The American Vice Presidency (34 page)

But upon election, the reform-minded Hayes, well aware of allegations of payroll padding and other corruption at the customhouse, ordered an investigation of it. Among the allegations against Arthur and other “spoilsmen” were demands of salary kickbacks of from 2 to 6 percent to the Republican Party and as much as fifty thousand dollars a year in port fees siphoned off for the collector himself, about as much as the president’s annual salary at the time.
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The
New York Times
, however, at first defended Arthur, saying that while the customhouse was “the most investigated place in the country,” it had “come out from each ordeal without a single breath of allegation against its head.”
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Hayes instituted a civil-service merit system that angered both Arthur and Conkling, and Arthur was obliged to testify before a commission created by Hayes. He repeatedly insisted that although he was under great pressure to hire political friends he had given jobs only to qualified
applicants. Hayes meanwhile forbade all federal workers from participating in political campaigns and other activities, a blow aimed at the heart of the Conkling organization.

Hayes eventually called for the resignations of Arthur and two Conkling men, and when Hayes nominated two replacements for them, Conkling led the Senate in refusing to confirm the men. Ultimately, however, they were replaced in what the editor E. L. Godkin called “an effective blow struck at what [was] worst in the present system” and at Conkling and his machine.
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The bitterness continued through Hayes’s presidency, and when Hayes decided not to seek a second term, and Grant, fresh from a long European tour, expressed interest again in a third presidential term, Conkling immediately took charge, along with Arthur.

At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, they stood firm through thirty-four ballots, until a longshot, the freshman senator James A. Garfield, made a stirring speech, and some New York delegates, in defiance of Conkling, switched to him on the thirty-fifth ballot, securing his nomination. As a gesture of conciliation, Conkling was offered the right to name Garfield’s running mate. Arthur, learning of the offer, approached Conkling, who told him Garfield was certain to lose and advised him to forget about it. Arthur was overheard by a reporter replying, “The office of vice president is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining. A barren nomination would be a great honor. In a calmer moment you will look at this differently.” But Conkling snapped back, “If you wish for my favor and respect, you will contemptuously decline it.” Arthur’s reply, according to another bystander, was: “Such an honor and opportunity comes to very few of the millions of Americans, and to that man but once. No man can refuse it, and I will not.” Whereupon Conkling turned and stalked from the room.
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Garfield meanwhile had just offered the vice presidential nomination to another New Yorker and friend, Congressman Levi P. Morton, a wealthy and prominent banker. Morton also consulted with Conkling and decided he would turn down the offer, easing the dilemma. Arthur’s name went before the convention, and he was nominated on the first ballot, so little did the delegates think of his troubles at the New York customhouse.

On the Democratic side, the former Union general Winfield S. Scott was nominated for the presidency with the former congressman William H.
English of Indiana as his running mate. In August, Garfield swallowed his pride and went to New York to make peace with Conkling, but the New York Republican boss would not meet with him. Many reformers in the state also held their noses at having Arthur on the ticket. E. L. Godkin, the editor of the
Nation
magazine, wrote derisively of Arthur’s nomination: “There is no place in which his powers of mischief will be so small as in the vice presidency.” With Garfield only forty-eight years old and in robust health, Godkin added that the chances of Arthur being called to the presidency was a “too unlikely contingency to be making extraordinary provision for.”
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At the White House, Hayes noncommittally called the nomination of Garfield “the best that was possible,” but he was not so charitable about the selection of Garfield’s running mate. “The sop thrown to Conkling in the nomination of Arthur,” he growled, “only serves to emphasize the completeness of his defeat. He was so crushed that it was from sheer sympathy that this one was thrown to him.”
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Sympathy, however, was something seldom extended to the spiteful and combative Conkling; the gesture obviously was extended more out of fear about what wrath the vituperative party leader might impose on the Garfield campaign if completely ignored.

