CHAPTER TEN

His Fraudulency the President

ROSCOE CONKLING MAY or may not have been too ill to campaign for Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876—years later, Dr. William Watson claimed Conkling “was under my professional care during September, October and November of that year, and was suffering from malaria to such an extent that he was unable actively to engage in the political campaign”—but there is no doubt the New York boss detested the new president. Still smarting from his Cincinnati defeat, Conkling “never spoke of [Hayes] in public or private without a sneer.” He questioned the legitimacy of Hayes’s victory over Tilden, referring to him privately as “Ruther-fraud B. Hayes” or “His Fraudulency the President.” Hayes’s cabinet choices only deepened Conkling’s distaste. In December 1876, Hayes confided to his diary that a Conkling ally had urged him “forcibly and with much feeling” to make the senator the secretary of state, assuring Hayes that Conkling would have participated in the campaign if he had been healthy. But Hayes appointed William Maxwell Evarts, a New York reformer, to that position. He selected the reformer Carl Schurz as secretary of the interior, and as postmaster general he tapped lifelong Democrat and former Confederate officer David Key, ignoring Conkling’s pleas on behalf of his friend Tom Platt. Meanwhile, the president continued to rely on Harper’s editor George William Curtis for advice on what Conkling called “snivel service reform.”

The strutting New Yorker in the English gaiters and the dour Ohioan in the plain frock coat had little in common. Conkling spent his free hours cavorting with his glamorous mistress, Kate Sprague, or gambling at the poker table. Hayes and his teetotaler wife Lucy—reporters dubbed her “Lemonade Lucy”—were strict Methodists who observed the Sabbath. They entertained their Sunday guests by handing them hymnbooks and herding them around the harmonium, which Lucy played. Lucy usually wore black velvet trimmed with white lace, and she brushed her dark hair straight down from a broad part in the middle of her head. Fashionable ladies of the time favored huge bustles, décolleté necks, long trains, and lap dogs, but Lucy disdained all of that. She had a college degree—a first for First Ladies—and a forceful personality that outshone her colorless husband’s, fueling speculation that she was the one running the country. She certainly ran the White House, and upon moving in she decreed there would be no alcohol served there. It was not a popular policy, and the chef in charge of state dinners often took pity on the guests by serving a rum-soaked sherbet concealed in a box made from the frozen skin of an orange. It became known as “the life-saving station.” Somebody who met Secretary of State Evarts after one White House dinner asked him how it had gone. “Excellently,” he replied. “The water flowed like champagne.”

In April 1877, Hayes solidified his status as an enemy of Conkling—and of machine politicians around the country—when he ordered Treasury Secretary John Sherman to investigate charges of political influence and corruption in the nation’s customs houses. Sherman urged Hayes to spare New York in the interest of Republican unity. But Hayes knew any reform effort that didn’t include the nation’s biggest source of patronage would be hollow. What’s more, he was bitter about Conkling’s failure to help his campaign, and had heard of his disparaging remarks about his legitimacy.

The investigation was well under way on May 14 when Hayes attended a Chamber of Commerce dinner at Delmonico’s in Manhattan. When the president entered the restaurant under an arch constructed of Hartford fern and lilies of the valley, the band in the balcony struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the three hundred guests gave him a standing ovation. Conkling was conspicuously absent, but the crowd included other leading characters in the unfolding drama. Arthur and George Sharpe, the surveyor of the port, represented the New York Custom House. From Hayes’s cabinet came Evarts and Schurz. There was William Dodge, the businessman whose complaints had launched the last New York Custom House investigation, and John Jay, who was leading the current probe. The men dined amicably under chandeliers festooned with smilax, amid tall stands of tropical plants and flowers. But after the coffee had been served and the cigars lit, Schurz punctured the blue haze with a searing indictment of Conkling and his henchmen.

“The public service ought not to be a soup-house to feed the indigent, a hospital and asylum for decayed politicians,” Schurz declared, prompting cheers from the prosperous men at the tables—and almost certainly a few furtive glances at Arthur. “It ought not to be a nursery for political mercenaries and a mere machine for carrying out selfish partisan ends. The offices of the Government ought to be regarded as places of duty, trust, and responsibility, and nothing else.

