We Must Not Be Enemies by Michael Austin

Author:Michael Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-02-19T15:11:39+00:00

Chester Arthur’s Road to Damascus

For most people, the name Chester A. Arthur will conjure up . . . nothing. Our twenty-first president is mainly remembered for not being remembered for anything. A 2014 study published in Science asked five hundred American adults to write down as many presidents as they could remember in five minutes. Arthur came in dead last, with only 6.7 percent of respondents able to remember his name.12 In a follow-up study in which participants were given names and asked which belonged to former presidents, Arthur again came in last, with only 46 percent of respondents identifying him correctly. The average participant in the study would have done better flipping a coin than trying to remember whether Chester A. Arthur had ever been president.13

The eminent forgettableness of Chester Arthur obscures the fact that he did one of the most memorable things of the nineteenth century: he reformed the civil service and ended the practice of political patronage. When Arthur became president in 1881, the US government employed nearly one hundred thousand of the nation’s fifty million people. Since the time of Andrew Jackson, the vast majority of these positions had been subject to the “spoils system,” through which the winner of each presidential election distributed patronage appointments to loyal supporters. By the time of the Civil War, members of Congress controlled most patronage appointments in their states, and this became the basis of their political power. All federal employees were assessed mandatory contributions to the party bosses who controlled their jobs.

The spoils system enshrined corruption. People needed to make contributions back to their patrons, and as long as they did, nobody looked too hard at where the money came from. Sometimes this involved illegal activities—Indian agents were notorious for selling items meant for Native tribes and keeping the profits. But there were also completely legal ways to augment civil service salaries. Customs inspectors, for example, could keep and sell a portion of any goods they found being smuggled into a US port. In this way, the head collector for the New York Customs House in the 1870s managed to earn $50,000 a year (more than $1 million in 2018). His name? Chester A. Arthur.

For years, Arthur was the poster child for an out-of-control patronage system. He lived lavishly on what should have been a modest salary. He rarely showed up for work before noon and spent every night socializing with wealthy New Yorkers and political donors. His patron and mentor, the powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling, controlled the largest political machine in the country. During Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, Conkling gained complete control over New York’s vast patronage network and used it to become the most powerful man in the nation’s most powerful state. Conkling was the king of patronage, and Chester Arthur was his loyal knight.

But the patronage system was not universally popular. By the time Grant took office, a movement had taken root within the Republican Party to move to a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service system.

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