100 Objects #13: The Sand Letters

Summary

Podcast Summary: 99% Invisible

Episode: 100 Objects #13: The Sand Letters
Host: Roman Mars
Guest: Elliot Kaelin
Date: August 14, 2026

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Overview:

This episode explores a little-known chapter in American history: how a chronically ill, homebound woman named Julia Sand influenced President Chester A. Arthur—once a symbol of political corruption—into becoming an unexpected champion of civil service reform. Through a series of 23 impassioned letters, Julia Sand’s voice prompted Arthur to move away from a corrupt patronage system and lay the foundation for the modern American government. The episode, part of the "100 Objects" series, uses "The Sand Letters" as a lens to understand the transformation of both an obscure president and the government he led.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights:

1. Chester A. Arthur: From Obscurity and Corruption to the Presidency

• Background:
  • Born in Vermont, son of an abolitionist preacher ([05:57])
  • Early career marked by instances of idealism, e.g., ending segregation on New York streetcars ([06:15])
• Political Rise:
  • Reputation for efficiency in unglamorous Civil War tasks (notably, the “socks” story) ([07:01])
  • Under tutelage of political boss Roscoe Conkling, Arthur became Collector of the Port of New York—then the most lucrative government post ([09:53])
  • Embodied the "spoils system": government jobs given as political rewards, regardless of merit ([08:54])
  • Amassed great wealth ("income was double that of the President of the United States" - [11:00]), famous for owning 70-80 pairs of pants ([11:20])

2. Spoils System and the Brewing Crisis of Confidence

• Systemic Corruption:
  • Ordinary Americans frustrated as they began to depend more on government services ([12:16])
  • The Republican split: Stalwarts (pro-spoils) vs. Reformers ([12:32])
• Path to Vice Presidency:
  • Arthur was chosen as the vice presidential nominee to balance reformer President James Garfield ([13:52])
  • He was reluctant and terrified at the prospect of becoming president ([15:04])

3. Turning Point: Assassination of President Garfield

• Assassination Details:
  • Charles Guiteau, a deranged "disappointed office seeker," shot Garfield, believing Arthur would reward him with office ([16:42])
  • The act symbolized the flaws of the spoil system ([19:47])
  • Arthur, widely seen as corrupt, was thrust into the presidency; even he did not want the role ([21:09])

4. Julia Sand: An Unlikely Catalyst for Reform

• Who Was Julia Sand?
  • Unmarried, chronically ill, politically powerless woman in 1880s New York ([24:39])
• Her First Letter ([25:09]):
  • Urges Arthur to “rise to the emergency” and embrace reform
  • Memorable quote:
    “The people are bowed in grief, but do you realize it not so much because [Garfield’s] dying as because you are his successor?” ([25:31])
  • Advocated civil service reform as Arthur’s chance for redemption
• Style and Substance:
  • Letters blend encouragement, advice, challenge, and playful teasing ([27:06])
  • She claimed the role of Arthur’s “dwarf”: speaking truth to power as court jesters once did ([26:34])
  • Told Arthur to avoid New York’s corrupt circles and appoint only the qualified ([28:10])
  • Cared for Arthur’s health (“Do you take care of your health? ... Nothing supplies a place of fresh air and sunshine.” - [27:45])

5. Real-World Impact: Arthur’s Transformation

• Arthur Starts Listening:
  • Vetoed the River and Harbor Act, impressing Sand ([29:54])
  • Ultimately signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883—beginning the merit-based federal bureaucracy ([31:21])
• Limits & Contradictions:
  • Despite Julia’s urgings, signed the Chinese Exclusion Act after his veto was overridden ([30:05], [30:32])
• Break with Old Cronies:
  • Ended alliance with Conkling:
    “For the vice presidency, I was indebted to Mr. Conkling, but for the presidency of the United States, my debt is to the Almighty.” ([33:08])

