The fourth (of five) presidents to have a beard as well as the first (and still the only) person to be elected to the presidency directly from the House of Representatives, takes the stage for today’s #stampoftheday. A 5-cent stamp issued in 1882, the stamp portrays James A. Garfield, who was shot on July 2, 1881 (and died a few months later from infections probably caused by the doctors who treated the wound).
Today Garfield (who also is the second president to be assassinated and the third to die while in office) is largely forgotten or ignored, one of a series of late 19th century presidents that Thomas Wolfe described as “lost Americans” whose “gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together.” (All the bearded presidents – Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Garfield, and Benjamin Harrison – served between 1860 and 1892).
Yet Garfield not only was more talented than I knew, he also dealt with many issues that are resonant today. A native of Ohio, he studied at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later renamed Hiram College), while working as a school janitor. He did so well that he was admitted to Williams College as a transfer student and, after he graduated from Williams, he returned to Western Reserve where he taught classical languages, English, history, geology, and math before becoming the school’s president, a job he kept for only a few years supposedly because he grew tired of faculty arguments. (That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?)
He studied law, became a state senator, served as a major general in the Union Army (where distinguished himself at the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga), and was elected to Congress in 1862. A skilled orator, Garfield spent a total of nine terms in the House of Representatives, where he was known for having a detailed knowledge of financial matters and where he chaired several important committees and held multiple leadership positions. He firmly supported the gold standard and initially agreed with Radical Republican views on Reconstruction (though he played a major role in the dealings that resolved the contested 1876 presidential election that ended in Reconstruction in return for the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president.
Well regarded by many of his colleagues, Garfield apparently didn’t have a high regard for many of his predecessors. He supposedly said of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that it was a “strange phenomenon in the world’s history, when a second-rate Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch memorable in all future ages.” And he reluctantly supported Grant’s reelection bid supposedly saying that while “Grant is not fit to nominated,” his opponent (Horace Greeley) “is not fit to be elected.”
He apparently didn’t actively seek the presidency but emerged as a compromise candidate on the 36th ballot at the Republican Party’s 1880 convention. He got only a few thousand more votes than the Democratic nominee, General Winfield Scott Hancock (though he easily beat Hancock in the Electoral College). During the campaign and once in office his main challenge was balancing the demands of the party’s two competing factions: the Stalwarts, who supported the existing patronage system, and the Half-Breeds, who backed civil service reform, that would protect many government employees from being fired by their political overseers (an issue, of course, that we’ve long since resolved, haven’t we?).
Garfield’s accomplishments as president included a resurgence of presidential authority against senatorial courtesy in executive appointments and purging corruption in the Post Office. Garfield advocated agricultural technology, an educated electorate, civil rights for African Americans, and a stronger federal role in education, particularly for former slaves, many of whom had been banned from learning how to read or write. He also proposed substantial civil service reforms, which were passed by Congress in 1883 and signed into law by his successor, Chester A. Arthur, as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.
On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed and delusional office seeker, shot Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington D.C. The wound was not immediately fatal, but he died on September 19, 1881, from infections caused by his doctors. Guiteau was executed for Garfield’s murder in June 1882.
For a few years after his assassination, Garfield’s life story was seen as an exemplar of the American success story-that even the poorest boy might someday become President of the United States. Beginning in 1882, the year after Garfield’s death, the U.S. Post Office began including Garfield in the notable politicians and others portrayed on stamps (he ultimately appeared on nine different stamps). However, by the turn of the century, Americans became disillusioned with politicians, and looked elsewhere for inspiration, focusing on industrialists, labor leaders, scientists, and others as their heroes.
But others, such as Allan Peskin, who wrote a biography of Garfield published in 1978, give him a more positive verdict, writing: ” “True, his accomplishments were neither bold nor heroic, but his was not an age that called for heroism. His stormy presidency was brief, and in some respects, unfortunate, but he did leave the office stronger than he found it. As a public man he had a hand in almost every issue of national importance for almost two decades, while as a party leader he, along with [a few others] forged the Republican Party into the instrument that would lead the United States into the twentieth century.”
So today, two days before Independence Day, let’s raise a glass to James A. Garfield and the idea that expertise, intelligence, knowledge and skill are desirable traits in our leaders. Beards aren’t bad either.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.