For roughly 10 years, I have studied the legacy of the 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Even after a decade, I continue to be astounded by how regularly Roosevelt is invoked in politics and beyond.

Today, TR is ubiquitous. If you follow sports, you may have seen Teddy Goalsevelt, the self-appointed mascot for Team USA soccer who ran for FIFA president in 2016. Or you may have watched the giant-headed Roosevelt who rarely wins the Presidents’ Race at Washington Nationals baseball games. If you enjoy the cinema, you will likely recall Robin Williams as Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum trilogy, or might know that a biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Roosevelt is slated for production.

In politics, Roosevelt has become the rare figure popular with both left and right. Vice President Mike Pence recently compared his boss Donald Trump to Roosevelt; in 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton named the Rough Rider as her political lodestar. Environmentalists celebrate Roosevelt as the founding father of conservation and a wilderness warrior, and small business interests celebrate his battles against large corporations.

And more than a century after he was shot in Milwaukee during the 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt remains a target; last year, his statue in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York was splattered in red paint in protest of its symbolic relationship to white supremacy, among other things.

Roosevelt’s high profile is no mere accident of history. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, two memorial associations organized and worked to perpetuate his legacy.

One of these organizations sought to tie Roosevelt to the politics of the early 20th century, and cast him as a national icon of Americanism. At that time, Americanism stood for patriotism and civic-mindedness, as well as anti-communism and anti-immigration. This ideology helped Republicans win back the White House in 1920, but it also galvanized the first Red Scare.

The second memorial organization rejected the political approach to commemoration, choosing to represent Roosevelt’s legacy in artistic, creative, and utilitarian forms, including monuments, films, artwork, and by applying the Roosevelt name to bridges and buildings. Of course, some of these activities had implicit political angles, but they generally avoided association with overt causes, in favor of historical commemoration. When it came to fundraising, the apolitical organization raised 10 times as much income as the political one, and within ten years the two organizations folded into a single memorial association that abandoned political interpretations. Roosevelt became bipartisan and polygonal.

This is not to say Roosevelt’s legacy lost all meaning. Quite the opposite; our perception of Roosevelt has endured a number of declines and revivals. And, through the rounds of historical revision and re-revision, he has maintained certain characteristics.

His civic-minded Americanism endures, as does his record as a conservationist and a progressive. Roosevelt still evokes an image of an American cowboy, a preacher of righteousness, and a leading intellectual.

Most interestingly, these elements of his legacy are not mutually exclusive. Invoking one does not require us to exclude another. For example, Barack Obama promoted the Affordable Care Act in 2010 by memorializing Roosevelt’s advocacy for national healthcare in 1911. Obama could recall Roosevelt’s progressivism while avoiding the Bull Moose’s mixed record on race relations or his support of American imperialism. In short, commemorators can take from Roosevelt what they want and, consequently, his legacy grows ever more complex and elastic.

The upcoming centenary of Roosevelt’s death in January 2019 offers us an opportunity to understand more about how presidential legacies are shaped by successive generations. Images of former presidents come from various sources, and because they can act as a powerful emblem for any cause, their images proliferate without much scrutiny.

Politicians are well aware of this. Sarah Palin, a right-wing Republican, co-opted the legacy of Democrat Harry Truman in her 2008 vice-presidential nomination speech, and Barack Obama had a penchant for invoking Ronald Reagan. In a political swamp full of alligators, summoning the ghosts of dead presidents is relatively safe ground.

Likewise, commercial advertisers take great liberty with the past. Beer and whiskey producers have long used presidents as brand ambassadors (Old Hickory bourbon and Budweiser are good examples). Automobile companies have named vehicles for Washington, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, and Roosevelt.

These contemporary invocations remind us of the real value of legacy, however it might be interpreted. The past has meaning for the present, and that meaning can be translated into advantage. Truth is not the highest value in the contest between presidential ghosts.

Happy Warrior: Teddy Roosevelt in 1919, the last year of his life. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Despite being the subject of scholarly historical biographies that document their lives with precision and care, American presidents are dogged by half-truths, myths, and arbitrary citations in public memory. At a time when our political climate is referred to as “post-truth,” and a celebrity tycoon who has mastered the art of self-promotion sits in the Oval Office, it is worth reflecting on how these legacies are produced.

