#21 Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885) I Am The Walrus

The Walrus was named after the doctor who oversaw his birth, who also happened to be a good friend of his father.  The Walrus’s father was a Canadian preacher, which is probably why he never thought to question why his wife would insist they name their brand new baby after a man who was always hanging out around his house.  The Walrus, thanks to his middle class upbringing, attended university, where he studied law, beat up supporters of President Pokey, and threw the school bell into Lake Erie.  After graduating he moved to New York City where he worked as a lawyer, defending African-American’s civil rights.  However, this didn’t pay the bills, so he got himself appointed to a government position at the Port of New York, where he made himself rich on bribes and graft.     

The Walrus had a reputation for being a snappy dresser (ill-gotten money has its perks).  He was often called Elegant Arthur, The Gentleman Boss, Prince Arthur, and the Dude President.  When the Walrus fought in the Civil War, he used his connections to make sure he got a job behind the front lines where his uniform could stay in immaculate condition.  His inscrutable dress sense undoubtedly won him the hand of his wife, Ellen Herndon, who wasn’t so bad herself on the looks scale.  Of course, the Walrus’s fat wallet full of bribe money probably didn’t hurt either.  The Walrus’s misdeeds ended up catching up with him, and he was fired from his job for corruption.  This was shortly followed by his election to the Vice Presidency.  When President Boatman Jim was assassinated in 1881, the Walrus became president, an event that made his wife so happy, that she promptly died. 

The start of the Walrus’s presidency was contentious.  First, he had to take the oath of office twice, because apparently it has to be done by a federal official, not just some random friend.  Second, people made all sorts of wild claims, like the Walrus had actually been born in Canada and that he had orchestrated the assassination of Boatman Jim.  Undeterred, the Walrus, a man of luxury, refused to move into the White House until it was redecorated up to his extravagant tastes.  To pay for the renovation, he auctioned off all of the historical items already in it.  Most of the Walrus’s presidency was spent trying to decide which one of his eighty pairs of pants he should wear, changing his outfit three or four times a day, hosting lavish parties, going to night clubs, and just strolling around the streets of Washington DC until three in the god damn morning. 

While still president, the Walrus discovered he had a deadly kidney disease.  Keeping it hidden from the public, he traveled to Yellowstone to see if drinking boiling sulfur water would prolong his life, or perhaps he was actually just looking for the entrance to hell so he could make a deal with the devil.  Whatever the reason, his health continued to deteriorate and he did not run for a second term.  The day he left office, four women asked him to marry them.  Eighteen months later he died.  The last thing the Walrus did was burn all of his personal and official papers, which is about the worst way to disprove conspiracies that you had your predecessor assassinated. 

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chester_Arthur_1880.jpg

#20 James A. Garfield (1881) Not A Cat

Boatman Jim’s dad moved out to the frontier to marry a beautiful woman.  When he discovered that the woman was already married, he said what the hell and married her sister as a consolation prize.  This very romantic union produced Boatman Jim, who they named after his dead older brother, because why waste a perfectly good name.  While Boatman Jim was still a baby, his dad died, leaving the family to live in terrible poverty in a log cabin.  They were pretty much nineteenth century trailer trash.  The family couldn’t even afford shoes.  This led to Boatman Jim being constantly made fun of by the other children, something he dealt with by keeping his nose buried in a book while his doting mother told him that all those mean kids were just jealous of how cool he was. 

While still quite young, Boatman Jim left home and got himself a job on a canal boat, earning the worst presidential nickname ever.  Deciding that boating sucked ass, he went to college, earning money to pay for it by working as a janitor and a bell ringer.  After graduating, Boatman Jim worked as a teacher, lawyer, and preacher.  It was during his tenure as a teacher that he met his one true love, Lucretia Rudolph, who also happened to be one of his students.  Boatman Jim fought in the Civil War for a little while, but later quit to go into politicking.  In 1880, his party couldn’t agree on who should run for president, so they instead just pointed randomly into the crowd and decided Boatman Jim should do it.  Boatman Jim, not big on travelling, took the novel campaign approach of just sitting on the front porch of his dilapidated house and waiting for people to come up and ask him questions.  Somehow this worked and he won the election.     

