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A Man of Some Importance

“Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!” It was not exactly what he would have wanted to hear, but then again, it was not exactly the best way to become president. Chester Alan Arthur hadn’t wanted to become the nation’s chief executive. He certainly hadn’t aspired to be vice president—after all, who did? But he had been asked, and he had said yes, never imagining that he would inadvertently set in motion a series of events that would culminate with the assassination of President James A. Garfield and his own elevation to the presidency.

Always an emotional man, Arthur was, by all accounts, devastated by the news that Garfield had been shot on July 2, 1881, by a deranged Charles Guiteau, who has been forever immortalized with the inaccurate moniker of “disgruntled office seeker.” Arthur seemed frequently on the verge of tears in the days following, and he prayed as fervently as anyone that Garfield would survive his wounds. It would be nearly three uncertain months before Garfield expired and Arthur became, much to his own shock and that of the nation, the twenty-first president of the United States.

Arthur is one of the forgotten presidents. Mention him to the proverbial man-on-the-street, and blankness is a likely response. “You’re writing a biography of who?” was the most common refrain when this particular author mentioned that he was writing about this particular president. Even among those who consider themselves well educated, Chester Alan Arthur remains a cipher, one of those late-nineteenth-century inhabitants of the White House whose echo has been muffled by more memorable individuals and whose footprint—and in the case of the rotund gourmand Arthur a rather large footprint—has been trampled on and all but erased.

Arthur belongs to two select, and not altogether proud, clubs: presidents who came to office because of the sudden death of their predecessor, and presidents whose historical reputation is neither great, nor terrible, nor remarkable. The first club has eight members, and its founder was John Tyler, who replaced William Henry Harrison after the latter died a month into his term. Arthur was the fourth to join, after Andrew Johnson and before Theodore Roosevelt. The second club has a more fluid membership, depending on historical fads and whether or not a new biography has been published that reverses decades of opinion one way or the other. It currently includes Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore (who like Arthur also belongs to the first club), Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald R. Ford, the first George Bush, and Chester Alan Arthur. It is impossible to remove Arthur from the first club—membership there is permanent. And as to the second, well, maybe, or maybe not. This isn’t a long book, but there should be some suspense.

There is a nature-nurture question here. Arthur’s time was not conducive to executive action. The White House had shed much of the power it had acquired during the Civil War, and Congress had asserted its traditional preeminence with the impeachment and near conviction of Andrew Johnson for the unpardonable sin of thinking that he could remove members of his own cabinet without the say-so of the Senate. Given the unelevated state of national politics, many otherwise talented individuals pursued more fruitful outlets for their skills. Why get involved with the rough-and-tumble of statehouses and Congress when fortune beckoned in the West or in industry? Just as the young, hungry, and talented tended to eschew Washington in the 1990s for the seemingly more fertile valleys of silicon, many took one brief look at Gilded Age politics and politicians and opted out.

Henry Adams, the disillusioned sage of the era, famously described the political life of the country after the Civil War in less-than-glowing terms: “The government does not govern. Congress is inefficient, and shows itself more and more incompetent to wield the enormous powers that are forced upon it, while the Executive is practically devoid of its necessary strengths by the jealousy of the Legislature.” James Bryce, the English commentator who saw America with at least as much perspicacity as Americans saw themselves, remarked that “an American may through a long life never be reminded of the Federal Government, except when he votes at presidential and congressional elections, lodges a complaint against the post-office, and opens his trunks for a custom-house official on the pier of New York.”

Chester Arthur was not well known to the general public before 1880, but he had been collector of the customhouse of the Port of New York. At the time, that was a position of greater influence than all but a handful of federal appointments. The size of the federal government grew rapidly in the 1870s, but the New York Customhouse remained the pinnacle. It was the largest federal office in the country, and in an era before income tax, it accounted not only for three-quarters of all customs duties but for more than a third of the government’s revenues. That the customhouse comprised such a large portion of federal activity simply reflects how much commerce subsumed politics in the late nineteenth century.

While the captains of industry—Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Gould, Vanderbilt, Villard, Stanford, Carnegie—carved out empires of wealth in the process of industrializing America, the federal government receded from the center of national attention that it had briefly occupied in the 1860s. Later generations exalted and lambasted the “robber barons,” and benignly overlooked the denizens of Washington. As the novelist Thomas Wolfe (the one from Asheville, not Park Avenue) eulogized for the lost generation of American presidents, “Their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea-depth of a past, intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable.… And they were lost. For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life? Who could believe that his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides; which was which?”

