CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Surprise Visit

FOR JULIA SAND, clutching the smooth leather felt like seizing a second chance. She loosened the reins and “Frank” trotted east on Union Avenue, away from Congress Park. The stiff April breeze carried the scent of fir and pine, and the Green Mountains glowed bluish in the sunlight. Julia felt steadier: a few months before, she had suffered through a sleigh ride with a young man, torn between her impulse to cling to his arm and her determination not to. Setting out today, she feared she would clip the wheel of a passing wagon or topple her own, but she had done neither, and she swelled with confidence and pride as she piloted Frank past the resort town’s famous racetrack.

Sand was in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the spring of 1882 to regain her health. There were a hundred mineral springs in the crescent-shaped valley between Ballston Spa and Quaker Springs. Saratoga, nestled in the center of the valley, was a mecca for visitors seeking the therapeutic benefits of drinking or bathing in the waters. It was a place with “greater advantages for the recovery of health than any other place in America, if not in the world,” and Julia was making the most of it.

By 1882, Saratoga’s races and regattas had become summer attractions for the social elite, and the village boasted several first-class hotels. Musicians played every morning in the piazzas of the Grand Union Hotel, supposedly the world’s largest. The Grand Union could accommodate 1,500 guests; 1,200 of them could eat at one time in the hotel dining room, which extended the length of a city block. The Grand Union ballroom featured Frenchman Adolphe Yvon’s allegorical painting, The Genius of America, which measured 2,400 square feet and had a frame that weighed three thousand pounds. The north veranda of the nearby United States Hotel was an attraction in its own right: tourists used opera glasses to observe the railroad barons rocking on what became known as “The Millionaires’ Piazza.” One popular pastime was promenading on elm-shaded Broadway, Saratoga’s main thoroughfare. The famous actress Lillian Russell liked to stroll with her Japanese Spaniel, “Mooksie,” who sported a $2,000 diamond-encrusted collar. Sometimes the buxom actress pedaled down Broadway on her gold-plated bicycle, which had handlebars decorated with her initials in diamonds and emeralds. The collar and the bike were gifts from her boyfriend, the railroad magnate Diamond Jim Brady.

Sand was in high spirits on the day of her wagon ride, and not just because her health was improving. She was encouraged by the performance of her president—especially his courageous veto of a bill she considered “a step back into barbarism.”

A month earlier, Congress had overwhelmingly approved the first significant restriction on free immigration in US history. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from entering the country for 20 years, and denied citizenship to the Chinese already here. Those who wished to leave but planned to return had to register at the US Custom House. And even those Chinese citizens who were allowed to come to the United States could not do so unless they procured a passport, written in English and countersigned by an American consular representative in China, describing the holder and his intentions. Labor unions had objected to the Chinese workers’ willingness to toil for low wages on railroads and in mines. But the measure also was rooted in racism and revulsion at the newcomers’ unfamiliar customs. “A congress of ignorant school boys could not devise more idiotic legislation,” Sand wrote to Arthur shortly after Congress approved the bill. “It is not only behind the age, but behind several ages—not only opposed to the spirit of American institutions but opposed to the spirit of civilization all the world over.” She implored him to “please give it a most emphatic veto.”

Arthur did. On April 4, he sent a long and forceful veto message to Capitol Hill. The president acknowledged that an 1880 treaty with China allowed the United States to “regulate, limit or suspend” the immigration of Chinese laborers if the influx seemed to threaten public order, but he argued that barring immigration for 20 years, “nearly a generation,” went far beyond the treaty and would be “a breach of our national faith.” He described the registration and passport requirements as “undemocratic and hostile to the spirit of our institutions.” He also noted that the Chinese laborers had made significant contributions to the development of the West, and warned that the draconian bill “must have a direct tendency to repel Oriental nations from us and to drive their trade and commerce into more friendly hands.”

The Times hailed Arthur for his “firmness and wisdom,” and Sand was thrilled. “I must tell you that your veto of the Chinese Bill delighted me,” she wrote from Saratoga. “And, what is more to the point, a great many other people also were pleased—pleased and surprised. Don’t you feel flattered how awfully surprised they are, whenever you do anything good? Well, go on surprising them. But I am never surprised, because I expected it of you.”

Arthur had taken a courageous stand—but it was short-lived. After a failed attempt to override the veto, Congress approved a revised version of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It cut the restriction period to 10 years but included all of the other provisions Arthur had denounced so eloquently just a few weeks before. Nevertheless, Arthur signed it. Sand was crestfallen. “What is there to admire in mediocrity?” she chastised him.

