Scott S. Greenberger’s biography of Chester A. Arthur, The Unexpected President, will be published by Da Capo Press on September 12.

Eight months in, it’s hard to argue that the presidency has changed Donald Trump.

The bombastic former reality television star hasn’t been sobered by daily intelligence briefings, or by North Korean nukes. In Houston, confronted with human suffering on an unimaginable scale, he mostly talked about himself. He continues to boast about his crowd sizes, his gilded Manhattan apartment and his golf courses. Other presidents were awed by the history of the house they inhabited—Trump called it “a real dump.”


On the eve of the election, Barack Obama warned voters that the presidency doesn’t change a person. “Who you are, what you are, it doesn’t change after you occupy the Oval Office,” he said. “It magnifies who you are. It shines a spotlight on who you are.”

But a virtually forgotten American president was an exception to Obama’s rule. Like Trump, he was a wealthy New Yorker, disparaged by big-city intellectuals as unqualified, unfit and corrupt. Fellow Republicans were shocked when he landed on the threshold of the highest office in the land—but no more shocked than he was.

The majority of Americans viewed his ascension with dread, and leading newspapers feared for the future of the republic. The Chicago Tribune lamented “a pending calamity of the utmost magnitude.” The New York Times called him “about the last man who would be considered eligible” for the presidency. Newspapers in Charleston and Louisville said he was a criminal who belonged in jail—or worse.

Chester Alan Arthur, the nation’s 21st president, surprised them all.



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Arthur didn’t start out as a corrupt machine politician. As a young lawyer, he won the case that desegregated New York City’s streetcars. During the Civil War, when many were enriching themselves on government contracts, he was an honest and efficient quartermaster for the Union Army.

But in the years following the war, Arthur’s quest for power and wealth led him down a darker path. He attached himself to Senator Roscoe Conkling, the all-powerful boss of the New York Republican machine. At Conkling’s urging, in 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Arthur collector of the New York Custom House, the largest single federal office in the nation and a valuable font of jobs and favors that was rotten with corruption.

When the Custom House fined merchants for violations, “Chet” Arthur took a cut. He lived in a world of Tiffany silver, fine carriages and grand balls, and had his Prince Albert coats and high hats imported from London. When an old college classmate told him his Custom House deputy was corrupt, Chet waved him away. “You are one of those goody-goody fellows who set up a high standard of morality that other people cannot reach,” he said.

Arthur held on to his lucrative post until 1878, when reform-minded President Rutherford B. Hayes, a fellow Republican, fired him.

But in June 1880, GOP leaders resurrected Arthur’s political career. When Republicans gathered in Chicago to pick their presidential nominee, James Garfield, a longtime congressman, upset former President Grant and emerged as the surprise choice. Party elders were desperate to appease Conkling, a Grant supporter, in order to secure his help in winning New York. The second place on the ticket seemed to be a safe spot for one of Conkling’s flunkeys. They chose Arthur, and the Republicans triumphed in November.

But on the morning of July 2, 1881, a deranged office-seeker shot Garfield in a Washington railroad station. Garfield survived the shooting, but he was mortally wounded. For months, as he lay dying in the White House, Americans prayed for their fallen leader and trembled at the thought of Conkling’s stooge leading the nation. Prominent diplomat and historian Andrew Dickson White later wrote, “It was a common saying of that time among those who knew him best, ‘Chet Arthur President of the United States! Good God!’”

Arthur had never coveted the presidency, and could not conceive of leading the country. When newspapers accused him of conspiring to kill Garfield, he avoided appearing in public, fearing his own life might be in danger. His friends worried he was on the verge of an emotional collapse.

Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president of the United States, is pictured. | Public Domain

Under siege, Arthur leaned on Conkling and his cronies from the New York machine. The New York Times acknowledged that Arthur’s loyalty to his friends was understandable, and had carried him far. But it warned that qualities praiseworthy in a private citizen or local pol could destroy a presidency. “If he is to prove equal to the great position he occupies he must know principles rather than individuals.” The Chicago Tribune suggested that Arthur could earn “the loyal and powerful allegiance of those true hearts now mourning for the death of Garfield,” but only “on one simple condition—that he be President of the Nation and not the chief of a faction.”

At the end of August 1881, as Garfield’s condition deteriorated, Arthur received a letter from a fellow New Yorker, a bedridden 31-year-old woman named Julia Sand. That letter, the first of nearly two dozen letters Sand wrote to Arthur, helped awaken the conscience of the man destined to become president.

“The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” Sand wrote. “The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.”

“But making a man President can change him!” Sand continued boldly. “Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine … Reform!”



