Lost and Found Department: A Gilded Age President

Ari Hoogenboom’s fine Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President is the first full life of the nineteenth president since Harry Barnard’s 1954 biography. Gracefully written and rich with quotations from Hayes’s voluminous diaries and letters, Hoogenboom’s lengthy account offers a highly sympathetic portrait of Hayes both as a representative nineteenth-century American and as an effective politician. Contrary to most textbook images of the Gilded Age, Hoogenboom argues that Hayes’s presidency strengthened the office and contributed to the evolution of twentieth-century American political institutions.

Hoogenboom, thoroughly familiar with the rich literature of the past forty years on Reconstruction and Gilded Age politics, replaces Barnard as the historian’s guide to Hayes’s public life. Like Barnard, he makes the case for a president whose entire career, both as a candidate and chief executive, was awash in controversies — between sections, between president and Congress, between parties, and within his own GOP. Hoogenboom sees Hayes as a man committed to achieving as much political reform as the era and his party’s needs would tolerate. The author sympathetically assesses Hayes’s role in the major issues of his presidency: the federal government’s abandonment of the remaining Reconstruction governments in the South, the use of federal troops to end the nationwide railroad strike of 1877, the currency question, civil service reform, the treatment of Native Americans and Chinese Americans. Good arguments are made for the probity of Hayes’s intentions, the moderation of his actions, and the political impossibility of achieving better results than he did.

Also like Barnard, Hoogenboom begins his biography with Thomas Wolfe’s invocation of “Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes” as “The Four Lost Men” in his famous meditation-short story of that title in From Death to Morning (1935), a work that still challenges historians of the late nineteenth-century presidency. Intimate with the diaries and vast store of letters into which Hayes poured his daily life, Hoogenboom tries to show us Hayes as Wolfe’s father had seen the four presidents, “living, real, and actual people in all the passion, power, and feeling of... youth,” rather than as most historians following Wolfe have envisioned them: “their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea-depths of a past intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable” (Wolfe, p. 121).

Of the two tasks, making the case for Hayes as president and finding the man, Hoogenboom is most successful with the first. Raised a Whig, Hayes followed one or two steps behind the pace in all the dramatic political shifts that led to the Civil War. An expansionist, he just missed marching off to fight in Mexico. Married to Lucy Ware Webb, a devout Methodist and strong temperance advocate and abolitionist, he attended church but never experienced conversion, supported temperance but not prohibition, defended fugitive slaves but opposed abolition, resisted public funding for parochial schools but steered clear of Know-Nothingism. He cautiously slid into the emerging Ohio Republican party not at its start but just early enough to be considered a founder (p. 98). Hayes favored letting the South go during the crisis of 1860–1861, then became a warrior in earnest after the firing on Fort Sumter. He served gallantly, effectively, and with great pleasure, advancing from major to major-general of volunteers. A backbench Radical in the House of Representatives from 1865 to 1867, he then served two successful terms as governor of Ohio, pushing through ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and gaining a reputation as a supporter of civil service reform while maintaining a distant but distinct loyalty to the Grant administration. After a brief retirement, his election for a third term as governor in 1875, despite Republican setbacks nationally and his staunch advocacy of hard money, established him as the available man — and he quietly “let availability do the work” of making him the Republican presidential nominee (p. 260).

Hoogenboom tells the political story well, but...