Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President

Who was the true Rutherford B. Hayes? Was he an excellent or inconsequential president? How did his formative years and profession form his later years? How did his triumphs and failures alter our historical past? And why ought to we care? Ari Hoogenboom’s masterful lifetime of Hayes definitively solutions these questions and reveals why our nineteenth president deserves far larger recognition than he is obtained up to now.

The primary biography of Hayes in practically fifty years, Hoogenboom’s ebook recreates the quickly altering world of Victorian America as skilled by certainly one of its most reflective and perceptive figures. The Hayes that emerges is a way more progressive and far-sighted chief than beforehand prompt. He was, Hoogenboom argues, neither a Southern sympathizer nor an exemplar of the “Grasping Gilded Age.” Relatively, he was a religious, pragmatic champion of equal rights.

Hayes’s colourful life was rooted in his frontier experiences in Ohio and galvanized on Civil Conflict battlefields, the place he survived 5 wounds and was finally promoted to main common. No different president was below fireplace on the entrance traces as a lot as Hayes.

Hayes’s picture as president (1877-1881), nonetheless, has not been fairly so shining. He has been blamed for Reconstruction’s failure and damned for an obvious discount that assured his election in alternate for withdrawing army help of Republican governments within the South. He has additionally been criticized for championing the gold commonplace, for breaking the Nice Strike of 1877, for inconsistent help of civil-service reform, and for being an ineffectual politician.

Hoogenboom contends that these evaluations are largely false. Earlier students, he says, have failed to understand Hayes’s restricted choices and have misrepresented his actions of their depictions of a very cautious, nonvisionary president. Actually, he was strikingly fashionable in his efforts to enlarge the ability of the workplace, which he used as his personal bully pulpit to awaken public help for his objectives.

Chief amongst these objectives, Hoogenboom reveals, was equality for all People. All through his presidency and lengthy afterwards, Hayes labored steadfastly for reforms that will encourage financial alternative, distribute wealth extra equitably, diminish the battle between capital and labor, and finally allow African-People to attain political equality. Though he fell far in need of his beliefs, his unwavering dedication deserves our consideration and respect.