Garfield: A Presidency Unfulfilled

books:

	• James A. Garfield (The American Presidents) Ira Rutkow Times Books, 2006 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Garfield: A Presidency Unfulfilled

In the grade school litany of the names of our nation's leaders, James Garfield does not even merit a pause. Amidst Washington, Adams, Jackson and Lincoln, then Roosevelt and Eisenhower later, the twentieth President gets little more in even High School U.S. History than does Pierce or Fillmore. Yet he was a complex and accomplished individual, a General in the Army and a most skilled politician.

Rutkow is a physician, and an accomplished author. He brings the eye of the surgeon to the treatment of the President after the assassination attempt while concisely reviewing his early life and run to the presidency with aplomb. At a time when the subject of errors in medicine is much with us, it is sobering to read of the "treatment" of the highest elected official. Rutkow validly makes the point that President Garfield was not simply maltreated: he was killed by the physicians watching over him, primarily one eclectic and ego-driven surgeon. Had Garfield suffered the same bullet wound in 2006 he might have been discharged from the emergency room and lived to a ripe old age.

Beyond this tome, the entire "American Presidents" series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. now numbers 33 volumes and is a collective treasure providing brief but well written biographies of the men who have led our country.

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Garfield's Lost Legacy Explored

Once again I found myself enjoying the strange politics of America's Gilded Age as I was introduced to a man who, up to this point, had remained a dim figure in my mind: someone who was famous only for his very short term as one of this nation's Chief Executives. It turns out that James A. Garfield did exist, and he was more than a footnote in history. He was a leading Republican (always a party man) who stood for a brief moment as the chosen voice of "the people" (or at least the voice of a very splintered Republican party).

Party politics was the defining, big-picture issue as Garfield came into the Presidency. Following U.S. Grant's term, which was tarnished by scandals, the men who held the highest office were by necessity forced to discuss (if not actually devote themselves to) civil service reform. Of course this only led to further deal-making and intrigue as both parties (a demoralized Democratic party that hadn't had a president in the White House since Andrew Johnson, and a Republican party at odds with itself over which faction should be in control) tried to vie for offices of importance. Enter James A. Garfield, a man who would, by his assassination, become a martyr to civil service reform.

All this is easily found in most grade school history books though. What the author, Ira Rutkow, does in this fine biography is outline not only the political forces at work behind the rise and fall of the Garfield presidency, but the conditions of American medicine at the time...conditions that directly impacted the death of America's 20th President. The chapters that immediately follow the attempt made on Garfield's life examine the care he was given by his doctors and the unsanitary methods used (methods that, as a reader, I found both interesting and grueling). One wonders how Garfield would have faired had he lived in a later century.

Mr. Rutkow has done a very good job of bringing this unknown, little-remembered president back to life, if only for awhile. "For who was Garfield," Thomas Wolfe asked, "and who had seen him in the streets of life?" Here, finally, we have an answer.

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Best president ever?

I suppose by some measure, James Garfield was one of the best presidents ever. After all, he didn't really mess things up. Conversely, he may be one of the worst, as he had no real accomplishments either. That's what happens when you occupy the office for around six months, much of which were with an eventually fatal bullet wound. In truth, even if Garfield had not been assassinated, he would probably would never have been one of more significant Chief Executives, just another in a line of minor figures to occupy the White House after the Civil War. Wedged in a group that includes Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, Garfield would be similarly obscure had he not died in office.

Ira Rutkow's brief biography of Garfield (part of the American Presidents Series) does not have much to say about Garfield's brief tenure as President. Instead, the focus is on two things: Garfield's rise to that office and the medical bungling that did more to bring about his death than the bullet had.

After an uneventful childhood, Garfield eventually started taking education seriously and, after finishing college, briefly taught and practiced law before becoming involved in politics. This was on the local level until the Civil War, where he served as an officer and eventually rose to the rank of general (though his military career left little impact on the war's outcome). Even before the Civil War ended, he had moved on to Congress where he served for nearly twenty years.

Garfield was one of the more "radical" Republicans and parlayed his growing influence in the party to become a dark horse candidate in the 1880 Presidential election. He would win, but a disgruntled (and somewhat crazed) Charles Guiteau would shoot Garfield just four months into his Presidency. Unfortunately, the doctors who oversaw his care were essentially incompetent, ignoring basic rules of cleanliness that were well-known by that time, and they wound up causing far more damage than the original bullet.

Rutkow, whose background is in medicine, spends a lot of the book discussing late 19th Century medical practices and goes into great detail about the shortcomings of those who treated Garfield. He does a decent job, and given Garfield's limited historical significance, it is probably more appropriate for a medical educator to write this book than a regular historian who would probably be hard pressed to fill 150 pages with Garfield's accomplishments. If you're really interested in the life of Garfield, I know there are bigger, more detailed biographies out there, but this book is at least a good introduction, and for most people will provide all the information on the twentieth president that they would ever need.

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Forgotten President

James A. Garfield is one of those forgotten 18th century U.S. presidents--along with Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Hays, two Harrisons, and a few others. Garfield is forgotten because he served only six months as President, and more than two of them were with a bullet in his back. Ira Rutkow does a credible job of reviewing Garfield's life. He shows Garfield to have been an intelligent, ambitious, talented, brave man(he served as a general in the Civil War)who was just a little full of himself. We'll never really know whether he would have done more to deserve being remembered.
The great strength of this book are two chapters-- one, a detailed narration of Garfield's wounding and its immediate aftermath. The second chapter is on medicine in the 1880s. It shows clearly how doctors who examined Garfield's wound, probing it with unclean fingers and instruments, gave Garfield an infection. And it was the infection that actually killed him. The idea of sterilization was fairly new, and many "old school" doctors did not subscribe to it. Unfortunately, it was the "old school" doctors who handled Garfield's case.
This book will give you a sense of who James Garfield was. But nothing can give Garfield memorable status. His brief presidency simply does not merit it.

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Enlightening

A great job of bringing James Garfield into the limelight. The author's insight (medically)was very helpful.

The ambitious self-made man who reached the pinnacle of American politics?only to be felled by an assassin?s bullet and to die at the hands of his doctors

James A. Garfield was one of the Republican Party?s leading lights in the years following the Civil War. Born in a log cabin, he rose to become a college president, Union Army general, and congressman?all by the age of thirty-two. Embodying the strive-and-succeed spirit that captured the imagination of Americans in his time, he was elected president in 1880. It is no surprise that one of his biographers was Horatio Alger.

Garfield?s term in office, however, was cut tragically short. Just four months into his presidency, a would-be assassin approached Garfield at the Washington, D.C., railroad station and fired a single shot into his back. Garfield?s bad luck was to have his fate placed in the care of arrogant physicians who did not accept the new theory of antisepsis. Probing the wound with unwashed and occasionally manure-laden hands, Garfield?s doctors introduced terrible infections and brought about his death two months later.

Ira Rutkow, a surgeon and historian, offers an insightful portrait of Garfield and an unsparing narrative of the medical crisis that defined and destroyed his presidency. For all his youthful ambition, the only mark Garfield would make on the office would be one of wasted promise.

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