Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

My knowledge of U.S. Presidents in the late 19th century is … a little shaky. If pressed, I could probably name all of the men who came between Grant and McKinley; no promises I’d have them in the correct order, though. The single thing I previously knew about James A. Garfield was that he served only a few months in office before dying at the hands of an assassin.

At the end of July, though, I read a newsletter in which historian Alexis Coe featured the work of Todd Arrington, Garfield expert and Site Manager at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. Their exchange about Garfield’s overlooked legacy piqued my interest, and in it I noticed an aside that the Garfield NHS is near Cleveland—a short detour for me on my drive from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor last weekend.

Lawnfield was once an expansive family farm in Mentor, Ohio, but in the decades after his death Garfield’s widow, Lucretia (“Crete”), and their descendants sold off much of the land. Today, the site almost looks like just another house on a suburban street, although larger and more sprawling than those surrounding it. I thought I would pop into the visitor’s center, quickly check out the exhibits, and be on my way, but when I walked in the park ranger asked if I was interested in the [free!] house tour scheduled to start in 15 minutes. I decided that if I was going to learn more about James A. Garfield, I was going to do it right.

Another ranger walked our small group from the visitor’s center to the front porch of Lawnfield, where Garfield more or less invented presidential campaigning as we recognize it today: during the election of 1880, journalists and interested voters rode the train to Mentor, walked down a dirt lane to the Garfield property, and assembled on the front lawn to hear his stump speech. Garfield wasn’t the era’s most prominent politician; despite serving nearly two decades in Congress and recently being elected Senator, he only received the Republican presidential nomination as a dark horse candidate on the thirty-sixth ballot. His front-porch speeches were effective, though, and helped Garfield secure a victory over Winfield Hancock.

The original house at Lawnfield is a jumble of well-appointed rooms—by the time the Garfields moved there in 1876, James had come a long way from his birth in a log cabin 45 years prior. It’s truly a family home: the guide pointed out the front parlor where the James, Crete, and their five children often assembled together, and the tiles surrounding the dining-room fireplace that Crete painted with the kids as a group activity. I asked what sort of household help the Garfields employed, and the park ranger replied that for the most part, they handled all the household chores on their own. Though only tourists have walked the halls of the house for many years now, it still feels comfortable and lived-in.

The standout sight on the hour-long tour is the addition that Lucretia built following her husband’s death, using donations from the public to create a memorial library and secure vault for his writings. The library is a beautiful room, with white oak coffered ceilings and large windows flooding the space with sunlight. Like the rest of the house, it manages the trick of feeling simultaneously formal and comfortable—the temptation to pull a volume off the shelves and curl up on a settee is a strong one (but made easier to resist by the red velvet ropes barring access to the furniture, plus the vigilant park ranger).

James A. Garfield might have only a short entry in U.S. Presidential history, but the National Historic Site and its staff make a convincing argument that he doesn’t deserve to be overlooked. As Todd Arrington argues in his exchange with Alexis Coe,

Garfield will never be a Lincoln or even a Grant simply because he was president so briefly.  But I do think that people are taking a second look at Garfield and realizing that he had a lot of potential to be a strong and impactful president. He was incredibly smart, experienced, and knew when to stand firm and when to compromise. He cared deeply about civil rights, fiscal issues, and education.

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Wednesday evening I was lying on my couch, half-reading, half-paying attention to the Phillies game as they played the Washington Nationals. The Nationals are not having a good season; it was a game that the second-place Phillies should win, though an eternal frustration of Phillies fans is how regularly they lose games to not-very-good teams. Inning by inning, I read less and watched more as the Phillies started scoring—first on a Bryce Harper hit, followed by a home run by Nick Castellanos (who also hit a second one later), then on an incredible home run blasted by Weston Wilson, a 28-year-old taking his very first at-bat in the major leagues. I barely even paid attention to Michael Lorenzen, a pitcher the Phillies just acquired from the Detroit Tigers, except to note that his pitch count seemed a bit high and he wasn’t always showing great command.

Not until the seventh inning or so did it really sink in that Lorenzen, though he had walked several batters, had not yet permitted a Washington hit. That’s when things got real and I stopped pretending I was paying any attention to my book: I’ve never seen a Phillies no-hitter (let’s not talk about Game 4 of last year’s World Series). With the pessimism of any longtime Phillies fan, I tempered my cautious excitement with the conviction that at some point the Nationals would ruin Lorenzen’s performance with a weird bloop grounder—not enough for the Phillies to lose, but something to turn the game into a routine victory against a middling opponent on a regular August Wednesday night.

