The Quiet Radical President

When I think of the lives of the American presidents — excluding perhaps the most recent ones, or those enshrined on Mount Rushmore — I’m reminded how little we remember about them, other than a few fun facts: Carter for his cardigans; Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal; Grant for being an alcoholic; Coolidge for being mute; Tyler for Tippecanoe; Taft for being overweight. In truth, however, history is more complex, and a lot more compelling. Carter, for example, enjoyed a string of successes that are often overlooked, including adding 100 million acres to the park system; appointing a record number of female, Black, and Hispanic citizens to government jobs; helping bring amity between Egypt and Israel.

All of this brings me to James Garfield, our twentieth president. His claim to fame is that he was assassinated, joining a morbid fraternity with Lincoln and JFK, only six months into office. But who was Garfield, otherwise? And what did he do? Do I see a show of hands? Not many — including me. Thanks to a new biography, however, by C. W. Goodyear, “James Garfield: From Radical to Unifier,” I’ve been enlightened. In this comprehensive and well-researched tome from Simon & Schuster, Goodyear makes a strong case for reviving the Ohioan’s legacy beyond the split-second moment in 1878 when he was gunned down at the Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., Garfield emerges as one of our country’s greatest statesman and one of our most intelligent.   

Employing largely primary sources and well-chosen quotes, Goodyear takes us from Garfield’s humble beginnings as a dirt poor “log cabin president,” to a canal boatman, Williams College graduate, Civil War veteran, long-time member of the House, and finally chief executive in the Republican party. Given Garfield’s brief tenure as president, the years as a Congressman are naturally given more attention. At first blush, this might seem like a hard sell to a prospective reader. Passing legislative bills, debating in the House and Ways Committee, and arguing for bipartisan policies, seem about as scintillating as a trip to the dentist. But Goodyear makes us think otherwise. He presents Garfield as a towering man of ideas, whose fervent beliefs on racial equality and education reform, among others, make him a man ahead of his time and a true activist.

His stance against slavery was not merely a political one, but a genuinely heartfelt one. There are moving passages in the book revealing Garfield’s passionate belief in the plight of Black Americans who were still struggling to achieve basic freedoms fifteen years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. “To violate the sanctity of suffrage is more than an evil,” Garfield stays in one address, “it is a crime…”

In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, more than a generation later, was much more regressive, segregating Federal offices, including the Navy, the Commerce and Treasury Department.

To some of his contemporaries, Garfield appeared less ideological and more opportunistic, following the prevailing winds of political expediency more than any idealistic stance. Frederick Douglas for one, as Goodyear notes, felt he lacked backbone. Other adversaries chafed at his appeasements to further his party’s agenda. But over the course of his career, it becomes clear in this book that Garfield earned the respect and often reverence of his colleagues — and Americans at large — as a fair-minded person, who could see both sides of an issue and was willing to change his mind if he felt genuinely convinced. A rarity today in politics.

Goodyear is to be applauded for his thorough history, given that he has much less precedent to work with than other authors of more popular subjects. Garfield has not exactly been a subject of many best-sellers, and far fewer books have been published about him than, say Lincoln, who seems to have a book published about him every month.

Goodyear’s’ prose is articulate and measured, and he does not slip into hagiography, which is the bane of lesser biographers. My only issue is that he dwells too long on the intricacies — and intimacies — of the slow, agonizing deathwatch of the bedridden Garfield ( who survived for three months after he was shot), describing in exhaustive detail the doctor’s reports on his bowel movements, his “resurging parotid gland,” his “boils the size of peas,” and the “pus leaking into his ear canal.” These bits, to my mind, add little to our understanding of Garfield, other than that he was a stoic figure to the end.

To Goodyear’s credit, he makes clever use of Shakespeare quotes, which open each chapter and act as pithy prologues to the ensuing text. The Bard’s passages are especially interesting because they are taken from Garfield’s diaries, to inspire him, and show what a thoughtful figure Garfield was. It makes us wonder what kind of president he might have been, given the chance. For the moment, we are left to our imagination, and the pages of Goodyear’s biography, to ponder this largely forgotten, yet exceptional man.

C.W. Goodyear will discuss his book, “President Garfield,” at House of Books in Kent, Conn., on Saturday, July 22, at 6 p.m.

Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster