Quote of the Day (James Garfield, On How Everyone Must ‘Direct His Own Course in Life’)

“You will agree with me that every one must decide and direct his own course in life, and the only service friends can afford is to give us the data from which we must draw our own conclusions and decide our own course.” —Future President James A. Garfield, letter of Jan. 15, 1857 to Burke Aaron Hinsdale, quoted in Burke Aaron Hinsdale, President Garfield and Education: Hiram College Memorial (1882)

A bullet from a deranged office-seeker cut short his life in 1881, but until that point, James A. Garfield—born on this date 185 years ago on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio—had “directed his own course” as few others have done on the way to the White House. Remarkably, he started out from origins perhaps even more lowly than Abraham Lincoln’s, helping his near-destitute, widowed mother tend their frontier farm. But unlike “The Great Railsplitter,” his ascent to the White House was constant, with virtually no deviation.

Self-improvement was the keynote of his early life. While liking the outdoors, he hated farming. An early attempt to try something different—running away to work on the canal boats operating between Cleveland and Pittsburgh—ended with him falling off the boats continually and catching such a fever that he had to return home. But before long, he had found his means of ascent: education.

Taking assorted jobs to pay his way—part-time teacher, carpenter, even a janitor—he ended up graduating from Williams College. Before passing the bar exam, he supported the Republican Party from its founding, becoming, at age 28, the youngest member of the state legislature. The time spent teaching and politicking sharpened his oratorical and debating skills.

When the Civil War came, he enlisted, rising to the rank of major general before leaving to take a seat in the House of Representatives. In the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, he served as minority leader in the House. He emerged as a compromise candidate between two warring factions at the 1880 Republican National Convention.

Charles Guiteau’s bullet not only left Garfield a forgotten President, but in some eyes, even a failed one, as I discussed in this prior post. That is unfair; he simply never had a chance to make a mark, with only four months from his inaugural address to the shooting. But his rise to power--the very embodiment of Ben Franklin's self-made man--was among the most marked in our history. It was a triumph of tenacity and the thirst for knowledge.

Quote of the Day (James Garfield, on the Presidency He Sought)

“My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?”—President James A. Garfield, diary entry for June 8, 1881, quoted in Garfield:A Biography, by Allen Peskin (1978)

President Garfield wrote those words only three months after taking the oath of office. The cause of his lamentation—an endless round of office-seekers that needlessly consumed his time—was also the cause of his death—an unhinged member of this vast tribe who fatally wounded him in July 1881.

I suspect that more than once, Garfield’s private misgiving about his office has echoed, in either its original form or some variation of it, in the minds of every occupant since then. (Though civil-service reform enacted in the wake of his death took care of one drain on his time, yet another appeared in the 20th century: the swelling of executive power that had the baleful effect of voters looking to the President to solve everything.) 

Yet nearly all of those in their first terms, including President Obama, want another crack at it. I’m not sure it’s the trappings of the office that get them so much as the chance to vindicate themselves while they still have time before the bar of history.

What awaits them—as well as their unsuspecting challengers, including Mitt Romney—is another story. Again, Garfield is instructive. This highly intelligent man, now unfairly neglected by posterity, came to know the price of high office. His last written words, scribbled in pain two days before he died in September 1881, were Strangulatus pro republica (Latin for “Tortured for the republic”).

This Day in Presidential History (Garfield’s Assassination and the Insanity Defense)

July 2, 1881—The nation’s capital, already warm because of its southern location, had turned even hotter over the last several months for James Abram Garfield (pictured left), the result of a fight within his own Republican Party over political appointees. Now, on this Saturday morning, the President had only five minutes to wait between the time his carriage left him off at DC’s Baltimore and Potomac Station and the train that would take him to his beloved alma mater, Williams College, for its commencement, and thence to a much-needed vacation.

Garfield, conversing with his good friend, Secretary of State James Blaine, never had a chance to enjoy either. As the two men proceeded toward the train, a dark-bearded man—an attorney who had unsuccessfully sought office from his administration—materialized in the largely empty building and shot Garfield twice with his revolver. More than 2 ½ months later, when the President died, his passing might have been just as much the result of the ignorant medical care he received as from the bullet at the hand of assassin Charles Guiteau.

In the 19th century, the Garfield assassination was regarded as an echo of an earlier tragedy--Abraham Lincoln’s murder only 16 years before at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Garfield, if he is recalled at all nowadays by most high-school students, is as one in a series of hirsute, mediocre 19th-century Presidents.

