President Garfield
From Radical to Unifier
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Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Goodyear debuts with a sturdy biography of President James Garfield. Born in 1831 in Ohio ("the last American president to begin life in a log cabin," Goodyear notes), Garfield turned a hard-won education into a teaching career. He soon became head of the Hiram Eclectic Institute and was elected to the state senate as pre–Civil War tensions intensified. When war broke out, Garfield led a regiment made up of his students, parlaying military success into a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would serve for more than a decade. Thanks to his ability to bring together rival Republican factions, Garfield secured the party's presidential nomination in 1880. Drawing connections between the circumstances of Garfield's rise and the modern day, Goodyear notes that Garfield's predecessor, Rutherford B. Hayes, who lost the popular vote and became president in a backroom deal, was "widely considered illegitimate." Garfield was in his first year of office when he was shot by "a frustrated office-seeker" from his own party; he would slowly die of infection over months. Goodyear provides a thorough complement to previous biographies, which tended to focus more on the legacy of Garfield's murder than on his life. This fresh appraisal sheds new light on the history of American political polarity. (July)
