President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier - Hardcover

Goodyear, CW

9781982146917: President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1982146915 ISBN 13: 9781982146917

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2023

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An “ambitious, thorough, supremely researched” (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America’s twentieth president—James Garfield.

In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more.

Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so.

President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C.W. Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University.

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Prologue PROLOGUE
“Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.”

—Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, as quoted in Garfield diary entry for August 17, 1878

Rain drums Chicago’s gridded streets on the early morning of June 9, 1880. Decorations sag and calcium lights hiss; warm, glowing lobbies lure celebrants inside as the night air is washed of the tang of fireworks. Then peace rules the city, with only newfangled electric lampposts—exuding soft light and a soothingly industrial thrum—left holding out against the black and the quiet.1

This brief calm falters before dawn, when a murmuring crowd packs the entrance of the Grand Pacific Hotel on Jackson Street. A band soon arrives to beat out patriotic tunes—thereby spoiling an ambush: the weather is unseasonably dismal, the hour unreasonably early, but hundreds have defied both to escort the new Republican nominee for president on his journey home. 2

His attempt at escape fails almost immediately. At eight-thirty, a distinctively large head (two feet in circumference) is seen bobbing under a side-exit, and the mob catches up to it within a half-block. Thus overtaken, James Garfield can only politely surrender to popular will. His hat lifts to reveal a kindly smile. Eyes like summer lightning invite the people to come along, if they’d like.3

They do, in a human tide—its noise, the pumping lyrics of “See, The Conquering Hero Comes” and less rhythmic swells of cheers. The candidate at its center has been buffeted by thousands of congratulations in the last eighteen hours.4

Upon finally reaching a train station, Garfield climbs onto a car festooned with flags. He shelters within until nine o’clock sharp—a time that is marked by engines firing, wheels chugging, and the car’s back door creaking open. Then, as a witness recorded:

Gen. Garfield yielded to popular demand and appeared on the rear platform, where he was greeted with a succession of cheers from a thousand pairs of patriotic lungs.

His outline recedes into the rain, leaving behind a depot of soggy supporters who are exultant despite the weather and their wetness. Their happiness had been well-stoked since yesterday, when Garfield yielded to a far more pressing demand from a larger audience. “I am not a candidate, and I cannot be,” he had repeatedly told a convention packed with senators and generals, governors and congressmen.5

Editors now opine the Republican Party (so dreadfully divided) had little choice but to force Garfield to accept the nomination for president anyway. “He was so aggressive, and yet so conciliatory.”6

Under bluer skies and across a nation now stretching unbroken from Atlantic to Pacific, millions of citizens learn the rough, remarkable outlines of a life driven by those traits. James Garfield’s story had begun in a setting so rudimentary as to be alien to most Americans in this mechanized age: a one-room log cabin on the Ohio frontier.

Erudite readers would describe his reported upbringing as almost Dickensian. Garfield’s father (indistinguishable “from the other plodding farmers” of early Ohio) had not survived their harsh surroundings for long—leaving his widow and four children to fend for themselves on a lonely homestead. “Mrs. Garfield… managed to support herself and the family on the little farm left by her husband, and James, from his earliest years, was obliged to aid… in the general work about his home,” describes one northeastern outlet. “James had a tough life of it as a boy,” another in Illinois summarizes.7

Other columnists take pains to specify the toils of the nominee’s childhood. Early years splitting firewood, plowing, and working a carpenter’s bench had ended when he ran away for the Twainish exploit of piloting a canal boat. But brawls and a bout of malaria evidently set the teenager straight: Garfield enrolled in nearby schools—paying for one by working as its janitor. Readers from Manhattan, New York, to Manhattan, Kansas, peek over their papers to tell their children to never complain again.8

Then, a climb that packs enough color to defy the black-and-white of print. The canal boy is baptized; he emerges as a tall, sandy-haired teacher, caning students in a firelit winter classroom; he roams summer roads as a lay preacher; an almond-eyed student passes by, catching his attention; he turns twenty-six and is a married college president—idolized by hundreds of farmers’ children flocking for instruction; he is a state senator, swapping peacetime political capital for a wartime army uniform; he is raring to fight as civil war engulfs America, telling voters a “government actually based on the monstrous injustice of human slavery” must not be allowed to exist; he leads congregants and students up frigid Kentucky slopes to hunt rebels; a general’s stars bloom on his shoulders—the youngest at the time to bear them in the U.S. Army; he crusades into the Deep South, sheltering runaway slaves in camp against orders; he becomes the second-youngest congressman in America at thirty-one and one of its most progressive. Then seventeen years fly by in a paragraph, and he is minority leader of the House—an unassuming, unparalleled survivor of an age’s worth of legislative battles.9

Many of Garfield’s political triumphs are lost to readers in that acceleration. He had been the youngest participant in America’s radical revolution and remains perhaps the last still politically alive; he had chaired committees governing the country’s military, budget, census, and currency; he had trimmed many millions in federal spending; he had single-handedly investigated a president, swindled an Indian tribe out of its ancestral lands, and even established a new wing of government: the first Department of Education. (“Shall we enlarge the boundaries of citizenship, and make no provision to increase the intelligence of the citizen?” he’d dared Congress during that particular fight.)10

His speeches on these topics and more, as later compiled by a colleague, would be found to “present an invaluable compendium of the political history of the most important era through which the National Government has ever passed.”11

Garfield has also seemingly found time for impressive activities outside the Capitol. Republicans as varied as William McKinley, James Blaine, and Benjamin Harrison court his stump services. Statesmen jaded by a lifetime of sappy speeches have reported their cynicism cured by a single Garfield performance. “It was eloquent, but it was far more than that;” one would write with wonder:

It was honestly argumentative; there was...

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Verlag: Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN 10: 1982146915
ISBN 13: 9781982146917
Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten: 624
Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar
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