Harry Augustus Garfield was an American lawyer, academic and public official.
Background
Garfield was born on October 11, 1863 in Hiram, Ohio, the first son of James Abram Garfield, the future president of the United States, and his wife, Lucretia Rudolph, daughter of one of Hiram's leading families. He was the second of their seven children (two girls and five boys) and the oldest to survive infancy. A brother, James Rudolph Garfield, became Secretary of the Interior in the cabinet of President Theodore Roosevelt. At the time of Harry's birth his father was serving in the Civil War as chief of staff to Gen. William S. Rosecrans; he was seated in Congress when the boy was two months old, and from then until he became president in 1881 the family lived in both Washington and Ohio.
Education
Harry's early education was a mixture of public and private schooling and parental tutoring, ending with two years (1879-1881) at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. When his father died on September 19 after being assassinated, young Harry had begun his freshman year at Williams.
Career
After graduating (B. A. ) in 1885, Garfield taught Latin and Roman history for a year at St. Paul's. He then studied at the Columbia University Law School (1886-1887) and read law at All Souls College, Oxford, and in London at the Inns of Court (1887-1888). Admitted to the Ohio bar on his return from England in 1888, Garfield opened a law partnership in Cleveland with his brother James. From 1892 to 1895 he also taught contracts at the law school of Western Reserve University. He organized a railroad and coal company that was sold at considerable profit to the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. The experience demonstrated his sound business sense as well as his integrity, fairness, and responsibility, but the degree to which enterprise devoured his time and energy made him fearful that a busy corporate practice would demand the sacrifice of what he called his "higher nature. " Such fears must have informed his energetic and effective work as founder and president of the Cleveland Municipal Association, a good-government reform group which he headed from 1896 to 1899, when it defeated the city's Republican political boss. In 1903 Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton and seeking a man both experienced in politics and committed to the progressive vision of a better world, persuaded Garfield to fill the chair of politics at Princeton. He held this post from 1904 until 1908, when he accepted the presidency of Williams College. Garfield was forty-four when he arrived at Williams, and most students and many faculty members never made their way through the reserve and dignity to the essentially pleasant and friendly man within. The Williams presidency enabled Garfield to preach, by word and example, the values of public service, good citizenship, and moral leadership which he, like Woodrow Wilson, regarded as essential to individual worth and effective democratic government. At a time when many, perhaps most, students regarded college primarily as a social experience, he was one of the administrators who with their faculties earnestly stressed the legitimacy of classroom learning. Beginning in 1911 he initiated a series of curricular reforms at Williams which brought the study of particular subject areas under the control of prerequisites and sequence, giving some encouragement to academic study of greater depth and quality. These tendencies were reinforced by a strengthened faculty, a rejection of professionalism in athletics, and the introduction of an honors degree program. In the age of rising universities, Garfield kept Williams loyal to collegiate ideals. It grew, but slowly and without perceptible damage to its style, which was imbedded in Latin requirements for admission, daily compulsory chapel, and Greek-letter fraternities. Students were overwhelmingly recruited from Eastern boarding schools, faculty were presumably able to draw on resources other than their salaries in order to participate in the good life, and the college community was held together by afternoon tea rather than cocktail parties. Garfield himself presided over this scene with unchallenged power: he hired and he fired. For him Williams remained what it had always been - a community where candidates for responsible positions in the governing class reaffirmed and strengthened a commitment to certain qualities of character and behavior denoting a gentleman. He himself symbolized those qualities. During prohibition he denied his well-stocked cellar to himself and his guests, but he enjoyed drink honestly on his European trips. Though for the most part a Republican by preference, Garfield voted the Democratic ticket in 1912 and 1916 (as he would again in 1920 and 1936). He served Wilson as wartime Fuel Administrator from August 23, 1917, to December 19, 1919. Administering an agency of 18, 000 men and women - most, like himself, unpaid volunteers - he gave effective and judicious attention to the needs of the nation, management, and labor, and succeeded in increasing bituminous coal production, stabilizing fuel prices, and reducing domestic consumption. His wartime association with Bernard Baruch led to the establishment in 1921 at Williams of the internationally known and widely copied Institute of Politics, a characteristic manifestation of Garfield's ideals and talents. Subsidized for its first three years by Baruch and later by others, the Institute brought to the campus each August several hundred men and women from universities and public life, at home and abroad, for lectures and discussions on international problems. Besides the quota of honorary degrees that normally comes to a college president, Garfield was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1923. In his long tenure at Williams, Garfield gave expression to the values and attitudes that were then thought to be synonymous with all that was best in American life. Complacency and a passivity toward student discontent with the Latin requirements and compulsory chapel characterized the last years of his presidency. In his retirement Garfield made his home in Washington, D. C. He died of cardiac decompensation at the age of seventy-nine while visiting in Williamstown and was buried in the Williams College Cemetery.
Achievements
Garfield is best remembered as president of Williams College, who also supervised the Federal Fuel Administration during World War I.
Personality
Garfield was of medium stature, somewhat heavily built, with a roundish handsome face, dark hair, and brown eyes. His serenity, judicial turn of mind, and aristocratic bearing lent themselves most effectively to formal relationships.
Connections
On June 14, 1888, Garfield married Belle Hartford Mason, a member of a wealthy Cleveland family and a distant cousin, who bore him four children.
Father:
James Abram Garfield
He was the 20th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881, until his assassination later that year.
Mother:
Lucretia Rudolph Garfield
She was the First Lady of the United States from March to September 1881, as the wife of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States.
Spouse:
Belle Hartford Mason
Brother:
James Rudolph Garfield
He was an American politician, and lawyer.
Daughter:
Lucretia Garfield
Son:
Mason Garfield
Son:
Stanton Garfield
Son:
James Garfield
Friend:
Woodrow Wilson
He was an American statesman and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921.