In the end, my pessimism was misplaced, as Lorenzen finished the game with three quick outs in the ninth inning, his no-hitter completed and the stadium erupting in celebration. (Here in Michigan, my neighbors very well may have heard me shout “Yessss!” as Johan Rojas caught the final out.) Despite their place in the standings, this season it has often felt like the Phillies aren’t firing on all cylinders: there have been baserunning mishaps, frustrating errors in fielding, a lack of offense, and inconsistent pitching performance. In this game, though, while Lorenzen got credit for the win, it was truly a team effort, as Matt Gelb wrote at the Athletic. And watching everything come together, lying on my couch on a regular August Wednesday night, was fantastic.

Also, one more shout-out to Weston Wilson, who would have been the story of the night if not for Lorenzen. He gets his due from John Stolnis in this episode of Hittin’ Season, recorded immediately after the game.

Recommendations

(Lots this week, as I finally cleaned up all my open tabs and also got through the newsletters filling my inbox, for once.)

China Stories
Elisabeth Braw, “Your Business in China May Be Uninsurable: Political-risk coverage is getting harder to find.”
John Cassidy, “China’s Economic Miracle Is Turning Into a Slog”
Yangyang Cheng, “The All-American Myth of the TikTok Spy”
Wenxin Fan, “China’s Latest Problem: People Don’t Want to Go There”
Emily Feng, “Malaysia’s a big draw for China’s Belt and Road plans. Finishing them is another story”
Claire Fu and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Don’t Be So Picky About a Job, China’s College Graduates Are Told”
Sheena Chestnut Greitens, “Xi’s Security Obsession: Why China Is Digging In at Home and Asserting Itself Abroad”
Mara Hvistendahl, David A. Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel, and Ishaan Jhaveri, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul”
David Rennie, “Xi Jinping’s revealing response to floods and heatwaves”
Oscar Schwartz, “Li Ziqi’s Online Pastoral Politics”
Deborah Seligsohn, “The Case for Renewing the U.S.-China S&T Cooperation Agreement”
Neil Thomas, “Xi Jinping’s Three Balancing Acts”
Vickie Wang, “Women in Taiwan Are Tired of Being Nice”
Li Yuan, “What Cuisine Means to Taiwan’s Identity and Its Clash With China”

Wanderings Around the World
Lyz Lenz, “The Secret Feminist History of Butter Cows”
Mercedes Mejia and April Van Buren, “Finding meaning in Michigan’s petroglyphs”
Azadeh Moaveni, “The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools”
Catherine Rampell, “She was lucky to escape Afghanistan. Two years later, she’s stuck in limbo.”
John Summers, “The biggest Vietnam War story that Americans don’t talk about”
Wanna Tamthong (translated by Tyrell Haberkorn), “Writing from Berlin: Letter to Uncle Kwa Kyi”

Standout Stories
Jennifer Senior, “The Ones We Sent Away”
Jennifer Senior has a special talent for writing articles so powerful and touching they’re almost painful to read. In this story for the Atlantic, Senior recounts the life of her aunt, Adele, who as a toddler in the early 1950s was diagnosed with severe developmental and intellectual disabilities. Senior traces what followed her grandparents’ decision to institutionalize Adele, not only interrogating the history of psychiatry but also the lasting effect these treatments—or the lack thereof—had on the families of those who were subjected to them.

Jonathan Cheng, “Even Jimmy Butler Had to Witness the Hottest Village Basketball League in China”
Scroll through my “China Stories” links above and they’re mostly about political matters: Xi Jinping, the economy, international relations. The small number of foreign journalists in the country right now means that we don’t get many accounts of everyday life outside Beijing or Shanghai anymore. Jonathan Cheng’s article about “村BA,” a basketball league in rural southwestern China, is a perfect example of the kind of story that has fallen off in recent years. As Josh Chin, another WSJ reporter, tweeted, “There are legitimate reasons to give China a wide berth these days, but stories like this one from @JChengWSJ and @qianweizhang make me miss it so much.” Same.

Feature photo: Exterior of Lawnfield, home of President James. A Garfield, in Mentor, Ohio, August 7, 2023.