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After his death, James Garfield got the full Horatio Alger treatment. As well he should have. Garfield, who died in September 1881 from an assassin’s bullet and his own doctors’ staggeringly inept care, really did rise, as Alger’s book phrased it, From Canal Boy to President. Born into poverty in Ohio, Garfield was a striver of tireless industry and integrity, particularly when measured against the slithering creatures that moved through American political life in the Gilded Age.
Now Garfield has received the prestige television treatment, becoming the subject of the four-part Netflix series Death by Lightning, which premiered last month and covers his nomination and brief presidency. The series presents Garfield as a thoroughly decent figure in a mostly rotten time—and with good reason. If Garfield had his compromises and inner conflicts, he really was serious and principled. But watching the show today, when flashes of the Gilded Age are visible in presidential decor, tariffs, weird manliness cults, and much else, its depiction of Garfield feels like a hollow revival of the Alger myth—while the qualities of the man who killed the president feel disturbingly familiar.
Alger wrote didactic fiction, the kind of thing that he said would “exert a wholesome influence on his young readers.” With Garfield, the lessons came from the story of his life: born in a log cabin, raised to labor on a farm, stood up to bullies, expanded his mind by diligent application, and performed heroic service in the Civil War. Garfield came to public service honestly, which is to say reluctantly. At 21, in 1852, he observed in his diary that politics seemed a crooked racket. What he called “the wire-pulling of politicians and the total disregard of truth in all their operations” held little appeal. Though his ambitions grew over time, Garfield never fully shook his basic doubts. Between references to Shakespeare, Latin poetry, and earnest reflections on books and sermons, Garfield’s diary records constant restlessness over the humdrum and compromises of public life.
The story of an honest bootstrapper became more complicated amid the corruption of the Gilded Age. Garfield retained his decency, but it didn’t always match the politics he inhabited, as evidenced in his 1877 Atlantic treatise on Congress. Scholarly and reverent, the essay presents the institution as noble at precisely the moment when its credibility was under strain. Written shortly after Rutherford B. Hayes ascended to the presidency because of a shadowy compromise Garfield had a hand in striking, this essay does not disguise the political system’s flaws. Instead, Garfield insisted that American institutions could retain their integrity, even in corrupt times.
Death by Lightning spares viewers Garfield’s backstory, but his inner conflicts over the dull and disreputable doings of politics forms the ample weight he seems to carry (which the actor Michael Shannon labors to convey under his thick, stagey beard). By the show’s telling—and not entirely without foundation—Garfield channeled his frustrations into a stirring speech at the 1880 Republican convention in Chicago. There to nominate the Ohio Senator John Sherman, Garfield spoke with such force (he’d bemoaned the decline of the oratorical tradition in his Atlantic essay) that he ended up advancing his own candidacy.
Once he was president, Garfield became mired in the unsavory workings of the spoils system: He was beset by factional jockeying among the Republican brass, and hordes of office seekers were beating down his door. Most formidable in the former camp was New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, who enjoyed the power and profit of patronage, and was not inclined to give it up. Conkling and his minions—including Vice President Chester Arthur—behaved like mob bosses in defense of the existing system. In the series, they talk like mob bosses, too. It’s possible that they use the F-word more over four episodes than it was used in the whole of the United States between Garfield’s nomination and death.
Garfield’s brief time in office was also menaced by a deranged drifter named Charles Guiteau. Guiteau, who had spent the election repeatedly delivering an incoherent pro-Garfield speech on street corners, was convinced that his campaigning merited a diplomatic posting—in Vienna, or preferably Paris. When his efforts failed, he purchased a pistol with an ivory handle, believing it worthy of the extra expense because it was destined to find a place in national history as the instrument that liberated the country from Garfield. He used it on July 2, 1881, shooting the president twice in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.
In Death by Lightning, Garfield is portrayed as a good man in an age of bad politicians; such a premise is hopeful but perhaps too hopeful for our current moment. At the same time, Guiteau, as played with demented earnestness by Matthew McFadyen, steals the show. The assassin is the more legible, if not the more compelling, character: a voracious consumer of political coverage and carefully attuned to the culture of celebrity. He is chillingly redolent of the violent figures who sometimes emerge from the darkest corners of contemporary discourse.
After Garfield’s death and Guiteau’s execution, Death by Lightning concludes with a gesture toward what Garfield’s life set in motion. A postscript montage notes that his assassination helped spur the first major civil-service reform with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, an effort to curb the spoils system that had consumed his presidency. That legacy was real—but it was also narrow and easily undermined. The civil service it helped birth is now in question, its independence hanging before the Supreme Court, all while openly transactional politics and the logic of the spoils system once again take hold in Washington. Then as now, when so much of governance is fraying, one good guy might not be enough.
