I think we have all seen his photo, but
I doubt if many of you have seriously gazed into the chubby self
satisfied face of President Chester A. Arthur and wondered what made
him such a clothes horse? You ought to. “Elegant Arthur” was a
vain, shallow, mutton chopped political hack who owned 80 pairs of
trousers, and who rarely wore the same pair twice. “Chet”, as
his friends liked to call the 6 foot 2 inch dandy raconteur, spent
more on hats annually than most Americans earned in a year. Chester
was a product of the spoils system. In six years as the Collector of
the Port of New York, with a salary of $6,500 a year, Chester amassed
a fortune of $3 million. And yet it was not his sticky fingers which
endangers his reputation to this day . It was his massive ego, which
inspired him to tell one little white lie . He fibbed about how old
he was.
Chester had never held elected office
before joining the Republican national ticket in 1880. He was the
choice of Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the Stalwarts, the
renamed Tammany Hall graft machine. In exchange for a promise to
get-out-the-vote in New York “Lord Roscoe” had forced James
Garfield to accept Chester as his Vice President. The Republicans
needed the help. During the campaign Democrats spread the rumor that
Chester had actually been born in Canada, and thus was not eligible
to serve as Vice President. Chester refused to even dignify the
charge with a response, even tho at least one Republican pol wondered
why Chester didn't just “say where he was born, and put an end to
all this mystery.”
It might have made a difference. Out of
4 million votes cast that November 8, 1880, Garfield and Chester
Arthur received just 1,898 more votes than Civil War hero Winfield
Scott Hancock and Indiana banker William English, running for the
Democrats. The close defeat was a bitter pill for Democrats to
swallow, and they stayed bitter. In mid-December, the New York Times
noted that a Democratic operative had arrived in St. Albans, Vermont,
investigating Chester's ancestry. The Democrats had tied this tract
before, claiming Chester had been born in Ireland. That smear fell
apart quickly, but evidently they were were not willing to let it go.
If Chester noticed that small item in the paper, and I bet he did, he
must have been more than a little nervous.
According to the Times, the operative's
name was Arthur P. Hinman. Shortly after the 1880 election members of the Democratic National
committee had walked into Hinman's offices at 14 Wall Street,
offering to pay his expenses to investigate the persistent rumors
that Vice President-elect Chester Arthur was not “a native born
citizen” as required by the Constitution. They had picked their man
well. Besides being a loyal Democrat, Hinman had written a poem
recently published in Harper’s Magazine. It began, "My back is to
the wall, My face is to my foes, That surge and gather around me,
Like waves that winter blows”. And it was this combative and
contentious bull dog who traveled to the town of St. Albans, 15
miles south of the Canadian border, and further, to the little
villages beyond, on both sides of the political line.
Interviewed by the Times in the
American Hotel at the corner of Main and Lake Streets, in St. Albans,
Himman claimed his investigation had uncovered that Chester A. Arthur
was actually, “born in Canada....that he was 50 years old in July
instead of October...and generally that he is an alien and ineligible
to the office of Vice-President.” It was hard to disprove the
allegation. Vermont did not begin recording and issuing birth
certificates until 1857. Yet, the tiny article, printed under the
headline “Material For a Democratic Lie”, caused barely a hiccup
back in Washington. After all Chester was just the vice president. He
did not matter.
Still it was just one more reason why,
after taking the oath in March of 1881, President Garfield had bared
Chester from even entering the White House. Garfield had decided on
civil service reform, doing away with the profitable spoils system,
and that meant figuratively castrating Senator Conkling and freezing
his “Stalwarts”, like Chester, out of the government. Then, on
July 2nd , President Garfield was shot in a Washington,
D.C. train station. As the deranged assassin was arrested he shouted,
"I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!”. In
September, 88 days later, Garfield died of blood poisoning Abruptly,
the charming but vapid Chester A. Arthur was President, and the
assassin had publicly tied the new POTUS to the murder.
And what happened next did not improve
the trouser snake's public image. Chester refused to occupy the
executive mansion until Lewis Comfort Tiffany had spent two months
and lots of public money redecorating it, with pomegranate plush
drapes and a floor to ceiling ornate wood and glass screen (above) jammed
into the main entrance hall. To complete the grotesque gilded age
transformation of a national monument, 24 wagon loads of historical
paintings, furniture and furnishings accumulated by Presidents John
Adams through Ulysses Grant were sold at auction. It was just one
more reason why a journalist would later write, “No man ever
entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester
Alan Arthur.”
