3

Onto the National Stage

There was no shortage of allegations: illegal kickbacks, overstaffing, insidious accounting, and lax administration were only a few of them. But Chester Arthur had never before been the target of an investigation and had maintained a benign reputation. At worst, he was seen as a party hack, but no one had seriously challenged his probity, until now.

Much like Conkling, Arthur was seen as part of a corrupt system rather than corrupt himself. He had taken advantage of moiety kickbacks, true, but he had stayed within the system. Oddly enough, that had made him acceptable to the reformers, and it was one reason why he had been reappointed to an unprecedented second term as collector in 1875. Because he was marked, and rightly so, as a man who would bend with the prevailing winds, he was not a primary target of reformist zeal. In fact, he was often lauded by the New York press as a likable individual who did his best to remain honorable in a dishonorable profession. The New York Times, admittedly partisan to the Stalwarts, complimented Arthur as a model of efficiency who had the added advantage of being kind and respectful to his subordinates.

His good reputation notwithstanding, the charges raised by the Jay Commission were severe. As one advocate of reform in 1877 commented: “If we turn to Collector Arthur, we find some improvement on the old order of things, but much which is a continuation of it.… We read the old story of political assessments: that one man last year paid sums amounting to $100, $200, and $300;… that under the present system, the officers who are appointed through political influence are expected to make their offices contribute to the support of the party.… We read of clerks receiving three or four hundred dollars beside their salaries; of weighers who are never seen on the docks, while their assistants come late, leave early, and read the papers; of men who are deficient in a proper attention to business as well in business qualifications and character.” Yet Arthur himself was not directly implicated; instead he was charged with looking the other way. He was also criticized for tardiness, on the grounds that he often didn’t arrive at work until noon. On that score, he was guilty.

The Jay Commission submitted a fairly damning report, and Secretary Sherman instructed Arthur to reduce the number of employees and to institute more rigorous hiring qualifications and administrative practices. Too many people, the Jay Commission reported, were hired solely on “the recommendations of their friends.” The defenders of the spoils system found that charge absurd, not because it was false but because that was the whole point. Appointees were supposed to be friends of the faction in power. That was what made them appointable and what guaranteed that they would contribute to the party’s coffers. Granted, assessments were supposed to be paid out of salaries, yet the Jay Commission found that they were instead being charged against the operating budget of the government. That wasn’t right, but in the eyes of the Stalwarts, neither was the president’s reaction. Hayes issued an order forbidding federal employees from providing assessments in subsequent elections. The Stalwarts denounced the move, but the reformers still weren’t satisfied and pressured Hayes to do more. In September, the president made the decision to break with Conkling and the Stalwarts and ordered Sherman to remove Arthur as collector. Conkling, who hadn’t minded some nods in the direction of reform, was now enraged.

The senior senator from New York was not Arthur’s sole defender. Edwin Morgan, Arthur’s first patron, wrote to Hayes protesting the decision. “Gen’l Arthur is entitled, on his merits, to remain til the expiration of his term.… He is strong and popular with the merchants and business men of both parties. He is an able lawyer, an excellent man of business, kind and generous to all, and liberal in furnishing the sinews of war.” Hayes replied that he wanted a new collector to “implement the recommendations and reforms of the Jay Commission,” and he did not believe Arthur was capable of doing so. Hayes may have been genuine about the need for reform, but he also wanted to break the hold of the Stalwarts over the national Republican Party. In response, Conkling declared war.

Lord Roscoe drew on a smorgasbord of tactics. He challenged the president’s right to remove Arthur on the same grounds that had been used to impeach President Johnson ten years before, the Tenure of Office Act. Conkling claimed that Hayes had violated the cherished tradition of senatorial courtesy that demanded a president not take action against a political appointee unless the senators from that person’s state concurred, and he marshaled the Senate to oppose Hayes. Almost as an afterthought, he also defended Chester Arthur as a man above rebuke.

Arthur wisely let others fight for him. Even so, he was not silent and occasionally fired off angry, righteous letters reminding both friend and foe that no charges had been levied against him specifically. In December 1877, the Senate voted to reject several of Hayes’s nominees, including the man nominated to replace Arthur: Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a wealthy, liberal Republican remembered for his even more successful son. Arthur was relieved and triumphant. He wrote to Conkling expressing his thanks. “I cannot tell you how gratified I am at the splendid victory you have won—apart from & way beyond any personal considerations of my own. The whole town is excited by the event & the current of popular feeling is all with you.”

