James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur - Bibliography

Allan Peskin, Garfield: A Biography (Kent, Ohio, 1978), is the basic contemporary Garfield biography, in which the author portrays his subject as more emotionally complex, intellectually sophisticated, and politically honest than previous twentieth-century historians had allowed. Thomas C. Reeves, Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur (New York, 1975), like Peskin's study of Garfield, attempts to bring about an awareness of Arthur's strengths, as well as his celebrated limits.

Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence, Kans., 1981), is the most basic study of the two presidents involved, upwardly revising their previous reputations and furnished with a complete bibliography. John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 (New York, 1968), a brief, thorough survey of the period described, furnishes a good broad background for understanding the issues of the two administrations. Leonard D. White, The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History (New York, 1958), part of a general history of the organization and powers of the executive department, is a valuable background for understanding, in administrative terms, what was expected of presidents and the resources available to them in the period during which Garfield and Arthur served. David M. Pletcher, The Awkward Years: American Foreign Policy Under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia, Mo., 1962), is the major source for the diplomatic history of the two administrations, contending that the period marked the necessary, if sometimes clumsy, prelude to the more coherent expansionist policies of the century's end.

Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), sets political behavior in the overall context of American cultural attitudes and expectations, in order to derive fresh understanding of familiar material whose interpretation was long taken for granted. H. Wayne Morgan, The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal , rev. ed. (Syracuse, N.Y., 1970), is a collection of essays in which different aspects of the 1877–1896 era are newly examined by different scholars, and long-held stereotypes are challenged; Morgan's From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969), focuses on a specific reexamination of party politics in the same revisionist spirit that marks the essays in The Gilded Age . These may be usefully supplemented by Ari Hoogen-boom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kans., 1995).

David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869–1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), is a penetrating examination of how the powerful bosses in the Senate established, maintained, and defended their prerogatives against presidents, reformers, and other challengers. David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), is a biography of Arthur's patron and Garfield's powerful opponent, incorporating recent scholarship to improve on a livelier but older biography by Donald Barr Chidsey. David S. Muzzey, James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days (New York, 1934), a careful, old-fashioned "life and times" of the charismatic and controversial Blaine, who sought to be Garfield's éminence grise, has surprisingly not been supplanted by a modern study and well deserves attention.

Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana, Ill., 1961), focuses on the political ramifications of the patronage system and of the alliances among its ultimately successful critics. Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877–1893 (Gloucester, Mass., 1968), a study of the Republican "change of base" from reliance on black votes after Reconstruction ended, usefully illustrates what dilemmas the move posed for four Republican presidents, including Garfield and Arthur. Two recent works contain the story of how early steps in the modernization of the United States Navy were taken during Arthur's tenure in office: Stephen Howarth, To Shining Sea: A History of the United States Navy, 1775–1991 (New York, 1991), and Kenneth J. Hagan, This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York and Toronto, 1991).

Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago, 1968), though it is somewhat tangential to the story of the Garfield and Arthur administrations, is a fascinating portrait of a disturbed killer and of the still unsolved dilemma of what is "just" in dealing with such a personality.