If, as philosopher Williams James once said, “The use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it,” the former American presidents have lived boundlessly productive lives, with legacies that far outlast their tenure. But because their legacies are produced by successive generations, they often tell us more about the agents of commemoration than the men who sat behind the Resolute Desk.

Examining presidential legacies helps us solve a historical problem: It allows us to see who shapes our perceptions of the past. Memorializers lay claim to historical narratives and create the illusion of public memory, invoking select elements of our shared past as shiny baubles to emulate and admire. So by understanding these myths, the mythmakers, and the motives of memorialization, we can see a laminated past with countless layers. The more myths and the more layers, the more insight we gain into the ways the past connects with the present, and the present with the future.

The “real” Theodore Roosevelt is lost to us. He is an imagined character, even to family. Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie met his grandfather only once. Still, every time he visited Sagamore Hill—his grandfather’s home in Oyster Bay, Long Island—he sensed his ghost. Archie felt that TR’s spirit looked over the kids as they played. On numerous occasions Archie reflected on his grandfather’s likely expectations for his family and even attempted to model his life on that conception. “We knew him only as a ghost,” Archie related, “but what a merry, vital, and energetic ghost he was. And how much encouragement and strength he left behind to help us play the role Fate has assigned us for the rest of the century.”

Indeed, conjuring Roosevelt’s ghost gives us another means of observing the last century, a period of time that Roosevelt himself never saw. Because so many have invoked Roosevelt in the way Archie did, examining his legacy helps to illustrate the motives and judgements of those who remember the past. Theodore Roosevelt’s ghost continues to haunt public memory because we continue to conjure it. TR has been dead for a century, but we refuse to let him rest in peace, believing the use of his life can help us achieve our ends.

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Jackson’s contemporary notoriety, however, far exceeds his actual impact. To be sure, he remains well known for his “war” on the Second National Bank of the United States and for signing the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the forcible eviction of thousands of Native Americans from their homes to lands west of the Mississippi River. But soon after he left the presidency, Jackson’s way of social, economic, and racial thinking was eclipsed—and it is not likely to be durably revived, by Trump or anyone else.

The true long-term winners of the “Age of Jackson” were actually his opposition—the Whig Party. After the 1860s, the Jacksonians’ articles of faith—agrarianism, states’ rights, and slavery—were relegated to history’s ash heap. It was the priorities of the Whig Party—the short-lived moderate party of antebellum America—that prevailed, and shaped the world to come.

The Whigs did not capture as many presidential elections as the Jacksonians (only two in five contests), rarely controlled Congress, and in 1854 dissolved into the Republican Party. But their party was in the forefront of modern American development in a way that the Jacksonians, a Southern-dominated coalition, never were. And thus its impact was both superior and lasting.

To say that the Whigs advanced a “modern” outlook is to note their support for what the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay called the American System, an economic plan to use the power of the central government to encourage internal improvements in the states. Canals, railroads, industry, and a more centralized banking system were to be the fruits of this program. Culturally, Whigs were known as the party of religious and educational reform. Typically, they were opposed to Indian removal and many were hostile to slavery. They comprised a coalition of entrepreneurs and evangelicals.

The Jacksonians’ unreflective emphasis on private capitalism and states’ rights came to a head in the disastrous Panic of 1837, which touched off a major recession that lasted for several years. The panic resulted from Jackson’s destruction of the Second National Bank, which had been a vital engine of development and financial regulation in the country. Jackson put the Bank on the road to extinction by vetoing an 1832 bill to recharter it, and then removing government deposits from the Bank. In the early 20th century, Congress would rectify his mistake—and acknowledge that Whiggery had gotten it right—with the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

During his Bank War, Jackson’s actions concerned many Americans. His rejection of the Bank bill was one of 12 presidential vetoes during his two terms—more than all the vetoes by the previous six presidents combined. Jackson sometimes refused to sign congressionally approved legislation that he merely disagreed with personally, which led to accusations that he was governing as a king rather than as a president.

Opposition to Jackson’s monarchal behavior was a big part of the Whigs’ identity. In fact, the very name “Whig” was chosen to align Jackson’s critics philosophically with the British Whig Party, thus portraying the Jackson camp as American Tories. In a similar vein, one of the Whigs’ biggest concerns was the growth of executive authority—a concern that was not only justified, it remains of vital importance in our republic today.

