CHAPTER TWENTY

“Between Two Stools”

A WEEK AFTER ARTHUR returned to Washington, he received another letter from Julia Sand, addressed to “My very bad friend (Who does not deserve that I should care where he goes, or what becomes of him!).” Reeling from her own infirmities, still pining over her magical meeting with the president, she succumbed to self-pity. “It seems a very long time since I saw you last summer. I feel about ten years older—I have had so much care & sorrow,” she wrote. “I thought then that I had suffered all I could suffer—but I was mistaken. Now I believe we do not reach that point until we are dead. I came near reaching it, though—in the spring I was very, very ill. But somehow I pulled through & at present I am stronger than I have been for years. Yet I don’t feel it—because so many sad things happen in my life & wear me out.”

Sand was in Newport, Rhode Island, staying at the Ives Cottage on placid Brinley Street. She told the president she had seen his son at the Newport Casino, a popular entertainment spot where visitors couldn’t gamble but could enjoy concerts, dancing, archery, billiards, bowling, and other diversions. She joked that young Alan “did not seem silly & dudefied at all—in spite of what you & some other men say about him,” though he was “talking to the ladies in front of me for quite a while.” Julia eavesdropped on their conversation, but she didn’t hear Alan mention his father’s travel plans. She couldn’t help wondering: Would the president be coming to Newport?

Sometimes—does this strike you as very comical?—when I feel exceedingly gloomy, I have an idea I would like you to come & talk to me. It is absurd, I know—but I can’t help it. I like the sound of your voice—even if you are such an awful old sinner!—and I would like you to tell me about your trip out West. I enjoy hearing about places I have never visited & interesting things I expect never to see. Will you come? Of course, if you are an old bundle of worldliness & have no heart at all, you needn’t. But you know best whether you are that, or not. If you can remember a time when you were very unhappy, & I tried to say things to comfort you, & you did care for my sympathy, then do come. It is very hard for me to take hold of life again—& I am very grateful to those who help me at all to be cheerful.

It was the 23rd letter Julia Sand wrote to the president—and the last one that scholars would discover in the special envelope Arthur used to preserve them. Either Julia stopped writing to the president or her later letters have been lost to history.

Even if she didn’t put pen to paper, the president’s “little dwarf” likely had strong opinions about Arthur’s response to a monumental US Supreme Court decision in October 1883.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 barred the owners of inns, restaurants, and railroads and other public facilities from discriminating against blacks. But in an 8–1 decision on October 15, 1883, the high court ruled that Congress did not have the power to safeguard black citizens against the actions of private individuals. The decision severely restricted the power of the federal government to guarantee equal status under the law, laying the groundwork for the Jim Crow laws that would oppress blacks for almost a century.

At the time the decision was enormously popular, even among Republicans who favored equal rights for black citizens. Many viewed it as logical and unsurprising; the Times, the Sun, and the Tribune didn’t even run the story on the front page. “In the temper which the people have now reached in dealing with questions that formerly had a sectional significance and that pertain to the relations of the races in this country it seems as though nothing were necessary but a careful reading of the [14th] amendment to show that it did not authorize such legislation as the Civil Rights act,” the Times editorialized. The 14th Amendment, it noted, prohibits “the making and enforcing of laws by the States which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens.” Even if equal accommodations in public transportation and places of entertainment were among the protected privileges, the newspaper argued, Congress could only counteract state laws that violated them; it could not control the actions of private individuals.

Even a progressive bastion like the Nation shrugged. The civil rights law “was really rather an admonition, or statement of moral obligation, than a legal command,” it argued. “Probably nine-tenths of those who voted for it knew very well that whenever it came before the Supreme Court it would be torn to pieces.”

According to the Times, most observers believed that the demise of the law “would not entail any hardship upon the colored people or deprive them of any privileges which they have enjoyed since the war.”

