Death by Lightning Recap: Men Like Us

Death by Lightning
Party Faithful
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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The greatest virtue of the Steven Spielberg biopic Lincoln, which the playwright Tony Kushner adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, is that it’s about the fundamental lack of virtue that comes with being president. For as much as Abraham Lincoln is flattened out into “Honest Abe,” the universal choice for the greatest of all American presidents, his lionization papers over the horse-trading and compromise necessary to get anything done in Washington. From the film’s perspective, that doesn’t necessarily diminish Lincoln’s status as a revered and principled leader, but it does reveal something important about the ugly business of politics and the types of people who are willing to engage in the backroom dealings that aren’t suggested by their soaring oratory.

We can’t really know what type of president James Garfield would have turned out to be because he spent 80 of his 200 days in office fighting for his life. But “Party Faithful” suggests that as much as Garfield appeared to be Lincoln’s spiritual successor in the Republican Party, he may not have had the stomach for the job. The premiere episode was wonderfully ambiguous about the nature of Garfield’s political aspirations: He arrived at the Republican National Convention with no intention other than giving a quixotic endorsement to John Sherman and left it as its seemingly reluctant nominee. Was he being called to serve, or did he carry secret ambitions that he denied but that others, like Sherman and Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, could see lurking under his modest front? Perhaps he doth protest too much. 

Yet when this episode begins with Garfield shifting into campaign mode, he’s immediately confronted by forces that challenge the idealism of his rhetoric. Is he going to fall on the sword of his own stubborn idealism? Or can he find a way to win an election and push his agenda through compromises that will take quite a bit of bloom off the rose? Perhaps an even larger question than either of those is whether Garfield can claim much control over his situation at all, since he’s just been elected the leader of a sharply divided party that expects some concessions in return for unification. The money and power necessary to defeat Winfield Scott Hancock comes from New York, which means that Garfield’s fate rests in the filthy hands of Roscoe Conkling, who’s so disgusted by Grant’s defeat at the RNC that he’s initially willing to sit on the sidelines and throw the election to the Democrats. It takes quite a bit of doing to convince him otherwise. 

James Blaine understands the problem right away, too, and he scoffs at the suggestion that he might be Garfield’s running mate. (“That’s an insult. It’s the vice presidency.”) As the delegates wait restlessly for a VP to be chosen, it’s notable that Garfield has decamped to his hotel room, the first sign that he wants nothing to do with the process. Later on, he’ll try to campaign entirely from his front porch in rural Ohio — yet another signal that he doesn’t want to do the grubby work required to govern at the highest level. But the problem with Garfield not making these decisions is that the decisions get made for him. To wit: “Meet your running mate, Chester Arthur!” 

For Garfield, a candidate looking to banish the corruption that had plagued the party under Grant, this party-unification ticket is about as odious an arranged marriage as possible. Arthur is known as Conkling’s hatchet man, a customs collector for the Port of New York who’s shown, in one amusing snippet, presiding over the beating of a noncompliant businessman. To his defense, Arthur appears genuinely humbled by the opportunity (“The office of the vice-president is a greater honor than I’d ever dreamed of”) and willing to defy his master Conkling, who’s still too bitter to see the possibilities. But they’re an awkward pair, and an early indication that Garfield doesn’t have a firm grasp on the party he’s ostensibly been selected to lead. 

The mixed messages persist in Ohio, where Garfield feels more comfortable being himself, but not for long. Meeting on his porch with a group of Black soldiers who fought for the Union, Garfield offers assurances that he’ll honor their sacrifice by protecting their freedom at the polls: “We fought together, gentlemen,” he says, “for freedom, not poll tests. I’d rather be with you and lose than against you and win.” When a guest offers a joke in reply — “You truly are a bad politician” — there’s more than a grain of truth to it. Before the episode even ends with Garfield winning the election, he gets caught up in an immigration controversy over Chinese laborers that finds him retreating so far from his ideals that his daughter Mollie (Laura Marcus) is disillusioned. It would appear that there are some cases where Garfield will betray his conscience for a win. 

Meanwhile, Charles Guiteau is out hustling shamelessly for a place at the table, having traded his loyalty to Grant for a now-fervent endorsement of Garfield, provided that he flatter and scam his way into a spot on the campaign. He seems to make a little headway with Blaine, who’s receptive to his obsequiousness, but the story he’s telling about himself is comically unpersuasive. Asked by Blaine about the reach of his essays and lecture circuit, Guiteau replies, “I’d say moderate to considerable,” which he seems to believe is lying at the proper scale. But Blaine and his fellow elites seem to recognize Guiteau as an imposter and eventually reject him sharply, despite (or perhaps because of) Guiteau’s wise advice that the Garfield campaign should turn to “rank and file” donors for support. There are sound reasons to turn your back on a dangerous man like Guiteau, but this is not one of them. 

One of the small graces of this episode is that Garfield’s humble backstory — a chunk of exposition that Candice Millard’s book can handle more easily and at greater length — is given over to Guiteau to tell, albeit to the sex worker he’s paying to listen. “Did you know that he was born even poorer than I was?” he tells her. “His father was dead at 2. His mother couldn’t afford shoes for him until he was 7.” Guiteau does not take inspiration from the fact that a “pauper” like Garfield needed four and a half minutes at the convention to become king. The show connects the two men for this one episode as proletarian types who have experienced the world differently than your Roscoe Conklings or your James G. Blaines. It’s an ugly bit of symbolism that their fates are tied to the same anchor.

Conklings

• We may envy a time when people didn’t know every single thing that happens in the world immediately, but it’s a pity that Lucretia discovers her husband is the Republican nominee from the press that’s suddenly gathered on her lawn. 

• The show has more sympathy for Guiteau than the book, at least so far. The scene where Guiteau gets rejected by Blaine is especially stark in contrasting the arrogance of powerful men against outsiders like Guiteau, who feels he deserves a voice in the democratic process. (“Why would you treat a person with such contempt when he only asks to lend a friendly hand? Do any of you have any idea how many more of us there are, like me, who have never had a taste for politics until now?”) 

• Of course, that scene with Blaine also features Chester Arthur, who comes away with a more favorable impression of Guiteau, even if he screws up his name: “You’re a good egg, Cousteau. That brash and ill-advised display you put on back at headquarters, that stuck with me. Men like us, we have to claw our way up.” 

• Conkling: “If you come from Ohio and Maine, kindly show yourself the fuck out.” 

• One of my favorite political films, the 1972 satire The Candidate, stars Robert Redford as a leftist lawyer that the Democrats recruit to run against a popular Republican incumbent senator in California. The Democrats expect to get trounced, which gives Redford’s character the freedom to speak his mind — that is, until the race gets close enough that his positions are watered down to peel away more voters. By the time the race is over and he emerges as the improbable winner, he’s the dog that caught the car, looking completely uncertain of what to do next. That is Garfield during Election Night.