100 Objects #13: The Sand Letters

Comedian Elliott Kalan joins Roman Mars to tell the story of how a politician who owed so much to a corrupt government system became the one to dismantle it, thanks to one woman: Julia Isabella Sand.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This episode of 100 Objects is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes, all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai.

• 0:42Roman Mars?

  The year is 1886. The Civil War is still within living memory. Veterans in their 40s and 50s are prominent figures in public life. And President Chester A. Arthur, himself a veteran, has been out of office for less than two years. And don't worry, it's okay if you forgot that Chester A. Arthur was ever a president to begin with.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  He's someone who has almost totally disappeared from the public memory and imagination for most people.

• 1:12Roman Mars?

  That's Elliot Kalin, Emmy-winning TV writer, author, comedian, and podcaster. And he's obsessed with President Chester A. Arthur.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  He was involved in what you could call shenanigans, or what you could also call political corruption. He was very much a figure of his time. And that meant he was involved with a lot of shady dealings. The types of dealings that involve buying votes, bribery, graft, that kind of corruption. But these are not the things that you want people of the future, or even necessarily your descendants, knowing about.

• 1:47Roman Mars?

  And this concern is front of mind because Chester Arthur is currently dying of kidney disease. And on his deathbed, after years of public service and years of semi-public shenanigans, he's going to try to erase all the evidence.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And so he directs his son to burn his personal and professional papers. He has barrels worth of papers. And he says, burn all of them.

• 2:13Roman Mars?

  Three garbage barrels, each around four feet high, stuffed with every paper from Chester Arthur's life and set on fire. Well, not every paper. A few survived the purge. Among those were 23 letters that were initialed JIS.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  And which we now know are from a woman named Julia Sand, a woman that Chester Arthur had never met before she started writing to him, that nobody really knew. She was not a public figure. She was just a regular person.

• 2:42Roman Mars?

  Just a bundle of letters from an unknown woman. No name anyone recognized. These are the letters remaining from his legacy. And they are the reason Elliot is so obsessed with Chester Arthur.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  The way the story is often told, and I always wonder if this is a real thing or if it's just a touch of romanticizing history, that the letters were wrapped together in a ribbon. And the papers that did survive, Arthur's family turned them over to the Library of Congress. And it wasn't until decades later that people really noticed these papers existed and bothered to go through them. Which is too bad because Julia Sand lived into the 1930s. There were many years where someone could have, if they had known of the existence of these papers, tracked her down and asked her about what happened.

• 3:26Roman Mars?

  Elliot wishes we knew more about Julia Sand, who she was outside these letters, what made her audacious enough to write to a president when she was a nobody. She was just an unmarried woman living in New York City, largely homebound, with no political ties, no platform, and no reason to think the president would listen to her. But what we do know is that her letters were key to one of the most amazing transformations in American history. A politician who owed so much to a corrupt system would become the one to dismantle it.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  These letters from Julia Sand seem to have incited a major change of heart in Chester Arthur that turned him from the symbol of all that was corrupt and slimy in American politics to a champion of civil service reform, the most exciting type of reform someone could possibly be involved in. It's not the most exciting, but one of the most important pieces of reform.

• 4:21Roman Mars?

  Civil service reform, meaning hiring people to work in the government who are actually qualified to do their jobs.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  So it really is this hinge point between a United States that has a non-professional government that you cannot count on to do pretty much anything, to the government of today where even the people who don't like it take it for granted that it does a lot of stuff and accomplishes a lot of things.

• 4:44Roman Mars?

  When Arthur started that professional merit-based bureaucracy, it allowed America to accomplish everything we accomplished in the 20th century. We landed on the moon. We won wars. We passed civil rights legislation. None of that happens without competent government workers. And that all can be traced back to 23 letters from Julia Isabella Sand.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  She seems to have inspired him to help lay the groundwork for the modern government that we have today and that we take for granted today.

• 5:15Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Sand Letters to President Chester Allen Arthur. The story of how a woman no one had ever heard of helped transform a president, if you remember, and in the process, created the American government as we know it.

• 5:47Roman Mars?

  So let's start back like in classic E-shaped narrative structure to the beginning of Chester Arthur's life. Like, what do we know about this guy?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  He was born in Vermont. His father was an abolitionist preacher. So they would get kicked out of towns because he would get a job as a preacher and then start preaching abolition and then they'd have to move. People didn't like that. And this is all in, and obviously if he's an abolitionist preacher, this is all pre-Civil War. This is in the first half of the 19th century.

• 6:15Roman Mars?

