CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“A Splendid Henry V”

DURING THE FALL of 1881, a poster memorializing America’s murdered president hung in every post office in the country. “In memory of James Abram Garfield,” it said, “a martyr to the fierceness of factional politics and the victim of that accursed greed for spoils of office which was the bane of his brief conscious existence as President, and is the gravest peril that threatens the future of his country.”

Guiteau was deranged—few Americans doubted that—but most saw his bloody act as the inevitable consequence of an evil system. Before the assassination, the Times observed, there was a general sense “that patronage had corrupted and perverted politics.” Something had to change—but people had only a vague notion of what that something should be. Garfield’s agonizing death brought the remedy into focus. “It is now very clearly seen that the change must be in the abolition of patronage, and that it can only be accomplished by making appointments depend on merit tested by competition open to all who enter the service,” the Times concluded. In the weeks following Garfield’s death, civil service reform groups sprang up from Massachusetts to California.

Reformers had momentum. What they didn’t have, apparently, was a friend in the White House. Arthur had rejected Conkling’s request to remove Robertson from the Custom House and had pledged to continue Garfield’s policies. But few knew he had rebuffed Conkling, and his promises to follow his predecessor’s path were vague. He had built his political career on patronage. How could he disavow the spoils system now—much less lead the charge for reform? The shuffling of cabinet positions during his first months in office didn’t inspire much hope. Arthur asked Garfield’s advisers to stay on, but several who were friendly to reform soon departed or announced their intention to do so. Postmaster General James, who had introduced competitive exams at the postal service; Secretary of the Treasury Windom, who vigorously enforced reform principles at the Custom House; and Attorney General MacVeagh, a longtime reform advocate—all left, replaced by men less dedicated to the cause. When Blaine resigned in mid-December, Arthur refused to give his job to Conkling, as several of his New York cronies urged him to do. He did, however, fill the crucial post with a Stalwart recommended by Grant: Frederick Frelinghuysen, a former senator from New Jersey.

In 1880, the historian and intellectual Henry Adams published, anonymously, a best-selling book about Washington. In Democracy: An American Novel, Adams portrayed a corrupt capital where everybody was for sale, and politicians sacrificed their principles on the altar of ambition. “Where did the public good enter into all this maze of personal intrigue, this wilderness of stunted natures where no straight road is to be found, but only the tortuous and aimless travels of beasts and things that crawl?” the heroine of the novel muses.

Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, observed the beginning of the Arthur administration from his home in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. What he saw depressed him. “Our friend MacVeagh, after an heroic and desperate as well as prolonged struggle to drag President Arthur into the assertion of reform principles, has utterly and hopelessly failed,” he wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge in mid-November 1881. “The new administration will be the centre for every element of corruption, south and north. The outlook is very discouraging.” A week later, Adams invited Lodge to “come and see how things are. You certainly will not find many reformers; all that swarm have vanished like smoke, and even I have ceased to lisp the word.… My mouth is shut on reform politics for at least two years to come; I have not the physical strength to cry like St. John in the wilderness.”

The widespread skepticism did not infect Julia Sand, who reaffirmed her faith in Arthur in three more letters she sent to him in the fall of 1881. “What a splendid Henry V you are making!” she wrote on October 27, while admitting that “as yet I have not met anybody who believes in you as I do.” She complimented him on his recent speech marking the hundredth anniversary of the British surrender at Yorktown.

Persons not inclined to admire you are ready to admit that you have excellent taste and tact. Just what that means cannot be easily measured. Taste and tact may be merely the polish of which any hard surface is capable. But I do not like to think of men as blocks of marble, things that may be cut down in the finishing, but cannot be made to expand. I prefer to think of them as things with infinite powers of growth. And to me tact and taste are the sweet-scented flowers which spring from the root of true sentiment and deep feeling.

In the same letter, Sand designated herself as Arthur’s “little dwarf”—the one person in a royal court allowed to speak the truth to the king. In that role, she reserved the right to “say all the unpleasant things I choose.” She started by urging Arthur to be wary of former president Grant. “Do not let the people believe that he is to influence your administration. He will never give you an idea that is new, or deep, or even bright,” she advised. “To him, politics means, which man is to get a place—& very little else. As to real statesmanship, he has no more conception of it than has a wild elephant.”

