He was a lawyer by trade, well-educated, a Governor and President, but perhaps because of his time in the Civil War, he was far more comfortable around common people, believing that by empowering the individual to learn, strive, and work, we would empower civilization itself, fighting for civil rights, universal education, and a more equitable distribution of wealth, as we do today.
I consider myself a student of history, at least to some extent. I took all the available Advanced Placement classes in high school, which admittedly weren’t much in Central New Jersey in 1994, went on to seminars in college, and have read widely in the almost 30 years since then. While I wouldn’t claim to be the equivalent of a professor by any means, I’d like to believe I’ve learned enough to have a general sense of the great movements in American history in particular, understanding who the key players were that laid the foundation for the modern world even if I wasn’t familiar with all of the details, but if the life and legacy of Rutherford B. Hayes is any indication, I know a lot less than I think and have a lot more to learn. Like many, I’d been taught that he only rose to power as a result of a corrupt bargain that condemned Southern blacks to Jim Crow and segregation. As the man who was in the White House when Union troops finally pulled out of the South more than a decade after the Civil War, allowing Southerners to flagrantly violate the civil rights of former slaves, and as a President who served only one term, suggesting he was fundamentally unpopular, there seemed little reason to doubt the prevailing narrative or dig any deeper, until by pure happenstance to a large extent, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong. The happenstance here is the roundabout way I came in possession of a modern biography, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President, skillfully written by Ari Hoogenboom. To make a long story short as they say, my lovely wife and my mother are sporting enough to join me and my brother on an annual expedition to race cars at the Mid-Ohio Motorsports Complex, located in Mansfield, about halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, but they don’t have the patience to hang around the track all day with us. Instead, they look for adventures in the surrounding area while we go out and race, or try to so long as the car is running. Last year, they discovered that the Rutherford B. Hayes Museum is located at his old residence at Spiegel Grove, outside of Toledo. While my brother and I took to the track, they headed up there to check it out and my wife returned with the book as a little present for me, knowing my interest in American history.
At the time, I didn’t think about it much, putting it rather low on my list, figuring not much could be interesting about such an unheralded, unrespected historical figure from a bygone era, one I believed had little connection to our own beyond the failure to resolve racial tensions almost one hundred fifty years later. I’d even forgotten about it for a while until my wife reminded me as wives will do, giving me no choice except to give it a try. To be honest, I’m not sure what I expected before digging in. I guess I figured I’d learn a little about the President between Ulysses S. Grant, winner of the Civil War, and Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected since the Civil War, at the least. In many ways, politics then was both the same and different as it is today. There is much we complain about – the entrenched interests, the corruption, the betrayals, the failure to resolve issues many believe are easy to address, the incendiary language, viscous character attacks, and more – that remains the same, but to a large extent, many of the crucial debates during this period were highly technical and esoteric, not relevant to much in the modern world even though they use similar language and terms at times. For example, both Hayes and Cleveland were preoccupied with tariffs, that is taxes on imports, an issue which tended to split both parties, resulting in the repeated use of the old phrase “politics make strange bedfellows.” In the late 19th century, however, there was no income tax and tariffs were the primary way the federal government generated revenue, making them critical to the operation of the entire country. A tariff today might mean the same as it did in the Gilded Age and we might still debate their use as former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris did just last week, but the issue was of much more dramatic importance when the government simply couldn’t exist otherwise. Likewise, both Presidents were also preoccupied with the gold standard and whether or not introducing silver as a substitute would drive inflation. Inflation remains a concern today, of course, but the mechanism for stabilizing the money supply, the Federal Reserve, makes the debate over gold being a sounder currency than silver seem primitive even as it might well be more grounded in reality in what passes for current discourse. The same, however, cannot be said of many of the issues that drove Hayes after he refused to run for a second term (which he probably would’ve won considering Republican James Garfield prevailed), leaving office in 1881 and considered a successful President at the time.