  So before Chester Arthur will become a shady politician, he starts out as an idealist like his abolitionist father. He's a young lawyer in New York when he takes on the case of a black woman who was forced off a streetcar because of her race.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And he fought her case and won. And from that point on, New York streetcars were not segregated by race anymore. And so there's this sense that he really was affected in some way by his father's beliefs in that he took on this case and fought it and won.

• 6:46Roman Mars?

  But it's during the Civil War that Arthur starts to reveal his true gift. He could get things done that basically no one else could. He was a quartermaster based in New York. He was not fighting on the battlefield. He was in charge of moving stuff from one place to another.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  He is doing the unglamorous work of, oh, people need something. I'm going to go get them that thing and make sure they have it. And one of the stories about that is the troops that were coming through New York and going out, they needed socks. They really needed socks. Like, and this is the kind of thing that when you're fighting a war, you need socks. It's like you have to have things on your feet to keep your feet clean and dry and healthy. Well, they do Civil War enactments. No one is the guy who collects the socks and gives them to people. But they needed socks. And the person who had been hired to do this, he's dragging his feet, no fun intended, on getting these socks made. And Arthur is like, what is going on? We need socks for these people. I'm going to find this guy. I have to get him. And they go, oh, it's Sunday, so he's not working today. He goes, what church does he go to?

• 7:43Roman Mars?

  Then Arthur sends his aide to that church.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And basically goes up to his pew and drags him out in the middle of the church service and is like, we need these socks. Like, you need to make them. The troops need socks. And they got made. Like with many things with Chester Arthur, it's not overtly exciting, but it is important in its practical and managerial effects.

• 8:04Roman Mars?

  But Arthur's gift for getting things done is about to be redirected away from the public good. Because quickly, Arthur catches the attention of arguably the most powerful and corrupt political boss in New York City, Roscoe Conklin.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Roscoe Conklin is one of the great political characters of American history. And he's another one where it's too bad people don't remember him because he is so flamboyantly sinister, I guess you could put it in some ways. Or so, he is so openly power-hungry and aggressive. He was an amateur boxer and he was always challenging people to fights, basically. But in his position, he was very powerful in the New York spoils system. And we're going to be talking about the spoils system quite a bit in this episode, so buckle up. It's going to be exciting and thrilling.

• 8:54Roman Mars?

  The spoils system refers to how government jobs were handed out at the time. There's an old saying, "To the victors go the spoils." And that's the entire logic of the spoils system. If you win an election, you get to reward your supporters with government jobs. Maybe you make them a postmaster. Maybe they work for the Treasury Department. Maybe they run a customs house. It doesn't matter if they've never done that job before. What matters is they helped you win.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And this is a period when every time the federal government changes hands from one president to another, pretty much everybody loses their job and new people get hired. If a state changes its governor, now the people who supported the party during that, they can go up and say like, "I was canvassing for you all over the 4th Ward. Like, you need to give me a job. All right, all right, I will. This job just opened up because I fired the guy who did it." They're like, "You can work in this insane asylum. Do you have any experience with psychiatry?" "No." "Okay, well, the job is yours. That's fine."

• 9:53Roman Mars?

  At this time, Roscoe Conklin is huge in the spoils system in New York. He has influence over who got jobs and where they'd be placed. Conklin takes a liking to Chester Arthur and makes sure Arthur lands one of the cushiest government jobs in all of the country: the collector of the Port of New York.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  It's really hard now, in the world we live in, to really grasp how important the customs house at the Port of New York was in the late 19th century. This is a time when there is no income tax. There's very few taxes of any kind. I don't believe there are any sales taxes. And so, as a result, the main source for government money is customs duties on the goods coming into the Port of New York, which at the time is the biggest port in the country.

• 10:35Roman Mars?

  About 2/3 of all the government's revenue came from import taxes through the Port of New York alone, the port that Chester Arthur was now in charge of.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  If you're in control of the Port of New York, if you're in the job of collector, then you have the ability to not just hire hundreds of people, because there's something like 1,200 or 1,300 people who work at that port, but you also have the ability to control and direct so much money.

• 11:00Roman Mars?

  It's at the port, and under the tutelage of Roscoe Conklin, that Arthur learns how the game is played: fines, kickbacks, goods that disappeared from warehouses and mysteriously found their way into the hands of his friends. He made so much money, in fact, that for a while, his income was double that of the President of the United States.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And he's a guy who likes fancy clothes. He likes to own fancy things. He was famous at the time for owning somewhere between 70 and 80 pairs of pants, which is a lot of pants even now. Most people, I think, did not own 70 to 80 items of clothing. They might not have owned 70 to 80 possessions, and that's how many pants he had. And, late 19th century eyes, his clothes would have been very fashionable for a dignified grown man.

• 11:45Roman Mars?