By the fall of 1881, Sand had been an invalid for five years. Sometimes she languished on the parlor sofa, eyes shut tight, for a week or more, and she couldn’t muster the strength to leave the house to visit anybody. And yet, when she read in the newspapers that Arthur might be attending a ball in New York, she burned with the idea of meeting him there. She said it was because she “had an idea, if I could see your face & hear the sound of your voice, I should know whether I were right or wrong in believing what I believe of you.” But beneath her banter there was a gnawing loneliness—and perhaps a deeper desire.

I thought of the pleasure of my mother at seeing her little girl in a ball dress again, of the approbation of my saucy nephews, who frequently say to me, “Aunt Julia, if you only would put on a little more style!”—of my own delight at catching such a concentrated glimpse of the world, after having lived in the moon so long—& I did want to go to that ball with an earnestness unknown to my early days. Then I thought of the trouble it would be to my brother—that is, if he would take it—to find tickets, for the regular sale had closed—of the flurry of procuring a dress—my last ball was at Annapolis in ’74, & though a costume from Queen Anne’s time might be fashionable, one of King Grant’s reign would be obsolete—& I thought of five years of unbroken suffering, of the desperate efforts to build up the little health I have, of the absolute necessity of adding to my strength and not wasting it—& then I shut the ball out of my thoughts altogether.

Having given up on the idea of attending the ball, Sand made an even bolder suggestion: that the president of the United States should come to 46 East 74th Street to visit her. She noted, coquettishly, that if Arthur came between 11 in the morning and noon he almost certainly would find her alone. At any time, she assured him, it was unlikely that he’d run into anybody he knew. Then, having dipped her toe into deeper waters, she quickly pulled it out. “I am quite aware that I have not the shadow of a claim upon you. I merely feel that, if you should want to know who it is that has written to you, you have a perfect right to that knowledge. If not, it is of no consequence.”

In early December, President Arthur submitted his first “Annual Message” (now known as the State of the Union address) to Congress. The president began with a detailed review of the country’s foreign relations, and proposed to repeal all internal revenue taxes, save those on tobacco and distilled and fermented liquors. He called for an army of 30,000 men, largely to protect settlers and their property against Indians, while at the same time asking for legislation to prevent settlers from encroaching on land that had been set aside for the Indians. He also suggested that Congress use money from the sale of public lands to help pay for the education of freed slaves.

Then, to everybody’s surprise, the erstwhile party hack proclaimed his support for civil service reform.

Arthur, quoting from the statement he issued upon his nomination as Garfield’s running mate, asserted that “no man should be the incumbent of an office the duties of which he is for any cause unfit to perform; who is lacking in the ability, fidelity, or integrity which a proper administration of such office demands.” These basic principles, he wrote, “are doubtless shared by all intelligent and patriotic citizens, however divergent in their opinions as to the best methods of putting them into practical operation.”

This broad endorsement didn’t mean much without specifics, but Arthur went further. He admitted he was wary of relying too heavily on tests, lest college graduates monopolize appointments at the expense of applicants with less book learning but difficult-to-measure attributes such as “probity, industry, good sense, good habits, good temper, patience, order, courtesy, tact, self-reliance, manly deference to superior officers, and manly consideration for inferiors.” Instead, he proposed the creation of a central examining board that would review the candidates for certain offices, “without the resort to a competitive test.”

However, noting the “grave importance” of the issue, Arthur assured lawmakers and the public that he wasn’t making these observations in a “spirit of opposition.” He promised that “if Congress should deem it advisable at the present session to establish competitive tests for admission to the service, no doubts such as have been suggested shall deter me from giving the measure my earnest support.” If Congress did not pass a bill, Arthur said, he hoped it would at least spend $25,000 to reactivate the moribund Civil Service Commission.

Reformers were shocked—and thrilled—by Arthur’s pronouncement. E. L. Godkin of the Nation latched on to Arthur’s favorable reference to the British civil service system. “Hitherto the Stalwarts have never been able to refer to it with straight faces, and the fact that their spokesman has stopped laughing at it, and made an explicit announcement that it must be treated as a serious political question, is an encouraging sign of the times.”

