Finding a Lost President: An Exclusive Guest Post from C. W. Goodyear, Author of President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier 

Debug Notice: No product response from API

Presidential biography is an exceptionally American literary tradition. More than any other country, we tend to deify our leaders — investing in their lives with almost a spiritual significance, rendering the twists and turns of their careers into parables about the nation itself. Through the years, presidential biographers have served as the “interpreters” of these legends to new generations of Americans.  

Yet the books they produce often have the same, rather linear backstory: a writer is usually drawn to a President because of that figure’s hefty accomplishments in the White House, and their sustained fame in modern times. This is completely natural — logical, even. However, a side-effect is that most American presidential biographies are written about a handful of our leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts lead the pack by a mile.  

How, then, does a biographer end up chronicling the life of a forgotten president? The answer, in my case, is “accidentally”.  

A few years ago, I grew interested in finding a point in American history where the nation’s conditions — its political climate, its racial relations, its distribution of wealth — were somewhat comparable to today’s but a national figure was defying the spirit of the times. This led me to studying Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. And throughout my research spanning this period, I kept finding the same figure standing in the “background” of major events, and whom everyone, regardless of ideology, had mostly nice things to say about. That man was James Garfield.  

I then dug deeper into Garfield’s story. And the further I got, the more I pieced together of what I now believe to be one of the most compelling and neglected political ascents of American history. “The truth,” summarized another of our presidents about Garfield, “is that no one ever started so low who accomplished so much in all our history. Not [Benjamin] Franklin or Lincoln, even.”  

But this arc had ended tragically. Garfield was both the last president to be born in a log cabin, and the second to be assassinated. He was shot only three months into his first term — and, as a result, a remarkable life ended up being remembered mostly for its tragic end.  

I finally had my subject — but my challenge then became how to present that life to a reading public that has rarely heard about President Garfield.  

I settled on writing in a way that would dispel the literary “grayscale” which sometimes shrouds 19^th-century America. This was a period of civil war; of racial revolution and repression; of industrial upheaval. I wanted readers to inhabit those moments — to hear bullets whiz past General Garfield’s ear; to feel the Montana sagebrush crush beneath Congressman Garfield’s carriage; to sit next to President Garfield’s deathbed after his assassination. 

For guidance on how to accomplish this, I often had to flip open a pair of well-worn biographies on my shelf: Margaret Leech’s In the Days of McKinley and Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.  

For better or worse, there exists today a perception that we live in unprecedented times and are enduring unprecedented crises. This is not exactly the case; the events of Garfield’s life are testament to that. But if there is a perfect moment for America to diversify its presidential pantheon — to return to the stories of our neglected past leaders and discover new perspectives on their significance — it is this one.