GENTLEMAN BOSS: THE LIFE OF CHESTER A. ARTHUR
by Thomas C. Reeves
ISBN 978-0-945707-03-5 $32.50
519 pages including bibliography, notes and index.
"Chet' Arthur President of the United States. Good God!"
was perhaps the most pithy contemporary reaction to the accession of the
twenty-first Chief Executive. It has certainly been the most enduring,
even though Arthur himself has remained an enigma - in large part because
this shrewd, secretive New Yorker saw to it that many of his private papers
were destroyed shortly before he died. Drawing on a wealth of newly
discovered documents, Thomas Reeves has now written the definitive, full-scale
biography of Arthur, revising our inconsistent assumptions about both him
and his era.
He gives us, for the first time, the unknown facts about
Arthur's early life: how, before he entered the boss-dominated Republican
Party under the tutelage of men like the notorious Roscoe Conklin, this
son of an itinerant minister was a model of ninteenth-century youthful idealism,
first as a beloved schoolteacher, then as a young lawyer directly involved
in the abolitionist struggle, and, finally, as a conscientious and honest
Quartermaster General for New York during the Civil War. Reeves assiduously
plots Arthur's consistently successful career as a master dealer in patronage
and electioneering, as a survivor among connivers - a career that culminated
in his nomination as James Garfield's Vice-President and, when Garfield
was assassinated, his own White House inauguration, in spite of the great
scandal attending his removal from the directorship of the New York Customhouse
and the revelation that Garfield's assassin claimed to be an Arthur supporter.
As Reeves makes abundantly clear, this spoilsman supreme,
who personified the worst gaudy excesses of the Gilded Age, administrated
the laws of the land honorably and even disinterestedly - to the chagrin
of his fellow bosses and henchmen. Attacked by both Republican friends
(the Stalwarts) and Republican foes (the Half Breeds) and weakened by the
fatal Bright's disease (a fact that was only made public by Reeves himself
in 1972), Arthur worked to eliminate extravagant government expenditures,
enacted and enforced civil service reform (thus undermining the basis of
his own public life), assisted in the birth of a modern navy, and initiated
an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy that set precedents for later
administrations. Above all, Reeves concludes, Arthur provided calm
and reassurance to a nation shocked by Garfield's murder and beset by recurrent
economic depression.
