A President’s Day Salute to Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President who Put Country over Party and Drained a Real (Metaphorical) Swamp

For most people, the name Chester A. Arthur will conjure up . . . well, 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.

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.

The eminent forgettableness of Chester Arthur obscures the fact that he did one of the most memorable, and indisputably positive things that any politician did in the nineteenth century. And he had to take on his own party to do it. Arthur reformed the civil service and ended the long-standing practice of political patronage.

When Arthur became president in 1881, the US government employed nearly one hundred thousand of the…