A wealthy man in one way, but poor in all others

JAMES Garfield didn’t want to be President of the USA. At the Republican convention of 1880 he nominated James Blaine, but with such dignity and eloquence that, when the voting became deadlocked between Blaine and Ulysses $ Grant, the delegates made a reluctant Garfield their candidate. Born in poverty in Ohio, the youngest of five children, he was raised by his widowed mother and at 16 began work as a canal muleteer, then paid his way through school by working as a carpenter's assistant and itinerant teacher. In 1851 he attended college, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, initially working as the janitor to fund his studies; by 1854 he was a full-time teacher there. After graduating from Williams College in Mas-

- Phil Wisdom

sachusetts in only a year he returned to the institute to teach, and in 1857 its former janitor became its principal. Garfield was a state senator, a general during the Civil War and then served nine terms in the House of Representatives. Inaugurated as President on March 4, 1881, on July 2 he was shot in the back by a deranged young man convinced Garfield had blocked his appointment as US consul in Paris and died on September 19, after weeks of patient suffering. Among his sayings are: “I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong”; “I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat”; and “We should do nothing for revenge, nothing for the past.”