I’m not one to grouse about trivialities. Bad meals, ill-fitting garments, traffic jams, so what? Irritants proliferate if permitted; ignored, they evaporate, with no waste of zest.
Movie blather chafes me similarly. So-and-so’s performance was a let-down – so what! Granted, we need a spark to ignite conversation but can’t we do better than that!
The ahistoricity of a recent cable series got my goat, but so? Pleasantness is all I ask of TV and this was pleasant enough. Just wrong. And the wrongness jarred me as an injustice – and a conundrum worth considering. How much probity do we owe the past? Mangling yesterday to delight today is the commonest of human pastimes. Shakespeare did it; we all do with our personal narratives. Whoever my parents were, they weren’t whom I’ve depicted, not really. Mistakes become mythtakes; ghosts rarely wreak revenge.
This series concerned the surprising election and sudden assassination of our twentieth President, James Garfield (1831-1881). It’s a worthwhile subject, mostly absent from the public imagination. History, like the movies, favors large characters and famous crises: the Revolution, Civil War, World Wars, and their respective leaders garner lavish attention: playing Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, TR, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, makes actors’ careers. For portrayers of Rutherford Hayes, Roscoe Conkling, James Blaine, Chester Arthur, or Garfield, the pickings are slimmer. Rutherford Who? Roscoe Who? The celebrities of the Gilded Age were the plutocrats: Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller – now we’re talking!
The guy who gets assassinated in this series is its hero. His Vice-President and successor gets his character assassinated. I’m a little cozy with Chester Arthur. He’s buried a stone’s throw from various great-grandfathers. These local worthies must have known each other – Albany wasn’t that big a town. Arthur’s a player in the vastly amusing book I wrote about our Presidents and Vice-Presidents (pardon the commercial interruption).
No doubt, Arthur was a senior apparatchik in Senator Roscoe Conkling’s vast New York-based patronage machine. Then (as today, alas) government was viewed as a get-rich-quick scheme by those in power. Chester Arthur had the plumiest of assignments, Collector of the Port of New York. No doubt he dispersed favors and benefited personally from his position (though I’d be surprised if he was cutting deals with foreign nations to develop desert resorts). But he was hardly the monstrosity these moviemakers have concocted for their convenience. He was, for starters, a successful lawyer, socially welcome, and a dandy. If he’d been this gluttonous, slobbering, brass-knuckle-wielding, falling-down drunk, he’d never have been appointed. Neither would he have served with startling distinction as a reforming President. He deserves, if not eulogies, some respect. Yet these moviemakers defame him as a repugnant clown.
Is that OK? This movie presents itself as true, not satire. Arthur’s slim reputation can’t withstand this torrent of obloquy. Because he’s slightly known, can he with impunity be so shabbily trashed?
History inevitably calumniates. Dictated by the winners, it damns the defeated. Arthur is the poster-boy for a corrupt system of self-dealing Americans believed, until recently, we’d put behind us. Bias can’t be helped. But don’t we owe it to our audience, if not our conscience, to strive for fairness?
We live in a lying age, where truth is treated as a namby-pamby joke. The Nameless One stars in this department, but he’s hardly alone. The reformation of America depends on the restoration of Truth as a sacred guiding principle. Truth and Trust branch from the same root – Troth – the pledge we make to deal justly with one another. “Justice cannot be for one side alone,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, “but must be for both.”