we are very pleased to have the

author of the brand new president garfield for radical unifier published just less than two weeks ago on the 4th of july, which a great day for a presidential biography to come back, come out. i think everyone would agree. published by simon and schuster. and he's been all over the place. he's doing a full book tour. he's on. he's been all over the place. and we're really thrilled to happen here. i think this is a perfect place for somebody to come and write the book about james garfield, to talk and to see all of these great faces and to see all these people who really are interested in garfield and want to learn more. so please welcome a native of new orleans, a graduate of yale, and his first biography just published, president garfield, a radical unifier, a c w goodyear,

and so much. all right. well, thank you, guys much for being here. i should echo todd's kind words that this is the perfect for me to come visit. it's actually with members of the garfield here, members of my own family kindly enough and this being the last stage of my ohio book tour, it seemed as though this was just a perfect case of things coming full circle. so i couldn't have dreamed dreamt of a better location. i also want to make it clear that the book says c w goodyear i've always gone by charlie and so, so militantly, so so we're going to have plenty of time for questions at the very end of the cw thing, i was advised on good authority that charlie does not good on a book cover. so. so i went with cw and by virtue of that i sounded on paper much older than i am. you got.

a better bent, but i. but i assure you, i'm old in spirit. by this point. this book was written over the course of five years. and over that time period, you know, we went through quite a lot as a nation. and in the research which to the staff here, law and field were so helpful and i lost some hair and then the rest of it or a lot of it turned gray. so we're working on that. anyway, this is the setting and the people who are in attendance, this puts me in a bit of a quandary because my normal stump speech is often with introducing people from the very beginning to the concept of james garfield. but what i'll do here, given the mix of people before me, is i'll actually try to trim things down and explain why i found him such a compelling figure from the very. so i'll start with the question i was asked hundreds of times over the course of this process, which is why james garfield and this is a that not a lot of presidential biographers get certainly not the ones of lincoln, roosevelt, washington. and it was something that i'll

admit at the beginning was bit of a indirect path. five years ago, i was working as a writer in dc and by virtue of where i was geographic early and i think where a lot of our nation still is. i was very interested just from a research perspective of finding a period of our nation's history where the divisions of our society were not necessarily exactly like those that we're experiencing today. but there was comparable subject just enough to tease some consistencies. and wanted to find somebody who was resisting the divisive spirit of the time, somebody who was fighting very hard to keep the great machine, the great structures of our government functioning and. so i was drawn to reconstruction in the gilded. so the post-civil war and then the post post-civil war and as i was diving into my research, which was initially based at the library of congress, i found the same figure floating in the

background of most every major event throughout time of the mid civil war. on through the beginning of the gilded. and that person was james garfield, not only that, what was also very interesting was that was somebody who everyone of the time, regardless of their own politics, had generally things to say about which was strange, sometimes passive aggressive, but it was always in a very kindly tone, which i which i found refreshing. and then when i the way he was generally spoken of in the histories, work could be distilled into one sentence. james garfield future president would die within his first year in office and the deeper i dug into his life, the less fair that seemed to be as the record. what i instead found was what i currently to be one of the most impressive rise is to political power, not only in 19th century american history, but in all of our nation's history. and for reinforcing it on that, i'll cite another expert, president rutherford hayes, who

said of garfield, even before garfield's election to the presidency, the truth is, no man ever started so low. who accomplished so much in all of our history, not benjamin franklin or abraham lincoln even, and so that's if you know, presidents like i do when they don't often say nice things about each other, that that that spoke wonders to me. and then you look at his record even before presidency, and it's an incredible life. james garfield, as many of you know, was the last president to be born. the log cabin he was raised by a single mother, never really knew his father. their relationship was. you could see the ghosts of that throughout the rest of his life. the place an absent father had and how he went forward. he was actually not many of you might know this he was actually not even the first james garfield in his family. he was named after an elder sibling who had died before he was born. so it's as humble a start as you can really think. and by his late twenties, so younger than me, he was a state senator or a college president and a preacher, an abolitionist preacher. at the same time in this area of ohio. and then you fast forward barely

another year and he has all of a sudden, by the time of his promotion, become the youngest brigadier general in the union army. and then you fast forward in another year. and he has, by his own judgment of the situation, become youngest congressman in the country technically that wasn't true. he was excluding at large members of the house so he knew how to compliment himself possible. and then what followed was a seven year house career, which by modern doesn't measure out very high. but at the time that was an all that was almost an unprecedented run of political power in our congress. nine consecutive terms struck many people as just ludicrous and so that was the kind of person you're dealing with. and over the course of that legislative career, from 1863 to 1881, he witnesses us and participates in the rise reconstruction, the handling of myriad economic crises. he personally investigates president grant for financial wrongdoing.

he founded the first federal department of education in part as a reconstruction. he chairs all of these fantastic house. he serves as a supreme court attorney. so he builds this very successful law. he writes these very well-written articles, the atlantic and the north american review. and he also together an original proof, the pythagorean theorem in his free time, which i've been told by my more mathematically gifted friends is a very impressive one. and i've had people from audiences tell me that before. so reviewing that record, i was i felt lazy. i, i felt jealous and i felt intrigued. so that was where this story began. and in many ways, that's where my own life began. as writer, because i haven't ever encountered a subject just as fantastic as this man. so i am surrounded by western reserve right here in front of me.

