What Donald Trump has in common with a man named Chester

I don’t know this for sure, of course, but I’m going to venture a guess that there comes a time in a lot of Americans’ lives when this thought occurs to them: “Wait. We had a president named Chester Arthur? Why don’t people ever say that out loud?”

It’s easy to miss that one.

His first name, though unusual, certainly can’t compete with the standalones like Millard or Franklin or Abraham, Ulysses, Rutherford, Grover or Lyndon.

Nor is it regal enough to exist among the Georges, the Andrews and the Jameses.

His last name is of no help either. It certainly doesn’t have the historical recall value of … well, all the rest of the U.S. presidents.

Nearly all the rest of them anyway.

Don’t ask me about Benjamin Harrison.

Most unfortunate for President Arthur, though, is that he had the kind of face and facial hair that immediately leads people, when shown his photo, to confidently but urgently whisper “It’s Taft. That’s William Taft! Write it down! No, you bring the card up this time!” at trivia nights in bars across this nation.

Oh how Taft would attempt to roll over in his grave if he heard that one. Instead he will just have to ghost-shout, “My mustache was so much better attended to than that guy’s!” while Chester Arthur ghost-mutters “At least I never got stuck in a bath tub, man!”

I don’t remember when I first paused and truly absorbed the fact of Chester Arthur’s existence, but it was after Google had been invented. I know this because I Googled him.

Here were the Top 3 highlights of his life for me: no one liked him at first but then they did; he might have been a secret Canadian; and his sister was his “first lady.”

Whoa. Not in that way.

Don’t fall victim to that old Chester stereotype. Put your banjo down, friend.

Arthur was a widower. Mary McElroy just hosted parties on his behalf.

Anyway, this is all to say that I attended the Women’s March in Washington this weekend.

What does one have to do with the other?

Geography mostly. But also my new hobby.

After barely surviving the migraine of a presidential election we just had, I decided it was high time to learn more about our Founding Fathers and about the 45 men who have been entrusted to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution since 1789.

And I don’t just mean “learn,” I mean adult learn.

I want context and perspective. Facts and philosophy. I want to be able to correct misconceptions and say “Actually, George Washington didn’t like his mother all that much” with supreme confidence.

I want to be able to answer the pressing questions, like “Which president had a mullet?” (James Polk), “Who was the most ruggedly handsome?” (Ulysses S. Grant. Don’t you “Ronald Reagan” me) and “Which president wouldn’t touch light switches because he thought he’d die?” (Well, well, well. I guess you can ask me about Benjamin Harrison, after all).

To achieve all this, I made it a goal to read one biography per president.

It’s going to take a while to finish this project, of course. Presidential biographies aren’t exactly beach reading. But it’s already paying off.

As social media erupts into a civil war of words and the country seems more divided than many of us can remember it ever being, I remind myself daily, sometimes by the minute, that this is what it’s always looked like.

Democracy is ugly, beautiful, loud, crazy, rotten, fatalistic, imperfect and hopeful.

And though we don’t agree on the whos and the hows — and we just never will — at the end of the day we can all say the same thing.

“I’m here for the liberty, the justice and the pursuit of happiness.”

“And, seriously? Chester Arthur was a president? How did I miss that?”

This story was originally published January 24, 2017 at 6:02 AM with the headline "What Donald Trump has in common with a man named Chester."