Jim Krause, age 15, of Columbus, Ohio, for his question:
WAS JAMES GARFIELD A GOOD U.S. PRESIDENT?
James Garfield was the 20th President of the United States. We don't know what kind of President he might have been because he was assassinated only a few months after taking office. However, history shows that he accomplished more by his death than if he had lived to complete his term.
When President Garfield took office in 1881, patty bosses controlled huge political machines that actually bought votes and sold political favors. It was called the spoils system.
Each time a new chief executive took office, thousands of government employees were put out of their jobs so that backers of the new President could be given employment. National politics in Garfield's day had dropped to a low moral level.
During the years before his election, Garfield had seen the corruption and dishonesty of the spoils system. He favored a merit system under which people would take tests for government jobs.
On July 2, 1881, not long after taking office, President Garfield was shot as he walked through the Washington, D.C., railway station. His assassin was a man named Charles Guiteau, who had been trying without success to get a government job through the spoils system.
Garfield's assassination by a disappointed job seeker shocked the nation into action and two years later, Congress started civil service reform by passing the first of much needed new legislation.
After being shot, Garfield lay near death for 80 days. One bullet lodged in his back could not be located. If X ray and modern antiseptics had existed at that time, Garfield's life might have been saved.
Before becoming President, Garfield had been a professor, college president, Civil War general and U.S. Congressman. He wrote and spoke well. He was very smart and would entertain his fziends~by writing Greek with one hand and at the same time writing Latin with the other.
At the Republican National Convention in 1880, Garfield nominated John Sherman of Ohio for the presidency. But the convention couldn't agree on either Sherman oz one of the two other nominees, James G. Blake and former President Ulysses S. Grant.
Then on the 36th ballot, the convention nominated Garfield.
In the election, Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock. The election was very close.
Garfield's successor was Vice President Chester A. Arthur.
Garfield's term of office was very short but during his days as president Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross, Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute as an industrial school for blacks in Alabama, the Southern Pacific Railroad connection between St. Louis to the Pacific coast was almost completed and electric lights anti telephones were appearing in U.S. cities.