Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [127]
To Americans in 1881, the principal danger their presidents faced was not physical attack but political corruption. With a determination that shocked even the most senior politicians, they turned their wrath on the spoils system, the political practice that had made Garfield the target of the delusional ambitions of a man like Guiteau. “We do not think we have taken up a newspaper during the last ten days which has not in some manner made the crime the product of ‘the spoils system,’ ” an article in the Nation had read soon after the shooting. “There has hardly been an allusion to it in the pulpit which has not pointed to the spoils system as the fons et origo mali. In fact, the crime seems to have acted on public opinion very like a spark on a powder-magazine. It has fallen on a mass of popular indignation all ready to explode.” With Garfield’s death, the cries of indignation reached such a fevered pitch that they could no longer be ignored.
Finally, civil service reform would find its most powerful advocate in the most unlikely of men—Chester Arthur. No man in the country owed more to the spoils system—or to its most powerful advocate, Roscoe Conkling—than Arthur. Since Garfield’s death, however, it had become strikingly apparent that Arthur was no longer the man Conkling had made. “He isn’t ‘Chet Arthur’ any more,” one of Conkling’s men mournfully said after he had taken office. “He’s the President.”
In his first official address as president, Arthur called for civil service reform. Just one year later, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. This act, named for the Ohio Senator who sponsored it, transformed government appointments from what men like Conkling and Guiteau believed them to be—gifts given at the pleasure of powerful officials to those who had been most useful to them—into positions won on the basis of merit. Pendleton had introduced the bill two years earlier, but Congress had ignored it. It took Garfield’s assassination, the resounding defeat in 1882 of several congressmen who had publicly opposed reform, and President Arthur’s support to finally make it law.
Conkling learned this too, when he visited Arthur in the White House soon after his inauguration. Now that Arthur was president, Conkling expected his protégé to redeem his reputation, and avenge his humiliating defeat at Garfield’s hands. He demanded that Arthur strip William Robertson of the collectorship of the New York Customs House, the appointment that had led to his disastrous decision to resign his Senate seat, and he expected to be made secretary of state. Blaine had resigned in December, writing to a friend that Garfield’s death was still a “fresh grief to me,” and Conkling relished the idea of taking up the powerful position from which his old enemy had limped away.
Arthur, however, to Conkling’s amazement, not only refused to do his bidding, but was offended by the assumption that he would. Conkling’s demands, he said angrily, were “outrageous.” Conkling, realizing that he was suddenly powerless to control a man who had for years been his most loyal minion, stormed out of the room, sick with rage and “swearing that all of his friends have turned traitor.” Even more than the loss of his Senate seat, this betrayal was, for Conkling, a staggering blow. “When I saw him afterwards,” his mistress, Kate Sprague, would later write to Arthur, “& saw how he was suffering, I urged his quitting Washington without delay. Friends who have seen him within a day or two, report him as very ill.”
Arthur