New biography of James Garfield reveals an influential statesman
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: July 24th, 2023
James Garfield was the second American president to be murdered by an assassin. But unlike the first, Abraham Lincoln, there haven’t been many books written about Garfield and many Americans don’t know much about Garfield.
C.W. Goodyear, author of the new biography President Garfield From Radical to Unifier, pointed out on The Spark Monday, Garfield had a great impact during Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Gilded Age before ever running for president,”Whenever you ask contemporary Americans about the presidents they remember, it’s always a product of how long that president was in the White House and what they accomplished within it. And for Garfield, that’s a short story. By no fault of his own, of course, he was assassinated. But the greater legacy of his life is a pretty incredible one. He was not only one of the longest serving congressional congressmen in American history by that point. So he had witnessed and participated the rise and fall of reconstruction.”
Goodyear described Garfield’s as a man who led a remarkable life,”He was also this incredible American renaissance man. He was raised by a single mother, the last president to be born in a log cabin. And by his late twenties, he was a college president and a state senator and a preacher simultaneously. And then soon thereafter, he was the youngest brigadier general at that time in the Union Army. And then he was the youngest congressman, or at least technically the second youngest congressman in America halfway through the war. And then he also he had this incredible congressional career. And he also founded the first federal Department of Education as a congressman. And he wrote an original proof, the Pythagorean Theorem. So it’s an amazing life and just one that was real. It was honestly very revelatory, given a lot of the things that we’re going through today.”
Republicans were the progressives politically in the late 1800s and Goodyear said Garfield was on eof the most outspoken,”He was a burn it down radical. He joined Congress in. 1863. He was this very young member of the House, and he was incredibly progressive. He was a member of the radical Republicans so far to the left of Lincoln. On the subject of social and racial issues in America at that time, by the time Lincoln was, I’d say, hesitantly embracing the idea that the abolition of slavery would be necessary. Garfield and their brand of Republicans, including the great Pennsylvanian, Thaddeus Stevens, by the way, I believe saw not only in the need for immediate abolition, but also immediate equality of race throughout the nation. They believe that leading Confederates should be exiled, disenfranchized or even executed. And they also believed in the necessity of breaking down Southern property, redistributing plantation land from the southern gentry of that time, the slaves to slaves and what they called loyal whites. So they believed fundamentally in the need for this thorough reconstitution of the South in order to make America into what they think it needed to be, which was something more in line with its founding ideals.”
As president for just a short time, Garfield became disenchanted with the patronage system of the party in power handing out federal jobs. It actually indirectly led to his assassination when a mentally ill man, who thought he should getting one of those positions, shot Garfield.
C.W. Goodyear will be at Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Thursday, July 27 at 7 p.m.
