Scott S. Greenberger - The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur

CHESTER ARTHUR, OUR nations 21st president, frequently lands on lists of the countrys most obscure chief executives. Few Americans know anything about him, and even history buffs mostly recall him for his distinctive facial hair. People who flock to Arthurs former home in Manhattan, a brownstone that still stands, typically come to shop at a store that sells Indian and Middle Eastern spices and foods, not to see the only site in New York City where a president took the oath of office. Arthurs statue in Madison Square Park, erected by his friends in 1899, is ignored. Arthurs fascinating and surprising story had a lasting impact on the countryso why have we forgotten it?

The first reason is that Arthur rose to power and served in the White House during an era that is a bit foggy in the minds of most Americans. We frequently dissect and rehash the events of the Civil War (and rightly so), but we often ignore the crucial decades immediately following the war. We shouldnt. The social, political, and economic changes that shook America during the 1870s and 1880s were the birth pangs of the society we have today. Arthur became president 136 years ago, but the era Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age doesnt feel distant at a time when political corruption, economic inequality, and corporate malfeasance are once again shaking peoples faith in the American experiment.

The second reason is that Arthur had a deep distrust of the press and paid little attention to cultivating his public image, either for his contemporaries or for posterity. Newspapers treated him harshly before he assumed the presidency, and he remained wary of reporters even after attitudes shifted in his favor.

But the main reason Arthurs story is unknown is that he left little behind, creating a challenge for historians. Shortly before he died, he ordered most of his letters, journals, and private papers to be destroyed, for reasons that will be revealed in the pages ahead. For many years, Arthur was represented in the Library of Congress by a single document, a letter he had written during the Civil War and that the library purchased in 1902. Painstaking work by chief librarians over many years gradually added to the holdings, but the collection is meager compared to what is available for most presidents.

In writing this book, I have relied on the letters and papers that do survive, together with the memoriespublished and unpublishedof the men and women who knew Arthur and the wonderfully vivid descriptions that filled the newspapers of the time. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document, and when I ascribe feelings to Arthur I do so based on his own statements or those of the people around him.

Despite the relative scarcity of writings by Arthur himself, I hope I have done justice to his story. It is the tale of a good man who veered off the right path, but rediscovered his better self with the help of an ordinary young woman who believed in him.

Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes were the lost Americans: their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea-depths of a past intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable.

THOMAS WOLFE, The Four Lost Men