It’s also significant that Jackson’s opponent in two presidential elections, John Quincy Adams, is in many respects a more relatable figure to us than Old Hickory. His support for federal aid in economic development, his criticism of slavery, and his desire to see the United States move beyond a narrow agrarian states’ rights orientation were not always political winners in his own time. But they were positions that would push the Republican Party to victory in 1860, continuing in their modern permutations to inform economic and cultural conversations today. Perhaps that is why John Quincy Adams is such a hot topic for contemporary historians. Since 2013 no fewer than four major biographies—by Herb Giles Unger, Fred Kaplan, James Traub, and William J. Cooper—have appeared; earlier this year the Library of America released an edition of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams.

Whigs were not perfect, of course—they could be elitist, patronizing, and condescending. Too much a party of the Anglo, the industrial, and the educated, Whigs alienated some voters. But they also believed in societal unity—a view that contrasted with the slash-and-burn tactics of Jackson, who often spoke of irreconcilable interests in America and seldom sought compromise. Northern Whigs in particular, who were closer to industry and further from slavery than their Southern colleagues, demonstrated a far keener understanding of the challenges facing the nation by taking centrist positions on the vital issues of the day—counseling reform rather than destruction of the Bank, advising peaceful border negotiations with Mexico rather than war, and seeking to limit planter expansion into the country’s western territories.

Jackson and his party were undeniably the “victors” of the 1830s. But the Jacksonian vision collapsed within a generation and the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln (a former Whig) put together a new American system that included a protective tariff, subsidized industry, and promoted education. These planks—along with the destruction of slavery—definitively overturned the Jacksonian order. Old Hickory may have carried the day, but his more moderate opponents won the war.

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That summer Coolidge spent several months in Lakota Sioux territory. He vacationed at his “Summer White House” in South Dakota’s Custer State Park, visited an off-reservation Indian boarding school run by the federal government, met with tribal leaders who presented him with serious concerns about U.S. policies toward Indians, and became the first sitting U.S. president to make an official visit to an American Indian reservation—Pine Ridge, home to the Oglala Lakota.

Throughout all of his interactions with Native people, however, Coolidge would cling fast to an outmoded and misguided 19th-century mindset: The conviction that Indians could only improve their lot by assimilating into U.S. culture, and that it was the federal government’s responsibility to make that happen. It was a paternalistic policy that would soon begin to be upended, thanks to the efforts of a new generation of Indian rights activists like Yellow Robe, and their allies. But Coolidge missed the message these activists tried to bring him during the summer of 1927—and, indeed, throughout his presidency—to become a holdout who, despite good intentions, thwarted and delayed efforts to improve life for millions of Native Americans.

The years that Coolidge was in the Oval Office, 1923 to 1929, marked a period of remarkable advances for the United States. Rapid popularization of technologies such as the airplane, motion pictures, the refrigerator, the telephone, and radio transformed many Americans’ everyday habits and coincided with rises in employment and wages that led to a yet another new 20th-century American phenomenon: mass consumerism.

But the “Coolidge Prosperity” never reached federally-administered American Indian reservations, where people lived in stark poverty, without adequate housing, food, clean water, or sewage disposal. Infectious illnesses, including tuberculosis and the eye disease trachoma, were widespread. In principle, federal policy aimed to reverse these woes, but in fact it was the source of most of the challenges plaguing Native Americans. The U.S. contributed to poverty and disease by forbidding American Indians to follow their traditional ways, by making them dependent on inadequate government health and other services, and by imposing a way of life that (inadvertently) marginalized them economically. The government mandated that Native children attend schools—preferably off-reservation federal boarding schools—where educators punished them for speaking their Native languages, and made systematic attempts to erase every aspect of their tribal culture and identity. Authorities outlawed some traditional religious practices, most notably the sun dance, and undermined Native leadership and governance in the name of an assimilationist ideal, breaking down tribal cohesion.