6. Personal Connection and Lasting Influence

• Did They Meet?
  • Arthur visited Julia Sand in her home ([35:04])
  • Visit was awkward and chaperoned by Sand’s family ([36:19])
  • Julia writes: “How good you were to come and see me after all, and how badly you were repaid for it.” ([35:16])
• Why Did Arthur Listen?
  • The letters reached Arthur’s “moral center,” recalling his idealistic upbringing ([39:32])
  • Arthur, a widower, may have found Sand’s combination of faith and candor both comforting and motivating ([33:59])
• Legacy:
  • Arthur kept all of Sand’s letters; destroyed almost all of his other papers ([38:30])
  • Sand’s words arguably restored Arthur’s idealism, fueling systemic change

7. Broader Legacy: The Value of Competent Government

• Implications for U.S. History:
  • Establishment of a professional, impartial bureaucracy enabled America’s 20th-century achievements ([40:23], [41:47])
  • The story underscores the historical importance—and contemporary fragility—of government systems based on expertise, not patronage

8. Memory and Immortality Through Design

• Memorial for Sand:
  • Sand is buried in Brooklyn, unmarked, but remembered because Arthur saved her letters ([43:32])
  • Kaelin: “Arthur saves Julia from being forgotten by history by holding onto those letters.” ([43:32])
  • Symbolizes how “ordinary Americans” can shift history by audaciously making their voices heard

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps):

• "He was very much a figure of his time and that meant he was involved with a lot of shady dealings... But these are not the things that you want people of the future or even necessarily your descendants knowing about."
  — Elliot Kaelin ([01:21])

• "The people are bowed in grief, but do you realize it not so much because he's dying as because you are his successor... Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you."
  — Julia Sand letter, voiced by Priscilla Alabi ([25:31], [25:43])

• "If any man says, ‘With Arthur for president, civil service reform is doomed,’ prove that Arthur can be its finest champion."
  — Julia Sand letter ([26:15])

• "For the vice presidency, I was indebted to Mr. Conkling, but for the presidency of the United States, my debt is to the Almighty."
  — Chester A. Arthur ([33:08])

• "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."
  — Elliot Kaelin ([43:32])

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Important Segments (Timestamps):

• 05:57 – Arthur’s family and abolitionist upbringing
• 09:53 – Anatomy of the spoils system
• 16:42 – Garfield’s assassination and its connection to office-seeking
• 24:27 – Introduction of Julia Sand and her first letter
• 31:21 – Signing of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act
• 35:04 – Arthur’s spontaneous visit to Julia Sand
• 39:32 – Discussion of Arthur’s moral reconnection
• 41:47 – Legacy of a competent, merit-based government
• 43:32 – Reflections on Julia Sand’s immortality through her preserved letters

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Conclusion:

"The Sand Letters" is both the tale of an obscure president’s moral awakening and a reminder of the hidden power an ordinary citizen can wield. Through her persistent, audacious correspondence, Julia Sand nudged Chester Arthur—and, by extension, American government—toward justice, meritocracy, and competence. This episode demonstrates the enduring, often invisible, influence of design—both of paper and of systems—on the course of history.

Transcript

[Roman 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. 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

He was involved in what you could call shenanigans or 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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Three garbage barrels, each around 4ft 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 and which we now know

[Elliot Kaelin]

are from a woman named Julius Hand, a woman that Chesterre 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, just

[Roman Mars]

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 Eliot is so obsessed with Chester Arthur.

[Elliot Kaelin]

The way the story is often told, and I always wonder if this is a real thing or if it's just, if it's 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.

[Roman Mars]

Eliot 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. 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

These letters from Julius Sands 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 the 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.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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

[Roman 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 few remember and in the process created the American government as we know it. So let's start back like in classic E shaped narrative structure to the beginning of Chester Arthur's life. What do we know about this guy?