On the day Arthur delivered his Annual Message to Congress, Senator George Hunt Pendleton, an Ohio Democrat known as “Gentleman George,” reintroduced a civil service reform bill he had put forward a year earlier. Pendleton was an unlikely champion: in 1864, he had been General George B. McClellan’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, when virtually all reformers supported Lincoln and the war. As president of the Kentucky Central Railroad during the Grant administration, Pendleton capitalized on his friendship with the wife of the corrupt secretary of war to collect a $148,000 claim against the government, personally pocketing half of it.

But Pendleton’s desire for reform was sincere. In 1880, he asked Arthur’s old college friend and Custom House adversary Silas Burt—whose reform credentials were unsurpassed—to review his bill. Pendleton assured Burt it was “framed after much consideration, and a thorough examination of the civil service in Great Britain and the methods already tried in our own country, and whilst I am not wedded to it, as it stands, I desire extremely to see the ideas embodied in it carried out.”

Pendleton’s idea was to require applicants for certain positions to take competitive examinations, and to give jobs only to those with the highest scores. He wanted to base promotions on merit and competition. And he would ban the “voluntary” assessments that Arthur had used to such great effect in New York: party operatives could not force employees to contribute either time or money to political campaigns. “The fact is patent that [Guiteau] wanted an office and did not get it, and he believed the president was responsible for his failure,” Pendleton said on the Senate floor. “We must supplant this system; we must chase it out with hue and cry. In its place we must put the other and better system founded on the idea that public offices are public trusts to be administered solely for the public good.”

Civil service reform groups from around the country rallied behind Pendleton’s proposal, bombarding Congress with more than 50 petitions in favor of it. Ten thousand Bostonians signed one petition, and reformers from New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cincinnati submitted their own. Supportive congressmen pointed to the distinguished Americans backing the effort: one petition included the signatures of Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and philosopher William James.

Sand believed that Arthur’s actions—or failure to act—on civil service reform would define his presidency. “The vital question before the country today is Civil Service Reform,” Sand wrote to Arthur in January. “The vital question before you is how you will meet it.”

Evasion in any form will be a proof of weakness. Yet if you fight the rampant evil—though more than half the country will back you—you will do it at your own risk. Are you a coward? Do you fear to face the same danger that Garfield faced? It is for you to choose. Are you content to sit, like a snake charmer, & let loathsome serpents coil about you, priding yourself on it that not one of them dares sting you? I would rather think of you, like St. George, in shining armor, striking death to the heart of the dragon.

Sand began that January letter by extending holiday greetings to the president. Her own Christmas, she told him, had been gloomy. Confined to her room by her illness, her celebration had been limited to listening to her nieces and nephews cavorting in the parlor downstairs. Finally, somebody closed the parlor door and the sounds of laughter and music grew fainter. Then the front door bell rang sharply, and she heard somebody climbing the stairs. It was her sister, carrying a horseshoe of flowers: pink rosebuds and carnations and velvety pansies, surrounded by sweet-smelling mignonette. “This is for you,” her sister said, placing the flowers beside Julia, “but we can not make out who sent it.” She held out a card with a monogram printed in purple ink. Julia could not believe her eyes: the flowers were from President Arthur! She lingered over the gift “with the rapt devotion of a child of nature—the serene vanity of a society woman—the morbid tenderness of an invalid.” Then something startled her out of her reverie. She looked up and her sister, the flowers, and the card were gone—only a glass of water and a bottle of camphor remained.

She had been dreaming.

“How could I help what I saw—far less what other people chose to do—when my eyes were shut?” she wrote. “Still, for a mid winter day dream, don’t you think it was rather poetic?”

At the beginning of 1882 Roscoe Conkling was in a desperate state, still reeling from Arthur’s refusal to fire Robertson from the Custom House. “Perhaps only you and I know how ill-judged and unfortunate Mr. C’s last visit to Washington was,” Kate Chase Sprague wrote to Arthur. She admitted it was on her advice that Conkling had gone to the president and “laid bare his heart.” Now she was filled with regret. “When I saw him afterwards, & saw how he was suffering, I urged his quitting Washington without delay. Friends who have seen him within a day or two report him as very ill.” In the same letter, she urged the president to appoint her longtime lover as secretary of the treasury—a request Arthur ignored. Instead, he chose his—and Conkling’s—longtime friend Charles J. Folger, who was chief justice of the New York Supreme Court.