In the remaining decade of his life, Hayes devoted himself to three topics that remain highly relevant to this day, the relationship between the races, education, and the inequitable distribution of wealth, sounding at points like he might step out of a time machine and immediately contribute something meaningful to a modern political debate. To begin with, he believed that the three issues were inextricably linked as we do now, with universal education including vocational training as the mechanism to both reduce racism, which was rampant beyond our modern ability to truly comprehend the travesty, and even wealth distribution, which was likewise and without the benefit of anything resembling a safety net of any kind. The idea of vocational training, called industrial education, alone was prescient at the time. For centuries, education was seen primarily as an immersion in the classics for rich people, frequently read in Greek or Latin, and with the goal not of preparing one for the world, but of filling the mind with ideas. Hayes was a voracious reader and didn’t object to a head full of ideas in principle, but he saw that as the old, aristocratic model in practice when building a modern country required a thriving middle class, armed with real, practical skills. As he put it, “Every American boy and girl should have that training of the hand and eye which industrial schools furnish [to give them] an equal chance and a fair start.” Likewise, he asserted that “No education for a boy or girl, rich or poor, black or white, is what it should be that does not prepare the young to make a living by manual labor on the farm, in the shop, or in the domestic employments of women. This, not merely because to make a living is the essential thing, but because such training builds up the intellect and character in a way and to an extent that no mere study of books can do.” He also believed that education would stop society from dividing between the rich and the poor, “castes, which prevail in the old world.” Prior to the woke-era at least, this is the modern conception of education, that we learn by doing, and that by doing, we can achieve upward mobility, living more fulfilling lives by taking advantage of the opportunities presented to us. Moreover, he also saw universal education as an essential component to the protection of our rights and the function of democracy itself. Even before he left office, he was arguing that “great and permanent prosperity” results from “intelligent self-government” and that universal suffrage required universal education. “My hobby, more and more is likely be Common School Education, or universal education.” He argued for federal funding when local governments couldn’t afford it, claiming that wherever education thrived, “shall be well done, in all our borders,” “it will be found that there, also, the principles of the Declaration of Independence will be cherished, the sentiment of nationality will prevail, the equal rights amendments will be cheerfully obeyed, and there will be the the home of freedom and refuge of the oppressed of every race.”
Both before and after leaving the Presidency, Hayes did everything possible to live up to his promise to ensure everyone had access to a proper education, especially the poor and the blacks suffering in the South, denied equal protection under the law, an outrage that dated back to his own time in office. He was a founder of Ohio State University in 1870, when he was Governor of the Buckeye State, and one of its chief proponents in the years since. In fact, the oldest building on campus, Hayes Hall, still bears his name, even as the college itself was originally called “Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College” encapsulating his desire to provide skill-based, industrial training at all levels including universities. He served on the board of trustees starting in 1877 and acted as the de facto president for over a decade, raising money, taking part in most of the decisions that enabled the institution to grow and thrive, even sighting the location of key buildings and actively helping to plan the college’s future. He also served as a trustee to the Peabody Fund, which was focused on educational opportunities in the South for both blacks and whites, dispensing money where needed to help ensure a well-rounded populace, but the Slater Group was the initiative that occupied most of his time during this period, where he proved over and over again to be a tireless advocate for the downtrodden. Similar to Peabody, Slater funded educational programs, but this time they were exclusively devoted to the black population and Hayes was a founder himself, personally invested in its success from the very beginning and allowing him to direct funding to the sort of industrial education he greatly preferred. The group backed a series of pilot schools for blacks of almost all ages, for example Clark University in Atlanta was an early beneficiary, and provided scholarship funding for collegiate students. Hayes was incredibly optimistic about both of these initiatives, almost to the point of blindness, once claiming against all obvious evidence there was “growing sentiment among Southern white people in favor of the education of the Negro race” notwithstanding “occasional outbreaks of prejudice and ignorance.” Regarding the scholarship program in particular, he declared “If there is any young colored man in the South whom we find has the talent for art or literature or any special aptitude for study, we are willing to give him educational funds to send him to Europe or to give him an advanced education.” Interestingly, this program brought Hayes in contact with the legendary black author, W.E.B. Dubois, who applied for and didn’t receive one of these scholarships at first despite being encouraged to do so. This prompted him to assail Hayes in a letter, claiming that he had withdrawn his offer of support unfairly, “I think you owe an apology to the Negro people…I find men willing to help me thro’ cheap theological schools, I find men willing to help me use my hands before I’ve got my brains in working order…but I never found a man willing to help me get a Harvard, Ph.D.” Rather than write back in a pique of his own, Hayes requested that Dubois apply again the following year, when a scholarship and a loan of $375 each was provided to send him to Europe and the two apparently reconciled.