Why do you take such comfort in half measures? Does it never strike you that there must be back of them only half a mind—a certain half heartedness—in fact, only half a man? Why do you not do what you do with your whole soul?—or have you only half of one? When you vetoed the Chinese Bill, the better class of people throughout the country were delighted. Now you sign it. And what is the difference, as it now stands? In quantity less, but in quality just as idiotic & unnecessary as the first. Unnecessary legislation is a positive evil, in any case, but this is worse, for it is contrary to the spirit of our institutions & the civilization of the age. The Czar of Russia might well respond to your remonstrance against the persecution of the Jews, with an expostulation against your persecution of the Chinese.

“Are you going to let your Administration be a failure?” she concluded. “What you do now, if you do right, will wash out all the harm you ever did in our life—but nothing you can do after will obliterate your Presidential record.” Sand resolved never to write to Arthur again.

Arthur got another chance to prove his mettle a few months later, when Congress sent him the latest “River and Harbor” bill. In 1822, the first such measure contained federal money for the upkeep and replacement of lighthouses, buoys, and other navigation tools. But over time, this mechanism to repair and replace essential infrastructure became larded with pork-barrel projects. Congressmen used River and Harbor bills to funnel federal money to their districts, boosting their reelection prospects—and often lining their own pockets—in the process. Between 1870 and 1881 the cost of the package grew from under $4 million to $11.5 million.

The version that landed on President Arthur’s desk in July 1882 totaled nearly $19 million, and it sparked public outrage. “This Congress is voting millions into the air and into the pockets of rapscallions, and the President is called upon to sign away the money,” the Sun wrote. “What an opportunity for a shrewd and brave man! What an opportunity for CHESTER A. ARTHUR!” The Times also urged a veto, calling the bill “a monstrous swindle” and “a scandalous misappropriation of public money for the advancement of local jobbery.” The president “has an excellent opportunity to place himself on the side of economy and public decency by vetoing it.”

Sand, who returned to Manhattan at the end of July, closely followed the debate in Washington. Every morning and evening she checked the newspapers for word of Arthur’s decision. She knew the political pressure on him was intense—nearly every member of Congress had a financial stake in the bill. Finally, on August 2, her brother Theodore peered over the top of his newspaper and cheerfully announced the verdict: “It’s vetoed.” Julia turned her head to hide the tears that were welling up in her eyes, fearing her family would laugh at her. As it was, her siblings treated her, the youngest, as if she were a child. “For a woman to weep over the veto of her own little bills is quite rational, I suppose, but to get excited about a bill down in Washington, with which she had nothing to do, is inexcusable,” she wrote to Arthur. “Still I was deeply moved by your action concerning this one, for I realized what a struggle you had passed through—how you had been worried, perplexed, tormented—what an opposition you had to stand up against in coming to your final decision.” Though Congress quickly overrode Arthur’s veto, Sand reassured him that he had “rendered the country a real service & the country will not forget it.”

Sand wrote Arthur twice more in the next two and a half weeks. But with Congress adjourned for the summer, her focus shifted away from politics and policy. She knew the president was coming to New York and she wanted him to visit her. “Well, have you not five minutes to spare for me—when I have spared so many hours for you, in this long, sad, exciting year?” she wrote on August 15. “When I was an invalid & hardly ever went anywhere or saw anyone, it seemed quite natural that I should not see you—you were as far from me in New York as in Washington—but now it is different.… I would not on any account have you run the smallest risk, or subject yourself to the slightest annoyance for my sake, but if it is possible, I do want to see you.”

In her next letter, written less than a week later, Sand wondered whether Arthur was snubbing her because of “the few harsh things” she had written to him.

Are you offended with me—really—seriously? Do the few harsh things that I have said to you outweigh all else—the fact that for a whole year I have thought of & felt with you in your cares & perplexities—that last summer, when you were bowed down in gloom & seemed almost broken in spirit, I did my best to arouse your manhood & your courage—that I had faith in you, when hardly anyone who had the welfare of the country at heart, hoped anything good of you? I did not ask you to answer my letters, for I knew you could not speak to me on the subjects I chose to discuss—but it never crossed my mind, till now, that you distrusted me.

At 8 p.m. on August 20, 1882, two men in claret livery drove a short rig down East 74th Street. The carriage halted outside no. 46, and a large man wearing a black frock coat, a white waistcoat, and gray trousers stepped out. He put on his silk hat and strode up to the brownstone owned by the banker Theodore Sand.