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

And he fought her case. And. 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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

He is doing the unglamorous work of, oh, people need something. I'm gonna 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. And this is the kind of thing that when you're fighting a war, you need socks. It's not like you have to have things on your feet to keep your feet clean and dry and healthy. When they do civil warrior 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 pun intended, on getting socks. 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?

[Roman Mars]

Then Arthur sends his aide to that

[Elliot Kaelin]

church and basically goes up to his pew and drags him out in the middle of the church. Service 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.

[Roman 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 Conkling.

[Elliot Kaelin]

Roscoe Conkling 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's 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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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, yeah, I was canvassing for you all over the fourth ward. 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.

[Roman Mars]

At this time, Roscoe Conkling is huge in the spoil system in New York. He has influence over who got jobs and where they'd be placed. Conkling 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

About two thirds 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 12 or 1300 people who work at that port, but you also have the ability to control and direct so much money.

[Roman Mars]

It's at the port and under the tutelage of Roscoe Conkling that Arthur learns how the game is. 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Arthur didn't create the spoil 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

In fact, there's a huge fight brewing in the Republican party over this half of the party called the stalwarts. People like Arthur and Conkling 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman 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 someone from the spoil system faction to balance the ticket and draw the stalwart votes.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 will work perfectly. And Arthur for his part is so excited about the idea of being vice president. Conkling 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, 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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

I.

[Elliot Kaelin]

And in his understanding 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 some, wants to keep his hand into the system, in the spoil 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 gonna take the vice presidency. You gotta do it.

[Roman Mars]

But was there any indication that Arthur wanted the presidency at.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 is too much responsibility. So he is just the idea of being president, I think, terrifies him.

[Roman 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 spoil system he's been running and benefiting from will kill a president, and Arthur will finally see what he's been a part of. What is the story of the Garfield shooting?

[Elliot Kaelin]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

town because it's summer in D.C. and it's disgusting to be in summer in D.C. 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.

[Roman 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 spoil system and the stalwarts and the reformers. Like, it really plays into the ideological schism that is happening.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 Guiteau, 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's 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 wanna be the post clerk for of Moose Jaw. Okay, great. You're the postal clerk of Moose Jaw.

[Roman Mars]

What Eliot 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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. Guiteau was one of those people, but he had. His sights were unrealistically high. And there's stories about him basically, like just jumping out of nowhere. Like if Garfield is walking around the White House, Guiteau jumping out of the bushes and saying, hey, it's me, your friend Charles Guiteau. I supported you in the election. You should make me ambassador to Vienna. You should make me ambassador to France. Guiteau, he's 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.

[Roman Mars]

And with each no. Guiteau'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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

Let's look at it from Garfield's point of view. This guy keeps jumping out at you and telling you that he should be the ambassador to Vienna. You don't give him that job. You know, the. And so Guiteau 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 A. Arthur is going to show up at the. 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.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

It's almost like Garfield's assassination is a living political cartoon. That Garfield could be labeled reformer and he's walking through the the train station in D.C. and a man labeled spoil 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.

[Roman Mars]

Guiteau shot Garfield twice. The first bullet grace 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 in 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. Well, maybe. And the country is for months just in suspense and worried because they don't know whether the president is gonna survive this or not.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

He is freaking out that people are suspecting that he's involved in some way, that he is part of this shadowy, 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. 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 read about it, that people were just going around saying, chet Arthur is 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 jock. He is surrounded by people saying, arthur, you're bad at this. Or like, arthur, we don't think you can do this. And Arthur, I think is he's so overwhelmed, sad and unhappy and emotionally suffering

[Roman Mars]

while the country holds its breath, sending thoughts and prayers to President Garfield. Someone new enters the chat. Julia Sand. Let's take a break to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, Anthropic. The team behind Claude. Have you ever wished you could hand off a task to someone while you're on the go? Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and things with with you. Integrate Claude into any part of your project, keeping you focused on solutions as your research assistant, Claude's research capabilities are comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations. Turning hours of research into minutes. Claude becomes your command center by connecting to your professional tools like GitHub, Jira, HubSpot, Notion, and Google Workspace. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Delegate tasks big and small with cowork so you can handle other work while Claude runs. It even has checkpoints that lets you save progress and roll back to any previous state instantly. And when all the work is done, Claude can help you create a polished document, spreadsheet or presentation directly in your file system. No need to worry about rough drafts that need heavy editing for problems worth solving. Get started with Claude at Claude AI. That's Claude AI.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman 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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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?