“Officers ought to be selected with consideration of their fitness—their ascertained fitness—for the places they are to fill, and not… their ability to pack a caucus or to run primaries, or to be a good hand at draw-poker, in the political sense,” Schurz continued. The audience laughed, and he waited for the last guffaws to peter out before continuing.

“Now, gentlemen, when such a reform is introduced, you will not only have improved the machinery of the civil service itself, but you will have lifted up the whole tone and character, intellectual as well as moral, of our public life. You will have withdrawn their sustenance from that class of politicians whose power does not rest upon real ability and sound information, but upon a shrewd management and manipulation of the public plunder.”

Ten days later, the Jay Commission issued its first report on the New York Custom House, and it was scathing. Custom House positions were doled out “generally at the request of politicians and political associations in this and other States, with little or no examination into the fitness of the appointees beyond the recommendations of their friends,” it stated. This system was “unsound in principle, dangerous in practice, demoralizing in its influence on all connected with the customs service, and calculated to encourage and perpetuate the official ignorance, inefficiency, and corruption which, perverting the powers of Government to personal and party ends, have burdened the country with debt and taxes.”

The panel called for a 20 percent cut in the Custom House’s 1,038-man workforce, the elimination of certain positions, and longer business hours. (Among the 1,038: novelist Herman Melville, toiling in anonymity on a Hudson River wharf for four dollars a day.) But these were only first steps. It emphasized that stamping out “the evils wrought by mismanagement and corruption, can be accomplished only by the emancipation of the service from partisan control.” In other words, Arthur and the rest of Conkling’s gang had to go.

This was the result that Hayes had hoped for. “Party leaders should have no more influence in appointments than other equally respectable citizens,” he wrote to Sherman. “No assessments for political purposes on officers should be allowed.”

Conkling quietly watched the Jay Commission do its work, hopeful that Arthur—a far less divisive figure than he was—could weather the storm. Arthur knew how to charm people, and he had managed to perform his political dirty work while doing a serviceable job for the city’s mercantile and commercial interests. So on June 16, 1877, Conkling boarded the German Lloyd line steamer Mosel for a long-planned trip to Europe, while his wife remained behind in Utica. He was making the journey, he said, to recover his health, though gossips noted that he and Kate Sprague would have overlapping stays in Paris.

Less than a week after Conkling’s departure, Hayes issued an executive order. No federal employee “should be required or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns,” it stated, and “no assessment for political purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed.” Rumors that Hayes was ready to fire Arthur wheeled between Washington and New York.

The pressure intensified when the Jay Commission issued follow-up reports on July 4 and July 21. The July 4 report found “ignorance and incapacity on the part of the employees in all the branches of the service, creating delays and mistakes, imperiling the safety of the revenue, and the interests of the importers, and bringing the service into reproach.” Department chiefs told investigators that “men were sent to them without brains enough to do the work, and that some of those appointed to perform the delicate duties of the appraiser’s office, requiring the special qualities of an expert, were better fitted to hoe and plow.”

On August 10, 1877, a foggy Friday morning, somebody spotted the German steamer Neckar off Fire Island. A short time later, the Thomas Collyer, “gaily decked with bunting and well-loaded with enthusiastic Republicans,” set out from Hoboken to meet her. As the Collyer rounded Sandy Hook, a southwest wind routed the fog, revealing numerous yachts and pleasure boats also decorated with bright bunting. Steamboats and tugs whistled, and schooners, riding idly at anchor, raised flags and streamers in tribute.

As the Collyer drew near to the Neckar, the cannon it had borrowed for the occasion belched forth a welcome and the Republicans crowded on the upper deck rent the air with cheers. On the bridge of the Neckar, a regal figure waved his hat in greeting. Roscoe Conkling was coming home.

