On September 17, C. W. (Charlie) Goodyear held a virtual meeting with the Club to discuss the 20th President of the United States, James Garfield, and the book Charlie wrote about Garfield’s life (President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, 2023)
Charlie, who was born in New Orleans and now lives in Alexandria, began with an illustrated presentation of Garfield’s life beginning with the log cabin into which he was born near Mentor, Ohio in 1831. Charlie said that he developed the idea for the book when, reading about U.S. politics in the second half of the 19 th century, he noted Garfield’s name kept cropping up when crises or divisions called for a respected conciliator.
Charlie described Garfield’s impoverished but determined childhood and his development into an extraordinary polymath: immensely talented in languages (five, including Latin and Greek, which, some said, he could write simultaneously with left and right hands), mathematics (he came up with a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem), preaching, law and politics. He was also a successful major general in the Civil War. Garfield was a devoted abolitionist and dedicated to the ideals of the Union’s Civil War aims, namely freedom and education for blacks and suppression of the old slave-holding political power in the South.
When these aims were compromised in the 1870s, Garfield became more of a pragmatist attempting to hold the several factions of the Republican Party together. Politically he had to try to live with a strong faction that favored the spoils system (newly elected officials replaced political enemies in the bureaucracy with their own cronies) and one that favored civil service reform.
“I think that if Garfield had lived through his term,” Charlie replied to one Club member, “civil service reform would have advanced but possibly not so swiftly. Ironically, his assassination at the hands of a spoils-system attention-seeking malcontent, the public elevated Garfield to a kind of civil service hero, not unlike how the assassination of John Kennedy hastened the passage of civil rights legislation.”
Asked about his reaction to the 2025 Netflix television series, Charlie gave it pretty good marks, though pointed out story compressions and blemishes: “Roscoe Conkling, for example, was even more flamboyant than was portrayed, if that can be believed,” Charlie said.
“In some ways, Garfield was ahead of his time,” Charlie said. “For example, in his inaugural address he called for universal free education, and he created the first Education Department, because he was dedicated to the notion that a republic is best served by a well-educated populace. But in other ways, he was a pragmatist and made compromises. I think it’s fair to call him an incrementalist.”