7. Chester A. Arthur
Although born in Fairfield, Vermont, on October 5, 1829, to a Baptist preacher who had emigrated from northern Ireland, Chester A. Arthur would cut his political teeth in the not-so-squeaky-clean New York political machine. Rather than a godly man like his father, Arthur gained a reputation for cronyism and allegedly using kickbacks from workers to fill the Republican Party coffers while working for Senator Roscoe Conkling’s political organization.
So, when Andrew Garfield won the Republican nomination for president in 1880 and nominated Arthur as his vice president it came as a surprise to many. That surprise was followed by shock when Garfield was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., at 9:30 am on Saturday, July 2, 1881, dying 79 days later.
Arthur himself would shock many people when he assumed the presidency by becoming a reformer in office and cracking down on the very practices he and Conkling were accused of by signing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which banned kickbacks in the civil service system. Despite his do-gooder attitude, Chester A. Arthur became one of the few Presidents to fail to win his party’s nomination for re-election.