Inside the house, Julia was sprawled on the lounge, sunk in a sour mood. Her family had dined on roast beef and peach pie, but she was too depressed to eat. She had been writing Chester Arthur for a year, holding up a torch to guide him through the gloom, sending a spark to rekindle the idealism of his youth—for his sake, and for the sake of the country. She knew him only through the newspapers, but somehow she sensed he was better than the press portrayed him. She was just a young woman, made doubly powerless by her illness, but was it unreasonable to expect some acknowledgment of her efforts? He hadn’t deigned to scribble a line or two on a card, much less pay her the visit she craved. She swore she would not write again to that horrid man—not a single word.

The sound of the doorbell roused Julia from her musings. She heard an unfamiliar voice in the parlor: a stranger who spoke gently, like an Episcopal minister. She held her breath and strained to listen. The few scraps of conversation that floated in piqued her curiosity. Could it be? She jumped off the lounge and flew through the house to see for herself.

Yes—it was the president of the United States standing in the parlor.

Theodore introduced his sister and Julia, chest heaving, stammered a greeting. Her pen had disgorged a torrent of words in the past year; now she couldn’t seem to utter a single one. Her brother later joked that she was like the man in the Arabian Nights who finally coaxed the genie out of the bottle, then became so frightened he immediately wanted to stuff him back into it. Amused by Julia’s reaction, the president said she ought to have known he was coming. It was left to Theodore to invite their guest to sit down on the sofa, and Julia settled into an armchair next to it.

It would have been different without her mother, sisters, brothers, and nephews there. Of all the days Arthur had been in town, of all the hours in the day he could have appeared on her doorstep, there was not another time when the house would have been so full of Sands. Their presence made Julia’s conversation with the president uncomfortably stiff. At first, they avoided talking about politics. She gave him an opening to scold her for her impertinence, but he refused to seize it. She resorted to small talk, inquiring whether he was fond of music. “Reasonably,” Arthur replied. What an unreasonable answer, she thought. If he had been a bit more enthusiastic, perhaps she would have persuaded her sister and brothers to sing a long trio from German or Italian opera. That would have lightened the mood!

As her siblings peppered the president with mundane questions, Julia concentrated on Arthur’s voice, his manner, and his facial expressions. She hardly heard what he said. She was elated when he looked at her, but her excitement was laced with melancholy—he seemed weary and worn out. What a disgrace to the country that the White House should be so unhealthy! Julia wanted to do something for him, to insist that he lie down on the sofa and rest for an hour, to have some dinner. But that natural reaction would be quite unnatural in the case of a president, wouldn’t it? Surely he would think her demented!

After the Sands’ flustered butler served Arthur claret in a sherry glass, Julia gently turned the conversation toward more substantial topics, slowly putting on the persona she had adopted in her letters. Why, she asked, had he recently pardoned a notorious embezzler?

Arthur paused. Well, he replied evenly, the attorney general recommended the pardon.

Julia objected. It might be the attorney general’s place to investigate cases, she said, and to give the president the chief points and to express his opinion. But was it the attorney general’s job to be the keeper of the president’s conscience?

Arthur smiled. She did him an injustice, he said. In this and many other instances, she shouldn’t believe everything she read in the newspapers. If she knew the truth, she would judge him differently.

Somehow an hour had passed, and Arthur rose to leave. Your sister believes I should be an angel, the president joked to his hosts, and she condemns me when I fall short of that high standard. Julia cringed at the accusation. How false! She had never for a moment been under any such hallucination. She believed moral progress was possible, that there was no such thing as standing still and remaining the same. Sometimes men progressed slowly, sometimes rapidly, and much depended on circumstances. But it was possible to become a better person—that much she knew.

As Arthur put on his hat, Julia asked him whether he had forgiven her for some of the harsh things she had written in her letters. “No,” he said with a wry smile. His tone and his stiff handshake made her wonder whether he was kidding.

Sand was still stewing over Arthur’s parting words when she wrote him again a few days after his visit. “The Presidency puts a man terribly to the test,” she wrote. “If he has fine qualities, they will shine with double brilliancy. If he is commonplace, it kills him.”

