Really Cool Stuff about Chester Arthur
1. His nickname was Gentleman Boss.
2. Arthur has a statue in New York City. “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” (p. 35).
3. Before he ran on the Republican ticket in 1881 as vice president, Arthur had never been elected to any other office.
4. Arthur decided to further renovate the White House and so he called on Louis Tiffany to do the job. “Tiffany was not yet famous for his lamps, but in 1881 he obtained a patent for a new technique to decorate stained glass. In the Cross Hall of the White House, he installed a large stained-glass screen, which inspired one magazine to rhapsodize that the only dark things left in the White House were the oil portraits of former presidents. The Blue Room itself was painted, not surprisingly, a light sky blue, and the ceiling was decorated with painted stars. Tiffany and his workers also painstakingly applied wallpaper inlaid with pieces of sparkling glass...The Red Room became more strikingly red; Arthur’s office gained a more open fireplace and yellow tones; and golf leaf appeared promiscuously throughout the public rooms. The executive mansion also acquired its first elevator” (p. 77-78).
5. In the summer of 1882, electricity was brought to New York City. “Thomas Edison and his company were hard at work on a power station that would by summer’s end provide New York City with its first supply of electricity and electric lights” (p. 90).
6. The first known celebration of Labor Day occurred in 1882. “And in early September, as the season was winding down, a parade estimated at twenty thousand to thirty thousand people marched through Manhattan to honor the workingman, beginning a tradition soon known as Labor Day” (p. 90-91).
7. The very first US Open in tennis was held in 1881. “The [Newport] casino was the center of the social scene, where drinks and cigars were consumed on cool porches in between leisurely and competitive games of the newest English import, lawn tennis. The first US National Championship (the precursor to the US Open) were held on its courts in 1881” (p. 91).
8. Arthur helped inaugurate the Brooklyn Bridge. “He was met by wildly enthusiastic crowds—not because he was president, however, but because he had come to celebrate the opening of what was then the greatest technical wonder of the United States: the Brooklyn Bridge…On May 24, 1883, amid fireworks, cannons, military parades, confetti, and the cacophony of brass bands, Arthur and the mayors of New York and Brooklyn inaugurated the span linking the two large cities” (p. 123).
9. Here is some political trivia for you. In the 1884 election, some liberal Republicans splintered from the party and were known as “Mugwumps.” “The splinter group was called, by some clever cynic, ‘Mugwumps,’ which was an Algonquin word that technically meant ‘chieftain’ but implied a foolish self-importance. The Mugwumps were precursors to the Progressives of the early 1900s” (p. 130).
Poor Chester A. Arthur just doesn’t have much of a chance. He seems like a pretty happy dude working behind the scenes so it’s just funny that he ends up becoming president of the United States of America. Karabell does a good job of trying to make Arthur come alive for the reader but I can tell he doesn’t have much to work with here. Arthur liked good food, was pretty easy going for the most part, and tried to steer a decent course with what he was given.
The problem is that Arthur quite literally blends in with all the other presidents during this time period. One reason I think this happens is due to the fact that after Grant all the presidents look the same. If you look back in my blog—at Garfield, at Arthur—and ahead at Cleveland, you will notice that they are all heavily-bearded, chubby individuals. Plus it was unfortunate that Arthur was president during a time, otherwise known as the Gilded Age, when executive power was at its lowest ebb. The reason for this was twofold. First of all, thanks to our old pal Andrew Johnson, Congress had become the big dog in the national firmament. During Johnson’s presidency if you recall, Congress hated him so much that they passed several bills that strictly limited the power of the president, including the Tenure of Office Act. All the presidents thereafter had to work within the limited confines of the executive office as proscribed by the legislature. “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 cabinet without the say-so of the Senate” (p. 3).
Secondly, money was king. I know that sounds simplistic but it’s true—this age was the highlight of big money. Probably at no point in American history is the gap between the classes as wide as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Robber barons were not only extravagantly wealthy but they owned the bulk of the country’s resources. Basically this meant that 1% of the population owned about 95% of the wealth. “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” (p. 4). Let’s face it—the American public was much more curious about the lives of the rich and famous than it was over its own head of state.
So, due to circumstances beyond his control, poor Arthur is overlooked not only by our historical standpoints but also by the American citizens of his own time. Sad.
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