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What did Chester Arthur have to hide?
No, I’m not talking about the way he hid his cheeks from the world with a pair of magnificent mutton-chop sideburns. I’m talking about how he burned all his presidential records just before he died in 1886.
Arthur’s grandson, Chester A. Arthur III, wrote in the 1930s that, after his own father, the president’s son, had died, he had tried to figure out where the 21st president’s records had gone. He reported that
I enquired of all the cousins there assembled — the nieces and nephews of my grandfather, as to what had happened to the bulk of the papers. Charles E. McElroy, the son of Mary Arthur McElroy who was my grandfather’s First Lady, tells me that the day before he died, my grandfather caused to be burned three large garbage cans, each at least four feet high, full of papers which I am sure would have thrown much light on history.
For decades, the Library of Congress could only lay its hands on a single document from Arthur, and that dated to his Civil War service, not his presidency. Archivists hunted in the early 1900s for any documents they could find from the Arthur administration. In 1915, Chester Arthur Jr. told the Library — five months after they asked him for information —…
