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 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 (above), boss of the Stalwarts - the renamed Tammany Hall graft machine.
The Republicans needed the help. During the campaign Democrats spread the rumor that Chester Arthur had actually been born in Ireland , and thus was not eligible to serve as Vice President. Candidate Arthur refused to even dignify the charge with a response, even though at least one Republican politician wondered why Chester didn't just “say where he was born, and put an end to all this mystery.”
King Roscoe's help made all the difference. Out of 4 million votes cast that Tuesday, 8 November, 1880, Garfield and Chester Arthur received just 1,898 more votes than Civil War hero Winfield Scott Hancock and Indiana banker William English. It was a bitter pill for the Democrats to swallow. But if Garfield was President, he was firmly in the pocket of the senior Senator from New York.
They had picked their man well. He was a loyal Democrat with a flexible moral compass. Hinman was just scrapping by as a lawyer with offices at 14 Wall Street. But he saw himself as a noble warrior, and was given to writing poetry. Recently he had even been published in the Harper’s Magazine. That poem 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 this was the combative and contentious romantic bull dog who set up shop in the town of St. Albans, 15 miles south of the Canadian border. 
Interviewed by the Times in the American Hotel at the corner of Main and Lake Streets, 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 would prove hard to disprove the allegation. Vermont did not begin recording and issuing birth certificates until 1857 - 28 years and a month after Arthur's birth. 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 Arthur from even entering the White House. Garfield had decided on civil service reform, doing away with the profitable spoils system. Then, on 2 July , in a Washington, D.C. train station, President Garfield was gunned down. In September, 88 days later, Garfield died of blood poisoning, and abruptly, the charming but vapid Chester A. Arthur was President, and the assassin had publicly tied the new POTUS to the murder.
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 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 tiny Fairfield, Vermont, about half way between St Albans and the Canadian border.
And although the father, William Arthur (above), had not become a naturalized American citizen until 1843, there was no doubt Chester's mother, Malvina, born in 1821, was blatantly American born.
Malvina's (above) grandfather had 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 was a nice little story. See, Malvina's parents had lived for years just 8 miles over the border, in Dunham, Quebec. William and Malvina had met and eloped in Dunham.
So it would have perfectly natural for Malvina to seek her mother's help in minding her four older children when it came time to deliver Chester (above) in the fall of 1830. And as for Dr. Abel's testimony, well, the old man was just confused. See, two years earlier, in 1828, there had been another son, named Chester Abel Arthur, born in Fairfield, Vermont. That 1828 baby was the child Dr. Abel had remembered. That baby had died before his first birth day. There was no record of the 1828 birth, or the 1828 death. Bu then there was no record of Arthur's 1830 birth either, not in Vermont or Canada. But, said Hinman, that was the way it had happened.
Years later, when applying to Union College in Schenectady New York, young Chester Alan Arthur (above) 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”, which Democratic publishers were happy to release in the summer of 1884, with another Presidential election approaching. That same year, with the popular Arthur likely to be on the ballot, the new theory was summarized in an article Hineman wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper. And that got reprinted all over the country.
It might have caught on. It might have become a majestic conspiracy theory, like the rabbit Alice followed, or a million other myths created by political hacks. 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 Lee Harvey Oswald's claim he was a patsy in November of 1963, or the black helicopters hiding in National Parks in the 1990's, or even Donald Trump's malicious lie about a stolen election. 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 Jeb Bush 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 16 November, 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 18 November, 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 of a political flunky, in with one administration, out with the next. His law business fell off and his was forced to move 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 Hinman 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.” Well, hell, we all must.
And the mystery of Chester Alan Arthur's birth would not be finally be answered until 1949 when Chester A. Arthur's great-grandson donated the family bible to the New York Public Library. And there, recorded in the handwriting of the President's father, William Arthur, are listed in order, the births of all nine of his children. The name of the first male and fifth child is indeed 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. He want to appear a year younger than he actually was. Simple, and foolish. But human.
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