[COLUMN] Death by Lightning Is a Cautionary Tale for the Second Gilded Age | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Death by Lightning, the four-episode historical miniseries now streaming on Netflix, which I really enjoyed. Also, I guess, for the presidency of James A. Garfield.

James A. Garfield (Michael Shannon), the twentieth President of the United States, is often overlooked in historical analyses.

In 1948, when Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. polled 55 historians to provide a definitive ranking of the men to hold the office, Garfield was omitted from the rankings entirely. Garfield is often excluded from such rankings, as he was for PBS in 1996, The Wall Street Journal in 2000 and again in 2005, The United States Presidents Center in 2011 and The Presidential History Network in 2016. Garfield is the rare President of the United States who may as well not exist.

There is, of course, a good reason for this. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) four months into his presidency. The wound became infected, and Garfield would die just two months later. He held office for a grand total of 199 days, and was succeeded by his Vice President, Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman). To this day, Garfield has served the second-shortest term in the Oval Office, behind only William Henry Harrison.

However, even in the polls that do rank Garfield, he tends to get lost in the pack. His highest ranking was perhaps in the first Siena poll in 1982, where he placed 25th. He never placed that high again. He frequently places in the lower third or higher fourth quartile in these polls: 34th for The Times in 2008, 34th for The New York Times in 2018, 29th for C-SPAN in 2017. Despite being martyred by an assassin’s bullet, Garfield is not a mythic figure like Lincoln or Kennedy.

Garfield is often reduced to a list of trivia: the last president born in a log cabin, the first left-handed president. He is occasionally treated as an abstract idea, “the Great ‘What If’ President.” However, he is still a strange choice for a four-part historical biopic like Mike Makowsky’s Death by Lightning, adapting Candic Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, and following Garfield from his speech at the 1880 Republican National Convention in Illinois to his death and the execution of Guiteau.

The President of the United States is almost a mythic figure in the collective imagination. Films and television shows about the holders of the office tend to approach it with a sort of reverence, the assumption that the individual in power must be one of Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Men of History”, a person whose very will bends the tides and the flow of history around them. These are remarkable men who stand on the very precipice of history.

Playing a historical president is often a short cut to awards recognition, with Oscar nominations for Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Alexander Knox in Wilson, James Whitmore in Give ’em Hell, Harry!, Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon, Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln, Sam Rockwell for Vice and Anthony Hopkins for both Nixon and Amistad. Paul Gimatti won an Emmy for John Adams, while David Morse was nominated for playing George Washington in the same production.

Even when these projects don’t translate to awards success, they feel like they aspire to be both important and significant. Rob Reiner directed Woody Harrelson as Lyndon B. Johnson in LBJ. Lee Daniels’ The Butler paraded a bunch of movie stars as presidents: Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Marsden as John F. Kennedy, Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan, John Cusack as Richard Nixon. It is not uncommon to rush out biopics of sitting presidents like W. or Barry.

Even fictional American Presidents are imbued with a sort mythic prowess, translated into kick-ass action heroes like President James Marshall (Harrison Ford) in Air Force One, President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman) in Independence Day, President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) in White House Down and President William Alan Moore (Samuel L. Jackson) in Big Game. The trend continues to the present day, with President Will Derringer (John Cena) in the tongue-in-cheek Heads of State.

On television, the President has historically been treated as an exemplar of the nation’s ideals, most obviously with Jebidiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen) on The West Wing, but even David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) on 24. Recent years have seen more cynical portrayals of the office like Fitzgerald Grant III (Tony Goldwyn) in Scandal or Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in House of Cards, but there still a sense that this individual holds tremendous sway over the larger arc of history. If the President is not God, then he must be Lucifer.

It’s difficult to think of another nation that treats its elected officials like this, whether as angels or demons. Perhaps the closest that British cinema has ever come to capturing that sort of national fantasy is having Prime Minister David (Hugh Grant) give the President (Billy Bob Thornton) a very stern talking to in Love, Actually. There is no real point of comparison for the idea of the President of the United States as a man, to quote Lincoln, “clothed with immense power.”

So it is interesting that Death by Lightning is largely about a President of the United States who has been largely lost to history. Throughout the miniseries, both Garfield and Guiteau wonder about how they will be remembered. During a fight over corruption, Garfield rallies his supporters, asking, “One day, years from now, each one of us will be judged by what we do in this moment. How will they talk about us, I wonder?” The answer, it seems, is that they will not talk about him at all.

In his dying moments, Garfield asks his wife Lucretia (Betty Gilpin), “Do you think my name will have some place in human history?” In the moment, his beloved lies to him, offering some comfort to a dying man. Later, when she visits Guiteau, she confesses that she knows the truth. “History won’t remember him at all,” Lucretia admits. “Be no reason to. Be a minor footnote at best. An idle piece of trivia.”