Hayes had been humiliated. The reformers were disgusted with him and whispered that he was weak. Conkling and the Stalwarts strutted through the Christmas season. Hayes had two options: he could suffer the defeat and all but concede that power had passed out of the White House and into the hands of the Senate, or he could fight. He chose the latter, and he wisely bided his time. After several months, he again turned on Arthur, and this time he outmaneuvered the Stalwarts.

Throughout the spring, Washington and New York buzzed with rumor and innuendo that Arthur had flouted the administration and refused to implement the recommendations of the Jay Commission. The correspondence between Arthur and Sherman was leaked to the press, and Hayes’s allies took every opportunity to contrast Arthur’s actions with the steps outlined in the late fall of 1877. Arthur rebuked his critics and defended his record, announcing that he was gradually reducing staff and punishing misconduct but that such matters had to be done carefully and diligently lest innocent, honorable civil servants get caught in the dragnet. Hayes, however, was not listening. It was no longer a matter of what Arthur did. His very presence was an affront, and when Congress went into summer recess in 1878, Hayes again instructed Sherman to suspend Arthur along with the city naval officer Alonzo Cornell and replace them. This time, it was permanent.

The New York Times defended Arthur’s tenure as collector, saying that during his time “the New York Customhouse [was] the most investigated place in the country, but it has come out from each ordeal without a single breath of allegation against its head.” The Times insinuated that the true reason for Arthur’s dismissal was that he had been more loyal to his staff than to the incoming administration and therefore refused to pack the customhouse with Hayes’s appointees. It was a brilliant counterstroke: accuse the administration of acting not for reform but for venal patronage, which meant that the Hayes administration occupied the lower circle of Hell reserved for hypocrites.

Rather than ruining Arthur’s career, Hayes’s vendetta catapulted him to national attention. He became the darling not just of the Stalwarts but of a motley assortment of the administration’s opponents. Though Arthur was removed, the imbroglio was kept alive by newspapers, by congressional committees, and by state nominating conventions, which used the confrontation as the axis for other debates. The Democrats in Washington veered toward Arthur and Conkling because they recognized the issue would divide the Republican Party and give the Democrats a better chance at capturing the White House in 1880.

In the end, the Senate decided in February 1879 not to overturn Hayes’s decision and confirmed a new collector, the liberal Republican Edwin Merritt, to oversee the vast revenue that flowed through the New York Customhouse. Arthur once again took up his law practice and was awarded by Conkling with the position of chairman of the New York Republican Party. The Hayes administration did indeed staff the customhouse with friendlier appointees who could then act as a crucial source of income and support during the next election. Meanwhile, the midterm elections of 1878 had given the Democrats control of both the House and the Senate, which placed Hayes in the unpleasant position of fighting against a powerful Congress controlled by the other party. The Stalwarts, for their part, could not have been more pleased at Hayes’s predicament.

Arthur’s state of mind during this period can only be guessed. Most of his papers were destroyed at his death. But it’s likely that in spite of the furor over his removal as collector, these years were among the happiest in his life. He was wealthy; he was happily married; he was engaged in work he cared about on behalf of a party he loved; and he enjoyed the ironclad support of one of the most powerful politicians in the country. He worked energetically on behalf of the New York Republican Party, and one of his central tasks as party chairman was the social massaging that accompanied fund-raising.

His two foci were the New York state elections in 1879 and the preparations for the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1880. Arthur was responsible for getting out the vote for Stalwart candidates, and that meant money and organization. He wrote countless letters to state and federal employees who owed their careers to the Stalwarts, and requested that they contribute a certain amount to the party funds. While phrased as requests, these letters were actually orders, or invoices. The recipient was obligated to pony up, and Arthur was both a successful fund-raiser and a persistent one. In part due to his efforts, the Conklingites swept the 1879 state elections, thereby solidifying the senator’s position as a power broker in the national Republican Party.

Arthur, meanwhile, delighted in the soft aspects of the job. Then as now, party officials went from one banquet to another, eating meal after meal with a revolving door of donors and would-be appointees. Arthur had a particular predilection for this work, and Nell was a superb partner. Both she and Chet doted on their children: son Chester Alan, whose birth had followed William’s premature death during the war, and daughter Ellen, named after her mother. Nell organized frequent dinners, music recitals, and parties at their home at 123 Lexington Avenue, and she kept meticulous notes about who was who in New York society, especially in Republican society. As the Arthur biographer Thomas Reeves noted, she was ambitious for her husband, and she treated their social life as a career of her own.

