R.I.P. President Arthur. You would have loved affiliate links
He can make the bad guys good for the weekend
I love history and learning about history. I wish I didn’t love US history the most but I do. I wish I easily remembered everything I’ve been taught but I don’t. It’s more like being tie dyed than being house painted. I need a lot of exposure to change color.
A few years ago I was on a presidents kick and I found this Washington Post podcast called “Presidential.” Each episode is 45 min on a different president. I was ticking through eps and it had gotten to an era that I thought didn’t interest me: the Gilded Age. Enter Chester Arthur and whoa. The twists and turns.
Before I tell you about why he’s interesting I want to say why he sucks: he signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration. This was not his idea, definitely a product of the time, but it was evil and it’s an important piece in our dark puzzle.
Chester Arthur was never going to be president. He was a lawyer in New York and then the Collector of Customs at the Port of New York, which was lit. He got paid 50k a year, which according to a website I chose called in2013dollars.com is about 1.5 million. He loved clothes. The Library of Congress has a bunch of his tailor bills and jeez this guy loved pants.
The Collector of Customs at the Port of New York was in charge of collecting import fees on any goods brought in through New York, America’s busiest port. The Collector got a salary plus a percentage of the import fees, plus a cut of penalties if anyone was found trying to sneak stuff in. It was so shady. And it was a politically appointed job. Besides that, Chester Arthur was also high up in the New York Republican scene and raised a lot of money for powerful bros.
Crucial to understanding the vibe at the time is understanding the spoils system. When your party came to power you fired everyone in the government and filled the jobs with your pals. If you were a civil servant you were literally expected to tithe, to give a portion of your pay to your political party. It was entirely about power and money and very little about doing things needed by people. It was a time of big business and corruption and money in politics and money to the tailor for pants.
In the 1880s the Republican Party was divided into the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds. The Stalwart name makes sense to me. Stalwart means loyal and they loved hiring their buds. Half Breed does not make sense and I did some light googling and I cannot explain.
The 1880 Republican ticket needed a New York Stalwart to balance James Garfield so Chester Arthur ended up Vice President and then Garfield was shot. The man who shot him is worthy of his own episode because he was nuts and pissed that he wasn’t given a job, and a Chester Arthur super fan. After shooting Garfield he said: “I want Arthur for President.”
So Chester Arthur is president and it seemed obvious how that was going to go. But there was this lady named Julia Sand who had one of those 1800s illnesses where she didn’t do much except write letters. And she wrote Chester Arthur a lot of letters. She said: "The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President. The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor." She continued: “Your name now is on the annals of history…It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold. For the sake of your country, for your own sake & for the sakes of all who have ever loved you, let it be pure & bright.”
She wrote him 23 letters over the course of his presidency, and he visited her once, but they had otherwise never met. She seemed to have successfully appealed to a purer, younger version of him. He was raised by an abolitionist minister and had argued the case that desegregated NYC street cars.
He ended up instituting civil service reform, which really pissed off all his old pals. Government gigs were given to the best qualified based on exams. You could not be fired for political affiliation, and you weren’t allowed to donate to parties.
He was secretly pretty sick and he died soon after leaving office. That’s sort of it for Chester Arthur but I think there’s a biopic in all this. Personally I would love to see the pants on the big screen. Apparently he had 80 pairs, and 80 pairs of shoes as well, and changed outfits multiple times a day and they called him “Elegant Arthur” and “Dude of all the White House residents.” He spent 30k redecorating the White House (2 million today.) He hired Louis Comfort Tiffany to do it, the bro known for those elaborate glass lamps. He took long walks around DC in the middle of the night. It’s all so visual. Someone tell Lin Manuel.
History podcasts I love:
Scene on Radio
Floodlines
Slow Burn
Throughline
Backstory
The Experiment
The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq
Uncivil
9/12
Constitutional
Presidential
Unreal: a Critical History of Reality TV
Mother Country Radicals
American History Tellers