In the 20th century, however, the death could be seen as a precursor of sorts: of one Presidential tragedy that involved Presidential intervention in a nasty intra-party state struggle (JFK); and of another assassination attempt in which attorneys pleaded for the defendant on grounds of insanity (Reagan’s would-be killer, John Hinckley).

In Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell has some fun with this impression, noting that, “Thankfully, the story of Garfield’s death is more interesting than the story of his life.” So, what makes the death so fascinating? “It is the story of this self-made man’s [Garfield] collision course with two of the most self-centered, self-serving, self-absorbed egomaniacs of the late twentieth century--Garfield’s nemesis, Senator Roscoe Conkling, and the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The Garfield assassination is an opera of arrogance, a spectacle of greed, a galling, appalling epic of egomania dramatizing the lust for pure power, shameless and raw.”

Garfield had emerged as a compromise candidate for an 1880 GOP convention deadlocked between the Stalwarts, the party conservatives, who backed Ulysses S. Grant for a third term for President, and the Half-Breeds, a somewhat more moderate faction who backed either Blaine or Sen. John Sherman for leader of the ticket. As a sop to Conkling and the Stalwarts, Chester A. Arthur of New York was nominated for Vice-President, and Conkling--an extremely powerful political boss--expected that deference would be paid to him in appointments.

But the first four months of the Garfield administration were consumed by warfare between Conkling and Garfield. The Senator, already annoyed when Blaine was picked Secretary of State, decided not just to stall over this appointment but to have it out with the President over a patronage position: collector of the Port of New York, which Garfield had filled by naming a Conkling opponent for the position.

When Garfield refused to blink, Conkling and fellow New York Senator Thomas Platt resigned in protest. They expected that the state legislature, which then controlled Senate nominations, would renominate them, delivering a stinging rebuke to the President.

But the legislature never nominated Conkling, fatally wounding his career. (The political boss never again held political office.)

It is often forgotten now, because of the endless swirl of conspiracy theories, but an intra-party squabble played a role in another Presidential assassination more than eight decades after Garfield’s. Again, that quarrel took place in the home state of the Vice-President who succeeded the murdered chief executive.

John F. Kennedy flew down to Texas in November 1963 to heal the breach between the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, led by Lyndon Johnson’s ally Governor John Connally, and the liberal wing, led by Senator Ralph Yarborough. Ironically, he rode to his destiny to get in the middle of this squabble; Garfield took his fatal trip to the train station for relief from this struggle, even for just a few days.

All the internecine rancor between Conkling and Garfield may have done was influence a diseased mind: Guiteau’s.

Just how diseased that mind was became a major bone of contention when Guiteau went on trial for the assassination. Then, as now, jurors had to contend with psychologists for the prosecution claiming that Guiteau was sane according to the legal definition of it versus other psychologists claiming that he very clearly was insane. Guiteau was found guilty and executed almost a year to the day from the shooting.

As the years turned into decades, Garfield--and, even more so, his murderer--receded far from the nation’s consciousness. But European criminologists and psychologists of the fin de siecle period returned to the case repeatedly, in much the same way that commentators of the last generation have discussed the O.J. Simpson case.

The Guiteau case would reverberate a century later, when John Hinckley was tried for the shooting of Ronald Reagan. The verdict--not guilty, by reason of insanity--might, in one sense, be regarded as an advance from the Guiteau case. But the Hinckley verdict outraged so much of the public that it sparked legislation limiting the use of the insanity plea in several states.

Toward the start of this post, I alluded to the period between the shooting and Garfield’s eventual death. During Guiteau’s trial, the assassin claimed that he hadn’t killed Garfield, but the President’s doctors had.

The public ridiculed the madman for this statement, but we now know he was correct
in ways that nobody could have anticipated at the time. From the moment Garfield was brought back to the White House, he was poked and prodded by a host of physicians who hoped thereby to locate the bullet believed to imperil his life. (Even Alexander Graham Bell got into the act, using a telephone-like receiver as a metal-detecting device. It didn’t work.)

When the doctors finally located the bullet during the autopsy, it was lodged in a back muscle. This position was far less problematic than they feared, but by then the damage had been done: All that poking with nonsterile instruments introduced new bacteria into his system that complicated all efforts to save the President.

Quote of the Day (James A. Garfield, With a Presidential Leadership Style Followed Rarely)

“I would rather believe something and suffer for it than to slide along into success without opinion.”—President James A. Garfield (1831-1881), quoted in Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (1978)

Calvin Trillin once wrote that every succeeding Presidential administration made people nostalgic for the preceding one. In the Reagan administration, he noted, this might take the form of people crying, “Come back, Bert Lance—all is forgiven!”

