over the course of several months. Garfield, as you know or your listeners might not, he didn't die immediately of the gunshot. He ended up dying of an Infection, which is probably the most painful way a president has ever gone. And it took him about 80 days to die. And that was a transformative moment because America had never really seen a president, President be mortally wounded before. They had seen Lincoln be shot and die quickly. They had seen other presidents fall pretty dramatically ill very quickly. They'd never seen one seemingly killed, then be resurrected and then slowly die again. And what happens over the course of that time? To go back to something I said earlier, when you review the events, it seems as though somebody else is writing this. It reads like a fictional story story. It is just so dramatic. It is compelling from a political standpoint because Garfield shooting and the shooter's motivation ends up really riling the American people against spoils politics. People are now demanding reform of the US Civil service. Civil service reform. It sounds like a topic from that name that's designed to put you to sleep. But at this time, in the aftermath of Garfield shooting, civil service reform became. Became the grassroots, fiery political movement in the United States because of this shooting. You had all these inventors trying to cobble together machines to save the president's life. You had this intersection of science and politics in a very graphic, vivid way that made it just the perfect topic for many people to write about for years afterward, as Candace did beautifully, and as you're now seeing be put into this Netflix series. The way I would end up describing the assassination from a spectacle perspective, it's like setting off a firework at the end of a Shakespearean play, the Shakespearean play being Garfield's life. Because it had been such a compelling and nuanced and interesting story about political ascent and struggle and the growth of a nation that ends in one of the bloodiest and nastiest ways to go that you could imagine. And it's happening in a very public way. And so it's just the peak of drama. What happens afterward is Garfield's shooting ends up inspiring. It creates this. As I mentioned before, it lights a fire under the civil service reform movement and it catapults Chester Arthur into the presidency. And when Chester Arthur went to the presidency, everybody unanimously on the Republican side and the Democratic side said, this man is the least qualified person and the least deserving person to ever be put into the White House. We are doomed. But what ends up happening, And God bless Chester Arthur, he uses it as an opportunity to turn his life around. He weeps openly when he hears of Garfield's death. He is personally, privately terrified of getting to the presidency because Arthur doesn't really want it. The Vice Presidency. Traditionally in the US it's a do nothing job where you get to live in a nice mansion and show up at dinner parties. And for Chester, for a lot of politicians who end up in the Vice Presidency, they hate it because of that reason. Chester Arthur was like, perfect. I love that. That's exactly what I want. But when he got thrust in the presidency, he's just distraught and weeping and depressed, not least of which because the assassin claimed to be a Chester Arthur follower. You talk about, what a disastrous setting. But he got private letters from a series of people who basically convinced him that this does not need to be the end note of your political life. You can instead use this as a chance to become the person, the leader no one expects you to be. And as a result, Chester Arthur serves the remainder of Garfield's term as President. President and calls for and then signs into law the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act, which is the first truly comprehensive civil service reform legislation that ends up depoliticizing the American civil service, that ends up instituting some form of regulation on competency that restricts political activity by civil servants, that restricts where they can get their income from. He kicks out the latter and he destroys the corrupt machines that enabled his own rise to power. It's a very interesting example of somebody, you know, turning against the evil forces that made their own life possible, their own success possible. And there's a line from a political reporter at the time who later said, after Arthur died, no one ever entered the White House more widely distrusted, and no one ever left it more generally respected than Chester Arthur. As a matter of fact, this is a bit of a non sequitur. One of the factors in Arthur's turnaround was his wife actually died a few months before he was nominated for the Vice presidency. He was a widow. And that also destroyed him because his wife had always complained that he was working too hard on politics. And then she died when he was literally away from home. And he said afterward, he said, honors mean nothing to me anymore. And so that was a factor in his turnaround. But as a result, when he went into the White House, he was this wealthy, wealthy, dressed, portly, gentleman, bachelor president. And so women around the country, around America, literally mailed marriage proposals to him, but he never opened any of them. He just let them pile up in their own little box. But then rumors spread around Washington shortly into his presidency that every day Arthur would leave flowers in front of a mystery woman's portrait. And no one knew who this was. And everybody was, you know, Excited to see who the target of the president's love is. But it turned out it was just a portrait of his dead wife. So he was. He clearly had a very soft heart. So that's why when I mentioned earlier that I had a soft spot for Chester Arthur, he had redemption. He embodied the very worst and then eventually the very best of our political system. And that's very compelling. That's something to really write home about.
- [51:49]
Eleanor Evans
I'm so glad we could get to Chester Arthur's story, get a little bit of that in there, because, yeah, as you say, it's such a brilliant redemption arc that's adjacent to Garfield's story. Returning just to Garfield. Then as we begin to wrap things up. It was a short presidency, a short Life. He was 49 when he was shot, is that correct?
- [52:05]
C.W. Goodyear
Yes. So he was born in 1831. He died in 1881. So, yeah, he would have been 49.
- [52:10]
Eleanor Evans
So such a brief life, a brief time. Arthur is obviously responsible for carrying on some of his legacy. I wonder if we can get a sense from you then, his broader legacy and how he was remembered both in the immediate aftermath and in the century since as well.
- [52:23]
C.W. Goodyear
Well, he basically became this heroic martyr. He was romanticized. Not only was he used by the reformed movement as this figurehead because, you know, when this civil service reform legislation ended up passing, it's because all these political activists literally used Garfield's death as, like. He became the dead figurehead for, like, a fallen saint, a fallen hero. So there was the political reforms that his death made possible. A whole bunch of people named themselves after him. They named mountains after him as the US Continued to expand westward. When you die like that and you leave such a public legacy like. Like that, he ended up having his name threaded into the fabric of our country in a lot of ways, where, if you know where to look, you'll find it. Pretty much every city in America has a Garfield Street. There are Garfield hospitals, Garfield schools. There are statues of him all over the nation. You had another strange tribute, you know, Garfield the Cat. When I was writing this book, I said, I'm writing a book about, you know, Garfield. People thought I was talking about the cat. The cat was actually a product of this, believe it or not, because the cartoonist's grandfather was one of those people who was named, named after James Garfield. And when the cartoonist who created Garfield the cat, according to one version of the story, had to name this thing, he ended up naming it after his grandfather. So it's an indirect tribute in some ways. And then it faded. The assassination kind of became what everybody knew him for. The other details are harder to find. His kids went on to be political dynamos in their own way. The Garfields, for a couple generations they were a bit of a political dynasty. But then he just kind of faded into the back background. And that is probably the best way to remember him, I'd argue, because it adds something to the historical soup of our presidential history to have somebody who is literally described by the time he was nominated for the White House. So even before he became president, Garfield was described as being one of the most influential and accomplished Americans of all time. To have somebody do all of those things and then not really be remembered for their presidency, that adds nuance to how we think of political power and political achievement in this nation. A lot of other stories like Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson and both of the Roosevelts, they've been told many, many times. Garfield is one of those more obscure stories that has something really significant and unique in it itself. And so that's something to look back on. And I think because he was a very wise man in his own nuance of character, in his own writings, in his own pretty incredible arc of achievement, there's just so much to find and enjoy. And so I think he occupies the right place, which is somebody who is obscure, but among the people who know him, they think very well of him. So he's almost like the indie band version of American presidency, which I approve of.
- [55:14]
Podcast Host Introduction
That was C.W. goodyear speaking with Eleanor Evans. His biography President From Radical to Unifier is out now. You can find much more about Garfield, Chester Arthur and Garfield's assassin, Charles Guiteau on our website historyextra.com thanks for listening to today's Life of the Week. Be sure to to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.
- [55:49]
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