When the Neckar reached the wharf at Hoboken, the senator glided down a gangplank draped with red, white, and blue bunting as the band played “Hail to the Chief” and passengers waved white handkerchiefs and small American flags. “Mr. Conkling seems the picture of health,” the anti-Conkling Tribune reported. “His appearance is in marked contrast with his haggard look when he departed for Europe.” The Sun ran the story of Conkling’s return on its front page, proclaiming that “no statesman returning to his native land after a brief sojourn abroad was ever gratified with a warmer and more enthusiastic reception.”

After the mayor of Jersey City delivered brief welcoming remarks, Conkling marched behind a line of musicians to the Collyer, which was docked nearby, for the short trip to Manhattan. When he arrived he climbed into a waiting carriage and was whisked across town to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

That evening, a crowd of nearly 1,500 gathered outside the hotel, eager to hear Conkling rail against Hayes and his “snivel service reform.” But the senator kept them waiting for hours while he socialized with friends and associates inside (Arthur was absent). Meanwhile, “a number of fashionably attired ladies” sent bouquets of flowers to Conkling’s rooms. When one of the senator’s visitors asked him about Hayes’s executive order, he “listened rather impatiently,” then tore up a note he held in his hand, tossed the fragments into the fireplace, and withdrew to a distant corner of the room.

Conkling finally emerged at 11 p.m., squinting in the glare of two calcium lights secured to streetlamps on either side of the hotel’s front portico. A 60-piece band played “Swanee River” as the crowd pushed forward to hear a rousing defense of the machine. Instead, the senator spooned out commentary on the “rapid and cheap transit” in London, and—in a sop to the many New Yorkers of German extraction—the “magnanimity of Germany” in sparing the parks and palaces of Versailles during the Franco-Prussian War. “What about Hayes?” one man called out. “Give us your views on civil service reform!” cried another. Conkling either didn’t hear their pleas or he ignored them.

Four days later, Conkling quietly boarded the 10:30 a.m. train to Utica. He spoke briefly from his car to crowds that met him at stations along the way, but he didn’t discuss politics. In his hometown he received a royal welcome and made his longest speech yet, but still he refused to mention Hayes or the Custom House.

Meanwhile, Hayes turned the screws tighter. On September 6, Sherman wrote in a confidential letter to Arthur that the president wanted him, along with the Custom House surveyor and naval officer, to resign. He invited the collector to Washington to discuss the matter. But before the letter reached Arthur, Sherman inexplicably leaked the news to the press. Arthur’s pique was evident in his written reply, which confirmed receipt of Sherman’s letter “informing me officially of facts which had already come to my knowledge through newspapers of this morning.” Arthur agreed to come to Washington, but claimed that pressing business in New York would detain him for another week. When Sherman and Arthur finally met on September 17, the secretary offered the collector the consulship to Paris in exchange for his resignation. Arthur said he would consider it. Sherman was relieved; perhaps a bloody intraparty battle could be averted.

A week later the New York Republicans gathered for their annual convention in Rochester. Arthur, obeying Hayes’s June 22 executive order, stayed home. But Conkling, who rarely attended state conventions, came with a large group of machine delegates. He had remained silent on the Custom House controversy for more than a month. That was about to change.

George William Curtis fired the first salvo by offering a resolution that “the lawful title of Rutherford B. Hayes to the Presidency is as clear and perfect as that of George Washington.” The Harper’s editor delicately criticized Conkling and other New York Republicans who were defying the president, then tweaked the senator personally by suggesting he won so many federal court cases because the judges and opposing attorneys owed their appointments to him.

The Conkling delegates buzzed as their champion, nostrils wide, eyes blazing, mounted the rostrum like a man about to run a race. Conkling began by questioning whether it was appropriate for a state political convention to tackle national issues. Then he wheeled his cannon toward Curtis and the other reformers.

“Who are these men who, in newspapers or elsewhere, are cracking their whips over me and playing schoolmaster to the party?” Conkling roared. “They are of various sorts and conditions. Some of them are man-milliners, the dilettanti and carpet knights of politics, whose efforts have been expended in denouncing and ridiculing and accusing honest men.” The Conkling delegates exploded with laughter at the mention of “man-milliners”—a reference to the fact that Harper’s had recently begun to publish articles about ladies’ fashion.

