The other major offense committed by the series was its characterization of Chester Arthur as a drunken, foul-mouthed, corrupt thug. I consider movies and historical novels that deliberately soil the reputations of historical figures for their creators’ own purposes not just unethical but harmful. It is well established that dead people and their estates have no rights when a screenwriter or author decides to distort and smear their legacies and character. I accept that our popular culture’s artists can do this, but nevertheless, they should not. It’s wrong. The Golden Rule says its wrong. Kant’s principle that one should not use a human being as a means to an end says its wrong, at least in spirit.

For the record, Arthur was an educated man and before entering New York machine politics a successful lawyer. I find no evidence that he was fond of drunken carousing in sleazy bars, as the series suggests.”Death by Lightning” shows him as perpetually disheveled, which must really hack off Chester’s ghost. Arthur was probably the most fastidious of our Presidents, ahead of even George Washington. He was known throughout is life as a “dandy”: the man famously had 80 pairs of trousers hanging in his closet.

There are too many inventions, fantasies and unfair portrayals in the series to recount, but especially annoying to me were these:

• The constant use of “fuck” by the characters as an expletive was anachronistic and jarring, if occasionally funny.
• Garfield was played (by Michael Shannon) as passive cypher, which he most definitely was not. He was one of our most brilliant Presidents and one of our most eclectic. After he dies. his wife describes him as the kind of man who “would sing show tunes while standing on his head to amuse his children.” That gives you some sense of what an interesting character our 20th President was.
• Lucretia is shown telling Guiteau as awaits execution, in a completely made-up scene that makes no sense, that because of the assassin’s crime her husband will be a historical footnote at best. But Lucretia established the first Presidential library with her husband’s papers, making sure he was not a footnote.
• The series shows Arthur defying his patron, Senator Roscoe Conkling, by accepting the GOP nomination for Vice-President. But it was Conkling who got Arthur the nomination so he could be Conkling’s “mole” in the Garfield administration.
• Matthew MacFadyen plays Guiteau ridiculously sympathetically, essentially as a slightly crazier version of the comic character he played in “Succession.” There was nothing sympathetic about Guiteau, except that his galloping sociopathy, extreme narcissism and possible schizophrenia were untreated. He was a violent, deluded, criminal maniac. The series also shows Guiteau singing the poem he read on the gallows before he was hanged, “I Am Going To The Lordy.”  Stephen Sondheim set the poem to music for his musical “Assassins,” so I guess this was a sop to Sondheim fans. (Sondheim’s melody was better.)
• Netflix couldn’t resist having Garfield’s daughter lecture him about unfair policies toward Chinese immigrants, who were regarded as threats to American jobs at the time. It’s a cheap and false analogy with our current illegal immigration controversy, but Netflix gotta Netflix.

To be fair, there were two events pointed out by the series that I was grateful to see. First, the Winfield Hancock-Garfield election of 1880 was the closest of all time. Even though Garfield won the electoral vote decisively, less than 10,000 votes out of over 9 million cast—a .1% margin—separated the two ex-Civil War generals. Second, I was reminded that the first doctor on the scene to treat the President after he was shot, Charles Burleigh Purvis, was black. He was a trailblazer for blacks in the medical profession, and attention should be paid.

But none of that can compensate for the betrayal of Julia Sand.