Calvin Coolidge meets Ruth Muskrat on December 12, 1923. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

Early 20th-century Indian rights activists, like Yellow Robe, sought serious dialogue with U.S. government officials to reverse this paternalism, which had defined U.S.-Indian relations for nearly a century. The Native leaders, intellectuals who had been educated in government schools and spoke flawless English, came from various tribal backgrounds. Radicalized by the abject poverty on reservations, as well as the government’s autocratic approach and refusal to live up to treaty agreements, they worked together in an early example of “pan-Indianism” to advocate for their people. Native activists founded the Society of American Indians, the first national all-Indian organization advocating for Indian rights. Later, many served on the Advisory Council on Indian Affairs, also known as the Committee of One Hundred, a group with Native and non-Native membership assembled in 1923 by Coolidge’s Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work. They championed many goals: ending numerous abuses by U.S. Indian agents; gaining restitution of tribal lands, control of natural resources on those lands, and respect for treaty rights; extending U.S. citizenship to all Indians; and protecting religious freedom.

Coolidge was not unfamiliar with their efforts. At his Lakota adoption, he had been welcomed by tribal leader Henry Standing Bear (who, with Chauncy Yellow Robe, had been a founding member of the Society for American Indians.) The president also knew of Charles A. Eastman—a Santee Dakota writer and physician—well enough to support his appointment as U.S. Indian Inspector, the official responsible for conditions on reservations. In December 1923, the president met with 66 members of the Committee of One Hundred—presumably to acknowledge the importance of their work—and posed for pictures with them on the White House lawn. One photograph taken that day shows Coolidge with Ruth Muskrat, a Cherokee student and activist at Mount Holyoke College, and Rev. Sherman Coolidge (no relation), an Arapaho educator who lectured widely on Indian issues. Muskrat presents the president with a copy of The Red Man in the United States, a 1919 book that helped bring attention to American Indian poverty and health and education disparities. In a speech, Muskrat appealed to Coolidge for schools that could lead Indians “back to their rightful heritage of nobility and greatness.” Afterwards, she joined Coolidge and his wife for lunch.

Throughout the 1920s, legislators, officials, and Native and non-Native reformers tried to publicize conditions on reservations, failures within the Office of Indian Affairs, and other key concerns of Indian rights activists. But Coolidge never understood that paternalism and federal Indian policy was the real issue. He addressed the “Indian problem” in his 1927 and 1928 annual messages to Congress, but noted only that despite improvements on reservations “still there remains much to be done,” and that “the administration of Indian affairs has been receiving intensive study for several years.”

Such remarks were masterpieces of understatement. Coolidge had fielded many complaints about Office of Indian Affairs Commissioner Charles Burke over a number of years, but never called for the corrupt administrator’s dismissal. Coolidge signed 1924’s Indian Citizenship Act—a bill that extended birthright citizenship to all American Indians, and which is regarded as a legislative milestone—yet the Act neither automatically granted Indians the right to vote (this was determined by states), nor did it fundamentally change the U.S.-American Indian relationship, which had been defined by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1831 decision Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. Marshall had written that Native nations were “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the U.S. government resembled that of a “ward to a guardian.”

Coolidge vetoed legislation that would have allowed tribes to file suits in the U.S. Court of Claims, a crucial priority for Indian rights activists and tribal leaders. And he is most severely criticized for not halting the continued implementation of the devastating General Allotment Act of 1887. Intended to integrate Indians into American society as land-owning farmers, the Dawes Act, as it was also known, allowed the government to divide communally held tribal land west of the Mississippi into parcels or allotments and assign them to individual Indian heads of families. Unassigned allotments were deemed “surplus” tribal land and opened up to non-Indian settlement. Over 90 million acres of tribal land was taken from American Indians under this legislation.

An undated photo of Coolidge with Indians in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

The press, who followed Coolidge everywhere in South Dakota, made a great deal out of the Lakota’s ceremonial adoption of Coolidge but made no real mention of a more substantive discussion tribal leaders had with Coolidge about the U.S. government’s illegal seizure of the Black Hills, holy ground for the Lakota tribe. Federal officials had acknowledged the Black Hills as Lakota territory in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, but after gold was discovered there, reclaimed the land in direct violation of the agreement. Lakota leaders submitted a claim for reparation in 1923. In 1927, during the president’s vacation, a coalition of Lakota leaders from different reservations traveled to the Summer White House to discuss the issue. Coolidge told them that he would report back to them after he returned to Washington. He sent the status report. Nothing came of it, and the Lakota leaders and activists continued to fight to reclaim their sacred Black Hills.

