Chester Arthur Redemption EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There are 3 million civil servants who work for the U.S. government today. Many take entrance exams. They have standardized pay scales. They work in the State Department or the Department of Energy or the Department of Homeland Security, regardless of which president or which political party is in office. Well, this definitely hasn't always been the case. For the first 100-plus years of the country's beginning, government jobs were basically handed out as political favors to people who, in many cases, had absolutely no qualifications or relevant experience. It was a system just rife with corruption and patronage. So, for this episode, we're going to explore the moment in American history when that transformed, or reformed, under President Chester Arthur. Now I've got someone here who dove into the research for this episode with me -- my colleague David Fahrenthold, who's a politics reporter at The Post and who did an incredible series of stories investigating government waste. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: Thank you. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Chester Arthur. Thanks for volunteering for this. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: The most obscure of all. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, so if anyone knows Chester Arthur today, it's probably as the namesake of a fictional elementary school that appeared in the 1995 "Die Hard With A Vengeance" movie, as many of our podcast listeners have pointed out to me. In all seriousness though, David, I think you and I both went into this episode thinking that, because Chester Arthur is so obscure and because the main thing that happened on his watch was civil service reform, that this was maybe going to be kind of a dry, dense story -- and we were so wrong. We were so wrong. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 Chester Arthur has one of the most amazing stories that I think we've heard yet in our study of the American presidency. He was the son of a Baptist minister. Then, he sinks to the very sort of underbelly of New York City Gilded Age machine politics. He holds the most lucrative patronage job in the country as the collector of the Port of New York, and then, at the very moment that Chester Arthur inherits the presidency and seems ready to just plunge the government into even deeper corruption, something magical and strange and completely unexpected happens: He goes from being exhibit A of corrupt machine politics to being the person who actually reforms and cleans up the system. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: So, all it took for Arthur to make that kind of redemptive arc was the death of a president and a set of mysterious letters from a woman that Arthur had never met, as we'll learn more about. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, here is the story of Chester Arthur. I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: I'm David Fahrenthold. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And this is the 21st episode of “Presidential.” PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, so the very basics are that Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont in 1829, and he was one of eight children. His father was a Baptist preacher who kept getting kicked out of parishes because he was such a fervent abolitionist, and so the family was constantly packing up and moving from town to town throughout Vermont and then throughout New York. And this kind of turned Arthur off from religion, but it didn't turn him off from advocating for African-American rights. After Arthur went to Union College, he moved to New York City and he worked in a prominent law firm where one of the cases that he really gained a lot of attention for was that he defended Elizabeth Jennings, who was a black woman who sat in the white section of a Brooklyn street car. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: This was more than a hundred years before Rosa Parks, and his victory in that case was something that was celebrated in New York for many years afterward. It's forgotten now, but it was a big deal at the time. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, this was the landmark case that ended up desegregating all of the trains and streetcars in New York City. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: Well then, during the Civil War, Arthur was a quartermaster general in New York, which means that he basically handled all logistics of feeding, clothing, arming a lot of the troops in New York state. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: A lot of administrative detail. Sort of an early exercise of his bureaucratic [skills]. DAVID FAHRENTHOLD: Right, the glories of bureaucracy. He was good at it, even early on. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, looking at this early story of Arthur, he actually seems pretty idealistic and principled. But during this time, he does seem to show also an increasingly persistent desire to gain money, to gain power. And this is sort of what brings him into working for big wigs in the Republican Party of New York at the time. And this is where we're going to turn to Michelle Krowl at the Library of Congress, who's going to paint a better picture for us of the personality of Chester Arthur. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'll ask you just my classic blind date question, which -- it's very interesting to see -- some listeners love the question and write to tell me how they love it, and other ones have certainly written to me to say that they think I should get rid of it. But you gave me the impression that you would have a very interesting answer to it, so I'm going to ask you what it would be like to go on a blind date with Chester Arthur -- beyond just how you feel about mutton chops. MICHELLE KROWL: Well, and actually, because of the question that you ask, I can't tell you how often I've been thinking about dating these presidents, which I had never thought of before. But Chester Arthur -- and it actually does play into his political career, so it's a legitimate question -- Chester Arthur would be a fantastic blind date. He would be a lousy husband, but he would be a fantastic blind date. And the reasons are -- and some of this sounds very superficial, I do understand -- but one thing, particularly when he was younger man, he was very handsome. I mean, I kind of like the mutton chops. Not that I would want to see them come back as a fad. But, as a younger man, Arthur had very dark, dark eyes and he was tall and a sturdy person. I mean, many people, if they even know who Chester Arthur is anymore or have an idea of what he looks like, [have an image of him from] later in life when he's got the mutton chops and he's sort of a larger man. But as a young man, he really is quite handsome, and he dresses well. He really likes the finer things in life. He likes to eat well, and he likes to dress well, and he likes his house to be nicely furnished. And he was somebody who liked to please people. He liked to get along with everybody. He wasn't radical in any way on that sense. So, he would he would be a very good person to court, you know. He would probably take you to a nice meal at Delmonico's and he would show up in a beautifully tailored suit, and he would have pleasing conversation. Everybody liked him. And so, that would all be fantastic. The reason he would be a lousy husband, or a less devoted husband or attentive husband -- and this is exactly what happened with his own wife – is, in his public career, he does all those those things I just talked about. He is a party operative. That is who Chester Arthur is. When he gets into the Republican Party, he is a party man. Not in the ‘woo hoo’ kind of party sense, but in the political party sense, which means he's at the Republican headquarters all the time and he's out with the people that he needs to wine and dine all the time. And so, he did love his wife Ellen, but he spent so much time being a good party man that he wasn't home. Particularly when he's collector of the Port of New York, that's part of what you Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 need to do when you're a political operative is to know who your constituency is, make them happy, be the person that gets along with everybody, and be good at it. And he was. So, the very qualities that would make him a really fantastic blind date make him a really fantastic political operative, which means he's never home to be a good husband. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, we heard a bit last week in the Garfield episode about how Arthur was the right-hand man to the New York senator and Republican Party boss Roscoe Conkling. So, what was their relationship like? MICHELLE KROWL: Conkling is a peacock. He's flamboyant and he's a good orator and he likes to be the center of attention. He's somebody that you notice.