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Stan'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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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. It is civil service reform. You can do it. Civil service reform. Civil service reform.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 of the letters 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. 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

[Roman Mars]

in subsequent letters. Julia Sands advice covers everything.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

Nothing supplies a place of fresh air and sunshine.

[Roman 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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Over and over across the 23 letters, the message is the do better because you can be better. 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 filled 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 like slightly in the fact that this didn't mean that Chester Arthur did all great things in his presidency. I think he did really contemptible things as president too.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman 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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 in 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 Julius sand is frustrated with him. About this.

[Roman Mars]

But despite spending his career benefiting from the spoil 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

This 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've got to kick everybody out.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

Yes. And so you have. It's. 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.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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's gonna send me right back. Because at that point, the. The legislature elected senators. People didn't direct elect senators. And the legislature was like, thank you for giving us this opportunity to get rid of you. And so, so he flames out of government.

[Roman Mars]

Amazingly, 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 spoil system buddies in New York, just as sand advised him to.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 things she wants him to do, but bears out the general direction she's trying to push him in.

[Roman Mars]

Why do you think Chester Arthur listens to her?

[Elliot Kaelin]

I do imagine that he is touched by anyone having faith in him when what 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 or that was attractive to listen to.

[Roman 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?

[Elliot Kaelin]

So we only know about this from a letter that Julia writes to Arthur that's dated August 24, 1882. And she talks in it about how she says at the start, she goes, my friend, my friend, how good you were to come and see me.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 have always imagined that this was Arthur on the spur 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 he literally just shows up out of nowhere.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

The way that I read what happened is that her family will not leave the room. She says in letters, 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's trying to say, like you didn't spend enough time talking to me. But at the same time, 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.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

My brother said I was like the man in the Arabian Nights who got the big genie out of the vase and then 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 romance novel version of this story, that might happen.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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?

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

They must have, because he doesn't throw them away. He doesn't have them burned. 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 onto all of them. 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 rather than standing for the spoil system.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, 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?

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 re. Emerge. 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 he goes, oh, no, no, this is more the. The world I was raised in, you know, or this was. This was the understanding of how a person is supposed to be and what they're supposed to stand for. That my father tried to put into me when I was young about like, you gotta do the right thing and stand up for justice.

[Roman 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.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kaelin]

That Nixon could found the EPA. And then for the next 50 years, no matter who is 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, the Republican Party. It means that the. 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. Yeah, 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.

[Roman 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. 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, off her belief that a president could be better.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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 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 Julius sand kind of saves Arthur 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 gonna be terrible, but he wasn't that bad. He was okay. And in a very real sense, Arthur saves Julia from being forgotten by history by holding onto 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 the 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. She's one of these many, many people who in our 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.

[Roman Mars]

Julius Ann's final letter to Chester Arthur was sent on September 15, 1883.

[Julia Sand (voice actor)]

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 day 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, Jis.

[Roman Mars]

Ellie Kaylin. It's always fun to talk with you. Thank you so much for doing this.

[Elliot Kaelin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Elliot Kalin is an Emmy, Peabody and Writers Guild Award winning comedian and writer. 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 Alabi, who also voiced the letters of Julia Sand. Our other producers are Ellie Lightfoot and Brenna Dahldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell, mixing by Ivor 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 Coordinator is Shan Pillay and the Production Manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stephen 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 100objects99pi.org. 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 workflows 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, dashboard, 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.