so i don't want to delve too deeply into the history of that land. but you can see from the very beginning where this this this character was built, this fantastic american at the time his nomination, somebody summarized his surprise nomination for the presidency because he wasn't running, of course, actively for the presidency. somebody wrote that the republican had no choice but to nominate james garfield because he was and i quote and this is what i opened in the prolog with. he was so aggressive and he was so conciliatory and i decide at the end of my research that that is basically what summarizes his life from the very beginning. he is he is here in the area as a young man. he is just he is has what i can only describe as a vulcan ambition from a young age, he writes, after giving an oration to a school that he was attending. and you can see that his ambition of kindling from a young age, he writes, the ice is broken. i am no longer a cringing scapegoat, but i'm resolved to

make a mark in the world i know without egotism that there is some of the slumbering thunder in my soul. so for a young man, a teenager, to be writing that to themselves in this setting of all times, because back then this was still the wild midwest. we think today the midwest as being the stained, placid location maybe. and speaking for myself. but he he was in as rough a life environment as i think most white men of that time in the north could be born to. he was determined to make something of himself. but not only that, he was somebody who was. i'd argue pathologically insistent on making friends with those that he defeated in the in the debate halls. and you can see this from his early writing. he says, after encountering one of these rough debates, he decides as a young man, propose the following resolution that carpet fission ought to give way to cooperation. and after he wins various debates with other students, he is described as being somebody who was just insistent on

remaining friends with those he defeated in the classroom and otherwise, and that explains how he became in later life in this, how he became this great pragmatist of a profoundly divisive era that was reconstruction. but his relationship, his youth and the way he grew up and this is what was very cool, i think, about our systems. we often ask who become our leaders to capitalize, if not monetize on their life story. and so growing up, and especially as he got into these incredible of public power, garfield often had to endure, people describe having him as this wonderful encapsulation of the american dream, this person who had come from being, as they put it, a canal boy to president over the course of their lives. and he would always slightly bristle at that. and i found this interesting piece of writing this is when he's in a layover in washington as a wartime general, he writes on the whole reviewing it all, i lament sorely that i was born to

poverty. let no man praise me because i was born poor with the pen, without a helper. it was in every way bad for my life. and he then went on to write, asking himself personally what more he could have accomplished if he had been born, as he put it, to a father and some wealth. and i think in my experience and still very true today, if you if you encounter an who's been through hard times and overcome they're not saying at the end they're not celebrating now what they've done. instead they're often saying what more they could have accomplished had they been given the same privileges as everybody else. so that struck me about him anyway. he he was also kind of unfair, obviously, to describe himself as without a helper. he had his mom with him the entire length of the way. and i see my mom in the audience right now. so i'm very conscious of that. but so when he got into the white house, the narrative, the title that got attached to all these campaign biographies, all they all had this singularity that they all circulated around and it was the title was from

i'm from the log cabin to the white house. and i thought what was more impressive about him is that he actually brought his mom with him into the white house after he won it. so i think that's much more telling. anyway, he he was president. and so by the beginning of the civil war, he, he and i want to emphasize this. he both felt on a religious basis the necessity of the war. he was chomping at the bit to, see this war break out in order to purge what he considered to be a great almost spirits mistake that the country had made to that point in its history, which is to allow the continuation of slavery. garfield was by that point. he was a radical. he was a radical republican, an abolitionist, in pure sense of the word. and he writes at the very beginning of the civil war, i can see nothing before us by a long and sanguinary war. this war will soon assume the shape of slavery and freedom. the world will so understand it. that was a very rare view for a union supporter have at that time, at the beginning of the civil war, the majority

viewpoint was that this is going to be a quick conflict. all it's going to take is a march down to richmond and back and that this war was actually about slavery. the south fighting for slavery. the north was, from a political perspective, insistent that the civil war were at the beginning at least was not about slavery. it was about maintaining the sovereignty of the union. and that was a very careful stance that lincoln had to adopt to keep his coalition together. but garfield kind of waved that all away. he saw that this is going to be an incredibly bloody conflict and that it was going to be a necessity to redeem the soul of america and in the way that the country should have been founded from its very beginning. but he also sees opportunity in this he's a he's an influential man. and at that time we often ask ourselves today, isn't it great that all of our past presidential leaders, they so many of them had military experience? well at times of existential conflict in our early days as a nation, we had a small peacetime army. whenever there was an existential conflict, we would be bolstered by volunteer

officers. and so garfield had this opportunity as this, you know, prominent, young, charismatic politician and preacher and educator to build his own regiment out of his followers and then lead it to glory. and so this was what was written about volunteer officers of that time and no episode, of american history. have there been greater opportunities for men of high character to wield a and controlling influence over their fellow citizens than were given to the officers who organize and commanded the volunteer regiments of the union? and that's an excerpt that comes the regimental history of garfield's own regiment, the 42nd ohio. so he he he had he had been married in this time. but his his focus was militantly his own future career. he had friends predicting him that at the beginning of the civil war, they writing were to be led politically by military men for the next 20 years. so he saw this opportunity and. he seized it in the war, went exactly as he predicted. it was long, it was bloody. it assumed the shape of slavery

versus freedom. and also in is predicted for himself because. very shortly into the war, he had distinguished himself to the point that he became at the time his promotion early 1862, the youngest brigadier general in the union army. and you had all of these press stories that cropped up because of the virtue of the timing of his early military victories in the national press. you had new york times, they called him the praying colonel because he was this he was this evangelical preacher from midwest who was frightening the rebels with his. and you know what's funny is when i was reviewing another new york times piece reporting on garfield's stunning in kentucky, a few paragraphs above that, it mentions a union preacher being released from a confederate prison and returning home to connecticut and then giving this great, passionate sermon. that man was my ancestor. so it was very cool. so it was one of those nice moments when as a researcher, you're like, oh, this is meant to be. and so then you get going anyway, partway through the war, garfield is he's a politician in

military uniform. he, he, he is in the south now the deeper south alabama. and he is not only very frustrated with how the union is fighting this war because he wants to be part of this liberating force going through the south. but instead, the union army policy at the time is preventing union soldiers from touching southern property, which at that time included human beings. and so garfield is in the south and he's passing all of these plantations and all these slaves and this is an anecdote he writes about are running out of fields to be freed. they expect by this union force and instead under orders they have to turn the slaves back to their fields. but at a bayonet point and garfield is he's just been he's been through the battle of shiloh. so he started to see real bloody, bloody fights. and he's writing about his agony that he's feeling, being bound union army hierarchy and also being forced to participate in social practices he doesn't believe. and he's hiding runaway slaves

in his camp against orders and his writing home. lucretia, his wife, who made this place possible in so ways he's writing of slaves who come to see him in camp. he writes, poor fellows. we seem to be as much their enemies as masters. so. so again, you're getting the sense of somebody who's blending politics with personal genuine idealism and ambition, very well. and he's also seeing ahead again, he's flipping a few chapters forward in our national history. and he writes home to seems to me that that the successful end of this war is, the smaller of the two tasks imposed upon the government. they will spring out of this war a score of new questions and new dangers. the settlement of these will be of even more vital importance than the ending of the war. i think that could do service in congress. in that work, you should prefer to do that, to continue in the army. so that's how he manages that transition. he see he's frustrated by what he's experiencing and he needs to go home, but he's always he's very self-conscious about seeming and this is a thread throughout his life.

