James Rudolph Garfield was an American politician and lawyer.
Background
Garfield was born on October 17, 1865 in Hiram, Ohio, the third child and second son of James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, and Lucretia (Rudolph) Garfield. During Jim Garfield's youth, his father was a congressman, and the family moved back and forth between Washington, D. C. , and Ohio - first Hiram, then, after 1877, Mentor, which he regarded as "home" for the rest of his life. There were seven children in the family, two of whom died in infancy. Jim's older brother, Harry Augustus, became president of Williams College and fuel administrator during World War I.
Education
James and his brother were educated together, sometimes in school, sometimes at home. Both boys attended St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, for a year and again were tutored in Washington, D. C. , after Garfield's election as president in the fall of 1880. In September 1881, after Garfield's assassination, Jim and Harry entered Williams College. He had leanings toward medicine and law and pursued both during the winter of 1886, but by fall he had definitely decided on the law. He entered Columbia Law School and simultaneously the law firm of Bangs and Stetson in New York City.
Career
Early in 1888 Garfield returned to Ohio, passed the bar examination, and in July opened a law office with his brother Harry in Cleveland. The partners concentrated on estate and corporation law, especially railroads. They added Frederic C. Howe as a partner in 1898. Politically, Garfield was committed to the Republican party of his father, but he was also predisposed to reform it. He wished, however, to introduce political and administrative improvements, not to change the economic order. He belonged to the group of upper-middle-class reformers who believed that leadership by men of their own class would promote justice and efficiency in government. He was twice elected to the Ohio state senate (1895 and 1897), where he initiated a Corrupt Practices Act, a civil service bill that failed of adoption, and he worked for home rule for cities. In the session of 1898 he supported the election of Mark Hanna to the United States Senate by the Ohio General Assembly and defended Hanna in the face of bribery charges against him. Garfield twice sought the Republican nomination for congressman from Ohio's Twentieth Congressional District, in 1898 and 1900, and was defeated both times. In the second try he also lost Hanna's support, and it appeared that his political career was at a standstill. His return to public life came not by election but by his appointment to the United States Civil Service Commission in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt. The appointment began a close political association that continued as long as Roosevelt was active in politics. Garfield was promptly brought into the president's inner circle - "the tennis cabinet. " The next year Roosevelt chose him for the new post of commissioner of the Bureau of Corporations because he respected his ability as an administrator and because the two shared the view that the proper way to deal with the trust problem was through federal regulation, not through trust-busting. During Garfield's tenure the bureau's most notable investigations were those into the beef and oil industries. He was criticized for not being zealous enough in the first but was praised in the second for the searching examination he made of the Standard Oil Company, which led to an antitrust suit. An investigation was initiated against the United States Steel Corporation, but in the view of the president and the commissioner this was a "good trust. " They reached a "gentlemen's agreement" with the officers of the steel corporation: the company agreed to provide information on its operations and finances and to correct any illegal or bad practices in return for a guarantee against prosecution. The agreement has been criticized as being too considerate of the company and not considerate enough of the public welfare. Roosevelt promoted Garfield to secretary of the interior in 1907. Although inexperienced in conservation problems, he readily adopted the views of Roosevelt and the federal forester Gifford Pinchot that there should be a program of scientific land management of the federal domain, and that the use of broad discretionary power was necessary to implement such a program. During Garfield's term the department established national parks, reclaimed arid lands, withdrew coal, oil, gas, and phosphate lands from private sale for classification and investigation, took steps to prevent the monopolization of water and electric power, and improved waterways. After William H. Taft was elected president, Garfield returned to Ohio in March 1909, not only to practice law but also to further his own political ambitions. Early in 1910 he was talked about as a Republican candidate for governor, and in the spring he drew up what he considered "a progressive platform" on which he would stand. He was drawn to progressivism because of its mounting popularity and because Roosevelt was identified with it. Garfield, however, had done nothing to organize his forces in advance, and he and the Progressives were routed by the regulars at the Republican state convention in July 1910. For the next year Garfield followed Roosevelt's advice to support Progressives, oppose Taft, but keep open the choice of a substitute presidential candidate. He joined the National Progressive Republican League but argued against linking league support to Senator Robert M. La Follette. As soon as Roosevelt announced his willingness to run again for the presidency, Garfield came out for him. He was prominent in the movement that bolted the Republican party after it renominated Taft and formed the new Progressive party to back Roosevelt. Garfield was the keynote speaker at the Ohio state Progressive convention, and he stumped for "Teddy" outside of Ohio. In 1914 he was the Progressive party candidate for governor, but was defeated. The precipitous drop in the party's polling strength in the 1914 elections made Garfield and other Progressive leaders determined to rejoin the Republican party on honorable terms. The Ohioan was a leader in the harmony movement. He helped Roosevelt draft the public letter refusing the Progressive nomination in 1916 and served as one of the six Progressives on the special election committee of the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes. After the 1916 election Garfield formally announced his return to the Republican party, from which he did not stray again. He was a partisan of America's entry into the war on the side of the Allies and was critical of President Woodrow Wilson for not being firm enough against Germany. Garfield's participation in politics subsided after the war, and he devoted himself more to his law practice in the firm of Garfield, MacGregor, and Baldwin. He became involved in Mexican affairs as counsel for an American land and cattle company that owned two million acres in northern Mexico, at a time when the Carranza government threatened foreign landowners with expropriation. But he maintained his concern for conservation, speaking against the proposal of Henry Ford to buy Muscle Shoals on the ground that it did not protect the public interest. He accepted the chairmanship of the Commission on Conservation and the Public Domain appointed by President Herbert Hoover in 1929. Garfield supported Calvin Coolidge for president in 1924, joining with other former Rooseveltian Progressives in denouncing La Follette's bid for the presidency. He campaigned for Hoover in 1928 and in 1932 was chairman of the Republican Resolutions Committee. His last notable public statement was a report to the American Bar Association in 1940 attacking the usurpation of judicial functions by administrative tribunals in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. Garfield's greatest service was as secretary of the interior. He undertook to reorganize the complex department according to a plan he and Pinchot had devised. He sought to prove that the federal bureaucracy could be operated as effectively as any private corporation and was praised as the best secretary the department ever had. He brought to the task the spirit of the efficiency expert, the hallmark of the Rooseveltian reformer. Sometime after his wife died Garfield went to live with his brother Abram, a prominent Cleveland architect; this arrangement lasted until his final illness. He died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Cleveland and was buried in the Mentor, Ohio, cemetery.
Achievements
Membership
President of the board of trustees of Lake Erie College, co-founder of the Cleveland Community Fund, director of the Welfare Federation of Cleveland, president of the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, president of the Roosevelt Memorial Association
Connections
On December 30, 1890, James married Helen Newell of Chicago, daughter of John Newell, president of the Lake Shore Railroad. They had four sons. His wife died in an automobile accident in 1930.