The very unique President Garfield

Garfield's Life

Brady-Handy portrait of Garfield, 1870s

James A. Garfield was a man who became President and died shortly thereafter. He does not get much presence in our collective posterity. It is hard for authors to lionize him excessively, because one cannot make a career (or a legacy) on what one was likely to do, or what one intends to do. However, if these are valuable indicators, then they suggest Garfield would have been a great President.

He was a renaissance man of his time, an extremely skilled scholar of Latin and Greek. He was the only President who was a clergyman. Garfield served as an Elder in the Church of Christ, resigning his position only on the occasion of being elected President. Before this, Garfield had been a languages teacher at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio.

In the lead-up to the Civil War, Garfield was a passionate anti-slavery orator, and soon allied himself with the fledgling Republic Party. He immediately sought a commission in the Union Army at the outbreak of war. While serving as General Rosecrans's Chief of Staff in the Western Theater, Garfield passed time with Rosecrans discussing religion and philosophy. The two officers dovetailed personally, with Garfield showing unswerving loyalty to Rosecrans, and the latter referring to Garfield as "the first-well read person in the Army." During the war, Garfield's writings demonstrated that he grasped the real aim of the war was to eradicate slavery, referring to the dismal possibility of having a worthy cause if slavery were maintained: "It is hardly possible God will let us succeed while such enormities are practiced."

Elected to Congress in 1862 (against his wishes to remain with the Army), Garfield had a reputation as one of the most captivating speakers on the floor. When he spoke, all listened.

General Garfield was on hand in Washington during Lincoln's assassination in 1865, although he was not present at the event. Two men who had praised Lincoln's assassination were beaten nearly to death in the streets, and there were calls to form to a mob to destroy the offices of newspapers which had been unkind to Lincoln. In a gesture that today seems Hollywood-esque, Garfield literally grabbed a US flag, stepped forward, and calmed the masses with an extemporaneous speech.

"Fellow-citizens,—Clouds and darkness are round about Him. His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. Justice and judgment are the establishment of his throne. Mercy and truth shall go before his face. God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives.”

He echoed Biblical grandeur in admonishing the panic and demagoguery, asking that the reality of Lincoln's death be accepted somberly. It was successful. The crowd was hushed, and no mob was formed.

In his personal life, Garfield was a voracious reader, having a personal library of some 3000 books. He was also technically gifted, and is certainly the only US President to publish a mathematical proof, when he submitted a fairly clever trapezoidal method for proving the Pythagorean theorem for the New England Journal of Education in 1876.

Garfield showed intense interest in the civil rights of African-Americans in the wake of the Ku Klux Klan's rise during the 1870s. Although he felt torn over supporting the Ku Klux Klan Act, as it would give the President extremely broad powers (including the power to suspend habeas corpus), he used his inaugural speech to declare that blacks deserved "the full rights of citizenship" and added: "Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen." With strong foresight, he predicted that if the blacks were not educated, nor their ability to vote and exercise their rights freely granted, they would become "America's peasantry." Garfield's predecessor, Rutherford Hayes, had willingly accepted the Presidency in a bargain whereby the Southern states would agree to the Republican victory only if Reconstruction were dismantled. Almost immediately after 1876, blacks were evicted from every level of state government in of the former Confederacy, and they were forced to yield almost every practical right they had previously enjoyed. If not slaves, the freedmen were treated on the same level as serfs. Garfield's personal principles suggest that he intended to roll back the status quo that was being entrenched throughout the South, but he never even had a shot at doing it. It would be many decades before another President emerged with similar principles.

Assassination

Unfortunately, Garfield had only a few short months of Presidential power before he was shot by Charles Guiteau. He would be helpless and bedridden for the rest of his life.

His wound was a single shot to the abdomen that lodged near his pancreas; another bullet grazed his arm but caused no serious damage. The President's medical treatment was sloppy even for the time, with American surgeons disdainful of the notion of surgical cleanliness which was then growing in popularity in Europe, they inserted unsterilized fingers into his abdomen and hastened his demise due to infection. They also incorrectly guessed where the bullet had gone, and probed continuously and unsuccessfully for the slug. If the bullet had been removed with sterile tools, or even if it had simply remained there in Garfield's body without poking and prodding, he likely would have escaped the massive infection that contributed to his death. Eventually, the doctors came to believe that his intestines had been damaged by the bullet's course, and prescribed a very strict diet for the President of egg yolks, bouillon, and whisky- even going so far as to require feeding rectally instead of orally. Thanks to this advice, the President wasted away to practically nothing, losing nearly 100 lb before his death. 

By modern standards, Garfield's wound would be considered miraculously lucky. The autopsy revealed that the bullet did not damage any vital organs. He could have been treated with high confidence by surgeons of today.

As summer wore on, Garfield found no comfort in the oppressive heat and humidity of DC. His doctors suggested that he needed to be moved to a more comfortable and agreeable climate to speed his recovery, so he was loaded into a train for Jersey Shore. The main line went as far as Elberon station in Long Branch, but sympathetic residents had (in a matter of hours) built a new railroad spur that led directly to a seaside cottage. This spared the dying President a bone-shaking carriage ride. Later on, the temporary spur would be dismantled and the ties used to build a small hut known as the "Garfield Tea House." This humble wooden monument to President Garfield's memory still stands today, although in rough condition.

In great pain and close to death one day in September, Garfield sat up in bed to scribble his signed name, adding the Latin phrase strangulatus pro Republica - "tortured for the Republic."

James Garfield died on September 19, 1881 from his injuries, with a contribution from medical maltreatment.

