The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur By Scott S. Greenberger

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When President James Garfield was shot in 1881, nobody expected Vice President Chester A. Arthur to become a strong and effective president, a courageous anti-corruption reformer, and an early civil rights advocate.Despite his promising start as a young man, by his early fifties Chester A. Arthur was known as the crooked crony of New York machine boss Roscoe Conkling. For years Arthur had been perceived as unfit to govern, not only by critics and the vast majority of his fellow citizens but by his own conscience. As President James A. Garfield struggled for his life, Arthur knew better than his detractors that he failed to meet the high standard a president must uphold. And yet, from the moment President Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades. He surprised everyone -- and gained many enemies -- when he swept house and took on corruption, civil rights for blacks, and issues of land for Native Americans. A mysterious young woman deserves much of the credit for Arthur's remarkable transformation. Julia Sand, a bedridden New Yorker, wrote Arthur nearly two dozen letters urging him to put country over party, to find "the spark of true nobility" that lay within him. At a time when women were barred from political life, Sand's letters inspired Arthur to transcend his checkered past--and changed the course of American history. This beautifully written biography tells the dramatic, untold story of a virtually forgotten American president. It is the tale of a machine politician and man-about-town in Gilded Age New York who stumbled into the highest office in the land, only to rediscover his better self when his nation needed him.

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According to Harvard University's "Writing With Sources":"If your own sentences follow the source so closely in idea and sentence structure that the result is really closer to quotation than to paraphrase... you are plagiarizing, even if you have cited the source. You may not simply alter a few words of your source... You need to recast your summary into your own words and sentence structure, or quote directly."By that definition, then, "The Unexpected President" is riddled with plagiarism.Years ago, I read "Gentleman Boss", Thomas C. Reeves' 1975 biography of Chester Arthur. So I was looking forward to reading "The Unexpected President" for a fresh, new take on the subject."New" it is, but "fresh" it is not. Consider the following few passages, from Reeves and then Greenberger:Reeves, p. 9:"He once threw the West College bell into the Erie Canal, and he carved his name at least twice on the somber college buildings."Greenberger, p. 12:"He once threw the West College bell into the Erie Canal, and he carved his name at least twice into college buildings."Reeves, p. 8:"Besides being an innovative educator, Nott was a well-known inventor who had patented thirty different kinds of stoves and devised an ingenious steamship boiler."Greenberger, p. 12:"In addition to being an educator, Nott was a well-known inventor who had patented 30 different kinds of stoves and designed an innovative steamship boiler."Reeves, p. 20:"Nell's father, Captain William Lewis Herndon, had won national attention a few years earlier as the leader of an expedition that explored the Amazon River from its headwaters to its mouth."Greenberger, p. 25-26:"She was the daughter of US Navy Captain William Lewis Herndon, an explorer who had become famous a few years before for leading an expedition that explored the Amazon River from its headwaters to its mouth."Those are just a few short examples of Greenberger's near word-for-word transcriptions of Reeves' writing, and that's just from the first two chapters of his book. I could go on. At times, Reeves is cited in Greenberger's end notes. Other times, he's not. At no time are any of these near-direct excerpts put into quotation marks to indicate they are Reeves' words and not Greenberger's.In his acknowledgements, Greenberger rightly cites Reeves' work as an indispensable resource as he wrote his book. But it's clear Reeves' book was much more of a template than a mere resource. Any two biographies on the same subject are invariably going to include many of the same stories. But in telling those stories, Greenberger very often uses precisely the same facts and anecdotes that Reeves did, in the same order, with the same descriptive phrases, using the same sentence structure.Consider these longer passages. While in this case, Greenberger's version is not a word-for-word transcription, it's apparent that he is merely rephrasing Reeves' version. And while Reeves is directly quoting a primary source, Greenberger simply incorporates the source's story into his narrative without any attribution in the text:Reeves, p. 11:"In the words of one of those students: 'He said that he knew about the past problems, but that with the proper respect for each other's rights teachers and students could live together in harmony. He said he did not threaten but would demand that the students obey him, and that he would try to win the good will of all present. Some of the leaders smiled a bit. A lad of 13 sent a marble shooting across the floor. The teacher walked to the lad and said "Get up, Sir." He said it a second time, and then took him by the collar, as if to raise him...'"Greenberger, p. 13-14:"He told the students he was aware of their dismal record but that he saw no reason why teachers and students could not live together in harmony - provided they respected each other's rights. He would not threaten them, he promised, but he would insist that they obey him. The class ringleaders smirked, and then one 13-year-old sent a marble shooting across the floor. Arthur strode over to the perpetrator. "Get up, sir." The boy remained in his seat. "Get up, sir," Arthur repeated, this time seizing the transgressor by his collar, as if to drag him to his feet..."As the book progresses, Greenberger continues to rephrase entire paragraphs of Reeves' at a time. The blatant cribbing subsides, at times, when Greenberger strays from Reeves' narrative in order to add additional color and background material. But then even some of this additional material ends up closely mimicking the specific wording of the primary sources cited in the end notes:Greenberger, p. 117:"Most of the men carrying the signs wore colorful badges, some with portraits of Grant, others of Blaine, and a few featuring the rugged face of John Sherman, stamped in black on green satin."New York Times article, June 3, 1880:"They were of all colors, and variously inscribed - some bearing the portraits of Grant, others a picture of Blaine, and a few the rugged features of John Sherman, stamped in black upon green satin."While Reeves' scholarly book is not exactly what one would call an easy read, it's long been considered the definitive biography of the 21st president. And it remains so. If nothing else, Greenberger has succeeded in rewriting Reeves' denser work to appeal to a modern, mass audience. But ultimately, essentially, it is just that - a rewrite. An abridged, derivative rewrite of someone else's work.The now-elderly Reeves is owed a public apology, if not a share of the royalties, for what is largely a pilferage of his work. And Greenberger, his editor and his publisher ought to be ashamed for trying to pass this off as a wholly original piece of writing. Chester Arthur is overdue for a new, authoritative biography. But "The Unexpected President" isn't it.

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