Chester A Arthur Quotes

I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business

Only one president in this book was a supervillain. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester A. Arthur, the Lex Luthor of the American Presidency.

I do not think he (Chester Arthur) knows anything. He can quote a verse from poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackeray, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed,and very soon he has given out his all.

Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.

On the morning of March 4, in an extraordinary sequence of events, the House approved the bill right before the noon deadline. Senators had already adjourned to the Capitol for the inauguration. They were abruptly rounded up and herded back into the Senate chamber, the hands of the clock were turned back twenty minutes, and, to tempestuous applause, they approved Grant’s bill. Chester Arthur hurried to the Capitol to sign it. As his last presidential act, he nominated Grant, and President Cleveland renewed his commission as general of the army. Chester Arthur instructed the president pro tempore of the Senate to send Grant a congratulatory telegram.

The thunder god stared for a while, broken only by bouts of acute blinking. Chester A. Arthur XVII scratched his shoulder. Catrina scratched the back of her neck. “Is he OK?” Timmy wondered. “He’s just thinking,” explained Catrina. “Oh god,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Should we help him?” “Give him a second. I think he can do it.

At the time, few Americans gave much thought to preserving legacies for history. The new was worshipped, the old usually cast aside. To the dismay of archivists and preservationists, the White House of the nineteenth century was a revolving door of styles and motifs, and successive occupants discarded past desiderata with little consideration for the desires of future generations for artifacts.

Maybe we should give Andrew a little test, just to make sure the fever didn’t damage his brain.” “Don’t be silly.” Hannah tapped the rolled magazine on her knee as if she wanted to whack Edward even harder than she’d whacked Buster. Looking at me, Edward went on with his game. “We’ll start with easy questions. What year is it?” Hannah protested, but I answered anyway. “1910.” Edward pressed on. “Who’s the president?” “For heaven’s sake,” Hannah said, “stop tormenting him, Edward.” 1910--who was president in 1910? Dates, names, and faces tumbled through my head. Ulysses S. Grant? Woodrow Wilson? Chester Arthur? Arthur Chester? Teddy Roosevelt? I’d memorized the presidents for my fifth-grade teacher, but I couldn’t remember them now. “It’s William Howard Taft,” Theo shouted. “Everybody knows that.” “Andrew didn’t,” Edward said. “Of course he did.” Hannah patted my hand. “He’s tired, that’s all.” Refusing to give up, Edward folded his arms across his chest and grinned at me. “Let’s see if you can answer this one. How many states are there?” Without thinking, I said, “Fifty.” “Didn’t I tell you he was touched in the head?” Edward laughed. “Even George Foster knows there’s only forty-six states.

Think about this: Most Americans consider the president of the United States to be the highest office of secular leadership imaginable. But how many Americans can name even twenty or thirty of the forty-four men who have held that office? When was the last time you heard someone mention Chester A. Arthur or William Henry Harrison?

That’s great and all,” said Thor, “but how do we kill Quetzalcoatl?” “Violence?” suggested Phil. “I don’t really know.” “Seriously, man? That’s your answer?” “You’ve been at his side this entire time,” added Chester A. Arthur XVII, “and that’s all you’ve got?

Speaking of frightening, have you seen Charlie or Vicky? We made them leave the hotel because they kept loving all over each other. And not the fun to watch kind." "Not since we got back."   Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII had spent the past two weeks either holding hands and skipping through fields of daisies, or in cheap motels doing terrible, terrible things to one another. Currently, they were at a charming Italian restaurant – situated in an old German restaurant and run by a Chinese family – holding hands, staring deeply into one another's eyes, talking about their future, and "not" having a serious, meaningful relationship.

No one described the mix of sublime and mundane better than the Republican senator from Kansas, John Ingalls. In an era when man’s conquest of nature was proceeding in an uninterrupted stampede, when the wonders of evolution and the fate of dinosaurs were occupying the salon dreams of the educated and the elite, Ingalls let loose a rhetorical fancy that almost flew away from him in a flurry of flowery verbiage. Government circa 1880, he remarked, “can properly be regarded as in the transition epoch and characterized as a pterodactyl.… It is, like that animal, equally adapted to the waddling and dabbling in the slime and mud of partisan politics, and soaring aloft with discordant cries into the glittering and opalescent empyrean of civil service reform.

