Book about Garfield tells tales of cults, infidelity, murder

Of Ohio’s several presidents, James A. Garfield used to be the one I knew the least about.

But I know a lot more after reading “An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder” by historian and journalist Susan Wels.

Garfield, the 20th president, and Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated him in 1881, are the book’s focus, but also making appearances are P.T. Barnum, Horace Greeley, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert.

The cult in question is the Oneida Community, an upstate New York commune whose founder, John Humphrey Noyes, encouraged sex as a “holy practice” with few restrictions — even to the extent of adults initiating children.

Guiteau joined up at 19, but it didn’t go well. Oneida women, put off by his volatility and delusions of grandeur, called him “Git Out,” Wels writes. Declaring himself an employee of “Jesus Christ & Co.,” he eventually left to pursue his outlandish dreams elsewhere.

Garfield, born poor in Cuyahoga County, was a teacher, Ohio state senator, U.S. congressman and a Civil War general despite having no prior military experience. The book describes him arriving at Camp Chase military installation, just outside Columbus, in 1861 “chronically tormented by self-doubt, depression and debilitating diarrhea.” But he proved himself an able commander.

The future president was away from home for long stretches. Wels says he had a habit of engaging in extramarital affairs, then confessing him them to his wife, Lucretia, then straying again. But their marriage, even more profoundly tested by the death of two children, strengthened through the years.

The author mainly uses Barnum, Greeley, Twain and other characters to establish the post-civil War era as a raucous time full of people with grand ambitions.

Garfield didn’t see himself as a president, but divided Republicans eventually turned to him after failing to agree on anyone else in 1880. He won narrowly over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.

The new commander-in-chief bemoaned the amount of time he had to spend fielding entreaties from job seekers. Wels says one of them was Guiteau, who haunted the halls of power and actually met

Garfield in the White House to make a case for why he should be sent to Paris as a diplomat.

The president’s rejection enraged Guiteau, who somehow believed himself responsible for Garfield’s election.

On July 2, 1881, Garfield was poised to escape Washington madness for a long vacation. He was at the train station, ready to depart, when Guiteau shot him twice. (Eerily, Robert Lincoln, who had been living in the White House when his father was assassinated in 1865, was at the station, too, and witnessed the attack on Garfield.)

The wounded president lived two months, during which time doctors probed his wounds with dirty fingers and recruited Alexander Graham Bell to search his body for an embedded bullet with a primitive metal detector, Wels writes.

He died on Sept. 19, 1881. Guiteau was hanged the following June. The book also follows Noyes, the cult leader, until his death in 1886.

If you want to know more, Garfield’s home in Mentor, near Cleveland, is a National Historic Site. It’s now higher on my list of places to visit in Ohio. Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist. joe.blundo@gmail.com @joeblundo