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As Arthur was poised to take over the presidency, America stood at a critical juncture, in the midst of what Mark Twain famously dubbed “The Gilded Age.” Rapid industrialization was creating vast fortunes—but also rampant waste, fraud and corruption. As the gap between rich and poor yawned ever wider, the Protestant ethic that had guided the nation since its birth was shunted aside in an orgy of speculation and consumerism. Financial titans such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould bribed legislators and siphoned government loans, land and subsidies even as they preached the values of self-reliance and a laissez-faire economy.

The Grand Old Party, the party that had saved the Union, was being corroded by greed and cronyism, dominated by political machines and bosses who enriched themselves at the public’s expense. Under the so-called spoils system, politicians doled out government jobs to loyal party hacks, regardless of their qualifications. “Where did the public good enter into all this maze of personal intrigue, this wilderness of stunted natures where no straight road is to be found, but only the tortuous and aimless travels of beasts and things that crawl?” the heroine muses in Democracy: An American Novel, Henry Adams’ 1880 book set in Washington.

The nation’s intellectual elite believed that without civil service reform, American democracy was doomed. They wanted to root out patronage and award federal jobs based on competitive examinations, not political connections or contributions. Now, after more than a decade of struggle, they watched in horror as Conkling’s puppet prepared to bring the worst features of New York machine politics into the White House. It seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that Arthur would disavow the spoils system that had been the whole basis of his political career.

And yet, that is exactly what he did.

Vice President Arthur had not hesitated to use his position to help his New York cronies, and Conkling and his associates looked forward to reaping the benefits of his elevation. But they underestimated the impact of Garfield’s suffering and death on their old friend. President Arthur was determined to show the country he was no mere ward heeler.

In his first Annual Message to Congress—now known as the State of the Union—the erstwhile party hack shocked the nation by proclaiming his support for civil service reform and asking for money to revive the moribund Civil Service Commission, which would craft rules for hiring, promoting and firing federal workers and oversee the exams given to aspiring employees. Congressmen from both parties rejected Arthur’s plea.

It took huge Republican losses in the 1882 elections, interpreted by many as a rebuke to machine politics, to change the mood on Capitol Hill. After the elections, Arthur acknowledged that party leaders often coerced government employees into making “voluntary” political contributions—the “assessments” he had enthusiastically collected as Custom House chief. He called on Congress to ban such contributions, and urged passage of the reformers’ civil service overhaul, which had been languishing in legislative purgatory for several years.

“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,” one New York reporter wrote. Prodded by Arthur, Congress finally approved the reform bill. Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in January 1883 and faithfully implemented it.

Julia Sand continued to write to Arthur throughout 1882 and 1883. The president heeded much of her advice—and even paid her a surprise visit at her home at 46 East 74th Street to thank her for believing in him. Ashamed of his pre-White House political career, Arthur ordered most of his papers burned upon his death—but he spared Sand’s letters, which reside at the Library of Congress.

Arthur would not serve a second term. He had earned the enmity of his old machine buddies without winning reformers’ trust, so he had no natural base of support. He also secretly suffered from Bright’s disease, a debilitating kidney ailment that may have dampened his enthusiasm for serving another four years. In any case, the GOP did not nominate him in 1884.

By the time Arthur left the White House in March 1885, however, the public’s perception of him had been transformed. “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur, and no one ever retired from the highest civil trust of the world more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe,” newspaper editor Alexander K. McClure wrote.

In 1899, many of Arthur’s surviving friends gathered in Madison Square in Manhattan to dedicate a statute to the late president. The featured speaker was Elihu Root, Arthur’s personal lawyer, whom the president had tapped to be U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and who went on to serve in the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Root began by recalling the summer of 1881—Garfield lingering on his deathbed, the strife within the Republican Party, the horror and rage many Americans felt when an assassin’s bullet put Arthur on the threshold of the presidency. “Dark suspicions and angry threatenings filled the public mind, and for the moment there was doubt—grave doubt—and imminent peril that the orderly succession of power under the Constitution might not take its peaceful course,” Root said.

But in Arthur, Root continued, “our ever fortunate Republic had again found the man for the hour.” Arthur recognized that the moment Garfield died, he was “no longer a leader of a faction, but the president of the whole people, conscious of all his obligations and determined to execute the people’s will.”

Some hold out hope that Trump will come to a similar realization. Last month, fellow liberals blasted Senator Dianne Feinstein of California when she counseled patience and suggested that Trump could be a good president if he learned and changed.

So far, Trump’s reaction to criticism or crisis has been to return to his base, to draw sustenance from the hard-core supporters who propelled him to the presidency. Campaign-style rallies may make him feel better in the short term, but if he wants his presidency to be judged a success in the long term, he’d be wise to heed the lessons of Chester A. Arthur.

“For the vice presidency, I was indebted to Mr. Conkling,” Arthur said to one New York crony who complained about his transformation in office. “But for the presidency of the United States, my debt is to the Almighty.”