On October 27,
2010,
Daily Show host, John Stewart, called
President Obama “Dude” on national TV.
It
triggered a spate of hand-wringing opinion pieces about whether it was inappropriate
for a talk-show comedian to call the President “Dude.” (See, for example,
Wall
Street Journal,
LA
Times).
But
regardless of where you fall on that issue, Barack Obama was not the first
“Dude” President. President Chester (“Chet”)
A. Arthur, who succeeded to the Presidency after President Garfield was
assassinated, was known by the nickname, “Dude President,” and President
Roosevelt, who succeeded to the Presidency after President McKinley was
assassinated, had been known as a “Dude,” since at least 1884.
Chester A. Arthur
Chester (“Chet”)
A. Arthur had the rare misfortune to be president at the very moment that the
word, “Dude,” came into being.
He became
President in 1881, when President Garfield was assassinated; the word,
“Dude,”
came to prominence in early 1883.
Arthur
also had the fortune – literally – to afford to dress like a “Dude”:
He was
known as the “Dude President,” because of his elegances of dress
and surroundings, and when his term was over, and he went back to his lawyer’s
office in New York, he was instantly forgotten.
The Pall Mall Budget (London), Volume
34, Number 948, November 25, 1886, pages 5-6.
 |
| Arthur is
down on one knee, looking up; the eventual Republican nominee, Garfield, is on
the left, holding his ankle (From the National Portrait Gallery). |
The President is
represented as descending a pair of stairs, presumably those of the White
House. One foot is upon the ground and
the other rests upon the last step, while he looks fondly down after a red, red
rose that has slipped presumably from his buttonhole and is falling to the
ground. The whole pose is intensely aesthetic
and strongly reminds one of “Bunthorne” in
Patience. It is too bad to think of
our good looking Arthur meandering down through the coming years as the “Dude” President.
The Meridional (Abbeville, Louisiana),
October 20, 1883, page 2.
But meander
through the years he did.
During the “Dude”
craze of 1883, political cartoonists lampooned the President’s fancy dressing
habits:
The “Dude
President” was no
Imelda Marcos,
but he is said to have had “33 suits of clothes, 21 pairs of shoes, and 165
pairs of pants, at the same time”:
Arthur, on
the other hand, did not turn into a turd – he became less of a turd after
taking office. He had been placed on the
Republican ticket with Garfield, a reformer, to placate his own, New York party-machine
wing of the party. But when Garfield was
assassinated early in his term, Arthur continued Garfield’s reform policies, to
the surprise of many onlookers.
Before he appeared at
all in the Presidential campaign, “Chester A. Arthur,” or more familiarly
“Chet. Arthur,” was in the very centre of New York “machine” politics, and by
merit held a very “bad eminence” among a band of professional politicians whose
tongues and hands were alike misemployed.
For seven years he held the collectorship of the port of New York, one
of the biggest “spoils” in the possession of the party. He was removed by President Hayes in the
interests of reform, and then he made himself so prominent by political “mud-throwing”
that nothing but a very high office could buy him, and with him the vote of New
York. His nomination for the
Vice-Presidency was simply a sop to the more disreputable political elements of
his city, and the life of Garfield was watched with greater anxiety because
“Chet. Arthur” stood next in succession to supreme authority. Responsibility, however, exerted its usual
sobering effect, and if his presidency was not strikingly good it was at least
not strikingly bad.
The Pall Mall Budget (London), Volume
34, Number 948, November 25, 1886, pages 5-6.
Early in his
career as an attorney in New York City, long before he became part of a corrupt
political machine, Arthur accomplished some good works.
He helped
win the freedom of eight slaves who
were passing through New York with their “master.”
He also helped desegregate the New York City
transit system by winning the case of
Elizabeth
Jennings Graham, who had been denied a seat on a streetcar because of her
race.
Chester A.
Arthur was not always a bad man; but he was always a “Dude!”
Teddy Roosevelt
President Theodore
(“Teddy”) Roosevelt was a wealthy twenty-five-year-old New Yorker in 1883; a
prime target for “Dude” taunters.
As a
studious and industrious man, however, he was not the proto-typical dude; but
that did not keep him, or any of the Roosevelts, safe.
His
uncle
Robert, for example, was branded a dude in May 1883:
When Mr. Robert
Roosevelt, of New York, arose in the Legislature of the State to denounce
something or other, attention was attracted by his affected manner and his
faultless and somewhat finical attire.
He talked too long, and a restive member rose and begged the Clerk to
read as germane to Mr. Roosevelt’s remarks an extract from a newspaper which he
sent to the Clerk’s desk. When the
reading began it was found that the extract was a doggerel poem beginning:
Butler Citizen (Butler, Pennsylvania),
May 16, 1883, page 1.
One year
later, it was Teddy’s turn.
It happened
at the 1884 Republican National Convention
[ii];
Teddy’s national, political coming out party:
A
DUDE SCENE.
And now followed the
most comical scene of this or any other convention. When there was a little lull in the Blaine
jubilation, Foraker . . . said: “I move that this convention take a recess
until 7 p.m.”
His words beyond “recess”
were not heard further than his immediate surroundings, for yells of “No! no!”
and “Ballot! Ballot!” went up and down and all around and caromed on the air
from delegates and galleries until hell reigned again. The New York independents, whom the Blaine
papers disrespectfully style “political dudes,” were
on their ears and feet at the same time. . . .
Wm. Walter Phelps,
from New Jersey, mounted a chair and young Roosevelt, the par excellence political dude from New York, just in front of him –
both wildly gesticulating with both hands and talking as fast and as loud as
they could yell.
St. Paul Daily Globe, June 7, 1884, page
1.
After the
convention, Teddy Roosevelt moved out to the Dakota Territory to live and work as
a rancher for several years; when he first showed up, he was considered a “Dude”:
Roosevelt’s
Dude Outfit
Young
Fellows from New York Who Didn’t Take with the Cowboys.
“It was in 1885 that
I first saw Roosevelt,” says H. W. Otis, of Peshastin, Wash., in Success Magazine.
. . . .
“There were five or
six young fellows from New York with Roosevelt, and we called them ‘the dude outfit.’”
St. Tammany Farmer (Covington,
Louisiana), February 24, 1906, page 2.
Over time,
he showed himself to be more than just a “Dude”:
Theodore Roosevelt
would not be taken for a New York dude in his
frontier garb among the cowboys out in the Bad Lands. Parties recently stole his boat, and Theodore
made affidavit in his mind that he would have that boat if he had to follow it
to the Gulf of Mexico. He took two men
with him, and overtook the thieves about 100 miles down the river. They showed fight, but were captured and
brought back, and are now reposing in jail at Mandan. They will have quarters at Bismarck in time.
St. Paul Globe, April 21, 1886, page 5.
By 1899, Roosevelt’s
friends, the Eaton Brothers, had established the first, “Dude Ranch” in Medora,
North Dakota; so-named because they entertained Eastern “Dudes,” like
Roosevelt, who went out West to experience some Western adventure:
What
Would Ben Corbin Do?
The Mandan Pioneer
tells of the Eaton Brothers’ “dude” ranch at
Medora where debilitated youths from the east spend the summer and rusticate
among the Bad Lands, become strong and lusty in the invigorating air and
indulge in genuine wolf hunts.
Bismarck Weekly Tribune (North Dakota),
June 16, 1899, page 6.
As for
Roosevelt, he left the Dakota Territory in 1886, and went into politics
full-time; eventually rising to the Presidency.
Perhaps he had always been more “Dude” than cowboy.
[iii] The Billings Gazette (Montana), July 12,
1904, page 1.