The Democrats saw a quick opening, but
Hinman rushed his shot and he missed. His new conspiracy theory
presented in the fall and winter of 1881, was a repeat of what he had
told the Times, with a few more details. But again the story still fell
apart. This time there was the testimony of Chester Abell, the
doctor who delivered the future President. The boy was even named
after him. Dr. Abel insisted Chester had been born in Fairfield,
Vermont, about half way between St Albans and the Canadian border.
And although the father, William Arthur, had not become a naturalized
American citizen until 1843, there was no doubt that he married
Chester's mother Malvina in 1821, and she was blatantly American
born. Her grandfather had even fought in the American Revolutionary
Army, for crying out loud. So when Chester Arthur was born in October
of 1830, he was automatically an American citizen, like his mother,
no matter what his father's status. And once President Chester Arthur
began to crusade for the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, his
public image improved and most people forgot the Democratic smear. In
fact the public began to notice that Chester was just so likeable. It
even began to look as if he might even run for re-election. And that
meant that Arthur Hinman would be back.
Lawyer Hineman's third theory still
insisted that Chester had indeed been born in Canada. Malvina's
parents had lived in Dunham, Quebec for years, just 8 miles north of
the border. William and Malvina had met and eloped in Dunham. It
would have been natural, in the fall of 1830, for Malvina to seek
her mother's help in minding her four older children when it came
time to deliver Chester. And as for Dr. Abel's testimony, well, the
old man was just confused. See, Chester Alan Arthur had been born in
Dunham, Quebec, but in 1828. Then there had been another son, named
Chester Abel Arthur, born in 1830 in Fairfield, Vermont. That was the
baby Dr. Abel had remembered. But, said Hinman's research, Chester
Abel had died before his first birth day. And years later, when
applying to Union College in Schenectady New York, Chester Alan
Arthur had appropriated his dead brother's birth date and location,
making him an American citizen and qualifying him for student aid. It
was such a good story that Hinman put it all down in a book, “How A
British Subject Became President of the United States”, and in the
summer of 1884, with another Presidential election looming,
summarized it in an article he wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle
Newspaper.
It might have caught on. It might have
become a majestic conspiracy, like the rabbit Alice followed. And the
Democratic party might have fallen down that rabbit hole in the
election of 1884. The American people have always been drawn to
conspiracy theories, be it FDR sacrificing Pearl Harbor in 1941, or
the mob contracting the shoot John Kennedy in 1963, or the UN black
helicopters hiding in National Parks in the 1990's, or even
Hurricane Sandy winning the election for Obama in 2012. But reality
intervened in 1884 when President Chester Arthur fell ill and decided
not to run for re-election. And as quickly as that, Arthur Hinman
lost his livelihood. He had become irrelevant, the Donald Trump of
his age, leaving behind a brown smudge as his only contribution to
the historical record.
Chester Alan Arthur left the White
House in March of 1885 a very sick man. On November 16, 1886 he
ordered his son to burn all his personal papers, reducing to ashes
all the shady deals he had cut while a loyal Stalwart for Senator
Conkling. And then on November 18, he suffered a cerebral
hemorrhage, and died. Mark Twain, the man who had invented the title
“Gilded Age”, offered a powerful obituary; “It would hard
indeed to better President Arthur's administration”
After his work as a hatched man dried up, Arthur Hinman suffered the roller coaster life a political flunky, in with one administration, out wit the next. His law business fell off and his was forced to move his office to cheaper space at 644 Hancock street in Brooklyn. But then the worm turned again and by 1901 he was back at 375 Fulton Street, just blocks from City Hall in Manhattan. But he never lost his pugnaciousness. In October of 1904, the now aging lawyer got into a fist fight with an
undertaker, a Mr. Joseph P. Pouch. Hinman had represented Pouch's wife in their divorce case, and when the judge awarded her custody of their 7
year old child, Arthur Hinman offered to effect the transfer, to avoid
a confrontation. With any other lawyer that might have worked. But
Arthur was never one to suffer an insult. He belted Joe in the eye, and Joe pounded Himman in the face and head. Poor Joe got
arrested for contempt of court, and Mrs. Pouch got her child. And
Arthur Hinman got the fight he always relished. It was straight out of the final
stanza of his poem, where Arthur recalls his “life of
combat”; "I stand, poor speck of dust, Defiant, self reliant, To die
– if die I must.”
And the mystery of Chester Alan
Arthur's birth would not be finally be answered until 1949 when
Chester A. Arthur III donated the family bible to the New York Public
Library. And there, recorded in William Arthur's own handwritten are
listed, in order, the births of all nine of his children. The name of
the first male and fifth child is Chester Alan Arthur. But the birth
date is October 5, 1829. It was the same year William Arthur was
elected to the school board in Fairfield, Vermont. And all the great
mystery and drama compounded by politicians over the birth place of
President Chester Alan Arthur, boiled down to a vain man's vanity
about his age.
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