What has Grant been good for since—except to eat dinners? Will Hayes ever be heard of again—unless at a Sunday School festival? It has not killed you yet—& will not, unless you, at some important turning-point, deliberately choose the wrong path. Setting aside all cant about sudden conversion—I hope you do not understand me as believing in that—& thinking simply of what it is to meet a great emergency, to rise to it, or to fail, are you not wiser & better than you were? Look back on the past year—did you ever in your life work harder?—& has not almost all of that work been for others? Even in your pleasures, have you not considered more what you could give, than receive? Have you had larger thoughts in your mind? When Vice-President, you had no dignity to keep or to lose—forgive me for saying anything so hateful, but it is true. As President—so far as the world knows—you have never lost your dignity once. Opponents have been forced to admire you. You have done better than friend or foe expected. And it is to your honor that it is so. You should not deny it & be ashamed.

Julia thought the president’s visit would begin a new chapter in their relationship. In mid-September, she chastised him for failing to write, and she fully expected him to stop by her house again when he returned to New York. “I have made one little visit out of town, since I saw you, & expect to make two more before going to Saratoga, but will not run away just now, if there is any probability of my seeing you,” she wrote. Sometimes she sat in the same armchair she had occupied during Arthur’s visit and stared sadly at the empty sofa. One day, when she came downstairs to greet a girlfriend, she thought she spied a familiar figure in the parlor. “I ran down stairs, looking like an angel, in dotted white muslin. (I hope you know that the angels always wear that—probably because there are so many of them, that they have to be economical—& it is pretty, considering.) Through the half-open door, I caught a glimpse of some grayish hair & a fine, large figure—not at all like my friend’s—& I thought!—what do you think I thought?” This time, Julia was disappointed. As she was introduced to a “Dr. Van Buren,” her face glowed with a “seraphic look of surprise and delight” meant for somebody else.

In a subsequent letter, Julia tried to entice Arthur by offering to paint his portrait. As the fall dragged on without a presidential visit, she expressed growing concern about what exactly Arthur was doing when he came to Manhattan—especially with critical state elections looming.

Many were paying close attention to the 1882 governor’s race in New York. Republicans and Democrats were evenly divided in the Empire State, and the state GOP remained riven by factional warfare between Stalwarts, Half-Breeds, and reformers. Out of office, Conkling was “just as rampant as he ever was, and you can spend the most disagreeable hour and a half with him if you happen to be his friend that you ever have in your life,” one Stalwart said. The former boss felt betrayed by his former protégé’s refusal to remove Robertson from the Custom House, but he hadn’t given up hope of regaining his machine. “He upbraids everyone, assails the course of events, regards himself as defrauded, duped and sold out.” The battle in the country’s most populous state—between Republicans and Democrats and within the GOP—would be a barometer of the Republicans’ prospects for retaining the White House in 1884.

Half-Breeds and independents backed the incumbent governor, Republican Alonzo Cornell, believing him to be honest and efficient. But Stalwarts bitterly recalled Cornell’s half-hearted support for Conkling’s bid to rejoin the Senate, and felt he had been stingy with state patronage. Conkling referred to Cornell as “that lizard on the hill.”

The Stalwarts supported Treasury Secretary Charles Folger—despite their mixed feelings about him. They thought Folger would be more useful in Albany than in Washington, where he had been less than energetic in handing out federal jobs to Stalwarts. “The old machine that Arthur brought up by hand is determined to have Folger out of the Treasury Department, and there is no way to get him out but to nominate him for Governor,” the Cincinnati Enquirer explained.

President Arthur insisted he did not want to get involved in a factional fight, and swore he was staying out of the New York race. Nobody believed him.

As the September state convention approached, newspapers reported that “Administration men” were plotting against Cornell, and the governor claimed he was a marked man. Arthur left for Washington shortly before New York Republicans convened in Saratoga, eager to show he did not intend to influence events there.

But when Folger won the GOP nomination, many saw Arthur’s fingerprints all over Cornell’s defeat. George William Curtis wrote that Folger’s nomination “was procured by the combined power of fraud and patronage, and to support it at the polls would be to acquiesce in fraud and patronage as legitimate forces in a nominating convention.” Even Sand assumed the worst, speculating that Arthur had not come to see her in September because he was ashamed of what he was up to in New York.

I felt that you were doing things which made you feel that you could not, with comfort, look me in the face. Invalid as I am, for more than a year I have poured out my best strength in one continuous appeal to your finer nature—& what has it availed? The dew might as well fall on polished marble in the hope of producing a flower. You have had an opportunity for good such as does not come to one man in a million. And what have you done with it? Look at your friends. To lie, to cheat, to steal, to forge, to bribe & be bribed—those are what they consider the avenues to your favor. Do you realize what the reflection is upon yourself?

