page_title: Presidency of Chester A. Arthur
section_title: Historical reputation
hierarchical_section_title: Presidency of Chester A. Arthur / Historical reputation
caption_attribution_description: English: US Postage stamp: Chester A. Arthur, Presidential Issue of 1938, 21c
context_page_description: The presidency of Chester A. Arthur began on September 19, 1881, when Arthur became the 21st President of the United States upon the assassination and death of President James A. Garfield, and ended on March 4, 1885. Arthur, a Republican, had been Vice President of the United States for only 199 days when he succeeded to the presidency. In ill health and lacking the full support of his party by the end of his term, Arthur made only a token effort for the Republican nomination in the 1884 presidential election. He was succeeded by Democrat Grover Cleveland.
  Garfield chose Arthur as his running mate in the 1880 United States presidential election due to the latter's association with the Republican Party's Stalwart faction, and Arthur struggled to overcome his reputation as a New York City machine politician. He embraced the cause of U.S. Civil Service Reform, and his advocacy and enforcement of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act became the centerpiece of his administration. Though patronage remained a powerful force in politics, the Pendleton Act laid the foundations for a professional civil service that would emerge in subsequent decades.
context_section_description: Arthur's tepid popularity in life carried over into his assessment by historians, and his reputation after leaving office disappeared. By 1935, historian George F. Howe said that Arthur had achieved "an obscurity in strange contrast to his significant part in American history." By 1975, however, Thomas C. Reeves would write that Arthur's "appointments, if unspectacular, were unusually sound; the corruption and scandal that dominated business and politics of the period did not tarnish his administration." As 2004 biographer Zachary Karabell wrote, although Arthur was "physically stretched and emotionally strained, he strove to do what was right for the country." Indeed, Howe had earlier surmised, "Arthur adopted [a code] for his own political behavior but subject to three restraints: he remained to everyone a man of his word; he kept scrupulously free from corrupt graft; he maintained a personal dignity, affable and genial though he might be. These restraints ... distinguished him sharply from the stereotype politician." In his final assessment of Arthur, Karabell argues that Arthur lacked the vision or force of character to achieve greatness, but that he deserves credit for presiding over a period of peace and prosperity.
  Polls of historians and political scientists have generally ranked Arthur as a below-average president. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Arthur as the 29th best president. A 2017 C-SPAN survey has Chester Arthur ranked among the bottom third of presidents of all time, right below Martin Van Buren and above Herbert Hoover. The survey asked 91 presidential historians to rank the 43 former presidents (including then-outgoing president Barack Obama) in various categories to come up with a composite score, resulting in an overall ranking. Arthur was ranked 35th among all former presidents (down from 32nd in 2009 and 2000). His rankings in the various categories of this most recent poll were as follows: public persuasion (37), crisis leadership (32), economic management (31), moral authority (35), international relations (35), administrative skills (28), relations with congress (29), vision/setting an agenda (34), pursued equal justice for all (27), performance with context of times (32).
caption: Arthur appears on the 21-cent U.S. Postage stamp of the 1938 Presidential Series.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2010:07:20 10:40:41", "Image ExifOffset": "110", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221"}