By the Fireside with First Minister Lloenflys - May 21, 2019





Is That ... Chester Arthur?
By the Fireside with First Minister Lloenflys - 5/21/19

Written by Lloenflys





An Opinion Article

(12 Pope Lexus Lane, Europeia - May 21, 2019) A few days ago, when I started thinking about what I wanted to address in my Fireside Chat this week, the thought came to me of discussing my choice of Chester Arthur for my avatar. It is, admittedly, a somewhat unusual choice. An exceedingly small number of people would recognize good ole' Chet as a former president of the United States. A vanishingly small number would have any idea what he did during his presidency. As a result, this would be a great opportunity to explain why I see him as an inspirational figure. I had the article roughly outlined in my head with plans to finish it during some downtime at work on Monday morning when one of those fortuitous coincidences happened that made me smile and adjust my plans a bit.

When I'm work, about half of my time is spent on conference calls or listening to pre-recorded phone calls. The other half of the time, I'm working on reporting or doing other computing work that frees up my ears - and typically I listen to podcasts during that time. One of those podcasts is the delightful "Stuff You Missed in History Class," which is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than focusing on the main stories throughout history, this podcast picks out the more obscure items, the forgotten details, the little peccadilloes of history that make it such a delight to so many of us. Without looking at the title of the episode, I hit play and was flabbergasted to hear the hosts talking about the background of one Chester Alan Arthur. It is uncommonly rare to hear anything about Arthur, so the odds that he would randomly be the subject of this podcast on the day I planned to write about him is stultifyingly small. Even better, while about half of the episode focused on Arthur himself and his rise to the Presidency, the other half focused on a story -- and a woman -- I had never heard of. I was delighted, and I'm excited to share a bit of her story with you while I discuss Chester.

But I digress. We're here to talk about why a portly, middle-aged man from the 1880s with wild sideburns and a horrible legacy as president among most historians was my choice to represent me on our forum. The selection of a forum avatar can be oddly intimate. After all, this is the image that's going to stick with people when they think about you. Do you go with some idealized image of yourself? Do you go with an animal? Do you remain as a letter on a colored square? I knew that I wanted to select a politician for my forum avatar because this is a political activity, but living figures are fraught with danger - they can easily say or do things that leave us perplexed, befuddled, or disillusioned. The dead, typically, stay dead, so a historical figure it would be. But who? Many of them are problematic - Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, Jackson was a genocidal terror, Lincoln had a complicated history with racial issues that has largely been buried by the hagiography that has grown up around him from the Civil War, Wilson has a similar racial history that is often forgotten due to his role in World War I.

Of course, it is a foolish and impossible task to hold historical figures to the standards of today. This is not to say that failures should be forgotten or swept away - merely that it is ok to acknowledge the shortcomings while recognizing the positive contributions as well. Since politicians and other historical figures are all too obviously human, failure to be able to recognize the good with the bad would mean disowning the entirety of the past. That's nonsensical to me.

And so, thinking back to what I knew about history, I decided to pick a figure who only reached the pinnacle of politics through tragedy and accident, a man for whom expectations were so low that it was legitimately said of him by a journalist, after his term was finished, that "no man ever entered the presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur ...". There was a good reason for this distrust. Arthur, who had started his career on a somewhat idealistic note as a lawyer who was not afraid to take on civil rights issues (he was involved in several landmark cases in New York that led to the official desegregation of the state), nonetheless came under the control of the Republican political machine in New York which was led first by Thurlow Weed and then by Roscoe Conkling. His association with these men was extremely profitable for Arthur - he would come to serve as the Collector of the Port of New York, controlling the disposition of over 1000 jobs, and giving him the means to collect thousands of dollars of graft. Arthur was nothing if not a supporter of the spoils system, in which politicians used their ability to provide jobs in exchange for votes and other means of support.

The issue of political corruption in the civil service was a major issue in the presidential election of 1880, with many Republicans wishing to reform the system and many more seeing nothing wrong with the status quo. The convention was a wild affair, with fights over credentials and a fierce three way battle for the nomination that would only end after 36 ballots and the emergence of James Garfield, a Congressman from Ohio, as a compromise candidate for the nomination. A pro-reform Republican, Garfield wanted to unite his party with his vice presidential choice, and so sought out a New York Stalwart as his vice president. Chester Arthur would ultimately get the offer, which he accepted despite the objection of Conkling, his patron.

History would likely have allowed Arthur to fade away into obscurity after a quiet four year term but for the actions of an assassin. Less than six months into the job Garfield would be assassinated by an unsuccessful job seeker. Inexplicably, Arthur was now president. At that point, he had a choice. He could govern as he always had, through coercion, bribery, and graft. He could utterly demolish the plans of the nascent Garfield administration and raise the flag for his Stalwart positions. This he was thoroughly expected to do, by essentially everyone. And yet, when it came time to govern, Arthur did not do this. Instead, he almost uniformly adopted the positions that would have been taken by Garfield had he lived, reasoning that it was Garfield's platform and not his own that had won the election.

What I just learned Monday morning is that Arthur's willingness to embrace Garfield's views - to put aside his personal feelings and to do what needed to be done for the good of his people - may have been driven by the actions of a 31-year-old woman from New York named Julia Sand. After Garfield was shot and during the three months in which Garfield clung to life, Sand wrote the first of over 20 letters to Arthur imploring him to follow his better nature when it came to his actions as president, including his decisions on legislation. It was discovered long after Arthur's death that, while he had ordered all other written correspondence destroyed upon his death, he had asked his son to keep the Sand letters. While he never acknowleged that they pushed him to be better than he otherwise would have been, it is clear that they did so. As she said in her first letter, "Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you - but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & brave. Reform! ... Disappoint our fears! Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest of aims."

Remarkably, the president appears to have listened. Arthur would become a champion of civil service reform, not only pushing for passage of reform legislation but fully staffing and funding the commission that was necessary to get the reform implemented. In other areas, he would come up short - after initially fighting against the Chinese Exclusion Act, including vetoing it, Arthur backed down and signed it into law when a revised version was presented to him. He would be chastised by Ms. Sand for this (although she revealed some troubling views on race in her letters as well). Despite this, on balance Arthur seems to have done all he could to live up to the office to which he was elected - to elevate himself to the role rather than dragging it down to the level he normally operated at. The second half of the quote from the journalist above speaks volumes: "... no one ever retired more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe." Arthur - quite likely with some significant pushing from Sand - revised his image and did his level best to be a great president.

That, above all, is why I like Chester Arthur and why I chose him as my avatar. He represents a striving to live up to whatever role we find ourselves in, even if it is far above any station we ever expected to attain. He demonstrates a willingness to embrace the best ideas from his political opponents and, if tasked with it, to push them forward to a conclusion. That is personal leadership that I can aspire to, and that I'm proud to be associated with.

So there you have it, and now you know. Chet's my guy, and I'll vouch for him any day.
 
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I read a book about Garfield's assassination not that long ago and they touched on Arthur before becoming VP; the political machinations that got him there; and his change from Conkling's pawn to his own man, as it were. It was very interesting to learn!

(A part of me was also fascinated by the relationship - and its deterioration - between Conkling and Arthur that they also touched upon)
 
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