Macfadyen as Charles Guiteau in Death by LightningLARRY HORRICKS/NETFLIX
Other parts of Guiteau’s bizarre and tragic life depicted in Death by Lightning have merit. Throughout the series, his character references a fraught childhood, punctuated by a terrible relationship with his physically abusive father, Luther Wilson Guiteau. Charles J. Guiteau was the fourth of six children, and after his mother died when he was seven, he was primarily raised by his father, and elder sister Franny, played in the series by Paula Malcomson. In the first episode, Franny lovingly recalls an anecdote in which their father would offer them a dime if Guiteau could sit still for five minutes—something the restless boy was unable to do, and, per a journal from the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, actually happened to Guiteau.
That restlessness was to blame for Guiteau trying and failing at many endeavors, including attending the University of Michigan, where he dropped out after one year. At the behest of his father, Guiteau joined the Oneida Community, a utopian religious colony founded by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York. In Death by Lightning, the Oneida Community is portrayed as a Christian religious sex cult, where members lived on a farm, attended bible study, and, most notably, had sex whenever and wherever they want —well, all the members except Guiteau, who was ostracized from the Bible communism community and deemed by the members too strange to fornicate with.
In truth, the Oneida Community, which believed that Jesus had returned to earth in 70 AD, coined the concept of “free love,” encouraging members to have relations with any consenting adult, and proposing the very modern idea of “complex marriages” where possessiveness and monogamy were frowned upon. Despite the polyamory of it all, the erratic Guiteau was apparently unpopular with the members of the commune, earning the nickname “Charlie Gitout” (a.k.a. Get Out). He wound up leaving and returning to the Oneida Community twice in 1865 and 1866, eventually filing a lawsuit against Noyes, whom he had previously worshipped, demanding to be compensated for menial labor he had completed while living there. His need for recognition and retribution for acts of service he purportedly had done would be a recurring theme for the increasingly desperate and out of touch Guiteau.