and so the phrase he keeps repeating in his letters back here, you know, back to his constituency in the western reserve, he's writing to friends if it should be a spontaneous movement of the people to elect me to congress, then i would support it. so he's he's being very coded and he keeps on falling back on that phrase, spontaneous. spontaneous. and that's that's that's really the his friends know what that means, which is him you know, asking them to bail him out of that situation. and it works perfectly and he gets elected to congress in he transitions to becoming a radical republican. there's a little bit of a layover because he continues this weird context. he is both a general in the union army still and a congressman elect, and he has to decide which path to take. and he eventually needs abraham himself to talk him into it. he needs the abraham lincoln tells him he's in more need for a republican in congress than republican generals out in the field. but garfield joins eventually as a radical republican. and he becomes from the very beginning part of this struggle

in what the future union will be, because by the time he joins congress, 1863, it's clear by that point how the war is going to what's not clear is the type of public will emerge in the aftermath. and so the big trouble that basically sabotaged reconstruct from the very beginning was that the coalition which won the war, disagreed fundamentally about how to win the peace. and if you listen to, moderates, moderate republicans, conservative republicans, and then democrats who are still in the north, they want the war union to look like the antebellum union minus slavery. they were still in many ways hooked on the idea of preserving, for lack of a better term, just white supremacy and and keeping the southern gentry, as you know, they were before. and on the other side, in garfield's, on this side, you have the radical republicans who understood the civil war not as this struggle for national sovereignty. that was brief they instead saw it as a second american

revolution and a rare chance for our nation to build in the aftermath of this existential conflict, a nation that, in the form it should have assumed from the very beginning the radicals believed fundamentally our most important founding document was not the constitution. they thought that the declaration of independence, which was a much more article to strive for and to quote another moderate republican, this is somebody this is gideon wells, who's one of lincoln secretaries. and wells says radical republicans that they are humanitarians and not constitution loyalists. there's somebody who wrapped their view for the nation around the law rather than vice versa. i'm sorry i grabbed the wrap the law around their political positions rather than vice versa. and so radicals wants not just to immediately abolish slavery, which moderate republicans, including lincoln were slow to do. they want to establish all civil and political equality between the races in america. they want to disenfranchize

exile and execute leading confederates. and i have southern blood in me so that me worry for my place in the world when they also want to even register butte's southern plantation land. they want to distribute these vast swaths of southern agriculture to former slaves and who they called loyal whites. so their vision of the future, of a future america was to really tear down the south to its constituent elements and rebuild it from ground up and but the the plethora of these divisions over how exactly to rebuild country, it it immediately runs into issues. and so the political seeds for reconstruction failure are sown very early. you have the you have andrew johnson fighting with the radicals and eventually the rest of the republicans. you have economic crises. you have legal obstacles. the supreme court becomes a great obstacle to the radical prosecution and reconstruction. and so voters like many in this

room, american voters in the north after the civil war, they eventually start to get exhausted, exhausted, worrying about the south, exhausted of what was perceived to be this of federal power in terms of continuing to intervene. what i'm just going to call states rights. at that time, they called it local self-rule, which was a nice way of packaging the i think in a in a clean way and so it becomes a liability and then all of these other distractions start to emerge of the major ones, the sense of coming back to bite or field brutal way is, the growth of machine politics to the size of the federal government. that from the civil war was massive. it was the biggest employer in the country after the civil war because of all this wartime funding and all of these new jobs that propped up out of nowhere and it became referred to as the yankee leviathan. and that was the term for it. and what was very difficult about was the amount of jobs

awarded in the federal system and the types of jobs where there was no there's very little regulation about it. so there was this expansion of public that became ammunition for corrupt politics and so voters start to get antsy. you have all these institutional issues and one of the people who's there at the very beginning and who witnesses all of this and such a tremendous witness told it is james garfield and he starts to evolve politically this die hard dyed in the wool radical who insisted that he was nothing but a radical. all issues in the nation. he starts to let his peacemaker come out this, this, this man who was so from young age, pathologically obsessed with being popular, well-liked by people and not being seen this ambitious so and so he starts to distinguish himself from the radical caucus. he starts to evolve and he has all these great lines. he writes, during the johnson impeachment, i'm trying to be a radical and not a fool, which i think is a line for the ages.

and he also defines himself as being he writes after another election with that the republicans get off on a national scale he writes about needing to build what he calls a constructive rather than a destructive style of republicanism that's more technocratic. and he embraces that. and garfield becomes of the great radical legislators of that time. and so he becomes a great worker. the congressional years, a master of legislation. he is, for lack of a better term, the the the nerd of the republican house. and he cuts all of these interesting deals with more show horse types, politicians of that time. james blaine and garfield are a few years at the end after the civil war. they're the two hotshot republicans of that time. they're both young. they're both famously smart. and they're both seen as being these the next generation of republican leaders. thaddeus stevens dies. james blaine identifies himself. william allison of of iowa and

james garfield is the three people who could take that stevens place in blaine sees himself. he's like, no, that's me. i, i want to be front and center. it's all about me. and that'll come up later. but he cuts this deal with garfield and basically he gives garfield the just these ransoms of committee power because all garfield wants to do is just to study and solve public problems. whereas he wants to let james blaine take the lead of marshaling the house and keeping legislation flowing so he garfield over the course of the reconstruction, just great pragmatic figure who also, i'd argue, one of the most interesting people that time. and he comes of a very famous supreme court lawyer. he does all of this writing and mathematical work on the side, but he becomes defined as somebody who, in the interest of keeping our institutions functioning, of continuing to hold republican power over the house, he becomes somebody who has the reputation of being a moderate and not just a moderate, inconsistent moderate, somebody who seemed to define

