[In honor of Warren
Harding’s 150th birthday on November 2nd, a series
AmericanStudying the lives and deaths of presidents who passed away while in
office. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very different anniversary—my
blog’s fifth birthday!]
On how the
second-shortest presidential term was still an impressive and influential one.
Many of the
things I’ve written in the first two posts in this series also hold true, with
slight variations, for our 20th president, James A. Garfield.
Like Warren Harding, Garfield arrived at his party’s Chicago nominating
convention (the 1880
Republican National Convention) as an extreme long shot (indeed, Garfield
was there primarily as the campaign manager for another candidate, Secretary of the
Treasury John Sherman); when the front-runners were once again unable to
gain a majority of delegates, Garfield was added to the roster on the 35th
ballot, and nominated on the 36th. And like William Henry Harrison,
Garfield named a surprising and ill-prepared Vice Presidential running mate (New York customs collector
Chester Arthur) for purely political reasons; when Garfield was
assassinated only five months into his presidency, shot by a disgruntled Arthur
supporter (a
group known as Stalwarts) and office seeker named Charles
Guiteau, that unlikely vice president became an even more unlikely
president. “Oh my God, Chet Arthur is president!” was the
supposed refrain around Washington.
But both
Garfield and Arthur were different from, and comprised a more successful and
impressive presidential term and administration than, either of the prior
subjects of this week’s posts. For one thing, while William Henry Harrison did
not serve as president long enough to enact his promised reform of the “spoils
system” (and his successor John Tyler had apparently no interest in pursuing
those reforms), Garfield was able to set in motion his own plans for civil
service reform, a policy shift that had become only more
crucial in the decades since Harrison (and in particular in the aftermath
of the patronage-heavy Grant administration). Although the assassination cut
short Garfield’s own efforts in this vein, Arthur took up the plans and saw
them through to fruition, with the result the hugely important Pendleton Act
(1883). Given that Arthur and Garfield represented two opposed factions within
the Republican Party (the
Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, respectively), and that Arthur had been chosen
precisely because of his ties to the patronage system that the Stalwarts
supported, the two men’s consistent approach to this issue was anything but a
sure thing; that Arthur saw his president’s plan through to success speaks well
to both men and their relationship.
On the period’s even
more dark and divisive issue of race, the two men likewise represented
meaningful progress (particularly in the aftermath of the Rutherford B. Hayes
administration and its dismantling
of Federal Reconstruction). Former Union General Garfield was a supporter
of African American civil rights, particularly through the vehicle of education,
and proposed
a universal, federal education system to extend that vital opportunity to
all Americans. Although that proposal did not succeed, Garfield also appointed
a number of African Americans to significant positions, including Frederick
Douglass as the recorder of deeds and Blanche Bruce as
register to the Treasury; he also appointed Supreme Court Justice Stanley
Matthews, best known for writing
a decision striking down a discriminatory anti-Chinese law in San
Francisco. Here too Arthur largely continued his predecessor’s policies,
including working with the mixed-race
Southern Readjuster Party in an effort to combat the white supremacist
Democratic lock on the region, and helping reverse the racist court
martial of the second African American West Point cadet, Johnson Whittaker.
Arthur did sign the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but with expressed
reservations, and only after vetoing an earlier
bill that banned Chinese immigration for 20 years (rather than the 10 of
the 1882 act). Neither Garfield nor Arthur were among our best presidents, but
taken together their shared term certainly surpasses both others in their era
and those about which I’ve written this week.
Next dead president
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
Garfield? Other presidents you’d particularly want to AmericanStudy?
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