President Garfield by C W Goodyear

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier
By C. W. Goodyear
Simon & Schuster 2023

“Garfield deserves more than a statue in the park,” writes historian John Taylor in his book Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man, published back in 1970, which sounds unambiguous enough until Taylor’s analysis quickly starts to wobble and stall, “if only because he was a very human person with an unusual assortment of strengths and weaknesses  … [he was] something of a puzzle even to his contemporaries  … a man of contradictions  …” Almost immediately, that park statue seems imperiled.

The reasons are laid out in great detail in Taylor’s book, and they boil down to a situation that will be very familiar to readers living through the most fractured American political scene since Garfield’s own day (he was born in 1831 — in a log cabin, no less — and died rather famously in 1881): he was a long, long-serving politician who generated some radically different estimations from people in his own day. There’s a secular sanctity that attaches to slain US Presidents (this was the second in American history), which makes it a bit jarring to realize that a great many people in Garfield’s time considered him to be an entirely empty vessel, a weather vane that would turn in any prevailing direction. 

The countering viewpoint is that Garfield, in both is nine terms in the House of Representatives and his 200 days in the office of President, was as brave and stalwart and completely dependable as he’d been during his military career in the American Civil War (as with most egomaniacal public figures, calling him “General” was almost guaranteed to elicit a delicate smile).

This second viewpoint is certainly the one held by C. W. Goodyear in his tremendously enjoyable big new biography, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, which will certainly be one of the best US President biographies of the year. Goodyear is firmly in the ‘we lost a giant’ camp, particularly (necessarily) when it comes to Garfield’s long tenure in Congress:

His House tenure measures as almost a record-breaker, and from an increasingly powerful perch in that body he had participated in almost every major American political event since the Civil War: presidential administrations, constitutional amendments, economic catastrophes, an impeachment, election crises, Klan violence, and more had come and gone. Garfield had served as one of the Republic’s few constants through it all.

By far the greatest of Goodyear’s accomplishments in these pages is how dramatically he brings alive the political back-and-forth of those years. Taylor’s book (not mentioned in Goodyear’s “Select Bibliography”) does this too, but nothing so far written about Garfield’s long government career comes close to the energy and enthusiasm Goodyear brings to it all. 

But, as all Garfield biographers point out, the man’s life tends to be overshadowed by his death. He was shot by an assassin at point-blank range, but he was famously as strong as an ox and didn’t die. Instead, he suffered a fate worse than death: he fell into the hands of doctors. He died slowly, agonizingly, and stoically over 80 days (the focus of Candice Millard’s bestselling 2011 book Destiny of the Republic). Goodyear’s outraged disgust when narrating this part of his story is hilariously palpable — you’re chuckling even while you’re wincing at how gruesome it all is:

As new medics reached the depot, each insisted on repeating the torture. Grimy digits, attached to men who did not yet believe in washing their hands, tunneled past shattered ribs to burrow into the president. Metal probes followed, but got hooked on bone shards at a depth of three inches. Pushing down on Garfield’s sternum was necessary to free these instruments. Coating them, imperceptible to the naked eye (and fictional, to many of those in the American medical community) were millions of living microbial poisons, now seeded across the president’s abdomen. 

Eventually, even Garfield’s immense strength failed, and America’s twentieth president died. But even in that tragedy, Goodyear argues, Garfield rendered a service to his country, perhaps the biggest service: his death pushed American voters “to chart a course to calmer public discourse and cleaner government.” 

This is an overreach, but it’s a mighty attractive one. Its sentiment caps and animates this shrewdly sympathetic book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.