James A. Garfield: The Great President Who Never Was

James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, had all the makings of a great president. So why didn’t he become one? Louis Picone, author of The President Is Dead!, answers this tragic question.

Become a member of this channel to support PragerU (there’s also some perks!): https://l.prageru.com/3QUqK4q

Download the FREE PragerU app: https://prageru.onelink.me/3bas/vgyxvm79

Script:

In 1881, James Garfield became the second US president to be assassinated. But while Abraham Lincoln died a martyr sixteen years earlier for union and liberty, Garfield was killed for a less glorious cause: civil service reform.

While that doesn’t seem like a big deal now, it was then. This was a time when most government positions were obtained through political connections.

This practice, known as “patronage” or the “spoils system,” was the way both Republicans and Democrats held power. It created a lot of party loyalty–you owed your job to the party–but also led to a lot of incompetence and corruption.

Garfield was the first president to seriously challenge this system–he took on the party bosses who doled out jobs and instead appointed qualified civil servants on the basis of merit.

This courageous act cost America’s twentieth president his life.

James Garfield was born on November 19, 1831 near Cleveland, Ohio.

His father died before James was two, leaving his strong-willed mother Eliza to raise him and his three siblings alone.

His mother and his older brother Thomas recognized that there was something special about James, and they made every possible sacrifice to get him an education.

James didn’t disappoint them. He was an excellent student with an exceptional work ethic. It wasn’t enough for him to merely master a subject. He had to be the best in his school. And, invariably, he was.

He put himself through college by studying during the day and working as a janitor by night. The same year he graduated–1856–he joined the new anti-slavery Republican Party. A committed abolitionist, he got himself elected to the Ohio State Senate in 1859 at age 28.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Garfield abandoned politics to join the Union Army.

As fate would have it, Garfield became one of the first major Union war heroes. He achieved that status by defeating Confederate forces at the Battle of Middle Creek in Kentucky in January 1862. Relative to future battles, it was a minor affair, but it was one of the first times that the Union could claim a victory, and it dispelled the notion that the South was invincible.

During the war, his fellow Ohioans elected him to the House of Representatives. Initially, Garfield felt uneasy about accepting the honor. He didn’t want anybody to think he was running away from the battlefield. It took President Abraham Lincoln to convince him otherwise. Lincoln’s argument was straightforward: he had enough generals; he needed more support in Congress.

It wasn’t long before everyone recognized Garfield’s manifold talents. He was a brilliant legislator, a master of details, and also known as the nicest person in Washington–too nice, many thought, to be considered presidential timber. Garfield had no ambitions to be president, so he didn’t care. He was happy to rise to the chairmanship of the powerful Appropriations Committee and, eventually, House Minority Leader.

But his career path changed when the Republican Convention in 1880 deadlocked between former President Ulysses Grant and Maine Senator James G. Blaine.

Grant was backed by New York machine boss Senator Roscoe Conkling, a staunch defender of the spoils system.

Civil service reformers backed Blaine.

After 33 ballots, neither side could get the upper hand.

On the 34th ballot, almost out of nowhere, the Wisconsin delegation voted for Garfield. That was enough to get the ball rolling. Over the next two ballots, Garfield’s delegate count skyrocketed to 399, enough to make him the party’s nominee.

Nobody was more stunned than Garfield.

The general election was almost as dramatic. Garfield won by the slimmest of margins, defeating Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock by a mere 8,000 votes out of 9 million cast. The electoral count, however, was decisive–214 to 155.

Boss Conkling assumed that Garfield, now in power, would just pay lip service to civil service reform.

He was wrong.

Garfield nominated pro-reform advocate William Robertson to run the New York Customs House–the motherlode of patronage, a position Conkling had long controlled.

Conkling was apoplectic. But his tantrum fell on deaf ears. It turned out that the boss’s influence was less than he thought. The party backed the new president.

See the rest: https://l.prageru.com/42lcd7b

#ushistory #potus #presidents