their positions, an issue based on what everybody else in the room had and what he could do to split the difference between everybody else's views. he was somebody who believed in theory, in enforcing equality of race throughout the country, but who also that the federal government couldn't exceed constitutional limits in order to enforce those issues. he railed against machine politics and he said that there was a need to clean up government and institute rules on civil servants so that these machine politicians could stop corrupting the public money. but he also, whenever he was in conversation, other reformers, he would say, oh, we can't be too militant. you know, we can't antagonize these bosses. so he was, as i write in the prolog a bit, janis but people never figured out what to make him even at the time. and now historically, the great mystery of the man was somebody who had been such a die hard radical and had such a long career, could evolve like that. what did he really believe? and that was something that was asked again today and back in that time. and so there are a lot of theories for this person wrote

of the time, his willpower was not equal to his personal magnet system. and then another and this is a very common insult that got thrown about. james garfield, by all manner of critics, frederick douglass to, ulysses grant to all of these reformist republicans, these democrats, they all said the same thing, which is that he lacked moral backbone. and the fact that such a strange insult and it's such a common one, that it made me think that they all got together, agreed what to call him, which i kind of like. so. but he turn it back on his critics. garfield would say that actually, and this is a quote of his to be an extreme in is doubtless comfortable is painful to see so many sides to a subject. and he also wrote that i never feel that to slap him in the face is any real to the truth. so he was somebody who saw both politically and personally, the incredible value of being open minded figure in, the midst of a splintering political of the time. and he found his being very painful and he saw that as being a real of strength on the other

side, i'm describing it almost like a boxing match. you have the hands of the republicans and. they were called half breeds by stallions because the stallion saw these republicans as being not real republicans. and so, again, our history rights interesting ways but but the half breed champion was james blake. he had managed to build a faction, the party devoted, i'd argue, almost entirely to him. he became, i think he was called the magnetic man because of his incredible charisma. i argue in the book that he was actually the first american politician to run on charisma. nothing else. that was all he had. so but as i also write in the fever of hell, like all magnets, he repelled as well as he did attract and gleans. great personal enemy was roscoe. cotton because he had cold turkey on the house floor. construction company wrote that he never forgive the originator of such an insult that but anyway, his administration

needed the two senators of the republican party. they had these factions of party devoted to them and they both hate rutherford. hayes and that's you can see why, because. hayes was this clean government operator, this executive who believed in dictatorial. he was elected to be this this outside activist in federal government and to institute rules on civil service. he antagonized the bosses. blaine and company, pretty much immediately. the only person really of the republican establishment of that time who was making everything work is minority leader james garfield and he is desperately trying keep all these different factions happy. he's minority so we can't afford to have all these divisions, the party by himself on his own, his own up faction and he's having to take all of these l's, if i may use modern parlance. he has to. he's asked by hayes to not run for ascendancy because he's needs good house leadership by republicans. and so he but so garfield takes all these personal losses and he

also writes at this time, though, i cannot believe that in the long run a man will lose my soul sacrifice. so he's in being this selfless operator. somebody who would eventually get there, just deserts in a good way. and he does, because by the end of the hayes administration. hayes doesn't want to run for the presidency anymore. james blaine, most certainly does. he's he's gunning for it. roscoe conkling wants to elect grant to a third term. and then you have all these independent reformist candidates who are also gunning for the nomination and enough republican bosses can read the tea leaves that they see that none of these none of these candidates are going to win the presidency or they're not going to, even if they win the nomination they're going to present a fractured republican party. so they're looking for somebody who can bind this shattered coalition together. and they all start showing up. the minority leaders doorstep in washington on i street, and they all say, you're the only man who can possibly, you know, be this dark horse candidate who who everybody can find agreeable and. garfield is genuinely terrified

by this prospect. he is and witnessed over the course of his congressional career that so many politicians in dc decide to run for the presidency and in doing so actually ruin their political. he's seen this so many times that he actually coins a name for it. he calls it the president shall fever and he writes, it is this very virulent disease around. and he says he vows that he will never catch it and that he will never contract in presidential fear because he's afraid of it being this this this ruiner of his usefulness. and then he also writes, because he's been through four presidential administrations by that point and all of them ended poorly, you have he's been through lincoln johnson, grant and hayes and for a variety of reasons they've all ended poorly for the occupant and so he writes, by that time. oh yeah, sure. so he's he's afraid of being forced into an office where he can't perform productive

statecraft. and he writes after another one of these pitches that he's free and not confident that he'll end up actually getting the nomination because he doesn't want to run but also writes that he would be greatly discouraged if he thought otherwise because as he puts it, there's too much possible work in me to set some near an end to it all. when you're a writer, you get few chances to break the fourth wall. and so when you have somebody who's who you know, doomed, who you know is going to go into the presidency and end up being assassinated, it and they're hesitant about it when. they write there is too much possible work and muted sets in there, an end to it all. you can use as your intro to your last section. so that's what i do. and with. and then so there's that. and then the next page is the presidency. and so he goes to the chicago convention. he's a, he's he's a floor manager for another and it just he just so happens throughout this process because. this is this is before the primary system. this is the convention system of

presidential nominations, where parties don't go into their conventions knowing who the nominee is going to be. instead, it's this wonderful gladiatorial bout between the leading candidates of that time and what was great about the chicago convention was that it was held in this building called the glass palace. so there's this giant glass and steel enclosure in ohio which had recently burned down. so this is a new building. and in the middle, this glass structure, there's a sunken pit that is filled with all of the delegates, the republican party. and then above the pit, there is there are public seating held by members of the public, paid for tickets to see this event. so it becomes this wonderful place to as a writer, you can just really draw out the drama of the moment in garfield throughout this long convention, he happens to say the right thing, the right time in the right place to put him in people's minds as a possible unity candidate. and when you look at that, you can't help but think, well, ask yourself what. he really meant what his intentions were.

i don't think. despite his honest his honest concerns i. i don't think that there's any such thing as a politician, america, who is not interested in the presidency. it's not a binary scale. it's not 0 to 1. it is something that falls along this infinitesimally graded line. and so even if was genuinely afraid, even if he was somebody who wanted to avoid the spotlight and not gun to this thing for a variety of personal reasons, there is still some iota of him that was fascinated with the prospect. and so throughout this convention, he adopts an actor's trick. he starts appearing just a few minutes late to proceedings, ensuring that everybody sees him and he interrupts whoever speaking at the time. and so and so he to steal roscoe cochran's thunder a few times and there are these great exchanges of glances that they give to one another secret supporters garfield have decided they're going to loudly applaud every time he makes a move on the floor.