At last, that instant nostalgia is allowing for a partial rehabilitation of George W. Bush. It’s manifesting itself in the reaction to President Obama’s poll-driven, whiplash-inducing observations concerning the proposed location of a mosque near Ground Zero.

The commentariat are not only pointing out the differences between Dubya—who quickly announced that Islam was a “religion of peace” after 9/11—and today’s GOP, but even between Dubya and the candidate most perceived in 2008 as the un-Bush, Barack Obama. Some are even calling for the former President to speak out on the mosque and call his party back to its better instincts.

For God’s sake, even Maureen Dowd, whose Bushworld collected her daily (sometimes repetitious) attacks on “Bushfellas,” found nice things to say about the eloquence-challenged former President in her recent New York Times column, “Our Mosque Madness.” At least he understood, she noted, that “you can’t have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam.”

Amazed that the “misunderestimated” ex-President could be far more clear about this matter than Obama, she urges him to “get his bullhorn back out.”

Meanwhile, back in Texas, the former President is grinning. Why should he offer an opinion on this? What’s the upside?

Like Albert Brooks in Lost in America, so angry at his wife for gambling away their “nest egg” that he won’t allow her to say the phrase or even any part of it, today’s GOP doesn’t want to hear a peep from the man whose wars abroad and recession at home ensured the loss of their hegemony in the capital. Because losing makes you even more a pariah in politics than moral turpitude, Bush might be even more of a non-person for his own party than for the Democrats, most of whom will always know him, following the 2000 election, as the Commander-in-Thief.

Garfield’s comment above is a little unfair to other Presidents, slightly ironic in his own case (he was assassinated only a few months into his Presidency, so he had little time to be buffeted by public opinion), and somewhat myopic (most Presidents lead by steering public opinion as it's just beginning to coalesce, not getting out far in front of it).

In the fullness of time, Obama will be judged, as his predecessors have been, by how well he performed on one or two issues related to peace and prosperity rather than on the latest imbroglio of the 24-hour news-cycle. He’ll probably look better to his critics, whether Republican or Democrat, than he does now. He might even chuckle at his successor's troubles.

As dismaying as it may be to watch the President scramble for cover as the flak comes in over the mosque issue, it’s amusing to watch another set of true believers—just like those in previous administrations of both parties—bewail the unwillingness of their champion to, in Garfield’s phrase, “believe something and suffer for it.”

Profiles in Presidential courage may be all well and good, but no occupant of the Oval Office has ever wanted to be a masochist.

Quote of the Day (Daniel Webster, on Editing an Inaugural Address)

“I have killed seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts.”—Daniel Webster, discussing how he edited an allusion-heavy draft of William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address, quoted in Jill Lapore, “Annals of the Presidency: The Speech—Have Inaugural Addresses Been Getting Worse?”, The New Yorker, January 12, 2009

(The link above is only an abstract—you’ll have to register to read the whole thing, with the alternatives being buying the issue or hunting it down in a library. Whatever you decide, reading Lapore’s almost unendlessly intriguing article on the fine—or, as it happens more often than not, not-so-fine—art of writing inaugural addresses will be worth your trouble.

After he finished deleting all the classical allusions in Harrison’s address, Webster—no economist of words himself—might have taken an ax to much of the rest of the content, since the President-elect in that 1841 speech went on, despite insanely cold winter weather, to deliver the longest inaugural address in American history. Harrison’s madness precipitated a cold that worsened into pneumonia, leading to his death one month later—the shortest term in office of any President.

If a highlight film of great inaugurals could be compiled, it wouldn’t last long, once you get past Kennedy’s, FDR’s, Lincoln’s, and Jefferson’s first. But Lapore brings to the forefront another address that, while not reaching that level of greatness, achieved a flickering power of its own: James A. Garfield’s, in 1881.

Garfield—my God, who knew?

Much of Lapore’s article uses Garfield’s prolonged, weeks-long agony in writing his own speech as a hilarious running thread through the piece.

But America might have been spared three-quarters of a century of lost opportunities and turmoil if it had listened to this Civil War veteran warning about the retreat from Reconstruction already taking place: “To violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the government itself.”

The Garfield link above is worth reading in its entirety. Finally, his dream of a race, long handcuffed by human-rights abuses, finally coming into its own, will be fulfilled less than two weeks from now, on the same spot where he spoke, by Barack Obama.)