9/7/23
Newsletter #451
The Crack of Dawn
We’ve had one U.S. president from Michigan — Gerald R. Ford. The only problem with that statement is that he wasn’t born in Michigan, he was not elected, and his name wasn’t really Gerald R. Ford. His name was really Leslie Lynch King Jr. Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the hometown of his father, Leslie Lynch King Sr. Three days after the boy was born, his father took a butcher knife and attempted to kill his mother, the nursemaid and the newborn infant. His mother immediately left his father, moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, married a man named Gerald Rudolff Ford, who gave the child his name and helped raise him. Gerald Ford ended up as Richard Nixon’s second vice-president after his first, Spiro Agnew, was indicted for tax evasion. Ford pardoned Nixon before he was indicted for the Watergate burglaries. Ford served the remainder of Nixon’s second term and was not reelected. Here in Michigan, we are as proud of Gerald Ford as we can be.
Directly south of Michigan is Ohio, nicknamed, “The mother of presidents.” So far, eight presidents have come from Ohio, but it’s not a particularly glorious list. The first was William Henry Harrison, the “Hero of Tippecanoe,” a battle in 1811 with the Shawnee Indians, led by Chief Tecumseh. In 1811 white people didn’t win many battles with Indians, so it was a big deal. Harrison ran for president with a military pal with whom he’d fought named John Tyler, and their slogan was, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” William Henry Harrison was the ninth president. He famously did not wear his overcoat to his extremely cold inauguration, caught pneumonia and died 31 days later. Harrison wins for the shortest presidency at 31 days.
OK, the seven others were: Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Taft, and Warren G. Harding. Ulysses Grant was both a great general and a great president, but the seven others were mediocre to bad, to the shortest, to the second shortest.
The second shortest was James Garfield, who was the 20th president. He was shot five months into his presidency, then during a severely hot summer, died a slow, miserable, medically mishandled, death. The incompetent doctor actually lost surgical tools within him. James Garfield died of sepsis on September 19, 1881.
That was all a preface to where this idea began two hours ago.
Also, on the same day Garfield died, Sept. 19, 1881, Vice-President Chester A. Arthur became the 21st President of the United States.
Chester A. Arthur was the personification of a “Party Man,” and was a cartoon character used for carrying bulging bags covered with $ signs. In the 1880s he was a man who got things done for the NYC Republican party machine run by Senator Roscoe Conkling. The biggest plumb in Conkling’s machine was the Port of New York, with so much graft and patronage that it took a man of Chester Arthur’s ability to run it. Conkling was so impressed with Chester Arthur that he got President Grant to appoint Arthur as the Collector of the Port of New York. Although everybody knew that Arthur was corrupt, and the ultimate party stooge, and he was, he was also so efficient at what he did that he was greatly respected. So much so that as payback he got attached to James Garfield’s presidency as vice president.
Ka-Pow! Now Chester Arthur was president.
Nine days after becoming president – September 28, 1881 – Arthur received the first of twenty-three letters from an invalid woman named Julia Sand. Sand was 30 when she began writing. She was bedridden, lame, deaf, and lived with her family in Manhattan. Over the course of her twenty-three letters (that all still exist) – no responses by the president have ever been discovered – Julia Sand morally and spiritually guided Chester Arthur through his presidency. She wrote things like, “How sad it must be for anyone to look back and feel that the best strength of their manhood has all been wasted on unworthy ends. For your own sake and for the sake of those who love you, do not fill your life with actions which afterwards bring you only regret.”
Although Chester A. Arthur was certainly not one of our better presidents, he could’ve been far worse. He not only seemed to develop a conscience over the course of his presidency, but the people around him actually noticed. President Arthur did get one important piece of legislation through. As Wikipedia explains it, “The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is a United States federal law passed by the 47th United States Congress and signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur on January 16, 1883. The act mandates that most positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political patronage.”
Julia Sand never married, remained a bedridden recluse for the remainder of her life, and died in 1933. She outlived Chester Arthur (who died in 1886) by almost half a century.
And that’s the way it was.
Good day.