“You know I do not wish to do you injustice—that it pains me beyond measure to think ill of you,” she concluded. “But I love my country too much to call myself your friend, while I believe you are doing it an injury. Am I wrong in believing that? If I am, come & tell me so yourself.”

Democrats were well positioned to take advantage of the perceived crookedness of the GOP, having nominated Grover Cleveland, the 45-year-old reform mayor of Buffalo, as their gubernatorial candidate. President Arthur fulfilled his pledge to stay out of the race. He might have raised money, sent speakers and strategists, or made a personal appeal for Republican unity. He did none of those things, in marked contrast to his use of the vice presidency to aid Conkling’s reelection bid just a year before. Nevertheless, Cleveland made “presidential interference” a major theme of his campaign, and the charge stuck: the Democrat crushed Folger by more than 190,000 votes—the largest margin of victory in any state election up to that point. To make matters worse, the Democrats claimed a large majority in the US House of Representatives and scored state victories in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The shattering defeat prompted many Republicans to call for new leadership. “The Republican Party’s message to President Arthur reads something like this: ‘Mind your own business, which is not that of interfering in the local politics of your own or any other state. Cease trying to be a ward politician and the Executive of the Nation at the same time,’” the Times editorialized.

Sand shared the prevailing view. “Had you remained at your post of duty in Washington, or at least kept out of the state of New-York, for the last six weeks, you would not be in the deplorable position you are now,” she wrote on the same day the Times pointed its finger at the president. “If there was anything deeply humiliating in your defeat, it consisted in not what your opponents prepared for you, but in what you prepared for yourself. You have been your own worst enemy.”

Politicians in both parties believed that voters had trumpeted their support for civil service reform. The consensus was that Cleveland’s enthusiastic endorsement of reform had helped propel him to victory, and that the issue tipped the scales toward the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, too. Many Republican voters supposedly stayed home to protest GOP infighting and corruption, and there was widespread outrage at reports that the Republican Congressional Committee had leaned hard on government employees to contribute to the party’s coffers. “Never has the popular feeling against the demoralizing abuses of the spoils system been as definite, sincere and strong as it is now,” E. L. Godkin wrote in the Nation. “Never has the demand for the abolition of that system, and for a thorough reform of the civil service, been as loud and as general as it is to-day.”

In Arthur’s second Annual Message, delivered to the lame-duck Congress in December 1882, he capitalized on the public mood. “The people of the country, apparently without distinction of party, have in various ways and upon frequent occasions given expression to their earnest wish for prompt and definite action,” Arthur declared. For the first time, he acknowledged that party leaders often coerced public employees into making political contributions—the “assessments” he had enthusiastically collected at the Custom House. He called on Congress to ban assessments, and urged passage of the Pendleton bill, even though it required the competitive examinations he had long opposed. “It may safely be said that the Message has taken many persons by surprise,” the Times observed. “One hears it said on the streets and in the hotels that the President has heard the verdict of the people and been guided by it.”

Congressmen heard “the verdict of the people” loud and clear. Less than a month after Arthur’s endorsement, the Pendleton bill sailed through the Senate, 38–5. The House debated for only half an hour before approving the measure, 155–47. Chester Arthur, who had mastered machine politics in the service of Roscoe Conkling and the Stalwarts, signed the nation’s first civil service reform into law on January 16, 1883.

The law Arthur signed was limited: it applied only to federal departments in Washington and to custom houses and post offices with more than 50 employees, about 10 percent of all federal jobs. The law did not apply to the nation’s 47,000 postmasters, veterans, “mere workmen,” or presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate. Most important, its success or failure depended heavily on the goodwill of the president. He might or might not appoint a three-man bipartisan commission to craft the required regulations, and he could stall, or decline to extend, the rules it produced. Members of Congress were unlikely to object to such tactics, since for most of them support for civil service reform was purely politics. “We are not legislating on this subject in response to our own judgment… but in response to some sort of judgment which has been expressed outside,” one senator had groused during the debate.

Julia Sand wanted to believe that Arthur was dedicated to civil service reform, but she feared there was “something tricky in [his] nature,” something that made it difficult for him to “put all double-dealing out of [his] life.”

“Do you know how the people regard your Message? They don’t regard it at all. You gave a splendid one last year—but you did not live up to it,” Sand wrote. “People have a great aversion to being made fools of—especially for the second time. Words will never serve you again—actions only will count.”

Would Chester Arthur faithfully execute the new law? Julia and many other Americans doubted it.