As friends later acknowledged, however, she would have been happier if Chester had made their home the center of his life. Instead, it was only one of his haunts, and not the preferred one. There were few things that he enjoyed more than wining and dining in the company of like-minded men. He conducted business from his offices in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, within walking distance of 123 Lexington. Today, the only trace of Arthur’s presence in the neighborhood is a statue of him, standing quietly on a pedestal at the northeast corner of Madison Square Park at Twenty-sixth Street. But at the time, the Fifth Avenue Hotel was the epicenter of New York Republican politics, the Waldorf-Astoria of its day. It was a mishmash of wood paneling, chandeliers, neoclassical touches, heavy drapery, and cigar smoke. And it was Arthur’s second home.

When he wasn’t entertaining there, he could often be found at Delmonico’s Restaurant, also on Fifth Avenue. As the hub of elite society gravitated to Fifth Avenue north of Washington Square Park, Delmonico’s, an old downtown café, moved uptown and went upscale. In 1876, having relocated to Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the restaurant defined a new level of opulence. It was vast, occupying most of the block between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and it was expensive. It had main rooms, ballrooms, and private rooms. Silver chandeliers hung from mosaic-covered ceilings. Mirrors were everywhere—rich, heavy, gilded mirrors—and there was a central courtyard with a fountain. “The service,” said a reviewer for the New York Tribune, “[is] splendid. The waiters as noiseless as images in a vision.… The dishes succeed each other like the well-composed tones of a painting or a symphony.” Yes, even the food was good, which was hardly common in those days of bad knockoffs of heavy Cordon Bleu cuisine.

Delmonico’s was where political and business elites met and mingled. Food, drink, and decor were the lures, and the restaurant fulfilled a vital social function. Until he became president, Chester Arthur used the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Delmonico’s as his offices. They were where he met with the Astors and the Goulds, the Morgans and the Conklings, the patrons and the robber barons. They were where promises were exchanged; where donors pledged money; where candidates were selected. They were where power was.

The contrast between Arthur’s stomping grounds north of Union Square and those of the masses to the south was staggering. As the population of New York City grew in the nineteenth century, the city marched north from lower Manhattan. The city’s fortunes were inextricably linked to the nearly two hundred docks and wharves that made a horseshoe around the southern part of the island. Across the East River, Brooklyn was a teeming city in its own right, with its own warehouses stocked with goods and its own problems. But New York was of a different order entirely. By the 1870s, the city had nearly a million inhabitants, though no one knew for sure exactly how many immigrants lived in the tenements and hovels that spread out from Five Points east of the Bowery and south of Cooper Union. There, as many as 250,000 people were crammed into a square mile. Sewage ran in muddy ditches through the narrow streets, and people competed with horses and carts and usually lost. Navigating through the labyrinth was a constant challenge, and it was easy to get lost in the dark of night. The mix of animal feces and human waste was a recipe for disease, and New York had the highest death rate of any city in the Western world.

The only common ground was Central Park, which was not yet complete in the 1870s but which would soon become the city’s melting pot. When he was collector, Arthur passed near to the tenements to get to his office at the customhouse, but it’s not clear that people of his class really noticed how most people in the city lived. Arthur’s home and Delmonico’s were less than a mile north of the tenements, but they were a world away.

In the city and throughout the country, trade unions were just beginning the struggle to carve out a larger slice of economic rewards for workers. Women were starting to question the limited scope of their political rights. Railroads were crisscrossing the continent, making a steel baron named Andrew Carnegie richer than all his Scottish relatives combined and a few New York bankers wealthy and most investors very, very poor. New inventions proliferated, especially at the hands of Thomas Alva Edison, and 124,672 new patents were issued in the 1870s, more than double the decade before. Hayes was the first president to have a telephone in the White House, though its use was still limited compared to the telegraph. Mail-order catalog businesses thrived with the expanding U.S. Post Office, and though that led Anthony Comstock, the postmaster general, to issue directives banning the use of the post for the transport of any materials he deemed to be obscene, it also led to a boom for the retail trade.

