Why Did James Garfield Refuse to Praise Poverty?

David Senra says James Garfield refused to praise poverty because he refused to romanticize his childhood. His extraordinary rise from fatherlessness and abject poverty made him the embodiment of the American dream, and he was raised in desperate circumstances.

James Garfield's father died just a few months after his 33rd birthday, in a log cabin he had built four years earlier. The cabin had one room, three small windows, and a rough wooden plank floor. Gaps between the logs were filled with clay in a futile attempt to shut out the brutal Ohio winters. His father's death left his mother with four children to feed and debts she could not hope to pay. James Garfield, the youngest, was not yet two. She sold much of their land and farmed what was left with help from her oldest son, his 11-year-old brother. James Garfield did not have a pair of shoes until he was four years old. He understood clearly that he was poor and had inherited an innate dignity from his mother.

As a young boy asking to go to school, he did not expect anyone to ask what kind of coat he wore if he got through a course of study, and if they did he would not be ashamed to tell them it was a ragged one. He saw no path to college while he had to support himself and work, so he left home at 16 and became a canal man. Born in poverty in a log cabin, he had no way to predict how his life would turn out. He already knew education was how he would get out.