They may only make up 10 percent of the population, but it’s become clear that lefties have the advantage in at least one important area: politics. No less than six American presidents out of 13 since The Second World War were left-handedthus helping to fuel speculation that left-handers may have a greater aptitude for language skills, which would help them communicate better (and win more votes).
Even though many people know James Garfield primarily as the second president to be murdered– in 1881, just four months after his inauguration – he was also the first known left-hander to occupy the Oval Office. In addition to being ambidextrous, or able to use both his left and right hands with equal ease, Garfield also spoke and wrote several different languages. His talents were so famous that people said he could write a sentence in Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing the same sentence in Greek with the other.
The Presidency of James Garfield
The last American president to be born in a log cabinGarfield rose from poverty to become a teacher and school president at age 26, the youngest Union brigadier general during the Civil war and a nine-term U.S. Congressman from Ohio. In 1880, he became the favored candidate for president on the 36th ballot of the bitterly divided Republican National Convention after delivering an enthusiastic nominating speech – for another candidate.
At the time, presidential candidates didn’t go on the campaign trail, but Garfield spoke to crowds of people who came to see him at his family’s farm in Mentor, Ohio. As Candice Millard writes in her book Destiny of the Republic: a story of madness, medicine and the murder of a presidentsome 5,000 people converged on Garfield’s home on a single day in October 1880. The crowd included a group of Germans, to whom Garfield addressed in their native language, becoming the first American presidential candidate to deliver a campaign speech in a language other than English.
During his brief tenure, President Garfield had to fight the demands of the “spoils system” of politics, which awarded government positions to people based not on merit but on political patronage. On July 2, 1881, Garfield was bullet in the back at a Washington train station by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled and mentally unbalanced job seeker who said he supported the “Stalwarts,” the Republican faction that defended the spoils system. He lived for almost three more months, while doctors tried to find the bullet inside him with unsterilized instruments, and even an early metal detector, designed by Alexander Graham Bell– before dying from infection and internal bleeding.
Garfield’s death had a huge impact on the American public, who had closely followed his health through newspaper reports. More than 100,000 people traveled to Washington to view his body, many of whom had seen Garfield as a symbol of American promise and potential. His assassination also inspired the passage of a civil service reform law that would end the spoils system.
Seven other lefties have occupied the Oval Office since Garfield, including Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton And Barack Obama. However Reagan wrote with his right handhe is believed to be a natural left-hander who was trained to write with his right hand very early in his life, as was common in schools before the last 60 years.
However, Reagan’s ambidexterity doesn’t quite compare to Garfield’s – does it? According to Garfield biographer Allan Peskin, historical evidence does not support the popular legend that Garfield could write simultaneous sentences in Greek and Latin.
Peskin, who died in 2018, told C-SPAN in 1999 that “Shortly after Garfield’s death, one of his sons attempted to rediscover this legend. Because he had heard it, but he had never seen it happen. He wrote to a very large number of people: parents, friends, family. And none of them supported it. It’s true that Garfield was ambidextrous, but he just wasn’t that ambidextrous.”