  Arthur didn't create the spoils system, but he was its most respectable face: the impeccably dressed gentleman boss who makes corruption look fashionable. But regular Americans were getting increasingly frustrated with the system. After the Civil War, people were encountering the federal government in an entirely new way. Soldiers and widows needed their pensions filled, and mail started coming to people's doors. Suddenly, it was more obvious when government workers weren't doing their jobs.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  People now expect the government to have a little thing called competence, which they weren't really expecting or caring about before. And this means that the level of spoils corruption is really much more visible to people than it was before, and it's much more on the top of their minds.

• 12:32Roman Mars?

  In fact, there's a huge fight brewing in the Republican Party over this. Half the party, called the stalwarts, people like Arthur and Conklin, want to keep things as they were, but the other half, the reformers, want to change the system. And this fight becomes a huge problem when trying to figure out who should run for president in the election of 1880.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  And so, there is this big split between the side that wants to keep the system going the way it is, that loves it, that profits from it, that understands it, and the side that wants to reform it and change the way that the government does things.

• 13:04Roman Mars?

  And that split in the Republican Party plays out in real time on the convention floor in 1880. They vote once, they vote again and again, dozens of times, but the party can't agree on a presidential nominee. Then, a congressman from Ohio named James Garfield gives a speech that electrifies the delegates. Suddenly, he's getting votes, and he wins the nomination in a landslide. Garfield is a family man, preacher, lawyer, a former Civil War general, guided by his principles that government should work based on merit, not political favors. So, he's a reformer, but the Republican Party knows that if they're actually going to win the presidency, they need to make the vice president

• 13:46Roman Mars?

  someone from the spoils system faction to balance the ticket and draw the stalwart votes.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And so, they ask Arthur to be vice president. The feeling was very much, "We're going to heal the party. We're going to have a united front. It'll be Garfield, the reformer, with Arthur, the old-hand stalwart, as his vice president." But the vice president doesn't do anything. So, it'll be fine. It'll be fantastic. This'll work perfectly. And Arthur, for his part, is so excited about the idea of being vice president. Conklin comes to him, and he has this quote that I love so much. Arthur says, "They've asked me to be vice president." And he goes, "You dropped that like it was a horseshoe hot from the forge." Like, he's so mad about it, because he hates Garfield. And Arthur is like, "I never dreamed of being vice president. I have to take it." And in his understanding

• 14:34Speaker 01

  of it, Arthur's understanding, this will be the ultimate, wonderful, no-show job, where all he has to do is be likable, hang around. He probably still wants to keep his hand into the system, in the spoils system, because that's how he maintains his relationships with a lot of the people in his life. And so, I think there was probably a sense of a step back, but, come on, you're not going to take the vice presidency. You got to do it.

• 14:59Roman Mars?

  But was there any indication that Arthur wanted the presidency at all?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  No. In fact, the exact opposite indication was very clear. He did not want the presidency. There, I think, is maybe no one in the history of the United States who has ever been one heartbeat away from the presidency who wished more, that he was millions of heartbeats away from the presidency. He really doesn't want it. Most men, in the back of their minds, like, "Yeah, if I was president, I'd do a pretty good job. I think I could do this." And I think in Arthur's case, he's one of the rare men who was like, "I would not be good at this. I do not want this. It is too difficult, and it's too much responsibility." So, he is just, the idea of being president, I think, terrifies him.

• 15:39Roman Mars?

  Well, what Arthur doesn't know yet is that the thing that terrifies him the most is about to come true. In just a few months, the spoils system he's been running and benefiting from will kill a president, and Arthur will finally see what he's been a part of.

• 15:55Roman Mars?

  What is the story of the Garfield shooting?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  So, this is one of the stranger assassinations. It's terrible that I can categorize presidential assassinations. This is one of the stranger ones, because the person who committed it is one of the stranger assassins, and also, how it happens would have been so easily avoidable.

• 16:17Roman Mars?

  So, it's July 2, 1881. James Garfield is the president, and he's about to take the train out of town.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Because it's summer in DC, and it's disgusting to be in summer in DC. Everyone's leaving town. I don't think he has any bodyguards, so he's just walking to the train. And literally, someone just steps out with a gun and shoots him in the back, and then goes, "Now Chester Arthur is president. Like, you know, America is saved," something like that, and gets arrested.

• 16:42Roman Mars?

