What we didn't learn from the 20th president

Imagine if Donald Trump had taken different lessons from Mark Twain

The Garfield School in Rensselaer County, N.Y., named for the 20th president. (Brunswick Historical Society photo)

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Schoolchildren in the 1950s became familiar with Mark Twain by reading (or having read to them) his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two boys growing up along the Mississippi River in the mid-19^th century. You remember the stories: Tom and Huck push for freedom over restraint, hustle to get ahead and eventually grow in their understanding of the value of friendship. No doubt little Donald Trump, who started school as Dwight Eisenhower was first campaigning for the presidency, drew some life lessons from the exploits of Tom and Huck. Maybe he stopped listening after the part where Tom snookered his pals into painting a fence for him.

It’s a shame that an earlier book of Twain’s has always gotten less attention, because a future president learning different lessons might have made these days better for us all now. Three years before Twain’s fame erupted with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he and a friend, Charles Dudley Warner, co-wrote a less successful novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The book is remembered today mainly for its title, which gave the era its nickname: The period from about 1870 to 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age.¹

It’s an apt metaphor — gilding being a thin layer of gold over a baser metal, suggesting superficial wealth that conceals a less opulent reality. In the last third of the 19^th century, a lust for wealth among leaders of America’s growing industrial might overshadowed the continuing struggles of a population that largely failed to win a share of the luster that attached to the few.

And so might our current day be similarly labeled by people looking back in decades to come. Consider: More than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth is now held by the top 10 percent of American households, while the bottom half has less than 3 percent. Even more stark is the fact that the top 1 percent — which, of course, includes the Trump social circle — holds almost one-third of the wealth.²

If our 47^th president feels any chagrin about the inequality that limits the opportunities open to most Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell it from his behavior, for he is literally gilding the Oval Office. When Trump welcomed Fox News host Laura Ingraham to his workplace for an interview the other day, he proudly showed off the changes he had made, and refuted an online rumor that the crown molding and decorations in the Oval Office had been coated with a polyurethane appliqué, like what’s available to all the rest of us.

“You know one thing with gold?” he asked. “You can’t imitate gold, real gold. There’s no paint that imitates gold.”

Ingraham responded, “So these aren’t from Home Depot or something?”

“No, this is not Home Depot stuff,” the president said, gazing up at the handiwork he had ordered. “This is not Home Depot.”³

He betrayed no embarrassment in speaking as the federal shutdown was still underway, amid his insistence that the government would not cover costs of the food aid that 40 million Americans depend upon every month, as millions of federal workers went without a paycheck, and as tens of thousands of former public servants he had fired remained out of work. Inflation is still growing, Trump’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, with a political cost to the president, as Democrats who focused on affordability this month easily won two governorships and the mayoralty of the nation’s largest city.

But Trump was happy to show off his taxpayer-funded gilding. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve come to this. So you can’t help but consider that earlier time, and the opportunities that may have been lost in that first Gilded Age to turn America toward a different course.

A couple of miles east of us in our little town (pop. 12,581), there’s a handsome two-room schoolhouse that is now the home of our local historical society. Construction began in 1881, shortly after James A. Garfield became America’s 20^th president. And just as the new school opened for the fall term in September, Garfield succumbed to gunshot wounds he had suffered in an attack in Washington that summer. The building has been called Garfield School ever since.⁴

Coincidentally, the first school I attended, as a 5-year-old in Illinois, was also called Garfield School. You might think that living half my life around places named for Garfield would have made me more curious about the man, but like a lot of Americans, I’ve known only the barest facts: that the phrase “disappointed office-seeker” was typically attached to his assassin, Charles Guiteau, and that Garfield was the only president ever elected directly from a seat in the House of Representatives. When we moved here, I heard that Garfield had taught penmanship in our town, which turned out to be nearly true: Actually, it was in the next town south of us, and maybe over in Vermont, too. But how much is there to know about a guy who had only four months in office before an assassin curtailed his place in history?

It turns out that the lives of James A. Garfield and Charles Guiteau present both inspiration and warning in the context of our current political climate. A four-part series now streaming on Netflix, “Death by Lightning,” depicts the two men dynamically, with the great character actors Michael Shannon as Garfield and Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau presenting mostly fictional dialog amid real events of the two men’s lives. It is in their ambitions, especially, that the two men are depicted by the show’s creator and director, Mike Makowsky, and that is how their contrasts are revealed.⁵

A man without ambition couldn’t become president, of course, in either the Gilded Age or now, but Garfield didn’t go to the 1880 Republican National Convention as a candidate; he emerged as a compromise on the 36^th ballot, and was so ambivalent about running that he spent the campaign on his Ohio farm. Guiteau’s ambitions were more obvious — he continually sought attention, most notably in eventually demanding a role in the Garfield administration based on the deluded notion that he had helped Garfield win. But Guiteau’s capacity for accomplishing his notions was scant; he was a habitual fraudster, likely with delusions of grandeur that experts in our century have suggested was caused by grandiose narcissism, or perhaps psychopathy.⁶