And yet these men did live, and breathe, and think. The newspapers and journals of their day took their actions seriously enough to scorn and ridicule, to praise and assess. They often struck their contemporaries as a questionable assemblage, but there they were, on center stage and playing roles that had consequences. More than most, they added their voices to history. Chester Arthur was an accidental president at an inopportune time, but he is part of the tapestry of who we are more than most ever have been or most of us ever will be.

He was president in an unideological era. The Senate would shortly be dubbed the “Millionaires’ Club,” and the House of Representatives was an unruly place of loose coalitions and influence trading. State and local politics were controlled by party machines that prized loyalty. Politicians genuflected to the concept of the public good, and they occasionally spoke of public service. But they didn’t seem to hold either very dear. Their careers did not depend on bold acts of legislation, stunning moments of oratory, or fighting for an ideal. The years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War had been characterized by an excess of ideology. The politicians of the Gilded Age, perhaps mirroring the mood of the public, turned away from troubling intractables like freedom, democracy, equality, and attended instead to order, stability, and prosperity.

America’s cities were growing rapidly. Immigrants flowed into New York and then out into the West, and millions took advantage of the opportunities created by railroads. The dual pressures of burgeoning demographics and industrialization meant chaotic growth. The population of some towns doubled and then doubled again in the span of a decade. In the face of such flux, big ideas took a backseat to daily needs: food, water, shelter, transport, order.

The Civil War resolved the question of slavery that had, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, kept the United States “a house divided,” but by the 1870s the memory of the war had begun to recede. Though the Republican Party continued to “wave the bloody shirt” at each presidential convention, hoping to dredge up Civil War passions and eke out an advantage against the better-organized though less popular Democrats, that yielded diminishing returns. In a Gilded Age version of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, the voting public demanded more than nostalgia for the glorious battles of Gettysburg and Antietam. The Democrats, as one historian noted, stood for “retrenchment and reform.” After the drama of war, of radical Reconstruction, and the scandals of the Grant administration, the idea of retrenchment and reform had mass appeal.

Economic expansion created new industries, new jobs, and new voters. For those so inclined, that meant new opportunities for graft. Cities were kept together by political machines, which were tight-knit organizations that corralled votes, collected a percentage of profits, and kept the peace. The machine was epitomized by Tammany Hall in New York City and its majordomo, William Marcy Tweed, a Democratic boss surrounded by a sea of Republicans. More than any mayor, “Boss” Tweed ran New York. His men greeted immigrants as they stepped ashore in lower Manhattan, offered them money and liquor, found them work, and in return demanded their allegiance and a tithe. Supported by Irish Catholics, who made up nearly a quarter of New York’s population, Tweed held multiple offices, controlled lucrative public works projects (including the early plans for Central Park), chose aldermen, and herded voters to the polls, where they drunkenly anointed the Boss’s candidates. Immortalized even in his own day by the rapier pen of Thomas Nast (has there ever been a political cartoonist who did more to define an era?), Tweed was gone by 1872, forced out and prosecuted, but the system kept going. Every city had its machine, and counties did as well. National politics was simply the apex of the pyramid that rested on local bosses and layers of graft.

It was a system of patronage, first and last. It had been dubbed the spoils system earlier in the nineteenth century, because to the victor of elections went the spoils of patronage—jobs could be doled out to supporters in return for their vote come Election Day. In the years after the Civil War, the number of government jobs grew, and so did the spoils system. Even the powerful members of the U.S. Senate were part of the patronage game, because they were not directly elected but instead chosen by the state legislatures, which were themselves an outgrowth of local machine politics. Elections were hotly contested not over principle but over the power of appointment that winning conferred. Senators could appoint a variety of officials at both the federal and state levels. Tens of thousands of jobs were at stake, and these jobs paid salaries, usually quite handsome salaries by the standards of the day. In return for being appointed, officials were expected to make monetary contributions to the party, and their contributions then funded the next round of campaigning.