  So, the man who shot President Garfield did so because he wanted Chester Arthur, the VP, to replace him. And after he fired the gun, he says so out loud, right there at the scene. What's interesting about this assassination is that it has to do with this spoils system and the stalwarts and the reformers. It really plays into the ideological schism that is happening.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yes, in a very real way, you could say that President Garfield was killed by the spoils system. In a more real way, you could say he was killed by an insane man who was obsessed with the spoils system. Because he was shot in the back by Charles Goutte, who was often described in history books as a disappointed office seeker, which is technically true. But he was also a mentally disturbed office seeker. And this was a time when it was a huge part of the president's job to just hand out jobs to people, that you could just walk into the White House, you'd wait outside the president's office till it was your turn to see him. The president would say, "What do you want? I ran this effort for you, for your election, in Moose Jaw. I want to be the post clerk of Moose Jaw." "Okay, great. You're the postal clerk of Moose Jaw."

• 17:48Roman Mars?

  What Elliot is describing is something that tormented presidents. Lincoln himself, with everything else he was dealing with during the Civil War, was exhausted by the endless stream of office seekers showing up to the White House, demanding a job. It was unsustainable.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And most of the day was that meeting, over and over again. A woman coming in, "My husband needs a job. He supported you. Okay, I'll find a job for him." Goutte was one of those people, but his sights were unrealistically high. And there's stories about him basically, like, just jumping out of nowhere. Like, if Garfield was walking around the White House, Goutte jumping out of the bushes and saying, "Hey, it's me, your friend, Charles Goutte. I supported you in the election. You should make me ambassador to Vienna. You should make me ambassador to France." Goutte is like the textbook example of someone who is a drifter, who cannot figure out a way to make a real life in the world, and has this drive to prestige, to be part of important events. He believes himself to be a historically important figure at a level that he is not.

• 18:48Roman Mars?

  And with each no, Goutte's rage with President Garfield grows. He becomes more and more unhinged, until he's sure that the only way to get what he wants is through violence.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Let's look at it from Garfield's point of view. This guy keeps jumping at you and telling you that he should be the ambassador to Vienna. You don't give him that job. And so, Goutte becomes convinced, "Garfield is the problem, and if Arthur is president, then I will get the job I want." And so, he shoots Garfield in the back and is immediately captured, thrown in jail. And even up to, I think, the day of his execution, he is sitting in his jail cell, saying, "Any minute now, Chester Arthur is going to show up at the head of the military and break me out of jail, and he's going to appoint me ambassador, and everything's going to work out fine."

• 19:38Roman Mars?

  Goutte was delusional to the end, but what he'd actually done, shot a president because he felt cheated by the spoils system, was too perfect a symbol.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  It's almost like Garfield's assassination is a living political cartoon, that Garfield could be labeled reformer, and he's walking through the train station in DC, and a man labeled spoils system or office seeker is shooting him in the back with a bullet that says "anti-reform efforts" or something like that. It's one of those rare moments when the actual happening of history is so easy to read as a symbolic moment in what was going on politically in the country at the time.

• 20:17Roman Mars?

  Guto shot Garfield twice. The first bullet grazed his arm. The second entered his back and lodged by his stomach. And for nearly three months, there's hope that Garfield might survive. Doctors believe they can save him if they can just find the bullet.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  And the news is constantly coming out. Garfield's getting better. He ate breakfast today. Oh, no, Garfield's getting worse. He couldn't eat food today. You know, the doctors are looking out on him. They can't find the bullet. They keep sticking their fingers into his wound to try to, try to get the bullet. Oh, they can't do it. Uh, well, maybe, and the country is for months just in suspense and worried because they don't know whether the president is going to survive this or not.

• 20:56Roman Mars?

  And in the meantime, the man that many Americans fear the most, the machine politician with 70 to 80 pairs of pants who once made more money than the president, that guy is now next in line to lead the country.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  He is freaking out that people are suspecting that he's involved in some way, that he is part of this shadowy, you know, slimy side of politics. And there is a suspicion, oh, is Arthur behind this? And I think it potentially helps his case that rather than stepping in and saying, I will do it, that he essentially disappears and people don't know where he is. He seems to be, he's just at home and he spends a lot of days crying, you know, and really being afraid of what's going to happen. And he finds himself in the situation where he may be about to take on the largest job in the country and the most difficult job in the country, something he never has had an ambition to do.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And the rest of the country, even the ones that don't think he was behind this, they are certain he will be a bad president. And you, you, you read about it that people were just going around saying, Chet Arthur as president? Chet Arthur as president? Like, can you imagine this? And I love the fact that his nickname was Chet because there's something about having a president named Chet. Like, you imagine he's like, he's just like a real job. He is surrounded by people saying, Arthur, you, you're bad at this. Or like, Arthur, we don't think you can do this. And Arthur, I think is, is, he's so overwhelmed, sad and unhappy and, and emotionally suffering.

• 22:30Roman Mars?

  While the country holds its breath, sending thoughts and prayers to President Garfield, someone new enters the chat, Julia Sand.