Garfield, by contrast, was seen as both humble and brilliant. Born in a log cabin, he became a lawyer, preacher, college president, Civil War general, author of a unique proof of the Pythagorean theorem and an eloquent orator. Mark Hopkins, the president of Williams College, where Garfield was salutatorian, noted of the future president, “There was a large general capacity applicable to any subject.” In Congress, he became an early advocate of slavery’s abolition, and during Abraham Lincoln’s term he steered to passage legislation that blocked the custom among wealthy and well-connected men of paying somebody else to take their place on the battlefield. Though Republican orthodoxy after the Civil War called for high tariffs, Garfield advocated moving toward free trade.⁷

Garfield’s legacy, though, might be seen especially in his opposition to the so-called “Stalwarts” of his party, who supported the existing federal patronage system. That infuriated the powerful senator who controlled patronage at the Port of New York, Roscoe Conkling; to placate Conkling, the party put his onetime hand-picked customs collector, Chester A. Arthur, on the ticket as Garfield’s vice-presidential running-mate.

And when Garfield died and Arthur became president, an extraordinary political transformation occurred: the New Yorker defied his own history and his sponsor’s expectations, and pushed through the civil service reform that Garfield had advocated. The so-called Pendleton Act created a professional class in public service that both enhanced the capability of government and reduced the unfairness of the spoils system.

What Arthur lacked, however, was Garfield’s capacity to inspire, as well as his predecessor’s deep commitment to racial healing. In his Inaugural Address, Garfield had declared, “Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.” He pushed for education reform, including federal school standards, believing that would help elevate the descendants of slaves. In the end, Arthur served out Garfield’s term and retired; he is buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery, only a few miles from the Garfield Schoolhouse in our town.

One of the lasting impacts of the Trump presidency seems likely to be in his push to dismantle many of the protections that civil service law has given to public employees since the presidency of Chester A. Arthur, acting on the initiative of Garfield. Trump has replaced nonpartisan, merit-based career professionals with political loyalists, reduced worker protections and consolidated executive power.

Most significantly, Trump created a new “Schedule F” job classification that reclassified tens of thousands of people in key policy roles as at-will employees who could be fired without due process. He has placed political cronies in roles formerly held by career officials and fired inspectors general and other watchdogs whose roles were to investigate waste and abuse across the government. We are witnessing a resurgence of the spoils system that Americans 145 years ago voted to reject.⁸

Indeed, Donald Trump seems to have less in common with James Garfield than with Charles Guiteau. Trump’s whole career — starting in his inherited real-estate business in the 1970s — has been aimed at drawing attention to himself, first by pumping his visibility in the New York social scene and then by splashing his name on buildings and business ventures. When he turned to politics, it was clear that in taking controversial or offensive stances he cared less about the potential for embarrassment than for the opportunity to be seen and heard. Many experts have suggested, indeed, that Trump displays symptoms of grandiose narcissism, the frequent Guiteau diagnosis.

The man who would become commander-in-chief famously avoided military service during the Vietnam war by claiming to be disabled by bone spurs, a 1960s version of the rich-guy dodge that Garfield legislated against. And the destructiveness of his tariffs, from which he is retreating in one country after another, suggests Garfield’s pursuit of free trade was the wiser course, now as it was then.

Where Garfield resisted the entreaties of the job-seeker Guiteau, Trump eagerly rewarded his supporters, qualifications aside. How else might we explain Kash Patel and Dan Bongino leading the FBI, and Pete Hegseth, a second-string Fox News TV host, running the greatest military force in history? Where Garfield urged education as a potential equalizer in society, Trump has pushed to abolish the Department of Education, and has fought to unravel statutory protections for minority rights while embracing avowed racists. Unlike Garfield, known as a man of broad general competence, Trump seems uninterested in developing expertise in any area at all: He can’t sit still, we’re told, for the crucial daily intelligence briefing.

Much of this 47^th presidency, in fact, could be seen as unconsciously aimed at repudiating the goals of the 20^th. The nation in 1881 looked back just 20 years to the start of its Civil War, which we now realize changed the law more than it moved the hearts of people. If we likewise look back 20 years, we see such technology changes as the launch of YouTube and Google Maps, which affected how we interact with each other and the world but made us no more empathetic or less selfish. We’re not learning much, then, from our history. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” wrote Mark Twain, chronicler of that earlier America, in another notion that we might wish today’s leaders had absorbed.

And so we stand today on the edge of a new Gilded Age, again looking for a leader to rescue us from corruption, wishing that we might have the good fortune that seemed to have come to our nation when it elected a relative stranger in 1880. And we imagine how different we might be as a people today if circumstances hadn’t played out as they did a few months later. Perhaps it all wouldn’t have come to this now.

1. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/3178

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/business/economy/wealth-cash-inequality.html

3. https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/president-donald-trump-oval-office-gold-home-depot/

4. https://www.bhs-ny.org/

5. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/death-by-lightning-dramatizes-the-assassination-america-forgot?_sp=d815e3d7-3b00-4dff-a410-7557dd0697b4.1763138602446

6. Resnick, Brian (October 4, 2015). “This Is the Brain that Shot President James Garfield”. The Atlantic.

7. As is the case with every president, there has been no shortage of research into the life of James A. Garfield. The definitive work is considered to be Allan Peskin’s 1978 Garfield: A Biography (Kent State University Press).

8. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-history-of-civil-service-and-the-impact-of-trumps-slashing-of-the-workforce

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