so then so. so they're playing operatic gladiatorial thing. it's like kabuki theater. it's wonderful. from the political standpoint. and then he ends up doing the thing that ends up sealing his fate is at the end of a series of contested ballots, he is suddenly given 20 votes from, i believe, wisconsin, the top of my head in garfield says the thing that he he you could argue, is his attempts to get of the nomination. but you could also argue very cynically that he knew exactly what to say to ensure that he got it. he stood up and he interrupted the chair and he said, no candidate may be voted on without their consent in the chair, them up on a technicality. chairman ford says the gentleman has not reached a point of order. sit down. and so there's that. and then there's this wonderful rush and he turns pale. garfield transparency realized what's going on and he starts when he eventually wins the ballot. all of these banners appear that are garfield for president and they're all and this is again from a running perspective they're all blood red. so when you're a writer, you know how to tease those things

out a little bit but he immediately inherits the great problem is how to preside over this fractured of republicans and he decides very faithfully to give his vice presidential slot to a stalwart to chester arthur. arthur had never been elected to a thing in his life and he was one of the most infamous interstellar bosses. he was actually in charge of the stellar movement. he was a, i'm going to say, just a lackey to conkling. they even shared a house in, d.c. they both lived on 14th street in a building that everybody called the morgue, which shows you how pleasant that was. chester arthur asked ross, you can't get permission conklin doesn't granted as arthur takes it anyway. but anyway. so what happens is over the course of the campaign that falls as garfield tries very agonizingly to to just strap this coalition together and to win over stalwarts who were still giving him grief, who were still the breakaway portion and he ends up triumphing. he ends up against against the odds, i think, at many points keeping this coalition together in the way he wins the stalwarts over is by promising them their

share of the spoils. we've all heard that phrase to the victor go the spoils that's from this period of american history, because the spoils were term used for all those federal jobs with no regulation about them that you could then award upon winning the presidency. to all your different, you can give out the plunder of the public business for private profit to all of your cronies and supporters. and so the stalwarts want the spoils and when garfield wins, they come calling, they come for they want the treasury. that's the one. because that i mean, you can understand why that's where all the money is. so they want all the money that they can get and they start becoming disappointed when they realize that garfield had a different understanding of all those agreements that they struck and see the seeds blooming for future conflict. and so you have control in who's giving up, who is calling on the president elect garfield here at dinner and he starts by the way, he starts calling garfield his private letters, the trickster of dinner, which is because he thinks garfield is relishing his

deal and instead. so conkling leaves disappointed. then he writes to the president elect. i need hardly add that your administration cannot be more successful than i allow it to be. so one. and then on the other side, somebody who who took their defeat in a much gallant way, or some would say slimy way is james blaine. you know, lifelong, not lifelong, but politically friend of garfield's, who's now been nothing but helpful and charming and surprising the prince of good fellows throughout this campaign, as garfield writes, who shows up and he says, you know, i'd love to be secretary of state. and garfield's like, that's a fantastic idea. and so blaine's by his side. and then blaine writes of the because he, you know, his his bete noire is conkling. and the stalwarts blaine writes to garfield of the stallions. they must not be knocked down with bludgeons. they must have their throats cut with a feather. so bad, so bad is brewing and amid all this, garfield has this wonderful nightmare, wonderful nightmare, this vivid nightmare that makes you want to put him

on your psychiatrist's couch. he dreams that he's going on a canal boat down on the canals here in this area. and he's on this boat with chester arthur. and then all of a sudden, they're a torrential downpour, a thunderstorm, and garfield bails out. he swims to shore, he looks back and he sees chester arthur going down with the ships. and then a childhood friend breaks out of the bushes and grabs him around the chest and says, don't go in, it'll be suicide. you can't save. and then garfield thinks of himself for the first time as president elect, he realizes in his dream that, you know, he's on the transom of something, you know, he's not who he once was. and so then he runs into the bushes. he's now naked and then he breaks into a cabin of an old black woman who nurses him to health and. then he wakes up here and it's snowing outside and he's missing his wife. and so that's the last section i begin before inauguration and then presidency and the presidency goes by the way, as we all know here, in ways that are both predictable with a

great fall out between the stalwarts and garfield then unpredictably because he's assassinated, he's shot, he dies. none of, as we all know, the gunshot but the infection. and then you have all these interesting moments in the aftermath of this awful event. you have this not reckoning actually, but a great political reconciliation of the country. the stalwarts get blamed for garfield's death. in many ways, they get blamed, not because they did, but because their rhetoric inspired somebody and then a member of the public who was mentally ill to do something terrible. and because of that, voters punished the stalwarts. and i found that very interesting. you also have this period of obsession, and even in even invention to try to keep garfield healthy. you have all these wonderful moments. i found stories of women being institutionalized across country because they were deemed insane. on the subject of the president's health, you have one woman who showed up in a bathing in the entrance to the house insisting that she has the cure to the president's illness

because he's dying of this infection and you have a lot of these much smarter ideas. you have a naval engineers who cobbled together the first ever air conditioner in the country to keep guarded secret cool. it ends up being turned off because it's too loud. and then you have alexander graham bell, very famously, who had already invented the telephone, who decides who is, who's intrigued? this idea of finding a piece of metal in a human body, that which is presented by garfield's case. and so he invents the first ever metal detector. famously, it does not work because bell does not realize that there are springs in the president's mattress as he's using it on. so it is it a remarkable period of just these strands of history come together. another thing on the side, garfield, secretary of war robert todd lincoln, eldest surviving son of abraham, who was also present at the time of garfield's assassination. he was in the train station in d.c. he watched garfield get shot. and so as secretary of war, he's

in charge of securing the area. and then he says outside a journalist, how many hours of suffering have in this town? so that's another thread to pull on, i think. but then finally, you have this period of mourning and even reform in the of garfield's death, i argue the reaction was not unlike that of the kennedy assassination. he suddenly gets built in the popular memory to something he was not sometimes deliberately, but also accidentally. accidentally, because the voters are reminded of this person who had lived such an incredible life and who represented in his art just the encapsulation of the american dream. and so when he dies. there's a natural inclination to attach just massive significance to the figure. and there was significance, but they really romanticize what he could have accomplished. but also reformist garfield was somebody who believed in dealing with bosses and machines than overtly antagonizing them. but reform is decide that his death represents a great to purge the us government of machine politics to get rid of