“Some of them are men who, when they could work themselves into conventions, have attempted to belittle and befoul Republican administrations and to parade their own thin veneering of superior purity.” If it was corrupt for officeholders to participate in politics, Conkling said, then “the Republican Party has been unclean and vicious all its life.” In his seat, Curtis was staggered by Conkling’s vitriol—made harder to endure by the knowledge that under convention rules, he would not have a chance to respond. “Remarkable!” he muttered to those sitting near him. “What an exhibition! Bad temper—very bad temper!”

Conkling pressed on, stalking up and down the aisle between the seated delegates. “Some of these worthies masquerade as reformers,” the senator said, bowing in mock reverence, his face twisted in a sneer. “Their vocation and ministry is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness.” These political amateurs “forget that parties are not built up by deportment, or by ladies’ magazines, or gush,” Conkling growled. He leaned forward and tilted to one side so he could point his index finger at Curtis, and hurled his words at the hapless editor like a boy flinging stones.

For two hours, Conkling poured “every resource of sarcasm” upon his victim. His followers were thrilled, but more neutral observers viewed the speech as a political disaster: the Republican boss in the largest and most important state in the Union had just declared war on the newly elected Republican president.

A Herald reporter acknowledged Conkling’s speech was “bristling with good points,” but added, “there will not be a shadow of a chance to elect a State ticket this fall.” Conkling “has not only drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard; he has dipped his weapon in venom,” the Herald wrote. “He used his personal triumph for flinging a firebrand of discord into the Republican Party.… The Senator has acted the part of a blind and infuriate Samson who crushed himself beneath the edifice against whose pillars he leaned his mighty shoulders.”

Even Greeley’s Tribune had to admit the speech was magnificent. “The Great Senator of New-York, as his friends are fond of calling him, had his innings yesterday and last night,” it reported. “As an exhibition of oratorical power, of brilliant sarcasm, well rounded, graceful periods, eloquent invective, great personal force, and individual momentum, it is conceded to be a masterly effort.” However, it went on, “no one of his most partial friends pretends to-day to deny that the speech was exceedingly injudicious and unwise, and that the effect upon both himself and the party must be damaging.”

Curtis was stunned by the barrage. “It was the saddest sight I ever knew, that man glaring at me in a fury of hate, and storming out his foolish blackguardism,” he wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, a Harvard art professor, author, and social critic. “I was all pity. I had not thought him great, but I had not suspected how small he was.” Curtis said the text of Conkling’s speech, which was published in the newspapers, did not reflect what it was like to sit through it. “You do not get all the venom, and no one can imagine the Mephistophelean leer and spite.”

A few days later, Arthur notified the Hayes administration that he was not interested in going to Paris, and that he would not resign as collector. “The treatment of the whole matter has been so unfortunate that I feel I cannot now resign,” Arthur wrote to Sherman. “Before your letter of September sixth or any suggestion to me of a resignation, official and public announcement was made that I was to be removed. The general understanding that it is a removal cannot now be changed.”

President Hayes didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and didn’t swear. He indulged in one cup of coffee at breakfast and single cup of tea at lunch, and at dinner he drank only water. He walked laps through the halls of the White House after every meal, and never missed his morning exercises or his afternoon nap. But those who dismissed the president as a milquetoast underestimated the steel in his spine. Hayes knew members of his own party objected to some of his policies, including civil service reform. But he did not consider backing down. “How to meet and overcome this opposition is the question,” he wrote in his diary. “I am clear that I am right. I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me. Now, my purpose is to keep cool; to treat all adversaries considerately, respectfully, and kindly, but at the same time in a way to satisfy them of my sincerity and firmness.”

Hayes had offered Arthur and the other Conkling cronies the opportunity to step aside gracefully, and they had rebuffed him. Now he would mount a frontal assault. With Congress about to reconvene, Hayes decided to nominate new men—better men—to replace the rogues who had defied him.