The country had nearly 50 million people, and while some gloried in the rapid changes, many felt dislocated. Reformers looked for things to reform but often despaired that they were tilting at windmills. Henry George, the best-selling author of Progress and Poverty (1879), proposed a single tax based on land ownership that would redistribute wealth away from the 1 percent of the population who owned more than 90 percent of the country’s wealth and offset the destructive imbalances caused by the yawning gap between rich and poor. George was especially troubled by the corruption and sprawl of urban America and asked a friend what could be done. “Nothing,” his friend replied, “you and I can do nothing at all. We can only wait for evolution.” That was not a satisfying answer, but the prospects for change seemed daunting. Every night, the gilded elite gathered at Delmonico’s to declaim against the likes of Henry George. It was their world, and one of its stewards was Chet Arthur.

Neither Arthur nor his peers were in any danger of being stripped of their wealth, but they had no defense against disease. Just as he was reaching the pinnacle of success, Arthur lost something precious: his wife. Nell Arthur died suddenly of pneumonia, at the age of forty-two, just after New Year’s Day 1880. Arthur was devastated. He had loved her, but he had also spent more evenings apart from her than with her. Though she had not been content with her husband’s life outside of their home, she had never been anything but cheerful and supportive of him in public. Arthur was visibly distraught for weeks, and even into the spring he seemed subdued.

The Republican National Convention was approaching, however, and that gave Arthur something to occupy his time and energy. The plan for the Stalwarts was to nominate Ulysses S. Grant for a third term. Grant remained immensely popular to the Republican base, and although his eight years as president had been characterized by cronyism and corruption, the Stalwarts preferred him to Hayes and especially to Blaine, who appeared to have the edge going into the convention. Grant, it was widely remarked, stood for nothing but himself. No program, idea, or platform was associated with his name, and his appeal lay in the fact that he was seen as a potential unifier of a fragmented party.

But Blaine wasn’t interested in joining a Grant bandwagon driven by Conkling and Arthur. He wanted the nomination for himself. That made the New York Republicans even more stalwart in their support for Grant, and when the convention assembled in Chicago in June 1880, Arthur was at the helm of his state’s delegation.

Nominating conventions were raucous, unpredictable affairs. The betting action outside Exposition Hall was nearly as intense as the balloting inside it. The convention began deadlocked between Grant and Blaine, and remained that way for thirty-five ballots. Treasury Secretary John Sherman (who had removed Arthur from the customhouse) made a showing, but he was considered barely viable. As for Hayes, he had alienated too many of his former supporters. Given the vagaries of machine politics and party dynamics, the fact that he was president was not enough to guarantee his renomination. He removed himself from consideration before the convention, but he would have faced a hard road had he tried to run again. Though presidents controlled a substantial network of patronage, they did not control the party, and Hayes was neither the first nor the last sitting president not to be renominated.

With each successive ballot, the prospects for the two frontrunners faded as well. The Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds were so antagonistic that neither camp would break ranks for the other, and it became clear that neither Grant nor Blaine would be able to command the necessary two-thirds majority of the delegates.

The result was the emergence of a dark-horse candidate, James A. Garfield, who was in the convention hall as a member of the Ohio delegation. Garfield had been a general during the Civil War and then served eighteen years as a congressman. He was universally respected by those who knew him, and he elicited a neutral response from most of the party. He was known as a moderate and had shown no signs of overweening ambition. Indeed, he had given the nominating speech for John Sherman. Neither a Stalwart nor a Half-Breed nor a Hayes man, on the thirty-sixth ballot he became the Republican nominee for president.

Almost immediately, Garfield had to select a vice presidential running mate who would be put to the convention for a vote. Conkling was upset that Grant hadn’t won, but he was pleased that Blaine had lost. The story of how Chester Arthur came to be Garfield’s choice was told almost thirty years later by a reporter named William Hudson. It is the only account of the tense discussions that took place between Arthur and Conkling, and there is no way of confirming its veracity. But it was juicily written and has been irresistible to biographers and chroniclers, including this one. According to the report, Garfield’s partisans settled on Arthur’s name as an unobjectionable sop to the Stalwarts. Garfield could not win New York without them, and he would be hard-pressed to win the election if he lost New York. Arthur was firmly identified with the Stalwarts, and he was almost universally liked within the Grand Old Party.