In late January, a New York newspaper editor gave Arthur a similar assessment of Conkling’s condition: the once omnipotent boss had lost his Senate seat, his machine, and his friends, and he was deeply depressed. Even as Arthur tried to transcend his past, he felt honor-bound to help his old patron. He had passed over Conkling for the major cabinet posts, but he did have one plum to offer: a place on the US Supreme Court. Conkling had rejected President Grant’s offer of a court seat, and it was unclear whether he wanted one now. Arthur nominated Conkling anyway, and in early March senators confirmed their former colleague 39–12.

Many reformers criticized Arthur’s choice. Ohio Republicans, still mourning their murdered hero Garfield, were especially appalled. “Better for Conkling, that he pass at least a decent probation in the seclusion of private life, and better for Arthur not to force under the nostrils of the American people an unsavory smelling object,” the Youngstown News Register said. In the end, Conkling rejected Arthur’s gesture, and opted to remain in exile.

As the year wore on, Conkling and other machine politicians could take heart from one development: Pendleton’s civil service reform bill was going nowhere.

Reform activity was strongest in major cities, and urban congressmen were under tremendous pressure to back the Pendleton proposal. But Congress as a whole remained resistant. In the House, Speaker Joseph Warren Keifer of Ohio populated the Select Committee on Civil Service Reform with members who were adamantly opposed to the idea. “If Jonah was one of these modern civil-service reformers my sympathies are all with the whale,” panel member Roswell G. Horr of Michigan proclaimed, sparking laughter and applause on the House floor. After six months of work, the committee produced “a bill to enlarge the powers and duties of the Department of Agriculture.” Congress also rejected Arthur’s call for $25,000 to restart the Civil Service Commission.

Arthur mourned his predecessor for the first six months of his presidency. During that time he dressed in black, used writing paper with a broad black border, and declined all invitations to theatrical performances. As a sign of respect, he delayed holding an official reception until the second day of 1882, about a month after moving into the redecorated White House. It was a stripped down affair: instead of elaborate decorations of flags, plants, and flowers, there were only a few ferns and palms set up in the corridor, along with smilax wrapped around the chandeliers and mirrors of the parlors. The Marine Band played in the vestibule while Arthur, wearing a Prince Albert coat, a dark blue satin necktie, and pearl-tinted gloves, greeted guests for three hours.

Fortunately, the refurbished Executive Mansion no longer needed the dressing up it had required during its shabbier days. As part of the renovation, 24 wagonloads of furniture, carpets, and drapes, some dating back to the John Adams administration, had been hauled away and sold at public auction. Louis C. Tiffany of New York, son of the famous jeweler and one of the nation’s foremost decorators, sent designers to work on the project, and Arthur took a keen interest in it. While living at the Jones house, the president had strolled over to the White House almost every evening to check in and make suggestions.

Many parts of the mansion had been transformed. In the main corridor, the walls were now tinted a pale olive and the large niches covered with squares of gold leaf. The ceiling was decorated in gold and silver, broken by traceries in colors spelling out “U.S.A.” In the Red Room, a cherry mantelpiece, a jeweled glass screen, and panels of Japanese leather surrounded the open fireplace. Tiffany made a 50-foot jeweled glass screen, fitted with imitation marble columns, to replace the old glass doors that formerly separated the main corridor from the north vestibule.

Arthur paid special attention to the redecoration of the president’s private dining room on the first floor. He had the walls covered with heavy gold paper in large designs, and pomegranate plush hangings were draped over the windows and mantelpiece. It was his idea to have an open fireplace with crimson glass sidelights. Even James Blaine’s wife, Harriet, who was quick to criticize Arthur, was impressed by the changes. “I dined at the President’s Wednesday,” she wrote to her daughter on March 13, 1882. “The dinner was extremely elegant, hardly a trace of the old White House taint being perceptible anywhere, the flowers, the damask, the silver, the attendants, all showing the latest style and an abandon in expense and taste.”