the stalwart source of power which is the corruption of the federal service. so they instituted in the aftermath of garfield's death, they successfully pursue with him as their symbol civil service reform. and i know civil service reform sounds like one of those topics. it's designed to put you to sleep. it's not it's very interesting. it's something that prevents the rangers here, for example, of personally pocketing a part of your entry fee. if there are any entry fees when you come into town or parts of the cells in the gift shop, it stops your tax man from being forced to contribute to a political campaign by whoever's in charge of his appointment. it's its civil reform is something that really enables our interaction with the government and the yields of it have been almost incalculable. but people did calculate after garfield's death that having such a powerful symbol of a martyred president, he people were at the time that garfield did is more useful than garfield alive to the clean government reform movement. and historians have now that his

death accelerated the cause by 30 years. so you have this sense of somebody who was really i don't want to say taken advantage of, but the symbolism, the remarkable symbolism of his life, it was for the public gain in a way he never really intended. i'm often asked today about what the modern relevance of this person's life was and. i think were mainly to i think in the course of what he witnessed influence participated in. you see from a presidential that the losing side called fraudulent threat threatening civil war over to economic crises to civil rights struggles, to even debates about the role of immigrants in american society. a funny thing, there's conspiracy theory spread about chester arthur that was a secret canadian in their lives and therefore and if you go to canada, somebody told me this they have marker that said he might have been born here. so i had this say because he was from vermont.

so but it's like mark twain line history doesn't repeat but it does run a lot but i think in garfield's life, he was such wonderful writer. i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to talk about it right here, but he was proof that all of these things that we call unprecedented and all of these events and that we call the president, it's actually not that unprecedented in ways both reassuring, because we've through it before and now, because we've through it before and then second, i think he's a very good view in his politics of what it looks like when a pathologically person is in power in washington in both good ways and bad. somebody is obsessed with keeping political enemies, personal friends, who just wants the systems of our government to continue and who's trying to resist divisive spirits. you get a very complicated and almost chimera of a man that results in a kind of area of a time. and so his legacy is incredibly

complex, but he was a wonderful figure to write about and to research. i want to end with this. when he was on his deathbed, this is when he got moved to the new jersey coastline. a friend of his from the army armond rockwell approached him and garfield looks up at his friend and calls him over, says, do you think that my name will have a place in our history? norman rockwell says, well, yes but he's also saying, don't talk like that. that's you know, that these are the words of somebody who's decided, move on. and then garfield goes, my work is done, and then he dies. the day and again. to go back to the fourth wall breaking when you're subject to a devoted their life their entire life to just working hard and improving his station the world when they see their work is done you have to listen to them. so that's a that's one of the lines that i end the pre epilog portion the book on and so now i'm going to take their cue again he said his work is done now my work is done and i'm

going to try to answer whatever questions you all might have but is just. a piece of. i think we actually have a microphone. you go. sorry. yes. it's about the i is very interested to see what you would think of what he think of politics today and how it's playing out, because some of it sounds i don't know i'm just curious, out of the thing, i'm always balancing between the two. you it's a very good question. in other times i've been asked also because i mean i live in the washington area of modern compares to james garfield one i'd say he was one of a kind there's nobody who matched his his intellect, his spirit, but also whenever you're asked to compare somebody today to, somebody who was assassinated, you got to be very careful. but i think he would by the of

today he would be he would feel both nostalgic and then familiar with a lot of the elements there are other things that would throw him off he would not be surprised by the division and rhetoric that he's seen here and he was i want to say incredibly progressive on racial issues even by his presidency. he spent a lot of his executive authority appointing black americans to positions of federal authority because he thought by that time that was the last. that was a great means of inoculating americans to the spectacle, minorities in power, you know, you get to bypass election troubles. you get to just appoint people president. he also wanted to he wanted to be the first president to appoint black people to, ambassadorships, to europe. so he was really ahead of his time. but i think he would see lot of consistent subject matter with what he went through and what we're through today. one of the things biographers get asked is, you know, if you had a meal with your subject, what would you like to talk to them about? and i thought about this a long

time because i had a lot a lot of time to think about this by myself and i think i actually want to i wouldn't want to have a meal with him. i would want to walk around washington with him. i would like to walk down the national and i would like to show him through all the smithsonian, the national galleries that we have, which are all free which is a great public resource. and i'd show him everything we've accomplished, everything we still struggle with and i show him all these scientific things and breakthroughs we've done that he would find fascinating. he is, he and he might have been most intellectual to ever be president. it the span of his knowledge and his writing and, his studies were incredible. and so i think you have a lot of fun there. and explain what we've been through. show him all the war memorials, let's say you won't believe what happened at the end of world war two. there's this movie called oppenheimer coming out. you might like it. and then but but i would end on the south west corner of the capitol building because there's a statue of him there, a big statue. that's that's in the middle of a roundabout. and i'd say, and here's where you are. you're you're right in the mix

of this, you know, and i think would just be a nice moment. and then then he'd able to give me a very long, complicated answer. long, complicated than what i just gave you. there's another president from ohio named you mentioned ralph rutherford behind rutherford, who also has a very beautiful home in spiegel grove. what did garfield play any part in that disputed election, that hayes into the president. he most certainly did he played a more comprehensive in the settlement of that election than i think any other republican. so for a bit of background election of 1876, was that election a reference been brief? it was the first election in american history. the losing side claimed the results were fraudulent. they threatened a civil war over it, and the context of it was

that in the south, democrats had successfully repressed the black vote violently. and in the aftermath of the official, you had republicans that use their control of election machinery to throw out enough democratic ballots in those southern states to then flip it back to republican. and so the official result was you had the democrat, samuel tilden, the popular vote victory, but he's won the electoral college one electoral college vote. so when the official results come out like that and the behavior happens, you knew that. and so it was the perfect tinderbox for, this unprecedented situation. and garfield is asked by president grant to, one, investigate election violence in louisiana. so he goes to my home state and he tries to investigate and he interviews black voters who have been suppressed by white democrats. he even finds one whose name is eliza, and his mom's name was. and that strikes very close home. and all of a sudden, all that separation he felt black southerners closes in an instant

