Chester Arthur

• Vice President to:       James Garfield - Republican, from Ohio.
  
  
  • James Garfield served March - September of 1881. He died in 1881, after only 4 months in office, at the age of 50.
    
    
• Dates Served: Arthur served as Vice President from March - September 1881, then as President till 1885.
  
• Political Party: Arthur was a Republican, from New York.
  
• Born: 1829.
  
• Died: 1886, at the age of 57.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1880 campaign was:
  
  
  • General Winfield Scott Hancock - Democrat - Former Civil War General from Pennsylvania
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1880:
  
  
  • The issues were hard to pinpoint this year. There was little difference between the 2 candidates this time around, except for their views on tariffs, with the Republicans backing high ones to protect domestic industry and the Democrats backing lower ones since they relied on foreign trade more than the North. The Democrats ran a Civil War hero as their candidate and the Republicans ran a career politician as theirs. In spite of Garfield having been implicated in the the Credit Mobilier Scandal during Grant's Administration he managed to be marketed by his party as an honest man of experience, in contrast to a solider who knew nothing of the affairs of state. They also pulled out the treason charges against the Democrats again which, added to the support of businesses who naturally supported high tariffs and Labor groups who were suspicious of Hancock's anti-Labor views, gave Garfield the victory by a slim Popular Vote but a comfortable Electoral margin.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Chester Arthur:
  
  
  • Chester's sideburns were noteworthy, but nothing compared to Martin Van Buren's sideburns.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Chester wasn't a member of any particular church, but he did occasionally attend an Episcopal church while in Washington. His father had been a Baptist preacher, but Chester rarely commented on religious issues to anyone.
    
    
  • Chester was supposedly born in Vermont, but there were allegations that he was really born across the Vermont border in Canada and therefore was disqualified from serving as Vice President or President, due to his foreign status. Chester denied this, and no proof of the allegation has ever been produced.
    
    
  • While attending Union College he once stole the school bell and dumped it in the Erie Canal. Chester was a prankster.
    
    
  • He was a lawyer, and began his political career by joining the executive committee of New York City Republicans in 1867, and being promoted to its chairman the following year.
    
    
  • He was appointed Collector for the Port of New York by President Grant, serving from 1871 - 1878. He then returned to his law practice for the next three years.
    
    
  • Chester was a snappy dresser. He owned 80 pairs of pants and changed clothes three times a day. He was the Imelda Marcos of his day.
    
    
  • Chester was nominated Vice President to run with James Garfield in 1881 to appease party conservatives who were uneasy about "Boatman Jim" Garfield, since he had been nominated as a compromise candidate when none of the others (including General Grant who had been trying for a third term) could manage to get a majority vote.
    
    
  • When told of his nomination, Chester supposedly said, "Vice President is higher than I ever expected to rise". He was soon to rise even higher.
    
    
  • James Garfield was assassinated 4 months after being inaugurated, by a supporter who had been denied a low-level political job. Garfield lingered for two months, before dying in September.
    
    
  • Chester had the first elevator installed in the White House.
    
    
  • Anticipating the modern fascination with every trivial detail of the President's life, Chester once had this to say to a group of Temperance activists who showed up at the White House one day, "I may be President of the United States but my private life is my own damned business!".
    
    
  • Chester died one year after leaving office, from Bright's Disease, a then-fatal kidney-disease. Prior to his death, Chester destroyed all of his personal papers. No Presidential Library for him.
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• The Star Route scandal, in March 1881. One week into Garfield's presidential term it was learned that mail route contracts were being awarded through shady backroom deals. Garfield ordered an investigation which turned up bribery within his own party. Several government officials were implicated, but no one was ever convicted.
  
  
• On July 2, 1881, President Garfield was shot twice at close range while walking through a train station in Washington DC. His assassin was a man named Charles Guiteau, age 39, who was upset at having been turned down for a low-level job at the White House he had applied for. Garfield was hit in the pancreas and would have survived, but his doctors operated on him 3 times to search for the bullet, which they never found, and since doctors didn't use sterilized instruments in the 1880's, their grubby fingers induced blood poisoning, which was the cause of death 2 months later. His assassin was hung in June the following year.
  
  

Notable events during his completion of Garfield's Presidential term:

• Billy the Kid is killed by a sheriff in New Mexico on July 14, 1881, after the Kid had killed 27 men. Age 21.
  
  
• The shootout at the OK Corral, on October 26, 1881. In Tombstone, Arizona, the US Marshall, Wyatt Earp had come to town with three deputies and Doc Holiday to lay down the law. They faced off against members of the Clanton gang who were openly violating a local ban on firearms within the town limits. They met in a coral in the middle of town and shot it out for about 10 seconds. When the dust settled, three members of the Clanton gang were dead but only one of the Earp deputies was slightly injured. Months of retribution shootings resulted, and President Arthur responded by dispatching soldiers to Tombstone and similar Western mining towns to re-establish law and order. This was the beginning of the end of the mythical Wild West, with the long arm of the law finally reaching the most remote of desert towns.
  
  
• The Electric Chair is invented in 1881 by a dentist (naturally) named Alfred Southwick of Buffalo, New York. He got the idea from seeing a man accidentally fall against an electrical transformer that powered New York City's street lights, being killed instantly and, apparently, painlessly. The dentist created a few prototypes and tested them out on a few unsuspecting animals. Soon he perfected his dentist's dream and presented it to the New York Legislature for use as a humane form of Capital Punishment. The City adopted his dental chair of death in 1888, ironically involving Thomas Edison in the debate over the Death Penalty.
  
  At the time, Edison was battling George Westinghouse over the merits of Direct Current electricity vs. Alternating Current. Edison argued that his Direct Current method was safer than Westinghouse's Alternating Current, and Edison lobbied the New York Legislature to adopt Westinghouse's AC method for use in the Electric Chair, to dramatize it's lethal potential, thereby supposedly driving public opinion away from it and making Edison's DC method the standard. Edison even coined the term "electrocution" to illustrate how dangerous Westinghouse's AC electricity was. But his ploy didn't work. Alternating Current became the eventual standard for consumer electricity, despite it's dangers, with Direct Current being used mainly for industrial purposes.
  
  
• Jesse James is killed in Missouri on April 3, 1882, while hanging a picture-frame on a wall, shot in the back by one of his own gang. Age 35.
  
  
• The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration for the next 10 years, and forbade US courts from granting citizenship to any Chinese people currently living in the US. President Arthur vetoed the legislation, but Congress over-rode his veto. The Act was eventually repealed 61 years later, in 1943.
  
  
• Pendleton Act, in 1883, which created the Civil Service system. As a result of Garfield's assassination the old nepotistic system of rewarding campaign supporters with government jobs was replaced by a more formal process of applying for a government job, being interviewed, and having qualifications checked. It also banned the common practice of demanding political contributions from civil servants. Garfield, a product of the old system, angered a lot of old cronies by supporting it prior to his death, but his assassination made it unavoidable, and long over-due.