"Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!" It was not exactly what he would have wanted to hear, but then again, it was not exactly the best way to become president. Chester Alan Arthur hadn't wanted to become the nation's chief executive. He certainly hadn't aspired to be vice president -- after all, who did? But he had been asked, and he had said yes, never imagining that he would inadvertently set in motion a series of events that would culminate with the assassination of President James A. Garfield and his own elevation to the presidency.

Always an emotional man, Arthur was, by all accounts, devastated by the news that Garfield had been shot on July 2, 1881, by a deranged Charles Guiteau, who has been forever immortalized with the inaccurate moniker of "disgruntled office seeker." Arthur seemed frequently on the verge of tears in the days following, and he prayed as fervently as anyone that Garfield would survive his wounds. It would be nearly three uncertain months before Garfield expired and Arthur became, much to his own shock and that of the nation, the twenty-first president of the United States.

Arthur is one of the forgotten presidents. Mention him to the proverbial man-on-the-street, and blankness is a likely response. "You're writing a biography of who?" was the most common refrain when this particular author mentioned that he was writing about this particular president. Even among those who consider themselves well educated, Chester Alan Arthur remains a cipher, one of those late-nineteenth-century inhabitants of the White House whose echo has been muffled by more memorable individuals and whose footprint -- and in the case of the rotund gourmand Arthur a rather large footprint -- has been trampled on and all but erased.

Arthur belongs to two select, and not altogether proud, clubs: presidents who came to office because of the sudden death of their predecessor, and presidents whose historical reputation is neither great, nor terrible, nor remarkable. The first club has eight members, and its founder was John Tyler, who replaced William Henry Harrison after the latter died a month into his term. Arthur was the fourth to join, after Andrew Johnson and before Theodore Roosevelt. The second club has a more fluid membership, depending on historical fads and whether or not a new biography has been published that reverses decades of opinion one way or the other. It currently includes Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore (who like Arthur also belongs to the first club), Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald R. Ford, the first George Bush, and Chester Alan Arthur. It is impossible to remove Arthur from the first club -- membership there is permanent. And as to the second, well, maybe, or maybe not. This isn't a long book, but there should be some suspense.

There is a nature-nurture question here. Arthur's time was not conducive to executive action. 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 own cabinet without the say-so of the Senate. Given the unelevated state of national politics, many otherwise talented individuals pursued more fruitful outlets for their skills. Why get involved with the rough-and-tumble of statehouses and Congress when fortune beckoned in the West or in industry? Just as the young, hungry, and talented tended to eschew Washington in the 1990s for the seemingly more fertile valleys of silicon, many took one brief look at Gilded Age politics and politicians and opted out.

Henry Adams, the disillusioned sage of the era, famously described the political life of the country after the Civil War in less-than-glowing terms: "The government does not govern. Congress is inefficient, and shows itself more and more incompetent to wield the enormous powers that are forced upon it, while the Executive is practically devoid of its necessary strengths by the jealousy of the Legislature." James Bryce, the English commentator who saw America with at least as much perspicacity as Americans saw themselves, remarked that "an American may through a long life never be reminded of the Federal Government, except when he votes at presidential and congressional elections, lodges a complaint against the post-office, and opens his trunks for a custom-house official on the pier of New York."

Chester Arthur was not well known to the general public before 1880, but he had been collector of the customhouse of the Port of New York. At the time, that was a position of greater influence than all but a handful of federal appointments. The size of the federal government grew rapidly in the 1870s, but the New York Customhouse remained the pinnacle.

It was the largest federal office in the country, and in an era before income tax, it accounted not only for three-quarters of all customs duties but for more than a third of the government's revenues. That the customhouse comprised such a large portion of federal activity simply reflects how much commerce subsumed politics in the late nineteenth century.

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. Later generations exalted and lambasted the "robber barons," and benignly overlooked the denizens of Washington. As the novelist Thomas Wolfe (the one from Asheville, not Park Avenue) eulogized for the lost generation of American presidents, "Their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea-depth of a past, intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable . . . And they were lost. For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life? Who could believe that his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides; which was which?"

And yet these men did live, and breathe, and think. The newspapers and journals of their day took their actions seriously enough to scorn and ridicule, to praise and assess. They often struck their contemporaries as a questionable assemblage, but there they were, on center stage and playing roles that had consequences. More than most, they added their voices to history. Chester Arthur was an accidental president at an inopportune time, but he is part of the tapestry of who we are more than most ever have been or most of us ever will be.

He was president in an unideological era. The Senate would shortly be dubbed the "Millionaires' Club," and the House of Representatives was an unruly place of loose coalitions and influence trading. State and local politics were controlled by party machines that prized loyalty. Politicians genuflected to the concept of the public good, and they occasionally spoke of public service. But they didn't seem to hold either very dear. Their careers did not depend on bold acts of legislation, stunning moments of oratory, or fighting for an ideal. The years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War had been characterized by an excess of ideology. The politicians of the Gilded Age, perhaps mirroring the mood of the public, turned away from troubling intractables like freedom, democracy, equality, and attended instead to order, stability, and prosperity.

America's cities were growing rapidly. Immigrants flowed into New York and then out into the West, and millions took advantage of the opportunities created by railroads. The dual pressures of burgeoning demographics and industrialization meant chaotic growth. The population of some towns doubled and then doubled again in the span of a decade. In the face of such flux, big ideas took a backseat to daily needs: food, water, shelter, transport, order.

Copyright © 2004 Zachary Karabell