• 22:49Roman Mars?

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• 23:34Roman Mars?

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• 24:00Speaker 01

  This is the moment of this story where it stops being tragical and starts being magical in a way. Because this is inspiring to me.

• 24:12Roman Mars?

  So to recap, the country already has doubts about the spoil system. President Garfield's life hangs in the balance and his potential successor is hiding out in New York away from public view, when he receives the letter that starts to change his life.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  This is in August of 1881. Arthur receives this first letter from Julia Sand, and she is very much not the kind of person who usually shows up in the historical record.

• 24:39Roman Mars?

  Julia Sand is 31, unmarried, chronically ill, and confined to her home. She's a woman in an era when women have no political voice. She cannot vote. She has no platform or power or influence. She's invisible in every way that matters in her time. But from that invisibility, she picks up a pen and writes to the vice president, a letter so politically astute, so beguiling, that it will transform him. And she comes in hot.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  August 27, 1881. To the Honorable Chester A. Arthur, the hours of Garfield's life are numbered. Before this meets your eye, you may be president. The people are bowed in grief, but do you realize it? Not so much because he's dying as because you are his successor. What president ever...

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And she talks about, everyone is sure you will be a terrible president. But then she says, making a man president can change him. And she says, here's the thing you have to do, reform.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Rise to the emergency. Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show them from the first that you have none but the purest aims. It may be difficult to inspire confidence, but persevere. In time, when you have given reason for it, the country will love and trust you.

• 26:04Roman Mars?

  Sand's letter goes beyond just encouragement. It's a challenge. She picks one thing, one issue, and she makes it Arthur's mission, civil service reform.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  If any man says, with Arthur for president, civil service reform is doomed, prove that Arthur can be its finest champion. She is a single-issue voter in this one letter. It is civil service reform. You can do it. Civil service reform, civil service reform.

• 26:28Roman Mars?

  And she makes it clear, this is how you prove you're not the man everyone thinks you are.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  I wish we knew more about why she decided to write this letter, why she had any faith in Arthur to begin with. We just don't know. And all we can pick up are the clues from this letter and the 22 others that she writes after that, where she starts establishing herself as what she calls his dwarf, saying that, in the courts of kings, the dwarf was allowed to say the things that other people couldn't say and to give the king his honest opinion.

• 26:58Roman Mars?

  It's brilliant. She has no power, no influence, no formal standing. But she uses that powerlessness as a kind of power.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So she's writing to him, saying, you have this decision for you. I think you should do it this way. Don't do it that way. Here's what I think you should do. But written also in a way that is frankly, like, really delightful, like very playful. She teases him often. In one letter, she talks about, she's like, oh, I saw, did you hear? I saw a picture of that awful President Arthur in the newspaper. He had devil horns, I think. Like, she's very playful with him, but also very stern and taking a tone with him that feels very presumptuous in that, again, she's writing to, at first, the man who is going to be president, and then to the president.

• 27:41Roman Mars?

  In subsequent letters, Julia Sand's advice covers everything.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  By the way, do you take care of your health? Perhaps naturally it is good, but there are limits to human strength.

• 27:52Roman Mars?

  She tells him to rest properly, to ride horseback daily for circulation and health.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Nothing supplies the place of fresh air and sunshine.

• 28:01Roman Mars?

  But she also tells him to stay away from New York and his old stalwart buddies, men like Roscoe Conklin, whose spoils machine made him rich.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  New York is the one spot on the continent where you positively ought not to be this fall. In coming to New York at this season, you do. You put yourself in temptation. And in a certain way, you put yourself in the power of untrustworthy men.

• 28:25Roman Mars?

  She pushes him to appoint qualified people, not political cronies, to stop the kickbacks or assessments to the party.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Appoint those only of marked ability and of sterling character. Such may not be abundant, but you will find them if you seek them.

• 28:39Roman Mars?

  To think about his legacy, about how history will judge him, about his children watching.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Of all your friends, do you know which ones I like best to hear of being with you? Your children, they are your guardian angels.

• 28:55Roman Mars?

  Over and over, across the 23 letters, the message is the same. Do better because you can be better.

• 29:07Roman Mars?

  And Arthur actually listens. He doesn't just read her words. He acts on them. When he vetoes the River and Harbor Act of 1882, Julia Sand is genuinely delighted. Arthur says to Congress that it was failed with bogus local projects that were not in the national interest, writing, "It would set a bad precedent for the, quote, extravagant expenditure of public money." His veto was eventually overridden by Congress, but Julia Sand was genuinely satisfied with President Arthur's choice. She writes to congratulate him, saying she sees it as proof that he can do the right thing. I want to complicate this slightly in the fact that this didn't mean that Chester Arthur did all great things in his presidency.

• 29:51Roman Mars?

  I think he did really contemptible things as president, too.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  In Arthur's case, the worst of it was he did sign into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which basically said Chinese people are not welcome in the United States for a certain period of time.

• 30:05Roman Mars?

  In her letters, Julia Sand advised President Arthur to veto the Chinese Exclusion Act because, as she put it, "It is opposed to the spirit of America and to the spirit of civilization all around the world."

• 30:18Speaker 02

  It is mean and cowardly. More than that, it is a step back into barbarism. At all events, do not let your administration be marked by any such disgraceful, retrograde movements.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Sand, in her letters, is saying, "You've got to veto that bill." And he vetoes it the first time, but then it comes back to him, it's still a racist anti-immigration act, that singles out a specific ethnicity and nationality for not being allowed in the United States. And he realizes that they have the votes to overcome his veto. And so he, I think reluctantly, signs it. And Julia Sand is frustrated with him about this.

• 30:58Roman Mars?

  But despite spending his career benefiting from the spoils system, despite once being its patron saint, he begins to reform. In 1883, he signs the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. It's the first law that fundamentally changes how government works. Certain federal jobs are now awarded based on merit, not political loyalty.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  The set group of jobs in the federal government, they're going to be awarded on the basis of merit, not on the basis of patronage. And they will not be turned over jobs, that you won't have this revolving door of a new government came in, we're going to kick everybody out.

• 31:35Roman Mars?

  It's really the establishment of the permanent federal bureaucracy. You know, like allies don't just like take over. And because you donated a bunch of money, you become the tax collector or whatever. Like, it is making those jobs permanent and consistent across administrations so that the job of government is permanent and consistent.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yes. And so you have, it's the very beginning of building up the institutional knowledge of how a government functions. The thing that is in such danger right now because of the way that the current administration is handling, employing in the federal government, this is the beginning of that. And Arthur becomes a real champion for this act.

• 32:18Roman Mars?

  Now civil servants are protected. They can't be fired just because a new president takes office. It's a complete reversal of the system Arthur built his career on. The guy they put on the ticket to appeal to champions of the spoils system has dismantled the system himself. The reformers have won the battle. I'm wondering if you know how his old cronies with the spoils system responded to his sort of about face when he signed the Pendleton Act and championed it.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  He had a break with Conkling. I mean, Conkling also, he flamed out spectacularly at a certain point where he was mad about something and he resigned his seat in the Senate. And he's like, "You'll see, I'm so powerful. The legislature is going to send me right back." Because at that point, the legislature elected senators, people didn't direct to elect senators. And the legislature was like, "Uh, thank you for giving us this opportunity to get rid of you." And so, so he flames out a government amazingly.

• 33:10Roman Mars?

  It's reported that Conkling then asks Arthur to make some typical spoils system appointments, but Arthur refuses. And when pressed on why he turned on his old mentor, Arthur says, quote, "For the vice presidency, I was indebted to Mr. Conkling. But for the presidency of the United States, my debt is to the Almighty." That was it. The friendship was over. He cut ties with his spoils system buddies in New York, just as Sand advised him to.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I like to think of Chester Arthur's life that he has a devil on his shoulder and an angel on his shoulder. And Roscoe Conkling is the devil on his shoulder and Julia Sand will become the angel on his shoulder. His actions as president do bear out, not always the exact thing she wants him to do, but bears out the general direction she's trying to push him in.

• 33:56Roman Mars?

  Why do you think Chester Arthur listens to her?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I do imagine that he is touched by anyone having faith in him. When, when he is hearing from outside and inside is, "This is bad. You're the worst person that we could have in this position." And that anyone believes he's capable of it, I think, is a big thing. But also that Arthur, at this point, he's a widower. His wife has been dead for a number of years. And the way that these letters are written, you can't help but read them as, "There's this delightful young woman who believes in me and is speaking to me in a way that is intelligent and that is meaningful." And when you're a man of a certain age who's interested in women, to get a letter from a woman you've never met, who is like, "I believe in you. I think you can be great. Here's how to do it." And it's written in this delightful way. I think it hit the bullseye of what he needed to hear at that moment. And in a voice that he was eager to listen to

• 34:44Speaker 01

  or that was attractive to listen to.

• 34:48Roman Mars?

  And I think if you read between the lines, you can kind of feel the possibility of something romantic. Maybe Sand hopes for it. Maybe Arthur wonders about it. And at some point, he actually goes and visits her. Could you talk about that, what happened there and what led to that?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  So we only know about this from a letter that Julia writes to Arthur that's dated August 24th, 1882. And she talks in it about how, she says at the start, she goes, "My friend..."