then he goes back and his minority of the house and you had a democratic majority the house that's saying, you know, we're going to hijack the electoral certification process. and if we're not allowed to put tilden in, you know, we're going to tell our voters to march on washington. and so garfield has to deal with that. this is a is this is unprecedented. this is never happened before. so he needs think about how to diffuse them. then he is trying to subtly get democrats to break from these threats. so he's trying to go behind scenes and break up their coalition. then he is invited against his will pretty much to join something called the electoral commission, which is the special 15 person body that's created to vote on which state went to which man and the final result, by the way, ends up being 8 to 7 republican to democrat to give the election to hayes. so that shows just how close this thing was. the guy who was on that commission. he also gets invited behind the scenes attend this secret smoke filled room meeting at wormley hotel, which is right around the corner from his home in washington. and he hears this hotel room.

republicans saying, if you let hayes take the presidency to these democrats because they're with democrats, real federal troops from the south will end. and in. garfield is invited to that room because the democrats say we want to make sure that you actually mean this. we need witnesses. we trust garfield's. and so they invite garfield down and they say, hey, also we'll make you a speaker of the house. that could be another 50 people throw into the republicans anyway. so garfield was there at stage of that election and he's also he's just he's he's on the when hayes is being upgraded and he's had gone to washington on inauguration morning not knowing if he was going to be sworn in as president. and garfield's there on stage and he's the only person smiling because roscoe conkling is there in blaine laughs and conkling shoots glance at blaine so they're very ready to feud. they both think that hayes is to be this just vanilla wafer puritans from outside washington, that garfield is the only one who's looking happy because he he avoided civil war

and he played a key role in that. so he had a he he was a perfect witness to that remarkable event that sadly became very timely when i was writing this. i think so just out of curiosity, doing all this research that you did five years, did you stumble upon anyone else that you think might be a subject of to future, to any. but i found enough figures who were just such wonderful, colorful characters that were just they almost leapt off the page with their vividness. roscoe coppin was one. james blaine was, another chester arthur was, another very interesting one who ended up by way becoming despite being this perceived crony of conkling. he ended up being one of the very few presidents. i think in our history who let the office make them a better person. arthur was a famous boss, never been elected. he spent much of garfield's wounding in tears and in hiding because.

he was so afraid of being thrown into the presidency. he was perfectly fine with the vice presidential trouble of being all ceremonial, no responsibility, he was like, that's fine with me. i don't mind. he's like, this is exactly what i want. and then, you know, it's there. there's this quote actually, because all these reformists were all so terribly frightened of of arthur becoming president when he got the vice presidential slot. and he and i went to see if i could find it. but now maybe i can. but anyway, arthur ends up redeeming himself, becoming this reformist when he was in the presidency. he ends up getting rid of or at least dealing fatal blow to these power structures that enabled own corrupt rise to power. and there's a line about arthur. somebody wrote when he left office and said, no one ever entered the white house, more widely distrusted it and no one ever left more generally respected than arthur. there's this great line. he had been a widower recently. some people say that's why he turned around his life and so he

was this bachelor president and around the country were sending hundreds of proposals into him by the month and he didn't open of them. but there is this story that went around that he every day he put flowers in front of a mystery woman's portrait and people intrigued by who this might be. so gossip. and then people eventually realized it was his dead wife's and that was how he was opening every day. so he was a he's a fascinating figure i think lucretia garfield also deserves a book as a silent. so i have a question about the future of research and paper and letters between mothers, sons and fathers and daughters and future. is it all going to be in a digital universe so you a researcher to help tell a little bit about those five years were they, you know, on paper or were they a lot of it digitized but going forward? what are we going to have? i love being able to tap your head the tactile feel of holding these things your hand. and what's great about the

library of congress is it was a free resource for, everybody, to access these wonderful artifacts of american history. and that's a very good question. one thing that came up as an obstacle in my research was covid. covid hit and all of a sudden the entire nation was shut down. archives follow that pattern. so digital access became actually a great resource. the library. congress provided a lot of things digitally, but you raise a very good question is when i asked at the beginning of this process, which is like, what is it going to look like for somebody who's writing about somebody who's leading today, our future biographer is going to have to read through social media emails that sounds awful. and that sounds terrible. it it's fine to leave through these, you know, tens of thousands of letters. that's perfectly fine with me. but the idea of going through somebody's old inbox and trying to piece that together, that sounds like it's almost like it's like a it's like an ironic curse, like, oh, you want research material? here's all your research material. it's like and it just it's it's

just a mountain of stuff. but that's a very good question. i don't know. it's possible that things like i might help identify certain elements of things to research, but we're going find out one way or another along those lines each you open up with a setting from garfield's diary. it has a quote from shakespeare. how did they come about? i know he was an intellectual, but i hope he had a book there that he can throw down. yeah, unless he memorized all shakespeare's work. yeah. no, it was interesting because that was one of the easiest editorial decisions i ever made. when i found his diary for 1870, i noticed almost every single day began with a different shakespearean quote and i immediately decided this going to be how i'm going to open each chapter, because i think it's a rare enough thing you find an american politician who truly knows shakespeare. it's another thing when you find one who's able to apply it to their daily lives.

