Murder of a President

In a year of national upheaval over black lives, campaign rally violence, and the possibility of contested conventions, the 2016 pbs documentary Murder of a President raises the disturbing question “What if?” The compelling project investigates not only the details of President James A. Garfield's 1881 assassination and infamous botched medical care but also the troubling political, economic, and social backdrop against which this tragic scenario unfolded. The film implicitly argues that Garfield's backwoods upbringing under straightened circumstances and Civil War battle experience built a character who might have advanced values of racial and economic equality in the face of consolidating Gilded Age disparities and Jim Crow prejudice. What emerges is Garfield's visionary determination to protect African American voting rights and education in a violent southern atmosphere deteriorating from the pullout of federal troops and the foreshortening of Reconstruction under President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, plus a flagging northern will, weakened by the economic panic of 1873. As Garfield proclaimed in his inauguration speech, “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

Administration (probate law · Battle · Hubris · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term · Sociology · Voting · American History and Culture · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society