However, Death by Lightning (a reference to a glib assessment of a president’s chances of being assassinated) aims to pull Garfield (Michael Shannon) out of the historical shadows by recounting the events leading to and around his assassination in 1881 through the prism of a parallel biography of his killer, Charles Guiteau (rather like the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). The series presents Garfield as sort of a Midwestern Cincinnatus, the Roman general who gave up his appointment as dictator as soon as a state of emergency was over and retired to his farm (and whose followers, the Cincinnati, lend their name to a city in Garfield’s native Ohio). The convention is bitterly divided between the Stalwarts—the faction headed by party kingmaker Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), so named because of their support for the spoils system, which awards high-paying government jobs as payment for party loyalty (and, as the senior senator from New York, Conkling controls many lucrative appointments)—and the Reform faction, which Sherman and Garfield belong to and which wants the civil service to be reformed and appointments made on the basis of merit.
Author: Ellin Stein
Published at: 2025-11-06 22:37:12
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