i believe that's what he was doing. and if you read the excerpts, he chose that you tell who what he was trying to communicate and what mattered most to him. there's one where he wrote and it was, i believe, from hamlet, but it says, i will find where the truth is hid the overhead. indeed, within the center. and so you in. and there the all these other wonderful ones you get a sense that again he i believe he was the most intellectual person to ever be president, which made him such a fantastic writer in many ways. and that's and so he was a great witness to his time, his his breadth, his political career was longer, almost anybody at that time. and he was in this tremendously disruptive period, american history. he knew to write about it and he knew how to apply literature to it, which made him, you know, a blessing to encounter. so it refrained from using it. can you talk about his attitude toward native americans since you mentioned in your prolog that he swindled an indian tribe out of there, insists they did and a very that's that's that's

something i it's just honestly what he frankly he his view of native americans was this when the time was viewed as a progressive viewpoint it was actually very almost, dare i say, genocidal. he had a great admiration for, native american culture, and he believed that all the races were capable of equal intellectual feats and had the same moral compass and things like that. but he was one of those republicans who believed that in order native americans to have their full and to be these truly equal parts of american society, you needed to get rid of their culture. so he believed very hard in relocating americans and then providing them with public education, providing them with welfare in, you know, not as we understand it, but in through teachers, through deposits of like public funds, foodstuffs and things like that. and he believed that that was right thing to do. and so when i say sold an indian tribe of its lands, he was tasked president grant when he

was this, you know, powerful political figure with going to western montana and getting a group of people called the salish to leave their ancestral lands. because the green government was citing this old half honored treaty, saying have the right to move you. a lot of white were moving to that area. they were armed. the salish did not their culture, didn't they? they didn't believe violence. they were very proud of having never killed a white man. that was one of their claims to fame. and they're still around today. i shouldn't say was, but they were not passive. and so there was this this terribly tense situation. garfield goes in and he's writing these really interesting perspectives on montana and on indian culture that he's experiencing. he's also saying, i must prevent these men from making a terrible mistake. and so what he ends up doing, he gets the written. signatures of two of the salish chiefs to move and in the third one, men named charlo holds out. and garfield writes to the

secretary of the interior delano and says proceed as if everyone signed in back in washington. member of the interior department forges charlo signature. so all of a sudden all these white settlers come in and they think everything's fine. charles is there and his followers are still there. and they, you know, they get a very end of the deal and. the salish, we never forget it. i talked to the salish a little bit about. it and their histories are really what should be consulted on all of these things. i say in the book, i can i must, and i should only deal with this briefly, but i do. but there's this great symbolism when he's taking a carriage of montana. he writes in his diary garfield writes in his diary and, he writes of passing a dead pine tree. and apparently his driver said that tree died. he said that that tree used to be used as a hanging post and trees on which men are hung, always die themselves. and garfield writes this down, and i think that's there's just

a lot of symbolism there that i couldn't impact. so i included that this is thing. yes sorry for the. yeah, but he was a general. i thought he was a real good friends with grant and thought maybe you could talk about relationship because you just mentioned that he was about the corruption in grants. yeah, they had a complicated relationship and garfield was general under he he was president shiloh both men were present at the battle of shiloh in never really forgave grant for the battle of shiloh. interestingly enough he would write in later years to fellow veterans, you and i can never forget the battle of shiloh we, because it was this bloody, awful conflict. many people blamed grant for it and not foreseeing that the rebels would leave their positions, ambush the union at pittsburg, landing. and i think they at best for enemies. garfield did lot of things for grant. he investigated grant's

allegations of financial misconduct by president grant, and he ends up giving grant pretty much a free pass. and then later on, as grant's administration starts to be distinguished by these corrupt scandals, these these abuses of the patronage, various other things garfield gives up on him, and he has this great line where he just describes grant as being this downright individual. he talks about being next to president grant at a dinner and apparently grant insisted on asking him grant. grant said, don't like dogs and i don't like eating food most other people like. and then apparently president grant starts this conversation with confidences. you know, do you think that animals can become insane. i think. garfield right. so many reports, all of this said had an interesting conversation which shed some light on grant's character and ended. but of course, they never really saw the great schism at the end was, stalwarts were devoted to grant. grant was running for a third term for the presidency in 1880, and garfield takes that away from him. and then in the later fight with

the stalwarts, grant sees garfield's actions emblematic of graft having a grudge against grant's old supporters, and they have this very awkward tiff in standoff because they're both on the new jersey seashore at the same time. this is before garfield shooting and their staying apart from one another. and then garfield goes to washington, he gets shot, and all of a sudden grant's composure, please. and grant ends up approaching lucretia, who's still on the seashore in new jersey and grant's insists that she'd seen men in the field survive worse wounds than the one that garfield had received. so it's a very complicated relationship. frenemy is is a good way of putting it, i think. but it was circumstantially they were often thrown into opposition with each other. i think this might be the last one, actually. oh, you mentioned the compromise of 1877 that garfield was in or played a role in many have said that was kind of the night of reconciliation, at least the

south finally accepting that it was to be one nation and not revolt. it is garfield's leading role. that is it. what was his perspective on it? did you see that as a turning point? yeah. so he did. he he thought he saw it as an attempt because he had a very scientific approach to public policy. he saw it as an opportunity to try something, given that what had been attempted so long had not worked. and he writes this so you asked that great question before about his role in it. that's he's traveling down to louisiana. he's writing funny things about louisianians. he says it's a shame the people here not so pretty, the trees and flowers. so she was writing about my people. but he's also writing to hayes because hayes is in this hayes is in spiegel grove and he's not sure what's happening in garfield writes, we need to find some way to divide the white people politically down here. so he's in this thing of branching out and thinking okay, radical reconstruction has failed. what is some other way that we can break up this old, you know southern gentry that's for so long opposed you know equality

and he starts to buy the idea that enough infrastructure sheer patronage and economic stimulus can be this new solution to the problem. and so he is he gets into this compromise room this smoke filled back room that would later become so controversial in american history. and he he he does this very interesting thing. he he listens to everybody the room, and he realizes that this is a conspiracy and he gives this to make sure that his position in the conspiracy, not a matter of dispute he doesn't want to go into trouble down the line and. so he says, and i'm paraphrasing, but he goes, gentlemen, you know, at this moment we should praise those democrats who are resisting a second civil war. but we can't enter into any bargain that undercuts the legitimacy of this election, although do believe that we need to find you some good solution to the problems at hand. and i support what's been essentially said so far good night. and he leaves because he's like out and so he did play a role he he the the role of that compromise of 1877 that's very

controversial historically because a lot of its tenants followed through and a lot of them more of them were not. so if you're looking at whether this was a deal or not. lot of its promises not kept and these things were already in motion on the national stage. confirmation of the election results. so it was more of an exchange of understanding rather than a binding compact, is my view of it. but a people have been looking back at it recently for obvious contemporary reasons. anyway, thank you guys so much. i really appreciate it.