This U.S. president only spent six months in office

Recently a president who isn’t well known to most was featured on a streaming series. It’s unfortunate that most don’t know about him.

His name is the same as an animated cat that loves lasagna. But this isn’t Garfield the Cat but James Garfield, our 20th president.

Maybe he’s forgotten in the history books because he only served six months, two of them spent in bed with an assassin’s bullets in his back. But President Garfield’s story is truly remarkable. He was the last of the log cabin presidents.

Garfield was born in Moreland Hills, Ohio, a birthplace I had such a hard time finding that I located it only by happenstance, thanks to a big gulp Mountain Dew. Needing a restroom, I stopped at the city public works department, where I happened to be shown the restroom ... and the log cabin replica next door!

Working his way all the way through law school, Garfield was a sponge for knowledge and would go on to teach and become principal of his alma mater just a year after graduating college. However, fate would intervene and with the onset of Civil War, Garfield went headlong into the fighting, seeing major action at Shiloh, Tennessee and Chattanooga.

While on the battlefield, Garfield was elected to serve in the House of Representatives. He was going to decline to take his seat until President Lincoln personally told him that he needed him in Congress. Thus, the major general’s political career was born.

Just like his unexpected congressional win, the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago was a deadlock with former President Ulysses S. Grant and James Blaine fighting for the nomination. Garfield had gone to nominate John Sherman for president, but his speech was so moving that he ended up getting the nomination himself!

The party at the time was rife with corruption. For a running mate, Garfield was saddled with Chester A. Arthur, who was tied to New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling, a corrupt political boss.

Garfield would win one of the closest elections in history without leaving his front porch. To the dismay of Conkling, he began to root out corruption.

Sadly, his efforts were cut short on July 2, 1881. Garfield was shot by a deranged man who had convinced himself he was helping the Conkling wing of the party.

Taken back to the White House, the President was subject to immense medical malpractice even by 1881 standards. Alexander Graham Bell came to the White House to use his metal detector, but two issues arose: doctors were looking at the wrong side, and the metal springs messed up the detector. Even a very primitive air conditioning unit using blocks of ice couldn’t stop the infections, and the president who could write Latin and Greek simultaneously passed away on Sept. 19, 1881.

But not before he started much needed civil service reform. President Garfield stood for the common American. His story can be seen in the series “Death by Lightning,” currently streaming on Netflix.

Tom Babbage of Casa Grande, Arizona is an avid collector of presidential history. He grew up in Marion and was a student in the Linn-Mar Community School District.