In the four-part Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning, Mike Makowsky (Emmy winner for Bad Education) creates a cracking good story out of an exceedingly obscure segment of our history. In a boring history class, this would be a period in which one President (James Garfield) served only six months and the other (Chester Arthur) was never elected President in his own right, with the big political debate being about patronage versus civil service. But there was also political intrigue, corruption, double crosses, a down-to-the-wire election, madness and murder – and Makowsky makes the story pop.
I’ll be commenting on the series itself, and then the history, and finally a personal perspective from my own life in politics. First, Death By Lightning itself. It’s 1880, and the Republican Party, desperate to keep control of the White House, faces a three-way race between the political heavyweights of the time; none of the three can muster a majority, and, after 33 ballots, the delegates settle on a compromise choice who wasn’t even running – James Garfield (Michael Shannon). And, they choose a guy with a completely conflicting political profile, Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) as Garfield’s running mate; Arthur hadn’t been running, either. Now the fractured party has to reunite behind the unexpected standard-bearers, refill the empty party coffers and navigate though the minefields of controversy.
Most of us have heard of Garfield and Arthur because they were Presidents, but the most powerful and visible leaders of the age were James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling – political giants and personal rivals with a visceral hatred for each other. Death By Lightning accurately shows how Garfield and Arthur try to make their way within the overall battle between Blaine (Bradly Whitford) and Conkling (Shea Whigham). It helps that Conkling was an outrageous, venal, womanizing character with a unique haircut that Whigham gets to flaunt. Whigham’s colorful portrayal of Conkling is reason enough to watch Death By Lightning.
The other best reason to watch Death By Lightning is the performance of Matthew McFadyen as the series’ real main character, Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was a highly functioning schizophrenic narcissist who saw himself as deserving of high office and deluded himself into thinking that he had great value as a political advisor. Guiteau, in his grasping for status, also showed himself to be a cunning fraudster and an audacious compulsive liar. Guiteau’s frustration was that everyone he met saw through his harebrained scheming, crank ideas and pathetic pretensions. As insignificant as was Guiteau, he managed to significantly impact history as a presidential assassin. In Death By Lightning, as Garfield, Arthur, Blaine and Conkling engage in real political competition, Guiteau flits around as a crazy pest – and as a ticking bomb.
The acting in Death By Lightning is superb. Shea Whigham, one of my favorite character actors, and Offerman get the flashiest roles, because Conkling and Arthur were such scallywags. Shannon has both gravitas and reserved magnetism as Garfield. Other standouts include Paula Malcomson as Guiteau’s fictional enabling sister, Betty Gilpin as Lucretia “Crete” Garfield and Dominic Applewhite as a young, idealistic party activist.
But the soaring, award-worthy performance is Matthew McFadyen’s star turn as Guiteau. McFadyen (Tom Wambsgans in Succession) is able to show how Guiteau could opportunistically turn on a dime as he reached for the influence he thought he was due, and how Guiteau just couldn’t keep it together when his lies were exposed. Ever watchable, McFadyen’s Guiteau never fails to entertain.
Incidentally, Death By Lightning was shot in Hungary on Hungarian sets with a Hungarian technical crew, but everything passes for America in 1880-81.
The history (contains some spoilers)
Death By Lightning is fictionalized, but accurately captures the politics of the day and the overall arc of the Garfield/Arthur/Conkling/Blaine/Guiteau story.
Even major American political figures, like Presidents and presidential candidates, had no real security at the time. People of the period must have thought of the Lincoln assassination as an awful, unthinkable one off. A regular person could approach and get up close to any politician or elected official, including inside the White House up to the door of the president’s office; (the Oval Office hadn’t been built yet.)
Unlike today, when all the regular government employment is civil service, essentially all federal jobs were appointed politically. So, if you wanted to be a small town postmaster or a clerk in the Interior Department or consul to Naples, you needed to ask the President (or somebody else who could ask him) for the job. Indeed, that meant that the President of the US himself was always swarmed with job seekers.