The contributions were known as assessments. There was nothing secretive or shadowy about them. The assessments were set by party leaders, and letters were sent each year and during each election cycle to all salaried civil servants specifying the amount they were expected to contribute. It was a self-perpetuating cycle. Win an election, appoint bureaucrats, judges, administrators, and then use them to pay for the next election. That is why party organizations were so powerful, and why the presidency, even with its executive powers curtailed, remained a plum position. As chief executive, the president had the ultimate power of patronage. Senators decided who would occupy most of the appointments for federal offices in their states, and governors did the same for state officials. But the president of the United States appointed the postmaster general. The postal service, with a branch in every city, town, and village, comprised nearly half the federal bureaucracy, or nearly thirty thousand employees by the 1870s, all of whom could be fired or hired after each presidential election. The president also chose the secretary of the Treasury, who headed the second-largest federal agency, and the one responsible for overseeing the customhouses of major ports such as Boston, Baltimore, and New York.

Jockeying for these offices was intense. Party seniority played a part, but major appointments were also used to reward friends and to penalize foes. Then as now, national parties were loose agglomerations of strange bedfellows, many of whom disliked one another as much as or more than they disliked the opposing party. Midwest Republicans competed with eastern Republicans, West Virginia Democrats with Ohio Democrats, and upstate Buffalo Republicans with New York City Republicans. Within the Republican Party in the 1870s, the major split was between those loyal to Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York and those who followed the lead of Senator James G. Blaine of Maine. The Conkling camp and the Blaine group detested each other, and the mutual animosity of the two senators could hardly have been greater.

Each national election was a patronage contest. Leaders who could most effectively mobilize their networks and raise the most money through assessments tended to emerge victorious, which of course allowed them to consolidate their power and become that much more entrenched. But while government was controlled by a limited number of men, no single group or faction was able to consolidate national power or even create a national base of support. Politics were simply too local, and national parties were at best coalitions of the willing. Even the Democrats, who except for Andrew Johnson were out of the White House from 1860 until 1884, managed to remain competitive with the Republicans because of tenacious local organizations.

There were other issues, to be sure. The railroads that were crisscrossing the continent drew on immigrant labor from China, and in the West those immigrants became the target of resentment and competition. Voices were raised calling for a ban on Chinese immigration, and these got louder year by year. Nascent labor unions developed in the 1870s, and though they sought to extend the rights of the working class, they were sometimes hotbeds of racial intolerance. The 1870s also saw the end of radical Reconstruction in the South and the beginning of a system that was not quite slavery and not quite freedom. The period witnessed the collapse of the economy during the Panic of 1873, and the rise of the temperance movement that would eventually spur both women’s suffrage and prohibition. Away from the burgeoning cities of the East, there was an ongoing campaign to pacify the West, as the U.S. Army confronted the Native Americans of the Southwest and those of the vast grasslands of Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, and the Dakotas.

The men in the White House, however, had only tangential influence on these currents. As far as the president was concerned, what mattered most was the steady, stealthy growth of the federal government on the one hand and the quiet evolution of a reform movement against the patronage system on the other. Unexpectedly, the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur was a tipping point. When Arthur entered the White House, he was as closely identified with the political class as any chief executive ever had been. He was what later generations would call the consummate insider, and, as such, he was seen as the least likely reformer of the system that had brought him such rich (in both literal and figurative senses) rewards. Yet, by the time he left office, he had presided over a sea change in the structure of government. Nixon went to China; Arthur reformed the bureaucracy.

Some would say that he was simply the instrument of forces that had been gestating before him and would have done whatever they did without him, that bureaucratic reform made significant progress under his watch but that he had little to do with it. He certainly wasn’t the most active or assertive chief executive, and reform wasn’t his idea. So perhaps he was just a placeholder. Which is it? Did reform simply happen while he was president, or did it happen because he was president?

Whatever the answer (and there will be one), Arthur was the sole occupant of the office of president between late 1881 and early 1885, barely remembered even in the early twentieth century, and almost entirely forgotten since then. Given his temperament, and his childhood ambitions, he may not have greatly minded that history has overlooked him. He neither expected nor desired to be president of the United States, and he was as astonished as anyone that he found himself in that role. Given the rapid deterioration of his health barely a year after he left office, his life may even have been cut short because of his service in the White House. In fact, Chester Alan Arthur may have the distinction of being the president who derived the least amount of pleasure from being president. And that is saying a lot, because in his five decades of life before that happened, he took about as much pleasure from life as any of us ever do.