Black leaders knew better. Frederick Douglass peered into the future when he spoke at a gathering of civil rights leaders in Washington’s Lincoln Hall a week after the ruling. “The cause which has brought us here to-night is neither common nor trivial. Few events in our national history have surpassed it in magnitude, importance and significance. It has swept over the land like a moral cyclone, leaving moral desolation in its track,” Douglass declared. The 1875 law “meant to protect the newly enfranchised citizen from injustice and wrong, not merely from a State, but from the individual members of a State. It meant to give him the protection to which his citizenship, his loyalty, his allegiance, and his services entitled him, and this meaning, and this purpose, and this intention, is now declared unconstitutional and void, by the Supreme Court of the United States.”

As a young lawyer, Arthur had defended Elizabeth Jennings’s right to be treated with dignity on a New York streetcar, and his victory in that case helped desegregate public transportation in the city. He knew the bigotry of private citizens could do great harm, whether or not it was state sanctioned. Given the tenor of the times, Arthur held enlightened views on race. The abolitionist’s son pushed for federal money for African American schools, contributed privately to a black church, and personally awarded diplomas to black high school graduates. He invited the choir from historically black Fisk University to sing at the White House—and was moved to tears by its performance. He also appointed African Americans to important government positions, such as surveyor of the port of New Orleans. Aleck Powell, his black valet, was his friend and confidant.

Encouraged by Chandler, Arthur also forged a political alliance with Virginia’s Readjuster Party. The Readjusters demanded relief of Virginia’s Civil War debt, but they also united white and black Virginians with their calls for more school spending, honest elections, and the abolition of the poll tax, dueling, and the whipping post. By the end of 1881, the Readjusters had captured both houses of the Virginia legislature and elected a governor and two US senators. To be sure, Arthur and Chandler were motivated by their desire to break the Democrats’ political stranglehold on the South, but they also believed the alliance with the Readjusters would help curb violence against blacks and advance the causes of “free speech, free education, free suffrage, and an honest counting of ballots,” according to Chandler. The administration tried to forge coalitions between Republicans and independents in other parts of the South, too. Black leaders such as Douglass and leading African American newspapers heartily endorsed Arthur’s Southern strategy.

Less than two months after the Supreme Court ruling, Arthur wove another thread into the pattern. In his third Annual Message, he forcefully called on Congress to approve a new civil rights law that would withstand judicial scrutiny. “Any legislation whereby Congress may lawfully supplement the guaranties which the Constitution affords for the equal enjoyment by all the citizens of the United States by every right, privilege and immunity of citizenship will receive my unhesitating approval,” he proclaimed.

But that was it—the president didn’t send Chandler or anybody else to Capitol Hill to lobby for such a law. Given popular prejudices and his shaky health, Arthur’s chances of success would have been slim. But as Julia Sand might have told him, there would have been honor in trying.

Americans had turned out in droves to cheer Arthur on his way to and from Yellowstone. The public reception he had received in Chicago—the site of the 1884 Republican National Convention—suggested that ordinary people were happy with their president. He had defied the dire predictions: Roscoe Conkling was in political exile, not in the White House. Arthur had not re-created the New York machine on a national scale. By reforming the civil service, he had restored Americans’ trust in their government, laying the groundwork for the progressive presidents to come.

But as the 1884 election drew near, Arthur’s claim on the GOP nomination was tenuous at best. One problem was that he had few allies on Capitol Hill. Many of the leading Republicans in Congress had been fervent supporters of the River and Harbor bill, and they were still seething over Arthur’s veto. The president “knew perfectly well when he took up his pen to write the veto message that he was about to write his own sentence of doom,” according to the Sun. “There is no doubt now that the veto did make personal enemies of men who otherwise would have been friendly to his nomination.” Many GOP lawmakers also feared a repeat of the party’s landslide defeat of 1882, for which they blamed Arthur.

Arthur wasn’t the top choice of any of the party’s rival factions. Stalwarts considered him to be a traitor, a zealous convert to “snivel service reform” who denied them jobs and favors. Former president Grant described the Arthur administration as “ad interim,” and claimed it had “fewer positively hearty friends than any except Hayes possibly.”

At the same time, Arthur’s diligent implementation of civil service reform didn’t convince suspicious reformers, who continued to sniff each presidential appointee for the taint of machine politics. The president “has sought to conciliate the bosses and reformers by turns, and has fallen between two stools,” E. L. Godkin observed in the Nation.