Chester Arthur, though one of the most forgotten presidents, managed government efficiently, left it more honest, put a stopper on its growth, and started no wars. These are not things that win a lot of fame, but America could do worse.

October of 1883, Bob Ford could be identified correctly by more citizens than could the accidental president of the United States (Chester Alan Arthur); he was reported to be as renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of grand larceny, and though it was by then a presumption on his part, it was unanticipated by others that a poised but unscrupulous young man could be thought dapper and tempting to women: the courtroom was as packed during his second-degree murder trial in Plattsburg as was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church when the corpse of Jesse Woodson James was prayed over and dispatched to his Maker, and as the correspondents noted the crowds inside and on the courthouse steps, they were surprised by the presence of otherwise sophisticated ladies, reading in this a proof of the young man’s beguiling powers.

Despite repeated and increasingly terrifying efforts to end Andrew Jackson II once and for all – including forcing him to watch all three extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies and the entire Hobbit trilogy without a bathroom break – Chester A. Arthur XVII and the Five Lincolns ultimately reconciled themselves to simply burying the reconstituted president alive, deep, deep underground in the atomic backwoods of Romania, where he would surely not harbor a grudge, and even more surely never bother anyone ever again.

Chester Arthur came from New York political corruption, but when the assassination of James Garfield elevated Arthur to president, he told his cronies never to darken the White House door. Unwilling to sully the office he unexpectedly occupied, Arthur began professionalizing the federal workforce, reducing patronage by persuading Congress to enact the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

The country often limited immigration in moments of fear, only to have those fears dissipate amid cooling emotions and a reinvigorated opposition. It had happened in 1798. It had happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Know-Nothings had sprung up in reaction to a wave of European immigration in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. And it had happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act under Chester Arthur, which was passed in reaction to fears of competing labor coming in from the Far East.

In May 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act. This treaty with the Chinese Government severely restricted Chinese from entering America and required the deportation of any who arrived after 1880. The act stated that, “in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory …

sheer size, it has no rival. Of the two American fleets involved in the battle, one was comprised of 738 ships and carried an invasion force of approximately 165,000 men in addition to the 50,000 sailors aboard the ships.1 The other American fleet was the most powerful in the world, with a total of 16 aircraft carriers and six of the world’s most powerful battleships. In total, the two fleets brought 235 surface combatants and 1,500 aircraft to the battle. Opposed to this collection of naval might was the Imperial Japanese Navy. Once the most powerful navy in the Pacific, the Imperial Fleet was forced into a desperate fight with all its remaining strength. In total, the Japanese committed 69 ships and some 375 aircraft, most of which were land based.2 Both sides committed so much because the stakes were so high. The Americans planned to invade Leyte Island in the Philippines as a potential first step to occupying the entire archipelago. The Leyte invasion force was larger than the initial American contribution to the assault force at Normandy. If the Philippines could be occupied, Japanese sea lines of communications between the Home Islands and the resource areas in Southeast Asia would be severed, fatally compromising Japan’s ability to continue the war. This demanded that the Japanese respond to the invasion with all of their remaining strength. The ensuing battle was the most complex naval battle of the entire Second World War. Its complexity makes it compelling. Instead of being a single battle as the name implies, it was actually comprised of four major engagements and several lesser actions fought over the span of three days. The characteristics of the battle continue to astound – it contained the largest air-sea battle in history; it included the last carrier and battleship clashes in history; it was the only time that a surface force engaged a carrier force while under air attack; and it featured the first pre-planned use of suicide attacks during the Pacific War. Adding to the drama of this momentous event was the role personalities played in the battle. On the American side were the flamboyant General Douglas MacArthur, the steady Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the impulsive Admiral William Halsey. Overlooked but still key commanders included Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid and the brilliant Clifton Sprague, commander of the escort carrier group known as Taffy 3. For the Japanese, the taciturn Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo was placed in command of their most important force. He was charged to execute a plan devised by Admiral Toyoda Soemu, who cared more about presenting the Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet with an opportunity to die fighting than to produce a plan in the best interests of the nation.

Wilson was eight years old when Lincoln died; while he was growing up, the occupants of the White House were Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur. It was the high tide of congressional power. Yet even as he completed his treatise, Grover Cleveland won the 1884