• 35:15Speaker 02

  "My friend..."

• 35:15Speaker 01

  "How good you were to come and see me."

• 35:16Speaker 02

  "How good you were to come and see me after all, and how badly you were repaid for it."

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And apparently, from what we can pick up from the letter, he didn't announce, he didn't say, "I'm stopping by." He just showed up. And at first, she didn't know who was there. She goes, "Wondering who that gentle-voiced Episcopal minister in the front parlor might be." And it turns out that it's President Arthur. And I've always imagined that this was Arthur on the spur of moment, "No, I'll do it. I'll go see her." And both of them having fantasies about what this moment would be like of finally meeting the other person. And again, Arthur has never written back to Julia. Until he shows up, other than his public actions, there's no way of knowing that he's even read the letters. So, so he literally just shows up out of nowhere.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  "I'm afraid you had a, what shall I call it? A very stiff visit, which was a pity. For my family are not given to stiffness. But you see, you took them quite by surprise."

• 36:19Speaker 01

  The way that I read what happened is that her family will not leave the room. She says in the letter, she says, "I thought if you did come, it would be to see me. But now it is quite evident that it was my mother, sisters, brothers, and nephews in whom you were interested." And I think she is trying, she's trying to say like, "You didn't spend enough time talking to me." But at the same time, it's, this is not a period when an unmarried man and an unmarried woman can go to a back room and talk easily by themselves. They have to sit in the front parlor. He says to her at some point, apparently, that she's been a little unjust to him in her criticism in the letters. And that's about as, as far as it goes.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  "My brother said I was like the man in The Arabian Nights, who got the big genie out of the vase. And I was so frightened, he wanted to put it back again. But that is not true. I did not want to put you back in your carriage and send you home again."

• 37:08Speaker 01

  There is part of me that believes that both Sand and Arthur had an inclination that maybe there was a romance to be had here, which, spoiler alert, does not happen. You know, this is not that much of a magical fairy tale that the president gets letters from a pen pal and then marries her. In the, in the romance novel version of this, this story, that might happen.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  "It seemed to me that you were not well, that you were very weary and worn out. I felt so sorry. I wanted to do something for you, and I didn't know what. Or rather, I did know, but is anything more unnatural than to be quite natural? If I had said, 'Do lie down on the sofa. No one shall speak to you for an hour. And as soon as you are rested, you must have some dinner,' you would have thought I was demented. Would you not?"

• 37:58Roman Mars?

  Julia's intuition was right. Chester was definitely not well. Within months, word would spread that he had a fatal kidney disease. He had maybe two years left, but Julia didn't know that. So Julia kept sending letters. Chester kept reading them. And he kept those letters for the rest of his life. And on his deathbed, when he instructed his son to burn all evidence of his life's work, he spared those 23 letters. We do know that the letters still meant something to him.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  They must have because he doesn't throw them away. He doesn't have them burned. He, he keeps them. And you could say that his change in behavior when it came to things like civil service reform was shifting with political winds or something like that. But it doesn't seem like it. It seems like he really is really paying attention to those letters. And when he can, following the guidance she's giving him. And he doesn't just hold on to the ones from before that meeting. He holds on to all of them. And they must have meant something. We'll never really know for sure exactly. And all we have to go from is, is their existence and that Arthur did change, that he did change as president and became someone who stood for reform

• 39:13Speaker 01

  rather than standing for the spoils system.

• 39:16Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Roman Mars?

  The letters are amazing to read and they feel very persuasive and they feel very motivating to me. But why do you think they hit Chester Arthur the way they do? Why do you think they make him change?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Arthur comes from, at least in his upbringing, from a moral background. Arthur's father is this abolitionist minister, very anti-slavery, like gets in trouble for the devotion he has to the anti-slavery cause. And you have to assume that at least some of that is buried in Arthur, kind of waiting to reemerge. And I wonder if after years of living in a system where that moral center was not rewarded, or cultivated, or wanted, or asked for, that her letters reconnect him with that part of himself, where it goes, "Oh, no, no, this is more the world I was raised in," you know, "or this was the understanding of how a person is supposed to be and what they're supposed to stand

• 40:15Speaker 01

  for, that my father tried to put into me when I was young about like, you've got to do the right thing and stand up for justice."

• 40:23Roman Mars?

