How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (19 page)

Every president that’s been discussed so far, and (spoiler alert) every president that is going to be discussed, was a very specific kind of crazy, a craziness cocktail made up of ego, passion, and ambition. Despite the craziness, however, the men and other men who have served our country were good people or, failing that, doing what they thought was best. Some were misguided and some were corrupted by their friends, but they all genuinely seemed to at least
try
to help the country.

Only one president in this book was a supervillain. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester A. Arthur, the Lex Luthor of the American Presidency.

To understand what kind of man Arthur was, we need to understand what America was like in the 1860s. The presidency was an obvious and showy position of power; everyone saw the prestige inherent in it, and everyone knew how influential and important the
president was. But some men, some dangerously ambitious men, saw a
similar
position in the 1800s, a position that also had a ton of power, but that received none of the scrutiny, none of the checks, none of the balances that presidents faced.

After the Civil War, the political conversation behind closed doors was less about the two established parties, and more about the “political machines” that ran these parties. These machines picked candidates, they financially backed candidates, and then they either bought or stole elections. They were the power
behind
the power, and New York had the biggest and most controversial machine of all.

The New York Custom House was where the government collected tariff revenues on the majority of goods imported into the United States, and it was run by just three officials. Each was powerful, but one of these officials, the Collector, was more powerful than the others. The Collector was paid more money than almost every other elected official (including the president of the United States). The Collector had the power to hire whomever he wanted. And not just a small team; the average Collector had power over one thousand jobs, and he had the ability to fire these people whenever he wanted, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. The Collector’s employees were
dependent
on him, so they all jumped at the chance when he asked them for favors, almost always in the form of political contributions toward the campaign of whomever the New York Custom House decided to back in a given election. Because he had so much campaign money and a ton of potential campaign workers, presidential candidates were
also
fairly dependent on the Collector. There’s a lot of power and money and prestige behind this position but very little accountability, and it always attracted the kind of people who wanted power more than anything else in life (historically, a cartoonishly evil sort of person).

People vote, but the Collector was one of the only people in history who could actually
make
someone president. So Chester A. Arthur wanted to be the Collector.

To secure that job, Arthur made sure he was always making the right friends, shaking the right hands, and doing errands for the right
party bosses, many of which involved breaking the law. Arthur did it and he did it with a smile. Pick any random party boss from the mid to late 1800s who, thanks to the watchful eye of history, has been exposed as a corrupt tinkerer in the big political machine, and I guarantee you, you’ll find a quote from that boss praising Chester A. Arthur.

Arthur was spending so much time away from his family in his pursuit of this job that his wife, fed up with the late nights and the time away from home, decided she was going to leave him in 1880. Before she got a chance to leave, she abruptly got sick and passed away. The historical records show that she got pneumonia and died, and that’s probably what happened. I’m not officially saying that Chester A. Arthur, like some menacing Michael Corleone-esque, cold-blooded, power-hungry monster, killed his own wife when she interfered with his plans, but I
am
pretending he did for the sake of making this chapter more interesting.

Eventually, after enough wheel-greasing, glad-handing, and deal-making, Arthur got his dream job. The Custom House was being investigated for corruption and accusations of patronage and general awfulness, so the party bosses who relied on it wanted to hire someone who would seem honest and trustworthy to an outside observer to help them weather this investigative storm. Arthur was the natural choice.

Arthur did a great job. He sat at the top of the New York Custom House as Collector, greasing the wheels of the political machine and fattening his own pockets with kickback after kickback, and dealing with the outside investigation the whole time. One investigation made it clear that Arthur had forced an import company to pay a $270,000 fine (even though they were only
legally
required to pay $7,000), but even as these and other scandals surfaced, Arthur was reappointed by then-president Grant, because even the
president
was mostly powerless against the machines.

Well, not
all
presidents. Once Grant was gone and Rutherford B. Hayes stepped in, he started shooting this Custom House–patronage–political machine bullshit right to hell. He personally fired Arthur, who retired in disgrace among scandal and corruption.

Oh, wait, no, he became president. Scratch that; he took a pay and power cut and
settled
for being president. First, he became the Republican nominee for vice president under James Garfield. No one would have thought that Arthur could have been a good VP (he was a shitty, proven scoundrel who according to at least one super-great book that you’re reading right now totally killed his wife), but he still got the job, because his ambition, as it always had in the past, won out. It’s important to note that he didn’t want the vice presidency so he could do any real good; he wanted a position that commanded a great deal of respect but required very little work, and the vice presidency had that written all over it. John Adams, the first vice president in history, hated the job because it was a waste of time and carried no real responsibilities; no one
wants
that job, except Arthur, because of the
prestige
. So he, more than anyone else in history,
campaigned
to be VP. He again shook the right hands and smiled his big smile at
the right people until he swooped in and took the nomination away from Garfield’s first choice, a personal friend.

He did it in a single day. It all happened behind closed doors and with a lot of shady whispers and presumably slimy handshakes, so we’ll never know exactly how Arthur, a proven con man, talked his way into the nomination; we just know that he did it in twenty-four hours.

Then Garfield died and Arthur—who, again, only became the vice president to cash a paycheck and get back the respect he’d lost in his disgraceful exit from his beloved Collector position—was suddenly the president.

Now here is the craziest part. As president, Chester A. Arthur was
actually pretty decent
. He immediately started reforming the corrupt political-machine system, the one that had made him so powerful in the first place, and launched a series of investigations and supported a bunch of laws that would ultimately render these machines powerless. He did a lot to fight corruption and did a ton for civil service reform. He’s actually like a smarter Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor’s flaw, and the flaw of almost every other supervillain, is that they crave power
too
much and don’t know how to quit when they’re ahead. If we made Luthor president, he’d just try to use that power to become president of the world and then universe and never stop until a Superman stood up and took him down. Arthur, on the other hand, realized he was ahead, so cashed in his chips and left the table. He covered his ass by defanging the corrupt people that could potentially manipulate him as president, and then he just walked away.

Even though his legacy as president is mostly positive, never forget just how manipulative and devious Chester A. Arthur can be when he wants something. If Andrew Jackson was crazy because he overdid the “passion” part of the passion-ego-ambition cocktail that all presidents drink, then Arthur is dangerous because he got drunk on ambition. He worked his way up in the political machine to get the position that carried the most power and pulled in the most money, and he used it for everything it was worth, down to the very last drop. When that no longer suited him, he set himself up in the
vice presidency, because once he’d gotten a taste for privilege and respect, he wouldn’t be satisfied with anything else. And then he became president, and as soon as he realized there was nothing else the political machine could do for him, he worked diligently to shut it
down
. He’s cunning. He’s wily. He’s a super-smart supervillain whom I’ve (obviously) dubbed “The Collector,” and you need to watch your back around him.

A childhood friend of the twenty-first president of the United States has a story about Arthur: “When Chester was a boy, you might see him … watching the boys building a mud dam across the rivulet in the roadway … Pretty soon, he would be ordering this one to bring stones, another sticks, and others sod and mud to finish the dam; and they would all do his bidding without question. But he took good care not to
get any of the dirt on his hands
.” This means there’s a chance that he’ll get a bunch of brutes to fight his battle
for
him, but it also means that his lack of dirt-touching experience will make him weak, and squeamish, so you’ll have an advantage if you actually
do
get close enough to hit him. If you want an extra edge, maybe cover yourself in dirt before the match.