As a widower, Arthur had to find somebody to perform the social duties of the First Lady, and he tapped his youngest sister for the role. Forty-year-old Mary Arthur McElroy was petite, with dark hair and eyes. She lived with her husband, insurance man John E. McElroy, and their four children in Albany, but the president convinced her to live in Washington four months a year to serve as “Mistress of the White House.” A graduate of Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, the president’s graceful sister was immediately popular, charming the capital’s socialites by inviting them to receive with her at receptions. During events she usually kept her daughter, May, and her 10-year-old niece, Nell, close at hand, “and the gay girls always soon did away with any stiffness there might have been.”

But it was the president himself who made the biggest splash on the social scene. Arthur was a sophisticated New Yorker, well versed in the pleasures and demands of upper-class society. “He wanted the best of everything, and wanted it served in the best manner,” recalled Colonel William Crook, the White House doorkeeper who served presidents from Lincoln to Wilson. Arthur treated himself and his guests to the best food, liquors, and cigars.

The new president also took great pride in wearing the finest clothes, made by a well-known—and high-priced—New York tailor. One day, it was said, he tried on 20 pairs of trousers made to his measurements before finally choosing the pair he wanted. During business hours he wore the choicest tweeds. In the afternoons, he put on a black frock coat, a white or gray waistcoat, gray trousers, and a silk hat. For dinner, he dressed in a tuxedo. Crook, who had served five presidents by the time Arthur took office, said the New Yorker was the first one to have a personal valet (the Lexington Avenue doorkeeper, Aleck Powell, served in the role) and described Arthur as “always well groomed; almost faultless in his dress.”

Arthur’s social appeal went beyond his appreciation for first-rate food and drink and his fashionable attire. It was how he carried himself, and how he treated others, that earned him acclaim. In an age when manners mattered, his were impeccable. “It is not that he is handsome and agreeable—for he was both long ago,” one admirer wrote, “but it is his ease, polish and perfect manner that makes him the greatest society lion we have had in many years.” Arthur could “open a door, restore a handkerchief, or hand a chair to a lady without exhibiting a colossal amount of clumsy dignity as did the eminent Rutherford B. Hayes; nor, on the other hand, does he effervesce with the effusive gallantry of men of distinction from the South.” But Arthur was no snob: when walking or riding through the streets of Washington, he always raised his hat and bowed to the citizens he met, even the lowest laborers.

Arthur hosted his first formal White House event, a dinner in honor of General and Mrs. Grant, in late March 1882. He had large azalea trees placed along the walls and in the niches of the state dining room, and the table was decorated with branches of wax lights along with crimson and gold roses, red and white azaleas, and pink carnations. Each of the 36 place settings included six wine glasses, a goblet, and a heavy, gilt-edge card embossed with the national coat of arms and the guest’s name. Each lady received a large corsage tied with blue satin ribbon, and each gentleman got a boutonniere. At 8 o’clock, President Arthur escorted Mrs. Grant, who was wearing crimson velvet that set off her diamonds and pearls, to the table and sat her on his right. For two and a half hours, the guests, mostly cabinet members, senators, and representatives, enjoyed 18 courses and six kinds of wine as the Marine Band played, illuminated by calcium lights projected through colored glass.

The president’s son Alan was in college at Princeton, but he visited often and “did much to add to the gayety of the White House,” Crook remembered. Tall and handsome with alabaster skin and piercing black eyes, Alan spent money freely and was an inveterate partygoer and lady-chaser. Whenever he was weary of Princeton, Alan stepped on a train and came to Washington, sometimes arriving late at night. No matter what time it was, the first thing he did was order his team of horses from the White House stable so he could whirl off to visit a young lady or some chums who lived in town. More than once, the president was surprised when Alan appeared at the White House breakfast table when he was supposed to be in New Jersey, immersed in his studies. Sometimes, Alan did his entertaining at the Executive Mansion. After one White House performance by the Princeton Glee Club, Alan and his friends enjoyed two suppers—one served at midnight, and another at 3:30 a.m. The wine and champagne flowed prodigiously, and “at a late hour there was a regular romp including a display of leaping by one of the young men who was quite an athlete in the east room.” On another occasion, Alan and the crown prince of Siam got drunk and were arrested for swimming nude in a White House fountain.