Meanwhile, the Half-Breed faction of the party believed that James Blaine’s turn had finally come. Rather than returning to Maine, the former secretary of state took up residence in a luxurious home in northwest Washington, where he often entertained. Blaine wasn’t shy about telling Congress and the press what he thought of Arthur’s performance—and frequently his reviews were critical. The former senator liked to plant stories in the Tribune denouncing Arthur, who declined to respond.

Publicly, Blaine and Arthur remained cordial, tipping their hats and smiling at each other at parties and receptions. Blaine and his wife Harriet invited the president to their home, and Arthur reciprocated. Privately, however, the couple sneered at the lightweight in the White House. “All his ambition seems to center in the social aspect of the situation,” Harriet wrote to her daughter after she and her husband ran into Arthur on the streets of Washington. “Flowers and wine and food, and slow pacing with a lady on his arm, and a quotation from Thackeray or Dickens, or an old [joke] told with an uninterfered with particularity, for who would interrupt or refuse to laugh at a President’s joke, make up his book of life, whose leaves are certainly not for the healing of the nation.”

Another prominent member of the Garfield cabinet, former attorney general Wayne MacVeagh, didn’t bother to disguise his disdain. Two weeks before the Republican convention, the Times published a scathing letter from MacVeagh on its front page. “Nobody has forgotten the pregnant fact that Guiteau was the original Arthur man; that he killed President Garfield expressly to make Mr. Arthur President, and that he did make him President by the act for nearly four years,” it said.

“Now, in view of this awful tragedy and its results, it has always seemed to a good many people—outside of Wall-street, of course—that a proper sense of decency and of the fitness of things would have led President Arthur and his friends to see that his true course was to be satisfied with the one term thus secured to him, and not to challenge his countrymen to review his political career and to express their opinion of it.”

With biting sarcasm, MacVeagh went through a litany of Arthur’s sins. Among them: building the New York City machine; defying President Hayes by refusing to give up his Custom House job; using dirty tricks in Indiana in 1880 (and then boasting about them at Delmonico’s); supporting Conkling and Platt in their efforts to win back their Senate seats; and inserting himself into the New York gubernatorial race in 1882. Only the last charge was untrue.

As MacVeagh had noted, Arthur did inspire enthusiasm among New York businessmen. On the same day his letter was published, the city’s foremost merchants, bankers, and professional men rallied at the Cooper Union to give a boost to the president. A hundred of them would travel to Chicago to bolster his candidacy. Despite Arthur’s disadvantages, political veterans said it was foolish to underestimate him. Surely, they said, the old machine pol had a few tricks up his sleeve. Former Conkling crony Stephen Dorsey boasted that Arthur would have the New York delegation all sewn up before the balloting began in Chicago. “One thing is certain, that there will be nothing left undone on the part of himself and friends to secure a solid delegation, and those who underrate his power and his active management will be left behind in the race.”

Chandler, who would chair the New Hampshire delegation to the convention and marshal the Arthur forces in Chicago, began preparing a battle plan. He expected his mission to be difficult but not impossible—as long as the president was willing to wield the powers of his office to sway delegates.

Shortly before the convention, Arthur asked Chandler to remain behind after a cabinet meeting in the White House. The men settled into their chairs, and then the president delivered an order so shocking Chandler thought he must have misunderstood it: Arthur did not want the navy secretary to go to Chicago.

Chandler was aghast. “Why, Mr. President,” he protested, “if you don’t let me go as a delegate to the convention you will not have any one there with practical leadership in national politics to direct the delegates who have been elected to support you. You know enough about politics to know what that would mean.” Blaine would have “some very foxy politicians” in his corner, Chandler reminded Arthur, and so would the other leading candidates. Why wasn’t Arthur willing to match them?

“I know,” Arthur replied, “but I do not want to be nominated as the result of any political manipulation. I want a nomination that will reflect the desire of the party, or none at all. I don’t believe it is dignified or proper for a cabinet officer to appear at a national convention and there work for the nomination of his chief.” After an hour-long discussion, Chandler staggered out of the White House feeling “mentally sick.”