In the fall electioneering that followed, all the nominees stayed off the campaign trail and limited themselves to writing letters of acceptance that essentially endorsed their parties’ platforms. Arthur, apparently to counter his record as New York customhouse collector, made a point of noting that he favored continued civil service reform. But one of his principal points was a slap at his own removal as collector: “The tenure of office should be stable.”
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Garfield, in a new campaign phenomenon, greeted hosts of daily callers from the front porch of his farmhouse in Mentor, Ohio.

Instead of campaigning, Arthur, now the state Republican Party chairman, immersed himself in the campaign’s details, personally scheduling and overseeing the travels of Grant and Conkling in New York and the Midwest. Arthur assessed “voluntary contributions” from federal and state workers in great amounts in much the same way he had done as the customhouse collector. Garfield and Arthur carried New York State, and in the largest turnout of qualified voters in the nation’s history, 76.4 percent, they were elected over Hancock and English.

After the inauguration, Arthur, with his long experience as an effective
“spoilsman” in New York, hoped and expected to have a major say in the distribution of patronage, especially to the Empire State. But Garfield made clear from the first: “I will not tolerate nor act upon any understanding that anything has been pledged to any party, state or individual.”
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When Conkling, rebuffed over several Garfield decisions, turned to his old political subordinate Arthur, he found the new vice president ill-positioned to be of much help.

In mid-March, Conkling was summoned to the White House, where Garfield told him he was willing to make several New York appointments involving Conkling men, but not to the lucrative customhouse post once held by Arthur. Two days later the names of five Conkling men were sent to the Senate, but none for a cabinet post. Worse for Conkling, Garfield made an appointment that the
New York Herald
deemed a direct slap at Conkling, putting in the New York customhouse “a sharp politician … who [would] know how to work it for all it is worth against Conkling.”
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Demonstrating where his loyalty rested, Arthur went to the White House at one point to urge Garfield to pull the offending job offer, but to no avail. Instead the president, determined to establish his primacy, withdrew the nominations of the five Conkling men. Conkling and Tom Platt, New York’s other U.S. senator, were outraged and submitted their resignations to Arthur in the presiding officer’s chair, sending the chamber into an uproar.

Conkling and Platt returned to Albany to push for their speedy reelection as a further demonstration of their political strength at home and that their fight with Garfield was not over. Vice President Arthur also returned to Albany to aid his old political colleagues. The
New-York Tribune
warned: “If General Arthur does not desire four years of public contempt he would do well to desist from the business in which he is now engaged before his inexcusable indiscretion becomes a National scandal.… The moral of his performances is that we must not expect to change a man’s nature by electing him to the Vice-Presidency.”
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The fight over the reelection bids of Conkling and Platt droned on for more than seven weeks, with no resolution. All this time, Arthur put his vice presidency on the back burner as he stayed at Conkling’s side in Albany, returning to Washington only on weekends. On July 1, Platt suddenly dropped his bid for Senate reelection, after a Republican foe on a
stepladder peered through an open transom of a hotel room and caught him in bed with a woman who was not his wife. The story swept through Albany and beyond, but Conkling and Arthur held firm.
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That same morning at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, President Garfield strolled in with Secretary of State James Blaine on his arm. The president was en route to the commencement exercises at his alma mater, Williams College, in central Massachusetts, and then on to a vacation with his family. Already aboard the train were four other cabinet members and their wives, awaiting Garfield and Blaine. Suddenly a short and scrubby-looking man with a dark brown beard appeared behind them, drew a revolver and shot Garfield in the back. As the president fell, the attacker fled, but a District of Columbia policeman who had heard the shots ran down the man in the station’s reception room and arrested him. “All right,” the man said quietly. “I did it and will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.”
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The assailant was identified as Charles Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced government job seeker with grandiose ideas about obtaining a diplomatic post. The forty-eight-year-old assailant knew neither Garfield nor Arthur but had sent Garfield letters expressing interest in working in Vienna or Paris, and after the election was given to hanging around the State Department, where Blaine once encountered him and told him to stop making a pest of himself. When caught, police found on him a letter dated that day in which he had written that he bore “no ill will toward the President … [but] his death was a political necessity.”
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Garfield in fact was still alive, but severely wounded.