As their struggle continued in the years to come, the political winds slowly began to shift. In 1928, the Institute for Government Research, a forerunner of the Brookings Institution, published The Problem of Indian Administration, frequently referred to as the Meriam Report, a damning 854-page study that found serious fault with the activities of the Indian Service and with conditions on the reservations. The Secretary of the Interior had commissioned the study during Coolidge’s presidency—but it was sociologist John Collier, a later commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carried out many of the needed reforms. Collier’s key initiative was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, a serious attempt to support tribal self-government that ended the government’s devastating allotment policy and recognized Native Americans as being citizens of their Native nations, as well as the United States.

What Coolidge made of the Lakota claim might best be construed from the speech he made in the heart of the Black Hills, less than a week after his Lakota adoption, as he stood before Mount Rushmore to designate it as a national monument. The president spoke of “the side of a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of Washington, in territory acquired by the action of Jefferson …”

He made no reference to the Lakota, nor any other indigenous peoples. It wasn’t until more than 50 years later—in 1980—that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Lakota claim to the land was valid.

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But at least one man was transformed by the presidency: Chester Alan Arthur. Arthur’s redemption is all the more remarkable because it was spurred, at least in part, by a mysterious young woman who implored him to rediscover his better self.

Arthur, the country’s 21st president, often lands on lists of the most obscure chief executives. Few Americans know anything about him, and even history buffs mostly recall him for his magnificent mutton-chop sideburns.

Most visitors to Arthur’s brownstone at 123 Lexington Avenue in New York City are there to shop at Kalustyan’s, a store that sells Indian and Middle Eastern spices and foods—not to see the only site in the city where a president took the oath of office. Arthur’s statue in Madison Square Park, erected by his friends in 1899, is ignored. But Arthur’s story of redemption, which illustrates the profound impact that the U.S. presidency can have on a person, deserves to be remembered.

Arthur was born in Vermont in 1829, the son of a rigid abolitionist preacher. Even in the North, abolitionism was not popular during the first decades of the 19th century, and Arthur’s father—known as Elder Arthur—was so outspoken and uncompromising in his beliefs that he was kicked out of several congregations, forcing him to move his family from town to town in Vermont and upstate New York.

Shortly after graduating from Union College in Schenectady, Arthur did what many ambitious young men from the hinterlands do: He moved to New York City. Once there, he became a lawyer, joining the firm of a friend of his father’s, who was also a staunch abolitionist.

And so he started down an idealistic path. As a young attorney, Arthur won the 1855 case that desegregated New York City’s streetcars. During the Civil War, when many corrupt officials gorged themselves on government contracts, he was an honest and efficient quartermaster for the Union Army.

But after the war Arthur changed. Seeking greater wealth and influence, he became a top lieutenant to U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling, the all-powerful boss of the New York Republican machine. For the machine, the ultimate prize was getting and maintaining party control—even if that meant handing out government jobs to inexperienced men, or using brass-knuckled tactics to win elections. Arthur and his cronies didn’t view politics as a struggle over issues or ideals. It was a partisan game, and to the victor went the spoils: jobs, power and money.

It was at Conkling’s urging, in 1871, that President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Arthur collector of the New York Custom House. From that perch, Arthur doled out jobs and favors to keep Conkling’s machine humming.

Vice President Chester A. Arthur. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

He also became rich. Under the rules of the Custom House, whenever merchants were fined for violations, “Chet” Arthur took a cut. He lived in a world of Tiffany silver, fine carriages, and grand balls, and owned at least 80 pairs of trousers. When an old college classmate told him that his deputy in the Custom House was corrupt, Chet waved him away. “You are one of those goody-goody fellows who set up a high standard of morality that other people cannot reach,” he said. In 1878, reform-minded President Rutherford B. Hayes, also a Republican, fired him.

Two years later, Republicans gathered in Chicago to pick their presidential nominee. Conkling and his machine wanted the party to nominate former president Grant, whose second administration had been riddled with corruption, for an unprecedented third term. But after 36 rounds of voting, the delegates instead chose James Garfield, a longtime Ohio congressman.