Guiteau definitely had historical encounters with Blaine. I couldn’t find documentation of Guiteau meeting Garfield, Arthur or Lucretia Garfield, but those encounters depicted in Death By Lightning are all plausible, especially for someone as devious and persistent as Guiteau, who was always on alert to ambush famous people.
Other things that Death By Lightning gets right historically:
- Arthur did feel compelled to reverse himself and enact Garfield’s program, which he had initially opposed.
- Crete Garfield was indeed a key White House advisor of her husband’s. It’s not depicted in Death By Lightning, but the Garfields’ marriage became close after a very rocky first few years, as you can read on Crete Garfield’s Wikipedia page.
- Guiteau really did join (and get kicked out of) a “free love” sect, the Oneida Community. The creeped-out women, who were having sex with the other men in the sect, did nickname him “Charley Gitout”.
- All the details of Guiteau’s capture, trial and execution, including his expectation that President Arthur would pardon him in gratitude, his attempts to monetize his notoriety and the song he composed for the gallows, were EXACTLY as they happened in real life.
- Roscoe Conkling really was that arrogant and flamboyant and really did sport that haircut with the curly locks on his forehead.
But this IS a fictionalized account:
- Death By Lightning portrays Garfield as some sort of citizen farmer who was reluctantly involved in politics. In 1880, Garfield had been in Congress for 17 years and had risen to become the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and then the Republican Floor Leader in the House. He was a professional politician and a national figure. This was a guy who had been elected to the State Legislature in his 20s, was able to recruit his own Civil War regiment at age 30, serve with distinction and rise to Major General rank by 34.
- In Death By Lightning, Guiteau has a good-hearted, gullible sister Franny who enables his misadventures. In real life, Guiteau had no sister, but had a father who didn’t cause Charles’ mental illness, but who used corporal punishment and toyed with the Oneida Community himself, which certainly didn’t help.
- Roscoe Conkling really did blunder his career away by resigning from the Senate, but I couldn’t find any source attributing his defeat to the combined efforts of his wife and his mistress.
It’s also not depicted in Death By Lightning, but Garfield, who was both a classics scholar and ambidextrous, would astound folks by writing in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other SIMULTANEOUSLY. Best Presidential party trick ever.
The politics (contains some more spoilers)
I really enjoyed Death By Lightning, and, as a history buff, especially as a student of American political history, I am admittedly a sucker for historical movies. But I also have spent four decades as a political professional, so I frequently DISLIKE movies about politics that I find naive, simplistic or implausible. So, please pay attention when I heap praise on Death By Lightning for capturing how people in politics really behave – especially those at the margins of politics.
Politics draws a lot of hard-working, ambitious people who are motivated by idealism, duty, hunger power, need for attention, and all kinds of reasons. But American democracy is, by definition a public process, and the high visibility attracts lots of mentally unstable people, too. Every politician – from school board member to presidential candidate – has been surprised by some unbalanced person with a crank fixation or worse. It;s the worst in California, where the Brown Act allows anyone to address any local government body on any topic, resulting in psychotics ranting nonsense at their captive audience of elected officials.
Of course, politicians WANT to be visible at public events. In what’s called the grip and grin, it’s traditional for candidates and their surrogates to get their photos snapped (and now we’re in the Selfie Age) with anybody, even those unknown to them. One anonymous guy who got his picture taken with First Lady Roslyn Carter turned out to be serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
While often a person immediately presents as crazy, sometimes you get a ways into the conversation before it happens. What I really love about Death By Lightning are the scenes with both Blaine and Lucretia, where Guiteau eventually makes the one overreaching remark that causes them to instantly recognize, oh, this guy is a crank.
What people didn’t understand in 1880 was that Guiteau hadn’t opposed Garfield, as John Wilkes Booth did with Abraham Lincoln. Guiteau was a huge Garfield fan, who was disappointed when Garfield’s team found Guiteau too crazy for them to hire. (It was also crazy for Chapman to shoot Reagan in an attempt to impress Jody Foster.) I have spent my life in politics, and I can verify that there are a lot of Guiteaus out there.
Makowsky even takes shot at a contemporary politician; he has Garfield proclaim, “No matter how long America stands, there will still be Roscoe Conklings.”
Death By Lightning is streaming on Netflix.