  That rediscovery of his moral center doesn't stay personal. It becomes systemic. Arthur helps create a government run on merit, not connections. And suddenly, that government is capable of accomplishing things on a massive scale, the things that make a nation great. I mean, it really does set up a competent government that can meaningfully fight two world wars. It sets up why the 20th century is the American century, in my opinion.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I think you're exactly right. The things that America accomplished in the 20th century are of such a massive scale. Winning the Second World War, like all the New Deal programs, the Social Security Administration, being able to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and then enforce them. These are things that can only be handled by a government that has a baseline of competency and basic productivity. Landing on the moon, like, there's no way that's happening if you don't have a government that is set up to do all the little things that you need to do. Just the fact that when the Apollo astronauts lifted off into space, you knew that even though this was private companies hired to build this equipment, that they had gone through a vetting process that ensured

• 41:32Speaker 01

  that it was not being done just through kickbacks. And it wasn't just that a congressman's nephew suddenly opened an aerospace company. Like, you can't accomplish any of these things without having a basic faith that the government can do its job professionally. And that all starts there.

• 41:48Roman Mars?

  And have some consistency across administrations of like the Apollo program, for example. It starts under Kennedy, and they land on the moon under Nixon.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  That Nixon could found the EPA, and then for the next 50 years, no matter who was president, it could do its job of keeping water and air relatively clean. And there's a constancy to the government. And it feels like America can last because it has people working for it who their highest loyalty is not for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It means that the government belongs to the American people in a very real way that it doesn't when it belongs to whichever party happens to be in power at that time.

• 42:31Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And you can't really overstate how much we, as a nation and as individual citizens, have benefited from this professional, impartial, nonpartisan bureaucratic service. As much as it's easy to complain about it, "Oh, it doesn't move fast enough. Oh, like, these people, you know, they care more about their little fiefdoms than they do about helping this thing or doing this other thing." It's still so much better than the alternative, which is living in a chaos world.

• 43:02Roman Mars?

  We complain about the bureaucracy. We vilify it as slow and inefficient. But a consistent and competent bureaucracy is what made this country capable of the achievements of the 20th century. And we owe that, at least in part, to Julia Sand, just a regular American, who positioned herself as the voice of the president's conscience. She changed the course of American history, and we've lived off the fruits of her audaciousness, of her belief that a president could be better.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And she is buried today in Brooklyn at Greenwood Cemetery. And she's just in the family plot. She does not have a headstone of her own. Years ago, I visited her grave and was just, I was so moved by seeing just that you could just walk by and not know that she was there. And that's the life she led, was she was a woman who, if you didn't know her personally, just walked by her house, you didn't know she was there. And it's only because of this kind of amazing story, this amazing connection through these letters. These letters are the only thing of her that survives, that we really know of today. And it's this amazing thing to me where it feels like Julia Sand kind of saves Arthur

• 44:16Speaker 01

  in a way by helping to motivate him to become the better president that he could be, so that when he leaves office, people go, "Actually, you know what? He was pretty good. I thought he was going to be terrible, but he wasn't that bad. You know, he was okay." And in a very real sense, Arthur saves Julia from being forgotten by history by holding on to those letters. And because those letters exist, we still know her name, and we know that she existed in this world. There's so many things in this story that become symbols of things. And she becomes a symbol to me for all those people who have one opportunity, maybe, to make their voice heard. And they make their voice heard, and it nudges history in a different direction. You know, she's one of these many, many people who, in our

• 44:59Speaker 01

  country, where we have this understanding of like, well, the ordinary American is the backbone of our system and our country and everything that's important, like, you can reach out to the President of the United States, and it'll make your name, if not legendary, then at least a little bit immortal in a way that it wouldn't be otherwise.

• 45:20Roman Mars?

  Julia Sand's final letter to Chester Arthur was sent on September 15, 1883.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  My very bad friend, who does not deserve that I should care where he goes or what becomes of him. Are you coming to Newport? One day I hear that you are, the next that you are not. At present, I'm staying at Mrs. Ives, a quiet little house in a quiet little street. And we so seldom are near. Do come if you can. Yours sincerely, J.I.S.

• 46:05Roman Mars?

  Ellie Kalin, it's always fun to talk with you. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Thank you, Roman. This has been such a pleasure. Anytime you want me to come and talk about Chester Arthur, I'll do it. I'll be there.

• 46:19Roman Mars?

  Ellie Kalin is an Emmy, Peabody, and Writers Guild award-winning comedian and writer.

• 46:43Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States and 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Priscilla Alabie, who also voiced the letters of Julia Sand. Our other producers are Ellie Lightfoot and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Iver Manley. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production

• 47:23Roman Mars?

  coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 47:59Roman Mars?

  Thank you again to the sponsor of today's episode, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the collaborator making your day-to-day life easier. Set up workloads with cowork to run on a schedule, like daily reports and weekly summaries. Claude can scan your Slack and email to build you a prioritized action list. That's how I use it for this project, actually. It takes all the suggestion emails and puts them in the spreadsheet for me, so I can check them all out and share them. You can build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need, like custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes, all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai.