President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

C.W. Goodyear. Simon & Schuster, $35 (624p) ISBN 978-1-982-14691-7

overprotected at a time of traumatic conflict and adult self-sacrifice”—and his historical comparisons aren’t always well supported. The result is an intriguing but ultimately unconvincing theory of history’s convoluted patterns. (July)

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)