Garfield: A Biography (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 10/11.5, 14 pt. hds., BOOK REVIEWS Garfield: A Biography. By Allan Peskin. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1978. Pp. 716. $20.00.) Improbably enough, a full-scale James A. Garfield revival is now under way. Frederick D. Williams led the way in 1964, when he published The Wild Life of the Army, a rich selection of Garfield's Civil War letters. In 1967 Williams and Harry James Brown began issuing their authoritative edition of Garfield's Diary, of which three volumes, bringing the story down to 1877, have appeared to date. John M. Taylor wrote a journalistic biography, Garfield of Ohio: The Available Man, in 1970. At the time of her death in 1974 Margaret Leech left an incomplete but richly textured account of Garfield's private life; now, ably rounded out with supplementary chapters by Harry J. Brown, it has appeared under the title, The Garfield Orbit. And finally, Allan Peskin, who teaches at Cleveland State University, has published his long awaited, exhaustive biography, Garfield. One can only speculate about the reasons why one of the more shadowy figures in American public life should have attracted so much attention. After all, Garfield was one of those Presidents Thomas Wolfe called "the lost Americans: their gravely vacant bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam togedier. . . . Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides: which was which?" Perhaps the fact that there had been no comprehensive biography since Theodore Clarke Smith's twovolume work published in 1925, no scholarly study since Robert G. Caldwell's in 1931, was reason enough for the revival: Garfield needed study because he had not been "done." Perhaps the extraordinary frankness of Garfield's journals and the fullness of his unpublished correspondence was the attraction. Some of the students working in the 1960's may have been spurred on by the hope of finding parallels between Garfield's career and that of another young President assassinated in his first term before he had had time to prove himself. Whatever the reasons for the renewed interest, all students of nineteenth-century American political history are the richer because of these studies, and all will feel particularly indebted to Peskin's careful, judicious, and well-written biography. Based on years of close study of the sources, organized in a straightforward chronological fashion, and avoiding both "blatant moralizing and overt analysis," this is an excellent biography that neither patronizes nor eulogizes its subject. Peskin has succeeded in portraying the shadowy figure of Garfield as a multi360 BOOK REVIEWS361 dimensional, complex personality: "a pacificist turned soldier, an educator turned politician, a preacher turned economist, a man of essentially literary tastes cast in the role of party chieftain, a husband who, at length, fell in love with his wife, and a man racked by self-doubts who was, at the same time, convinced of his high destiny." Peskin's biography does not resolve these contradictions; it explores them. Each of the crises in Garfield's life is examined thoroughly and objectively. In many cases Peskin's verdict is unfavorable: Garfield did maneuver to oust his rivals and become head of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute; he married one woman while he was in love with another; he lent his name to the fraudulent schemes of an oil swindler, exhibited a "disturbing lack of candor" about his relationship to the Credit Mobilier, and was guilty of influence peddling in the DeGolyer scandal. On other, and perhaps more significant, points Peskinfinds that the evidence exonerates Garfield. In undercutting his commanding officer, General William S . Rosecrans, his conduct was "not . . . dishonorable , only somewhat disingenuous." On the silver question he put principle ahead of self-interest. And "by most standards" Garfield was not guilty of undercutting John Sherman in order to promote his own presidential candidacy in 1880. If Peskin's judgments are mixed, it is because Garfield's character was mixed. Those who knew him well spoke of his warmth, his charm, and his learning. John Hay thought that his years of service in the Congress made Garfield "the best-trained, best-equipped president since John Quincy Adams." But even those who admired the man had to recognize "his old weakness, lack...