Conkling was enraged. Party elders were desperate to placate him, realizing that Garfield had little hope of winning in November without the help of the New York boss. The second place on the ticket seemed to be a safe spot for one of Conkling’s flunkeys; They chose Arthur, and the Republicans triumphed in November.

Just months into Garfield’s presidency, Arthur’s meaningless post suddenly became critical. On the morning of July 2, 1881, a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield in a Washington railroad station. To Arthur’s horror, when Guiteau was arrested immediately afterward, he proclaimed his support for the Arthur-Conkling wing of the Republican Party—which had been resisting Garfield’s reform attempts—and exulted in the fact that Arthur would now be president. Some newspapers accused Arthur and Conkling of participating in the assassination plot.

Garfield survived the shooting, but he was mortally wounded. Throughout the summer of 1881, Americans prayed for their ailing leader and shuddered at the prospect of an Arthur presidency. Prominent diplomat and historian Andrew Dickson White later wrote: “It was a common saying of that time among those who knew him best, ‘Chet Arthur, President of the United States! Good God!’”

Big-city elites mocked Arthur as unfit for the Oval Office, calling him a criminal who belonged in jail, not the White House. Some of the people around Arthur feared that he was on the verge of an emotional collapse.

The newspapers were vicious. The Chicago Tribune lamented “a pending calamity of the utmost magnitude.” The New York Times called Arthur “about the last man who would be considered eligible” for the presidency.

At the end of August 1881, as Garfield neared death, Arthur received a letter from a fellow New Yorker, a 31-year-old woman named Julia Sand. Arthur had never met Sand, or even heard of her. They were complete strangers. But her letter, the first of nearly two-dozen she wrote to him, moved him. “The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” Sand wrote. “The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.”

“But making a man President can change him!” Sand continued boldly. “Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine … Reform!”

Sand was the unmarried eighth daughter of Christian Henry Sand, a German immigrant who rose to become president of the Metropolitan Gas Light Company of New York. She lived at 46 East 74th Street, in a house owned by her brother Theodore V. Sand, a banker.

As the pampered daughter of a wealthy father, Julia read French, enjoyed poetry, and vacationed in Saratoga and Newport. But by the time she wrote Arthur she was an invalid, plagued by spinal pain and other ailments that kept her at home. As a woman, Julia was excluded from public life, but she followed politics closely through the newspapers, and she had an especially keen interest in Chester Arthur.

The “reform” she was most concerned about was civil service reform. Under the so-called “spoils system,” politicians doled out government jobs to loyal party hacks, regardless of their qualifications. Reformers wanted to destroy the spoils system, to root out patronage and award federal jobs based on competitive examinations, not loyalty to the party in power.

Vice President Arthur had used his position to aid Conkling and his machine—even defying President Garfield to do so. There was every reason to believe he would do the same as president.

But Garfield’s suffering and death, and the great responsibilities that had been thrust upon him, changed Chester Arthur. As president, the erstwhile party hack shocked everybody and became an unlikely champion of civil service reform, clearing the way for a more muscular federal government in the succeeding decades. Arthur started rebuilding the decrepit U.S. Navy, which the country desperately needed to assume a greater economic and diplomatic role on the world stage. And he espoused progressive positions on civil rights.

Mark Twain, who wasn’t bashful about mocking politicians, observed, “it would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.”

Arthur’s old machine buddies saw it differently—to them, he was a traitor. Meanwhile, reformers still didn’t completely trust that Arthur had become a new man, so he had no natural base of support in the party. He also secretly suffered from Bright’s disease, a debilitating kidney ailment that dampened his enthusiasm for seeking a second term. The GOP did not nominate him in 1884.

Arthur was ashamed of his political career before the presidency. Shortly before his death, he asked that almost all of his papers be burned—with the notable exception of Julia Sand’s letters, which now reside at the Library of Congress. Arthur’s decision to save Sand’s letters, coupled with the fact that he paid her a surprise visit in August 1882 to thank her, suggests that she deserves some credit for his remarkable transformation.

Arthur served less than a full term, but he was showered with accolades when he left the White House in March 1885. “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur,” newspaper editor Alexander K. McClure wrote, “and no one ever retired from the highest civil trust of the world more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe.”

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