MILES PARKS, HOST:
Off the top of your head, how many movies or TV shows can you think of where there's a portrayal of a U.S. president? I think I can probably do 10, maybe 15. It might be the only genre that's more flooded than the "Marvel-Verse," but there is a new addition to this list, a new series on Netflix called "Death By Lightning." This one, though, gives the spotlight to one of the country's lesser-known leaders, James Garfield, the 20th U.S. president who was shot four months into his presidency. For more on "Death By Lightning" and to talk politicians on the big and small screens, we're joined by presidential historian, Alexis Coe. She's a senior fellow at The New America think tank and the author of a bestselling biography of George Washington. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ALEXIS COE: Thank you for having me.
PARKS: So I have to ask - how excited were you when you found out that there was a miniseries that was coming out about a U.S. president that was not Abraham Lincoln or Richard Nixon? I feel like those guys get all the airtime.
COE: They really do. And Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, his successor, rarely get any attention. They're a hard sell, even when I've got people in the room and they're excited to hear about lesser-known presidents and anecdotes they haven't heard before. Their eyes kind of glaze over.
PARKS: I want to dig into the president a little bit and the portrayal of Garfield here because he's portrayed as this high character, family man, a war hero who basically has the Republican nomination thrust upon him. Can you talk a little bit more about what he was like? - because if listeners are like me, I am not really familiar with James Garfield.
COE: James Garfield was at the 1880 convention to stump for someone else. And so it's interesting that he is able to sway them in this way because he is, of course, known. He fought the Civil War. He served in Congress, but he was not a big part of the party machine that controlled politics at the time. In the 1880s, the country was living in the aftermath of the Civil War. So Reconstruction had ended. Federal protections were withdrawn. White supremacists were controlling the South, and it wasn't really fully dismantled, but it reasserted itself sort of openly. And so the Republican Party - Garfield is a part of it, but he's not a part of the patronage machine. There are bosses who treated government jobs like private spoils. And corruption wasn't so much a scandal in the way we think of it. It wasn't like Watergate. It was standard operating procedure. And therefore, someone like Garfield, who had taught classics, he's not really at the forefront of everyone's mind.
PARKS: I want to dig in a little bit to the man who shot him, who's also a main character of this series, Charles Guiteau, who's played by actor Matthew Macfadyen. There is something pretty uniquely American about this guy. He is sort of a grifter, a little bit of a kind of career liar, but he also has high aspirations for himself. What did you make of Macfadyen's portrayal of the assassin?
COE: Macfadyen did a great job of conveying what we would see today in what's known as incels, in these articles about men who feel adrift and who want to be engaged. And they view themselves in these stories as heroes, but they're not really doing much to apply themselves or entering society in a way that contributes or presents them with those kinds of situations in which they can rise to the top. So we have someone like Guiteau who sees Garfield, recognizes greatness and thinks to himself, if this guy can get in, so can I. And of course, that catapults him in his mind as a major player. And we see throughout the series people telling him he's not.
PARKS: I mean, do you also think there's something resonant here, specifically with a rise in political violence and violent rhetoric in our politics?
COE: So much about the series felt like it applied to the present. One of the issues was political violence. We saw how it can happen in an instant, how it can't be anticipated. There are people who seem to be really consistent in their lives as far as their views. There are people who seem inconsistent. You can't really know when someone's going to act. I think the feeling, though, the passion was what connects throughout the eras.
PARKS: Have you noticed - I mean, it feels like with Ken Burns' documentary about the Revolutionary War also coming out recently, that there is a wave of interest in this sort of historical content. Do you feel like there's more interest in content right now looking back at the American past than maybe in previous years?
COE: I think there's a hunger to understand how we got to this place that feels so divisive. It also has to do with our 250th. America will soon turn 250, and so we have this race to define our collective memory to say who we were, who we are and who we're going to be. So that resonates. But I think, in particular, the world of 1880 seems closer both on the timeline and when we look at what we see in the series. It's more than we'd like to believe. Americans then were exhausted by corruption and inequality was exploding. The political system felt captured. I feel that way now. So when Garfield stands up and insists that a conscience should matter more than machinery, I think it really resonated because people are starved for integrity.
PARKS: Is there anybody else who maybe I haven't heard of who should get Netflix miniseries - a figure in American history who you're kind of like, they could hold a four-episode, eight-episode series, who you would like to see made, who maybe isn't super-famous?
COE: I would love to say all because that's honestly how I feel. As much as I'm happy that Garfield and his moment - those four months in office and the incredible speech that got him there - is now reinserted into our collective memory, I'm a little sad we don't see what Chester A. Arthur did next.
PARKS: All right. Well, Netflix has their work cut out for them. Presidential historian Alexis Coe, thank you so much for joining us.
COE: Thank you.
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