Arthur didn’t want to resort to the machine methods that had convinced so many of his countrymen that he was unfit for the presidency—that much was true. But he withheld from Chandler the main reason he was forfeiting his office: he was dying.

Nearly two years before, Arthur had been diagnosed with what was then known as “Bright’s disease,” a chronic inflammation of the blood vessels in his kidneys. At the time, the disease was almost always fatal. The Associated Press had reported the news, but the White House strongly denied the story, and Americans largely dismissed it as unfounded.

It is likely that Bright’s disease caused the nausea, depression, and lethargy that plagued Arthur throughout his presidency. But he was determined to keep his failing health a secret, and he confided in just a handful of close friends and family members. The president also disclosed his illness to the ship’s surgeon on the Tallapoosa, who blamed the disease for Arthur’s nighttime attack. But at Arthur’s request, the surgeon did not reveal what he knew.

Arthur subscribed to the Victorian belief that it was undignified and unmanly to suffer in public. “He could not bear to have his friends or the public know that the strong man whom they knew in health was slowly fading away, and even after the first reports of his serious illness had been published there were many who failed to realize its solemn import, so difficult was it to get any confirmation of the sad news,” the Times later wrote.

Bowing out of the race would look weak. So Arthur carried on, though he would not take the steps necessary to secure the nomination.

A few days before the convention opened, he refused to trade the postmaster general’s portfolio for 18 delegates. And when Edward Stokes, part owner of the Hoffman House, a popular Manhattan hotel, showed up in Chicago with $100,000 in cash for the Arthur campaign, the president telegraphed an order to reject it. For the duration of the convention, the businessmen backing Arthur scarcely had enough money to pay their hotel bills, even as “the delegates hung around their headquarters like so many cormorants, supposing they had millions of dollars.”

The convention opened on June 3, 1884, in the same Interstate Exposition Building where Garfield and Arthur had been nominated four years before. The cavernous hall was draped in flags and bunting, and a brass band played as the delegates filed in. Swallows swooped in and out of the open windows, adding their chatter to the urgent clicking of the telegraphs.

On that first day, “a slight, almost boyish” New York state assemblyman delivered a memorable speech urging the delegates to choose a black man, John Lynch of Mississippi, as temporary chairman. The light-haired, gray-eyed speaker threw off his straw hat and “scrambled to his perch in the chair with juvenile activity.” With his hand on his hip, 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt Jr. reminded the delegates that nearly 25 years before, the party had nominated Abraham Lincoln, “who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever.” It would be fitting, Roosevelt said, “for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and the treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party.” Roosevelt’s speech hit the mark, and Lynch was elected chairman.

During the next two days, the delegates tussled over rules and procedures on the floor, while the jockeying and coalition building that was the real work of the convention went on behind closed doors. Arthur’s supporters should have had a built-in advantage: many wavering delegates wanted government jobs for themselves or their relatives in exchange for their votes. But the president refused to use his patronage power to win the nomination. “This is no time to discuss such matters,” was his reply to one Pennsylvania delegate who wanted a position for his son.

At 7:35 p.m. on June 5, the delegates reconvened to nominate presidential candidates. Every square foot of the hall was crammed with people. Many ladies with tickets arrived to find no seats and scarce standing room, forcing them to congregate in the side aisles, until a few gallant Pennsylvania delegates relinquished their seats. Thousands of fans flittered in the sultry air.

The secretary began the roll call of the states. Alabama, Arkansas, and California passed. Connecticut’s delegation was the first to speak up, and it nominated Senator Joseph R. Hawley, a newspaper editor and former governor who had been a general during the Civil War. Illinois put forward Senator John Logan. When the roll call reached Maine, Blaine’s home state, the hall erupted. For a full 10 minutes, Blaine’s supporters shook their hats, handkerchiefs, and fans and stamped their feet, creating a roar like distant thunder. The pandemonium continued as Judge William H. West, the famous “Blind Orator” of Ohio, was led to the platform. “Through all the conflicts of its progress, from the baptism of blood on the plains of Kansas to the fall of the immortal Garfield, whenever humanity needed succor, or freedom needed protection, or country a champion, whenever blows fell thickest and fastest, there in the forefront of the battle, was seen to wave the white plume of James G. Blaine, our Henry of Navarre,” West declared. West was alluding to Blaine’s well-known nickname, “The Plumed Knight,” which Civil War veteran Colonel Robert Ingersoll had bestowed upon him during the 1876 convention.