Civil Service Reform

Public outcry following Garfield's shooting and death was directed at the very system that Garfield himself had vigorously opposed: the "spoils system," whereby a newly elected leader or party would expect to replace most of the offices with their own loyal supporters. These government jobs were usually not filled competitively, so they were comparatively easy jobs, and many of them (Collector of the Port of New York, for example) were extremely lucrative for the officeholder. Placing the final decision power on the President's shoulders for filling federal jobs ensured that the President never saw an end to aggressive office-seekers who demanded an audience with him. The enormity of dealing with thousands of would-be appointees meant that a President generally lost weeks or months of work filling appointments.

The solution was a double-edge sword which remains so even today. 

The former system conferred a certain power upon the Presidency to hire and fire appointees with no repercussions, representing a check on the power and size of the federal bureaucracy. The biggest upside was that it kept government accountable for the actions of all of its appointees every 4 years, and it checked the size of the bureaucracy. The downside was that the President was expected to fill favors in this way, opening up opportunities for graft, and wasting time that could be spent in real work.

The system we use today is different in two key ways. One of these is more-or-less universally considered a worthwhile development, while the second is still debated to this day.

1. The immediate solution to the problem of inept office-holders was to create a competitive system whereby candidates would be evaluated by objective standards set for each position. A Civil Service Examination determined the aptitude of a candidate for government work, so that at least grossly unqualified candidates would not be accepted. This was popular in the 1880s, and it remains so today. The American people do not object to submitting their prospective civil servants to standardized testing and evaluation procedures.
2. The ultimate solution to the problem of Presidential power over the bureaucracy was to empower the independence of the bureaucracy from the President. In the early days, the President had the power to almost totally clean house in the Executive Branch, and fill many thousands of positions. In the subsequent period, the bureaucrats who entered a career of civil service had their jobs protected from Presidential capriciousness by regulations and the requirement of cause to be given in termination (a situation unlike most private-industry jobs in the US). Civil servants could expect to keep their careers for the long-term, since the very nature of ensuring independence from political whims meant that they had an unmatched degree of job security. This process has made bureaucracy jobs almost impossible to remove once created, and it means that the federal employment rosters will always rise, and the government will always be accused of inefficiencies. The inefficiency is, in most cases, simply required by law. However, it has been vigorously opposed by those who rail against government waste. Especially by individuals who haven't even contemplated what the alternative is.

The President does still have the power to appoint thousands of people, but the bureaucracy has millions of employees in the 21st century, so the President's power is substantially weaker in this area than it once was. Even if the President had the singular goal of cutting down on the bureaucracy, he would not have the legal authority to do much about it. Congress has established the right of the people to decide how their civil servants are hired and retained, except for a very small number of appointees who serve "at the pleasure of the President".

Political Assassination in the American Political Consciousness

On a certain level, the experience of the assassination was substantially more therapeutic than Lincoln's had been. 

In the first assassination, the killer had supported the Confederacy with arguably true principles, had fled successfully, eluded pursuit for days, and was ultimately punished by a Union soldier who shot and killed him, not tried and convicted by a court of law. This did not let the government save face. It did not give the people satisfaction that their system was just, fair, and effective. On the other hand, there was grinding resentment about those who had helped and sheltered Booth, with vastly disproportionate punishment doled out to them by vengeful military courts. In the end, people never knew exactly how much of a conspiracy it was. The death of Lincoln was an incompletely-resolved trauma for the American people- to some extent, it still is. The American political landscape would be unimaginably different today if he had survived.

It had only happened once, and was therefore a unique event from 1865 to 1881.

 In the second assassination, the killer had been immediately apprehended, had been given as fair a trial as could possibly have been expected, and had revealed himself to be a horrible human being with a twisted sense of reality rather than any principled assassin. Guiteau's hanging was a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it had all happened as expected, with no loose ends, meant that the American people could finally come to grips with political assassination and not treat Lincoln's death as a unique horrifying tragedy. When seeking an explanation for why it had to happen this time, they could blandly note that Garfield was a martyr for civil service reform. That is, seemingly, the get-out-of-jail-free card for knowledge on Garfield- just mention "civil service reform" and you are doing as good a job as some textbooks.

Scholarly and dignified, Garfield had a clean image then, just as now. He had his enemies, but most of them were not enemies of principle. No scandals or improprieties are alleged of the Garfield administration. It was easy for the public to try and make sense of the death as if he were a martyr for the cause of civil service reform.

At the same time, the real effects of his death were somewhat harder to grasp. In the same way that LBJ would later feel bound by Kennedy's challenge to fulfill the Moon landing by 1969, Chester Arthur had assumed the office with a mandate to do what his predecessor wanted done. This occurred humbly, patiently, even graciously on Arthur's part, even though Arthur, a Stalwart, had had a reputation for supporting the spoils system and being a giver and recipient of political patronage in New York politics. The highlight of Arthur's presidency was the Pendleton Act, a groundbreaking civil service bill. During the Republican National Convention of 1884, the GOP failed to nominate him for a second term, so he retired from politics at the end of his first term. Arthur's transformation had been totally unexpected; he never gained the trust of reform-minded Republicans, but he also threw away his good graces with the Stalwarts. Arthur was popular with moderates of his time, but he would never have ascended to the Presidency if not for Garfield's death. The Stalwart faction of the Republican Party might have remained strong if Garfield had not been assassinated and its main reason for existence discredited.

Garfield, if he were alive today, may not be pleased with the current state of the federal government, but on a practical level, the tangible motivation for his assassin would never be a factor again in the future, since civil service reform would prevent most job-seekers from benefiting from a personal audience with the President. Whether the reform actually did ensure that appointees were the best people for the job is up for debate, but the fact is that newly elected Presidents afterward would not spend months re-appointing an entirely new Executive Branch from the ground up, and no Presidents afterward would be attacked by a disgruntled office seeker.