But dark undercurrents flowed beneath the frothy surface of Arthur’s White House. Nell’s death, Garfield’s months of agony, the savage attacks in the press—all had wounded Arthur deeply. He had not sought the presidency, and the burdens of the office weighed heavily on him. “When you go into his office in the morning, there you see a man oppressed with either duties or the inversion of his natural hours, or staggering under a sense of responsibility which he does not like,” one member of the administration said. As collector, Arthur had concentrated on machine politics and left the day-to-day drudgery to his subordinates. “But in the Presidency, he cannot delegate much, and the successive shocks of conflict over every office, and his desire not to offend either public opinion or the large personal influences which make up his party, keep him in a measure stunned, uncertain, and in any event moody, possibly unhappy.” Arthur often felt depressed and exhausted, and suffered bouts of nausea. Dr. Brodie Herndon, invited by Arthur to stay at the White House for several months in 1882, recorded his concerns in his diary, describing the president as “sick in body and soul.”

Unaware of his ailments, hostile newspapers accused Arthur of not working hard enough. He usually rose at about 9:30 a.m. and ate a roll and drank a cup of coffee while getting dressed. He began the workday by reading private letters and dictating replies to official communications. Then he spent an hour or so receiving members of Congress and people seeking federal jobs. Especially aggressive office-seekers sometimes broke past the presidential secretaries in their desperation to reach the president.

At noon Arthur ate a light meal—usually fish, fruit, and oatmeal—before returning to his office until around 4 p.m. In the late afternoon he enjoyed taking a ride around the city, either on horseback or in a carriage, usually joined by his daughter or other guests. At around 6 p.m., he ate dinner with his family. His favorite meal was a mutton chop with a glass of Bass ale, or a slice of rare roast beef with a glass of claret, a baked potato, and fruit. After dinner he returned to his office to read documents and letters submitted to him by heads of departments. On nights when he had no social obligation, Arthur might continue working until the early morning hours.

Arthur dreaded days when he had to receive general callers in the White House library. For three hours or more, he had to shake hands and make small talk with anybody who wanted to meet the president, sometimes as many as three thousand people. Gentlemen deposited their coats in the president’s private dining room, while ladies piled their wraps in the state dining room. To keep the crowd moving along, White House workers had to reconfigure one of the large lower windows as a second exit. With his sister standing gamely by his side, Arthur greeted each person in line, shifting back and forth on his feet when he wanted to cut short an especially unpleasant encounter.

It was dispiriting, Arthur told a reporter, that unlike a New York businessman he could not disconnect from his workday worries and find rest and recreation in a domestic sanctuary; the president had to work and live in the same place. He deeply resented his lack of privacy, and took pains to protect his children—especially young “Miss Nellie”—from the prying eyes of the public. Since Andrew Jackson’s time, presidents’ families had been put on display, their children treated as if they were the nation’s offspring. The Arthurs departed from that tradition. “Madam, I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damned business,” he snapped at one visitor.

As skilled as he was at hosting large events, Arthur much preferred to be in the company of close friends. He was at his best at small dinner parties, chatting over cigars. He especially enjoyed walking the deserted streets of Washington after midnight, accompanied by one or two of his old New York cronies. He was a man who did not like to be alone. “I have sat up with him until midnight, and then, when I excused myself, he would say, ‘Oh, General, don’t go; stay and let us have a good time,” the Civil War hero General William T. Sherman recalled.

Washington wondered whether the widower was seeking female companionship. Henry Adams’s wife Marian described one gathering in early 1882. “Our good king Arthur was there, all the pretty girls taken up to him and presented—it was more like royalty than anything I have ever seen—not being a pretty girl I did not compete in the ceremony.”

Julia Sand teased the president about his frequent visits to New York, suggesting that perhaps he had a secret lover, or even a fiancée, in the city. “Do you remember any other President as restless as yourself—who was rushing home every few weeks? If, as Washington gossip hints, you are engaged—& wish to see the lady without having her name dragged before the public—of course the end justified the means.” Some of the rumors swirled around one of the daughters of Secretary of State Frelinghuysen.

The press pounced when word leaked out of the White House that President Arthur ordered fresh flowers every day and arranged them around the photograph of a woman, which he kept in his bedroom.

But the disclosure of the mystery lady’s identity silenced the wagging tongues: the woman in the photograph was the president’s beloved wife, Nell.