Conkling, however, was in no mood to see his lieutenant vaulted above him. While no one coveted the vice presidency, it was still a national office with national prestige, and Conkling preferred to extract promises of patronage. He may also have been concerned that if Arthur accepted, Garfield would act as if he owed nothing more to the Stalwarts. But tactical and strategic quibbles were secondary. What most annoyed Conkling was the blow to his pride. Arthur was approached directly by the Garfield camp. Conkling was not asked first and did not learn about the idea until Arthur informed him.

“The Ohio men have offered me the vice presidency,” Arthur told Conkling in a quiet back room of the convention hall.

“Well, sir,” Conkling is said to have replied, “you should drop it as you would a red hot shoe from the forge.”

To Conkling’s apparent astonishment, he did not. “The office of the vice president,” Arthur answered stoutly, “is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining.” Conkling responded that Garfield was going to lose the election, and that the Stalwart day would come in 1884. He could not imagine why Arthur would want to jettison a promising future on a losing ticket. But Arthur saw it differently. “A barren nomination would be a great honor. In a calmer moment you will look at this differently,” he said.

“If you wish for my favor and my respect you will contemptuously decline it,” Conkling answered.

“Senator Conkling,” Arthur shot back, “I shall accept the nomination and I shall carry with me a majority of the delegates.” Startled into speechlessness, Conkling turned and walked out of the room.

The specific words may be apocryphal, but the shift in Arthur and Conkling’s relationship was anything but. Given Conkling’s personality, he could not have reacted with equanimity to Arthur’s elevation, and he must have realized that the guard was changing. In fact, in the moments just after Garfield’s victory and Blaine’s defeat, Conkling reached the apex of his influence. The moment Arthur was nominated, Conkling’s star began to wane, and within slightly more than a year he ceased to be a power broker and Arthur was president.

That was not an outcome anyone would have predicted in the summer of 1880. After Arthur was confirmed by the delegates, the convention broke up, and the essayists drew their stilettos. “The nomination of General Garfield,” observed Harper’s Weekly, “has been received with great satisfaction by Republicans throughout the country.… [But] Mr. Arthur was selected in accordance with the principle which governs the practice of nominating conventions—to placate the minority.” John Sherman, smarting from his own defeat and from the stunning elevation of a man he had recently fired, said that Arthur running for vice president was “a ridiculous burlesque.” Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton called the choice of Arthur “a miserable farce.” And the Nation wryly editorialized that the nomination of Arthur might just convince Conkling to make one stump speech on behalf of the ticket. The nominee was notably undistinguished, the magazine’s editor, E. L. Godkin, wrote the following week, but he urged readers not to worry. “General Garfield, if elected, may die during his term in office, but that is too unlikely a contingency to be worth making extraordinary provisions for.”

In the space of less than two years, Chester Arthur had gone from being the best-paid employee of the federal government to a well-remunerated lawyer and head of the New York Republican Party to vice presidential nominee. He had escaped one cauldron only to jump into another. Even his Panglossian temperament must have been tested by the scorn that greeted his nomination. He had lived an oddly insulated public life and had thrived within it. That was about to change. Arthur knew that and dreaded it. He left Chicago as quickly as possible and went home. A crowd had assembled at Grand Central depot in Manhattan to celebrate his arrival, but his friends, who understood Arthur’s preference to be out of the public limelight, had him led out a side door and into a carriage so that he could, as his sister Regina explained in a letter, “have a chance to rest for one night … and to eat his dinner.” But as pleased as he was to be home, she confessed, he could not stop himself from breaking down in tears as he remembered the wife who wasn’t there to share his good fortune. The next night, the crowd came to him and essentially forced him to celebrate publicly, which he did politely but unenthusiastically.

After a brief respite, Arthur turned his energies to the election. The Republican Party platform made an anodyne nod in the direction of civil service reform, as did the Democratic platform, which was written under the aegis of party nominee General Winfield Scott Hancock, another Civil War hero, and his running mate, former congressman William English of Indiana. Garfield was favored by the reform wing of the Republican Party because he seemed to eschew the naked system of patronage and promised that he would, if elected, be beholden to no one. Would that it had been so. Garfield might have wanted, in an ideal world, to run a campaign untainted by the association with professional politics, but in the real world, he wanted to win. That presented him with a choice: lose honorably or win less honorably. And as the nominee of the Republican Party for president of the United States, that wasn’t really a choice at all.