Newsbusters has a post up saying CBS and MSNBC Both Falsely Claim Obama First President to Have Citizenship Questioned. Last night's Daily Show included Larry Wilmore mentioning, in all seriousness, Chester Arthur's citizenship controversy as a precedent to Obama's.

But as I said to a commenter at Volokh the other day, as far as I've ever seen, the contemporary 'debate' over Chester Arthur's eligibility wasn't very widespread. Rather, it has always appeared to me to be almost exclusively a one-man campaign by Arthur P. Hinman.

From Wikipedia:



"Gentleman Boss" suggests that Hinman might have been originally hired by Democrats, but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that Arthur's political opponents ran with the issue. Or that editorial boards promoted it, or that much of anything happened beyond Hinman's book. It was like Obama Birtherism, if Birtherism consisted of just Phil Berg.

Am I right in this assessment? Was Arthur Birtherism pretty much a one-man show? Or did it attract any audible or measurable level of support beyond Hinman himself?

In my, admittedly limited, stroll through historical newspapers, there was at least one editorial about Chester's citizenship during the campaign. Macon Weekly Telegraph, 2/18/1881, p. 4, "An Alien Vice President."

The Daily Inter Ocean, out of Chicago, Date: 12-24-1880; reported on Hinman coming to town to research Arthur's citizenship. They described it as the "second edition of the Morey myth."

That's from the online database, "America's Historical Newspapers," provided to me by Boston Public Library.

I suppose we will never know. One of the downsides to the internet is that it provides a way for the communicable disease known as The Crazies to spread faster and to more places. They didn't have the intertoooobes back in Chet's day.

Wasn't Arthur's purported citizenship issue related to a rumor he was born in Canada and not because his father was a Brit when he was born?

That's my understanding. While there was purportedly a "Chester Arthur eligibility" question, it never embraced any question of Arthur's father's citizenship. In fact, it seems quite well accepted that Arthur's father didn't naturalize until well after Chester's birth. (I seem to recall the naturalization papers themselves are in a museum somewhere.)

Yeah. far from burning the proof of this terrible secret as birthers have claimed, I read somewhere that Chester Arthur included his fathers naturalization papers in the personal papers he donated to the Library of Congress.

You can see them here. (I nabbed the link from a birther site but it should be good. The guy was going Vattellist)

privately stated to who? Hinman really was the original Phil Berg.

And Black is the new Irish, I guess?

There is a hidden clue in that New York Times article. If Chester Arthur was indeed born in Canada, as Hinman claimed but never proved, and his father was British at the time, what did that make him, since he was never naturalized? Yes: an alien.

In other words, Hinman's claim that Arthur was an alien more or less proves that he knew Arthur's father was not a US citizen at the time of his son's birth. Far from being a closely hidden secret, quite a number of people knew. But did not mind, until the claim was made Arthur was born in Canada ...

Note that Hinman was not a (complete) charlatan - Arthur did fiddle with his birthday -and his middle name was Alan (mistakenly spelled "Allen" in the article") and not Able as some people thought.

Here's an underacknowledged distinction between Hinman's allegations about Arthur and the Birthers' allegations about Obama.

The commonality between the two is that both were alleged, by some, to have been born outside the United States.

The difference is that Arthur was alleged to have been born in Canada, about 20 miles* north of his supposed U.S. birthplace in Vermont. Furthermore, his parents had previously lived and farmed property in Canada, before his birth. So Arthur's alleged 'true' birthplace was a short distance away, in a place where both of his parents had resided a few years earlier.

Obama, by contrast, is alleged to have been born in Kenya, some 10,700 miles from Honolulu. Almost fully halfway around the globe. And in a country (and on a continent) that his mother had never so much as set foot upon.

Fun Geographical Fact: Honolulu is further from the continent of Africa than every other Presidential birthplace.

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*20 miles, incidentally, is roughly the distance between my own parents' suburban home at the time of my birth, and the Atlanta hospital where I was born. Naturally such a trip could be made a lot faster in the 1970s than the 1820s, but it should indicate the relative insignificance of the geographical distances we're talking about with Arthur.

I have nothing of substance to add to this thread, but I wanted to post anyway because I had a historical encounter with President Chester Arthur this past weekend. Some friends and I wandered down to historic Tombstone, Arizona, site of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that Americans and Europeans alike (especially Brits and les français) are fascinated by. A stroll through downtown Tombstone today still looks like this:



Much of the town is preserved, especially a few historic buildings like the Old Courthouse, and the Bird Cage Theater (which also served as a brothel), and an old graveyard where the actual gunfight victims are buried. Tombstone is in Cochise County:



Anyway, the early 1880s were pivotal years for Tombstone, and for what is now southern Arizona. That placed it in the Arthur administration. I wasn't really aware of that as I went through various exhibits at the local museums, until I came across a mention of Chester himself in some project funding that had created a railroad or depot or something in the town.

Tombstone, like most historic Arizona towns, also had an active Chinatown in the late 19th century. President Arthur, it turns out, vetoed a particular immigration bill passed by Congress that sought to discriminate against Chinese immigrants in the country at the time. As we know, his little veto was not enough as several decades of anti-Asian immigration laws would follow, but I thought that was interesting. Tip o' the hat to you for that, Chester.

There was a mention in the FR thread about NBC requiring at least one parent being a US citizen and I starting reviewing the Chester A. Arthur stories. It has often been mentioned that he had his papers burned before his death and often suggested that the reason was to hide the circumstances of his birth to a non-citizen parent (his father) or that he himself had been born in Canada not far from the Vermont town recorded as his birthplace.

Here's a video that shows a curator showing some of the documents that survived Arthur's orders. When asked why he wanted those papers burned, he gives an interesting answer. It was because for most of Arthur's career, he had been a spoilsman. That was reflected in his correspondence and he had made attempts at reforming the spoils system. The Republican Party did not support him for re-election because a) he had done too much and b)he had not done enough towards reforms.

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/featur ... p?rec=3306

Notice the letter from Ulysses S. Grant is referred to as a "spoils" request asking for a job for someone.

Chester A. Arthur became president due to his predecessor, James Garfield, being short by a disappointed spoils seeking supporter. The demand for reforms became strong enough for the first federal civil service system to be formed under the Pendleton Act of 1883 and signed into law by Arthur.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Act