Garfield: A Book Reivew (Reprise)

My first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of 1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker" and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.

That was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.

Early on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read that book, too. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and leadership. He wrestled with male students, and he debated itinerant atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In 1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were collected and edited by a colleague in the English department. Another colleague produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.

Garfield was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist before the war and remained committed to full racial equality afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition. In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor, though he was no goody two-shoes.

That Garfield was “not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive research in what appear to be the most pertinent sources. The madman at the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older physicians in the United States strenuously resisting the revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease.

As for murder, Millard endorses the testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection almost immediately when he and many others repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the bullet. Later, they were unable to recognize the infection that had set in, let alone stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally, was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to save its intended beneficiary.

This is a wonderful book, though in a recent Washington Post review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do, however, have two reservations of my own.

The first has to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as a “disappointed office speaker,” and Millard shows that he shamelessly lobbied to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire assassination.

My second reservation has to do with the book’s title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the presidency--Lincoln's example notwithstanding--were narrlowly circumscribed during this period. And in any case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur, the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse. Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet Arthur rose to the occasion to an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American political history.

If it seemed to some people at the time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be because the president of the United States, in addition to being chief legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues, which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.

The Empty Chamber (reprise)

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer has made the same argument, specifically about the Senate, in The New Yorker. Actually, no one has issued the indictment more eloquently than former Senator John Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--maybe, as a wag once suggested, they never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated while the executive--and the judiciary--have been flexing their muscles. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

January 25, 2012 update: There's an interesting story in today's Politico on the GOP legislative agenda--interesting in part because it features Rep. Steve Stivers.

Winter 2012 Glenn Fellows at Voice of America

Yesterday afternoon we had a revealing tour of Voice of America and a very interesting conversation with Kent Klein, VOA's White House correspondent.

Left to right in the photo above: Cathy Hatten, Elliot Stone, Kristen Maiorino, Ana Hontz Ward (our tourguide), Zach Rybarczyk, Kris Fetterman, Adam Kong, Jenn Semon.

Ratiionality and Public Policy Making (Reprise)

It's week 2, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books had a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Winter 2012 Glenn Fellows at the Newseum

From left to right: Cathy Hatten, Elliot Stone, Zach Rybarczyk, Kristen Maiorino, Adam Kong, Kris Fetterman, Jennifer Semon

The Federal City

After the Constitution of the United States went into effect in 1789, the government proceeded to make a number of momentous decisions, some of which had to do with the finances of the precarious new republic. Congress had been granted the power to levy taxes, to regular interstate commerce, and to print money—all of which had been denied the Congress under the Articles of Confederation. But the challenges were many, including the issue of who would be responsible for repaying debts incurred during the American Revolution. Some of the states had made an effort to retire their loans, but others had not. Our creditors included both individual Americans and foreigners, and it wasn’t clear whether the states respectively or the national government under the new Constitution should bear the burden of repayment.

The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who harbored a vision of a “strong, well-mounted government” and a bustling commercial republic, viewed the national debt as a national blessing—up to a point, at least. Hamilton proposed that all of the nation’s public debt be assumed by the new national government and funded at par, a policy that enriched the many speculators who had bought up depreciated war bonds during the hard economic times of the 1780s. In addition to making some people rich (and in effect buying their loyalty to the new republic), Hamilton also proposed the creation of a national bank and investment in infrastructure, that is, “internal improvements” such as roads and canals. To win Congressional approval of this highly controversial plan, Hamilton had to cut a deal with those harboring a more modest, agrarian vision of America’s future, particularly the two Virginians, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. A deal was cut over dinner at a New York townhouse: Hamilton’s financial measures would be approved by the Congress, but in return states that had paid off their debts would be reimbursed by the federal government ($1.5 million in the case of Virginia), and the national capital would be moved away from the northeast, where the commercial classes were prominent, to a location more convenient for and receptive to the rural and slave-holding south.

The issue of the national capital was addressed by Congress with the Residence Act of 1790, which authorized President George Washington to select a location somewhere along the Potomac. Unsurprisingly, Washington favored a spot that was below the fall line and not too far from Mount Vernon; to implement the plan, Washington recruited aides, including Hamilton, whom he had learned to trust during the Revolution.

Enter the shadowy figure of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the man whose name is synonymous with the design of the city of Washington, DC. L’Enfant had come to the New World to help General Washington win the Revolutionary War. He made himself useful at Valley Forge, and he did some networking among the officer class through the terrible winter of 1777-78. Afterwards, he employed his talents—many of them artistic—to further the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, which some people regarded as an American version of the English House of Lords. It was L’Enfant who designed Federal Hall in New York, the building where Washington was sworn in as president of the United States on April 30, 1789, and he earned something of a reputation for what we would call “event planning.” After passage of the Residence Act, L’Enfant offered his services as designer of the city that would arise in the new Federal District straddling the Potomac.

Though L’Enfant was enamored of life in the New World—he wanted to be called “Peter,” for example—it was natural for him to look to his home town, Paris, for inspiration, and that suggested the standard baroque playbook of geometric plans with radiating boulevards, public squares with their neoclassical palazzos, obelisks, and equestrian statues, and long axial vistas—elements suitable for military parades and revues and for exploiting the local topography, the whole composition being an implicit rejection of the humble Jeffersonian gridiron that was to become ubiquitous throughout the rest of urban America.

The result is that among cities in the United States, Washington is unique, and has always been so. L’Enfant thought that the several states would take responsibility for developing “their” grand avenues and piazzas, and that the city as a whole would issue from these nodes like a puppy growing into its paws. That happened in the end, but it took the better part of a century. During that time Washington was ridiculed as an “embryo capital,” featuring “squares in morasses,” and “obelisks in trees,” a city of “magnificent distances,” with tree stumps in the boulevards and a swamp dividing the President’s House from Jenkins’ Hill (i.e., Capitol Hill). For many decades, L’Enfant’s plan seemed a hopelessly grandiose exercise in futility. Benjamin Latrobe called it a “gigantic abortion.”

L’Enfant himself, unfortunately, was a prideful and somewhat prickly character who rubbed DC’s commissioners the wrong way, alienated the most powerful local landowner, and finally wore out his welcome with President Washington. L’Enfant was dismissed in February of 1792, and an imperfect version (see image above) of L’Enfant’s plan executed by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott. Rather quickly, L’Enfant drifted into obscurity along with most of the leaders of the Federalist party that had been led by his patrons.

Washington, DC, began to look like a proper national capital only with the growth of government that accompanied the Civil War, with soldiers, bureaucrats, construction crews, office-seekers, and prostitutes descending upon the capital city. But the growth that ensued was higgledy-piggledy, unguided by the L’Enfant plan, which was neglected along with memory of the man himself. The elderly L’Enfant lived as the “permanent houseguest” of kindly friends at Warburton Manor, where he spent his time petitioning Congress for proper recognition of his service to his adopted country. He died and was buried in an inconspicuous grave in 1825.

Recovery of L’Enfant’s original vision was spurred by the professionalization of landscape architecture and the popularity of Beaux-Arts classicism during the Gilded Age. The watershed event was the Chicago Fair of 1893—formally, the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating the “discovery” of America. Through the Senate Park Commission, also called the McMillan Commission, Progressive politicians called for recommitment to the basic principles of L’Enfant’s plan; their wooden models are on permanent display at the National Building Museum. As for the long-neglected Major L’Enfant, his mortal remains were exhumed in 1909; his grave now occupies a place of honor near the front of the Lee-Custis Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery.

L’Enfant’s original plan for the city is easily discerned in the modern city. The Victorian train station on the National Mall was eventually removed, part of a deal struck to build Union Station, Washington’s most eloquent tribute to the Chicago Fair. Tiber Creek, which L’Enfant turned into a canal, was covered over, finally giving way to Constitution Avenue. Until fairly recently, Washington still had many of the features of a somewhat sleepy Southern city, racial segregation being only the most lamentable of these. As late as the early 1960s, it was still possible for President Kennedy to joke about the city’s unique combination of “southern efficiency” and “northern charm.” Before long, the Capital Beltway and the Metro had transformed the black-and-white city that had dazzled Mr. Smith when he came to Washington in the person of Jimmy Stewart. Architectural controls and building height limitations have preserved much of the spirit of the L’Enfant plan.

And now, with publication of Scott W. Berg’s Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (New York: Vintage, 2008), we have a biography worthy of the city that took shape so gradually over a long span of time. Berg shows us that the distinctiveness of Washington, D.C.—it’s beauty, most would be willing to say—is due entirely to its designer’s recognition that this city, unlike all others, “would not happen; it would be made.”