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Book Review: Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves

There are two things that stand out for me as amazing about Thomas C. Reeves' wonderful biography of the 21st President of the United States entitled Gentleman Boss: The Life and Times of Chester Alan Arthur. The first is the incredible handicap that the author is able to overcome so well. While on his deathbed, Chester A. Arthur ordered the destruction of many of his personal papers, making much about the life of this lesser known president permanently hidden. Reeves is over to work around this problem through an incredible amount of research which included tracking down his subject's descendants, and conducting a painstaking review of some of Arthur's papers at the Library of Congress both while as President and when he held the prestigious post of Collector at the New York Customs House, as well as combing through a variety of other sources.



The second incredible feature of this biography is the remarkable objectivity and honesty with which Reeves writes about his subject. He succumbs neither to hero worship, fawning, adulation nor a berating of his subject for Arthur's short-comings. Reeves tells it like it was. When Arthur deserves credit, credit is given, and when Arthur is deserving of criticism, Reeves lets him have it. This is especially important for a subject like Chester A. Arthur, who is both naughty and nice.

Arthur presents a complicated study in transition and transformation. He begins life as the son of an abolitionist preacher and becomes a lawyer defending the civil rights of African-Americans long before the obvious merit of such behaviour becomes apparent to most Americans. Arthur becomes the ultimate machine politician, a "spoilsman" who is a key cog in a system that rewards his faction with civil service positions not because of merit, but because of political allegiance. Those rewarded are then used to become a source of financing that political machine as part of a corrupt political way of life that was common-place in the "guilded age." Arthur demonstrates that he is more than a political hack when he goes against the direction of his political master, Senator Roscoe Conkling, biting the hand that fed him to accept a position as Vice-Presidential nominee on the 1880 Republican Party ticket with James Garfield.

When Garfield is elected as President and is later felled by an assassin's bullet, Arthur becomes President amid skepticism about his honesty and his loyalty to the more unsavoury factions of his party. Reeves tells us how Arthur went on to confound his critics, taking principled stances on a number of important issues. The biggest irony is how the former spoilsman and party boss presided over the most sweeping civil service reforms of his generation.

Through thorough research, Reeves is able to explain many of Arthur's seeming contradictions, the most glaring of which is how Arthur managed to seem diligent and conscientious at times, while concurrently appearing lazy and disinterested. Reeves writes an interesting account of many of the issues of the day, domestic and international, including maintaining the peace while negotiating touchy issues in Latin America, tariff and monetary policy, native American policy, building a strong navy and reforming the civil service as a meritocracy. On some of these issues, the explanations are pedantic and tedious, but Reeves always explains the competing interests required to be balanced, as well as the actors involved on each side of the issues. We come to admire Arthur for the way that he is often on the moral side of many of these issues, while dealing with a Congress whose members march to the drummers that tap out the beat that will more likely lead to their re-election.

Reeves writes a book not only about Chester Arthur, but also about the other major political and economic personalities of the day, including James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, Alonzo Cornell, James Garfield, Ulysses Grant, and many others. He has a wonderful way of writing about the political chess games and backroom strategies and manipulation that take place. The intelligence and tremendous work ethic of the author make for a fascinating read.



Reeves is able to take a lesser known president like Chester Arthur and provide the reader with a front row seat to view the politicking, the presidential decision making and the complexity of the times. Reeves makes a strong case for his conclusion that Arthur was a good president trying to govern in difficult times. In the course of doing so, Thomas Reeves proves himself to be an excellent historian and author who is able to produce a very good book about a very challenging subject.
Tags: book review, chester alan arthur, james g. blaine, james garfield, presidential bios, ulysses s. grant
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