Underlying his concern for the future of blacks in America and his focus on education, was a belief that wealth had become far too concentrated in the United States, which at times made him sound almost frighteningly close to a modern democratic socialist. Having faced down strikes while in office and seen them continue in the intervening years, he feared the potential for another Civil War, noting that “strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on the grounds of intolerable cruelty and oppression.” This, he came to believe, was precisely what was happening. The Gilded Age was in full swing at this point and “robber barons” from J.P. Morgan to John D. Rockefeller were redefining what it was to be rich while exploiting everyone and everything in their way long before there were laws protecting workers’ rights, unfair competition, or limiting the power of monopolies. Even the Supreme Court at the time generally deferred to the interests of the wealthy as a result of an 1819 decision involving Dartmouth College, declaring that the legislature had no power to intervene in private contracts, greatly curtailing a state’s ability to regulate industry within its borders, a decision Hayes described as a “mistake” because it “gave to capital a power that should reside only with the people.” In 1896, he declared these developments were nothing short of a threat to democracy, “The question for the country now is how to secure a more equitable distribution of property…There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property…in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.” While he remained a capitalist, a believer in private property, and strict adherence to the law, he felt that the modern businesses at the time were woefully under regulated and the wealth the rich accumulated enabled them to effectively purchase politicians along with everyone else, “In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the circles of the educated and talented,” the influence of money was “growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.” In his view, we would have to choose “to limit and control great wealth, corporations, and the like, or resort to a strong military government.” Though he referred to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as “offensive” and a “menace,” Hayes was especially concerned with the railroads, based on his own experience as a younger man and when he faced the largest strike in US history, the Great Strike of 1877, while he was President. “It may be truly said that for twenty-five years, at least, railroad workingmen have had too little, and railroad capitalists and managers…have had too much…The railroads should be under a wise, watchful, and powerful supervision by the Government.” At the same time, “No violence, lawlessness, destructive to life and property should be allowed. It should be put down instantly and with a strong hand.” The violence, he believed, originated in the burgeoning communist movement, which he saw as antithetical to American values. Following the Great Strike in 1877, he’d declared that “all of the lawless agitators and their fellow anarchists. They train under the red flag…It is the enemy…of honest industry in America. Rally under the old flag – the Stars and Stripes – the emblem of liberty regulated by law.”
Taxes paid by the rich, or rather the lack of them, was also a sore point to Hayes, resulting in comments very similar to those frequently made to this day. According to him, millionaires “pay less than half as much as ordinary citizens, whereas they ought to pay more taxes.” He even went so far as to connect poverty directly with crime. As a staunch advocate for prison reform with a lifelong history of defending the rights of the accused in a court of law, Hayes believed that lack of access to resources was fundamentally linked to one’s willingness to commit a crime in a formulation similar to what some might still insist. To him, the root cause of crime in general was “the crimes of the wealthy,” who in their “extravagance” denied capital to others, depriving people of an honest living. Though he’d benefitted from wealth accumulated by his uncle, Hayes proposed an early version of the inheritance tax, “Let no man get by inheritance…more than…an income of fifteen thousand per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.” Elsewhere, he wrote “No man…can use a large fortune so that it will do half as much good in the world as it would if it were in the hands of the workingmen who earned it by industry and frugality.” Here, we get to what we might consider the heart of the Hayes philosophy. He was a lawyer by trade, well-educated, a Governor and President, but perhaps because of his time in the Civil War, he was far more comfortable around common people, believing that by empowering the individual to learn, strive, and work to the best of their ability, we would empower civilization itself. Because of this, he was contemptuous of too much power in one person’s hands, citing the “inconsistency of allowing such vast and irresponsible power…to be vested by law into the hands of one man,” and those who denigrated the working man trying to get ahead in life. “No man,” he wrote, “is fit to make or administer laws in this country who holds in contempt labor or the laborer.” Even well over a century later, it remains a fine sentiment, one we would all do well to remember along with much of what Hayes said regarding these issues and more, suggesting once again that times change as much as they remain the same. Ultimately, it also goes to show that rarely do we know as much as we think and usually, we have a lot more to learn. What’s that they say about reading being fundamental?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 