Garfield is presented as something of a historical fluke, a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time to end up President of the United States and also at the wrong place at the wrong time to end up the target of Guiteau’s bullet. He is conscripted at the Republican Convention to give a speech nominating John Sherman (Alistair Petrie). Garfield provides a stirring piece of oration that turns him into an unlikely compromise candidate for a body otherwise deadlocked.

It would be easy to paint Garfield as a naïve and selfless fool with no agency whatsoever in the arc of history unfolding around him, a sort of Gilded Age Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks). Death by Lightning is smarter than that. Though Garfield repeatedly insists he does not seek office, others see through him. “Nobody makes a speech like that unless he craves it for himself,” Sherman observes. Later, dying, Garfield admits his ambitions to Lucretia, who already knew. “I wanted them to know me.”

Death by Lightning explores the liminal space between goodness and greatness. Garfield is pointedly not a Great Man in the historical sense. In their audience together, Guiteau pleads for Garfield to share his secret, “Tell me how I can be great too.” Garfield responds modestly, “I’m afraid you misinterpret me, Mr. Guiteau. You see, we’re all only men.” Relating the conversation to Lucretia later on, Garfield confesses, “You know better than anyone, I’m the furthest thing from a great man.”

Garfield may not be a great man, but the miniseries suggests that he is a good one. He works hard to create a government that serves the people, fighting the corruption embodied by men like Roscoe Conking (Shea Whigham). Over the course of the miniseries, Garfield's single greatest accomplishment might be the redemption of Chester A. Arthur, who goes from Conkling’s right-hand man to the steward of Garfield’s legacy. “You are a good man, Jim,” Lucretia assures her husband.

Death by Lightning is clearly in conversation with these historical portrayals of political power. Its cast is full of political television veterans, such as Bradley Whitford from The West Wing or Nick Offerman from Parks and Rec. In pitting Michael Shannon against Shea Whigham, Death by Lightning evokes Boardwalk Empire, a fictionalized account of Enoch Lewis "Nucky" Johnson’s political grip on Atlantic City. It is a series caught between a romantic and cynical view of American political power.

In this context, Death by Lightning feels like a companion piece to the recent wave of historical biopics like Oppenheimer or Napoleon, a rejection of the “Great Man” thesis that underpins so many of these stories of remarkable individuals by presenting the central figures as complicated men caught in the grand swell of larger historical winds. In his most unguarded moments, Garfield will concede that he aspires to greatness, but the show repeatedly questions his agency.

The big fight that consumes Garfield’s first one hundred days in office is not won through grand strategy or planning. Conkling is undermined not by Garfield’s maneuvering, but because Conkling rejects his mistress (Tuppence Middleton), who reveals their affair to his wife, tanking his political momentum. As Garfield admits to Joe Brown (Archie Fisher). “There was no play, Joe. Make no mistake, we got lucky this time. Very lucky.” He could just as easily have been unlucky, as he is meeting Guiteau’s bullet.

This presentation of the President pairs neatly with the framing of the anonymous President (Idris Elba) in Kathryn Bigelow’s recent A House of Dynamite, who is similarly presented as a cog in a larger machine, a man of ego who is swept up in forces and systems beyond his control. It feels notable that these two portrayals of the presidency should come out so close together. It’s rare to see the President of the United States portrayed so impotently, but it’s especially rare to have two of these portrayals come out in such proximity.

Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, there is an uncomfortable resonance to Death By Lightning. The show is set in an era of massive governmental corruption, of “elected officials brazenly peddling their influence at auction.” It is a time of political turmoil and unrest, with Garfield describing the Republican convention as “a human ocean in tempest.” It is also a period dominated by frustrated and disillusioned men like Charles Guiteau, whose disillusionment turns violent.

The parallels to the current moment are quite obvious, to the point that contemporary American has been described as going through “a Second Gilded Age”, and not just Julian Fellowes new show. As in the earlier Gilded Age, political violence – particularly political assassinations – are on the increase. Death by Lightning even delves into Guiteau’s past at “the Oneida free love colony” to draw a connection between the assassin and the modern incel movement.

More broadly, though, Death by Lightning challenges one of the core tenets of American exceptionalism, the idea that the President of the United States must by his nature be “a Great Man.” In that sense, it is engaged with the anxieties of this specific moment, capturing the fear that the arc of history is not guided by any intentionality, but instead exerts a gravity that pulls historical figures along with it – and that those men who seek such power will claim it at an impossible cost.

Death by Lightning feels like a very modern take on the familiar historical biography, a miniseries that finds something incredibly resonant and contemporary in a story from over a century ago. It is a remarkable piece of work, an exploration of the mythology of the presidency and American exceptionalism, and perhaps an argument that it is better to be a good man than a great one.