In another letter to Arthur, Guiteau informed him of what he had done, assuming Garfield was dead, and offered recommendations for a new cabinet. There was some immediate speculation, soon ended, that Arthur might have been involved in a plot. In any event, his qualifications to assume the presidency immediately came under editorial fire. The
New York Times
declared, “Active politicians, uncompromising partisans, have held before now the office of the Vice President of the United States, but no holder of that office has ever made it so plainly subordinate to his self-interest as a politician and his narrowness as a partisan.”
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Twice after hearing the news, Arthur went to the White House inquiring about Garfield’s condition but was not told.

Through all this, Conkling clung to his effort in Albany to be reelected to the Senate. When the Conkling forces finally went down to defeat in late July, some of his old Stalwarts called on him at his Fifth Avenue Hotel suite to commiserate, but Chester Arthur was not among them now. By this time Garfield’s condition had seriously deteriorated, and the vice president secluded himself in his home in New York, where no word was passed to him about the prospect of having to assume presidential responsibilities. At August’s end, Blaine proposed to the cabinet that Arthur be called to Washington to take over the presidential duties, inasmuch as the Constitution said only that the “Powers and Duties” of the presidency were to “devolve” to the vice president “until the disability [of the president] be removed.” But Arthur declined even to rush to Washington. The end for Garfield finally came on September 19, and a state supreme court judge was produced to swear Arthur in as the twenty-first president.

His ascendancy was marked by considerable apprehension, in light of his checkered career as a close ally of Conkling, even to the point of breaking with Garfield in their notorious clash over federal patronage to New York. Governor Charles Foster of Ohio put the matter as optimistically as possible in predicting, “The people and the politicians will find that Vice President Arthur and President Arthur are different men.”
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Arthur’s vice presidency had lasted only six months, and the shock of his elevation, as well the springing of a flood of hopeful goodwill from the country, seemed to sober him to his new responsibility. He was advised by friends to keep Garfield’s cabinet for a time if only for the appearance of continuity, but many expected, and many others feared, that he would bring Conkling into his inner circle. The new president asked all cabinet members to stay on at least until the next session of Congress in December, and all did. In mid-October, however, Blaine asked to be allowed to resign, as friends urged him to prepare to make another presidential bid in 1884.

Conkling, still nursing his political wounds and hatred of Blaine, made clear his desire to replace his old enemy as secretary of state. But Arthur was well aware by now that such a move would be seen widely as turning his new administration over to his old political chieftain. Conkling himself called on the new president, offering to serve in his cabinet and presenting him with federal patronage demands for New York, the foremost of which was removal of Garfield’s choice as collector of the New York customhouse.

Conkling, rebuffed, left in renewed anger. Other Conkling machine Stalwarts were invited to sumptuous White House receptions and dinners, but there was no rush to give them positions as had been widely expected. One old machine friend, John O’Brien, observed, “He isn’t Chet Arthur any more, he’s the president.”
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Arthur did, however, retain some sense of obligation toward Conkling. In February 1882, he sent his old political boss’s name to the Senate to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, but Conkling rejected it and retired from public life. During this time, Garfield’s assassin was tried for murder and convicted. An appeal to Arthur to intervene on the grounds of insanity was rejected, and Guiteau was hanged.

In the congressional elections of 1882, continued allegations of government corruption contributed to Republican loss of the House and a narrower majority in the Senate. To the amusement of many, Arthur, the old Conkling political spoils man, in his first annual address to Congress embraced Garfield’s call for civil service reform, including competitive tests for government jobs based on the British system. In January 1883, Congress passed and Arthur signed an act establishing the bipartisan Civil Service Commission, following the lead laid down by Garfield.