Even as president, Boatman Jim was poor as hell.  He even had to borrow a horse and carriage from former President Granny to get around.  Boatman Jim spent most of his presidency impressing visitors by writing in Greek with one hand while simultaneously writing in Latin with the other, declaring a national holiday so people could go decorate Civil War graves, and juggling bowling pins to build his manly physique.  Like many people with rock hard bodies, Boatman Jim had a stalker.  During the election, a man named Charlie Guiteau, who was all sorts of crazy, had ranted and raved in the streets about how Boatman Jim should be president.  Mr. Guiteau felt that this unasked for service had earned him a government job.  When he was not given a government job, he bought a gun that he thought would look good in a museum one day and used it to shoot Boatman Jim.  

The shooting of Boatman Jim left the old timey doctors of the time with a perplexing medical case because they were unable to find the bullet lodged in his spine.  They tried to use an old timey metal detector to find the bullet, but it kept getting false positives because of the metal springs in the mattress.  This didn’t stop the doctors from cutting numerous holes into Boatman Jim and probing the holes with their dirty fingers.  After eighty days of these shenanigans, Boatman Jim very reasonably died of blood poisoning.  The doctors than cut out his spine (to finally find that pesky bullet) and put it on display in a museum. 

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Rutherford_Hayes_1870_-_1880_Restored.jpg

#19 Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) Mr. Excitement Himself

Granny (so called because he didn’t drink, smoke, or gamble) was probably the nicest, but most boring, man to ever be president.  When Granny’s mother told his father that she was pregnant, his father became so happy that he fell over and died.  His mother, who never remarried, raised Granny on her own, teaching him to avoid excitement at all costs.  Granny spent most of his time studying, because it was what his mother told him to do.  This resulted in him graduating from Harvard and becoming a lawyer.  As a lawyer, Granny became famous for perfecting the insanity defense, by pointing out that anyone who would hire him as a lawyer had to be a little crazy.  When the Mexican War broke out, Granny considered joining the Army, but decided to instead visit a friend in New England.   

Granny married Lucy Webb, a well-educated woman, pretty much just because his mother told him to.  Are you sensing a pattern here?  Soon after the Civil War broke out, Granny, ignoring his mother’s advice for the first time ever, joined the Army and became a Major General.  Granny probably should have listened to his mother, as he was shot in five different battles and was erroneously listed as dead for a period of time, which led to a great amount of difficulty in getting himself declared alive again.  After the war, Granny went into politics, where he was successful because he was a nice man with an epic beard.  In 1876, he ran for president on the very liberal idea that pretty much everybody was the same regardless of race.  The 1876 election was very contentious, with lots of back room deals and voter intimidation and fraud.  In the end, a compromise was made.  Granny got to be president, but in return the South got to go back to being blatant racists.  This earned Granny the nicknames His Fraudulency and Rutherfraud.  Both of which really hurt his feelings. 

Granny was given his oath of office in secret because it was worried that his opponents would try to derail his inauguration by booing or something.  His opponents did try to impeach him, but failed because his supporters just didn’t show up to the meeting.  Lacking a quorum, the vote could not take place.  Upon entering the White House, Granny banned drinking, smoking, dancing, and playing cards.  When people complained, Granny told them it was because of his wife, so people started calling her Lemonade Lucy.  To try and make up for the lack of fun, Granny started leading the singing of gospel hymns every morning, had a telephone installed at the White House (a device he claimed would never catch on), and imported the first Siamese cat into America (which he creatively named Siam).  Having little else to do, Granny spent the last 70 days of his presidency touring the West Coast and boring the hell out of the people there. 

No one wanted Granny to run for a second term, so he told everyone that he didn’t believe in second terms and didn’t run.  After his presidency, he continued his legacy of being a dull nice man by spending his time supporting educational foundations and pushing for prison reform.  In one last attempt to be interesting, he died of a heart attack and was buried with his wife and his favorite horse, Old Whitey.  The Siamese cat was not buried with them, because that would have just been silly. 

Images: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Rutherford_Hayes_1870_-_1880_Restored.jpg