After Blaine’s name was placed in nomination, somebody paid tribute to him by placing a garlanded helmet with a white plume on a flagpole and hoisting it into the air. The frenzied crowd ripped the decorative flags from the galleries and waved them in celebration. One man in the balcony accidentally dropped his flagpole, which tumbled onto the head of a delegate on the floor below. The delegate was knocked unconscious and was carried out of the hall as the cheering continued.

Finally the roll call reached New York. Without Chandler there to supervise, the Arthur camp had failed to designate a principal convention speaker until the proceedings were already under way. An elderly district attorney from Troy, Martin I. Townsend, ended up filling the role. He performed it poorly, and he later admitted that his speech was “extemporaneous from necessity.” Townsend rambled on about the virtues of the Bible and argued that Arthur should not be “struck down and cast into oblivion.” At least twice, people hissed loudly, and at one point conversations in the hall grew so loud the convention chairman had to bang his gavel to restore order.

The balloting began the next day. On the first ballot Arthur got 278 votes, second to Blaine’s 334. When he received the tally by wire, the president frowned; he had expected a higher total. Even as he refused to work for the nomination, he desperately craved the approval of his party. His tally shrunk with each ballot—from 278 to 276, to 274, to 207—but Arthur “preserved an even temper and yielded to the inevitable with better grace than many persons had expected.” Blaine clinched the nomination on the fourth ballot, with 541 votes. Arthur immediately sent a telegram to the nominee expressing his “earnest and cordial support.” Then he ordered his carriage and disappeared into the streets of Washington.

Chandler believed that if Arthur had let him go to Chicago, things might have turned out differently. “I know now many of the inside details of that meeting and I can say to you that there was one moment during the preliminary work of the convention when, had I been there, I am certain I could have brought about an agreement among certain groups of delegates which would have led to the nomination of Arthur instead of Blaine,” he told a reporter. “The golden moment passed with no one to take advantage of it, for, as I feared the day the president forbade my attending the convention, the skilled politicians opposing him were more than a match for the practically leaderless delegates who had been sent to Chicago to support him.”

A month later, the Democrats convened in the Interstate Exposition Building to choose their candidate. They nominated New York governor Grover Cleveland, a symbol of clean government who, they hoped, could win the Empire State and the votes of reform-minded independents. The Democrats, losers of six straight presidential elections, were desperate to regain the White House.

On a beautiful summer afternoon shortly after Cleveland’s nomination, Arthur went for a solitary stroll on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. Congress had adjourned and the president was about to leave the deserted capital for his own summer vacation. He spied a friend who had been at both parties’ Chicago conventions, and invited the man to walk with him. Arthur, always interested in political gossip, was hungry for information about the Democratic nominee.

“Mr. Hewitt, I see, speaks of Mr. Cleveland as the man of destiny, yet I have lived long enough to learn that it is not until a man’s career is ended that it is safe to say much about his destiny. But Governor Cleveland, from the little I know of him, has impressed me favorably,” Arthur remarked.

His companion replied that perhaps the president didn’t realize how many people regretted that it was Blaine, rather than Arthur, who would be taking on Cleveland that fall.

The president was silent for a few moments. “I think I do know of the regret you speak of,” he said slowly. “I have met with it, and it has occurred to me many times lately to think how much truth there is in the saying of someone, that the consolations of failure are sweeter sometimes than the joy of success.” He paused again before continuing. “There was nothing of surprise, nothing of personal disappointment to me in the action of the Republican Convention,” he said. “I long ago determined to do what was at hand as well as I might, and let each day be complete for itself. Then I am prepared for whatever happens. Such a course may not bring many of the joys of anticipation, but it certainly entails none of the sorrows of disappointment.”

Arthur was ready to retire from the arena. Despite his promise to support Blaine, he stayed out of the 1884 campaign.