Tag Archives: election

Presidential Rejects: (2) Rutherford B. Hayes

Last month in this space we looked at the presidency of John Quincy Adams – forced to take the office in 1825, after being rejected by the voters in 1824. Since no candidate had a majority among the presidential electors, Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives.

The next presidential reject was Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War general and governor of Ohio. The electoral college system had messed up the elections of 1796 and 1824, and turned the election of 1800 into a train wreck (even before we had trains). Now it turned the 1876 election into a train wreck with a simultaneous clown show, on top of a heist movie.

Hayes lost the 1876 election to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. But Republican bigwigs discerned that if they could grab the electors of three southern states where the count had been extremely close, they would put Hayes over by one electoral vote.

Both parties charged election fraud, and both sides were probably guilty – American elections were staggeringly corrupt at the time. As day after day the inauguration drew nearer, Congress appointed a 15-man commission – five senators, five representatives, five Supreme Court justices – to allocate the disputed electors. The eight Republicans and seven Democrats voted eight to seven and called all disputed electors for Hayes, to the disgust of people from both parties all across the land.

A filibuster began to stop the inauguration, but Hayes finally swayed southern Democrats by agreeing to pull troops out of the south, which was essentially license for the Ku Klux Klan to run riot, crush the biracial governments set up after the Civil War, brutalize the African American population, and open a century of one-party white-power rule. Hayes went to the White House, and America abandoned millions of its children, who would suffer for generations like Jews in Russia.

“Rutherfraud B. Hayes” (as he was soon angrily nicknamed) quickly announced that he would not run for a second term as president, apparently preferring to make a graceful exit rather than trying to overstay a non-existent welcome. He tried to advance civil rights and civil service, but with only indifferent success.

As for Tilden, who had won an out-and-out majority (not just a plurality) of the voters, and who had apparently won the electoral college only to have 20 votes snatched away, he rejected calls to have himself inaugurated, to put crowds into the streets, or to resist the Hayes inauguration by force. “I can retire to private life,” he said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people.” True enough: Tilden had been elected president of the United States, which was more than Hayes, despite his many virtues, could say. Like the other “reject presidents,” Hayes was hobbled by trying to put through a program that the nation had already demonstrated it didn’t want. He was wise enough, and mature enough, to go gently into that good night. Being wounded five times perhaps conferred a certain perspective.

Election Vignettes

Elections and political campaigns often make for vivid memories. It’s fashionable to disdain them, to say the politicians are all liars, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. But first, that isn’t true – there’s often a LOT of very meaningful differences between candidates. For good or ill, if Al Gore had been president… as the voters chose… would we have invaded Iraq? The world could be a very different place today.

*Remember also that elections are what we do, rather than having gun battles in the streets. Elections are a much better choice.

*In no particular order, here are some vignettes of voting and campaigning in our area.

*Angelica lays claim to being the birthplace of the Republican party. More precisely, a political group in Angelica later joined the new Republican party. The Angelica group preceded the party, but it’s a bit of stretch.

*Rock-ribbed Republican Hammondsport, like much of the rest of the nation, voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932. Suffering the horrors of the Great Depression, voters hoped that F.D.R. could improve matters. In Hammondsport, though, the key issue was probably the fact that Roosevelt wanted to repeal Prohibition, which would be great news for the grape growers and winery owners. Within the year Prohibition was repealed, but Hamondsport voters, in the true American spirit of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, went back to the Republicans. At least this gave them the distinction of having voted for Alf Landon, who carried exactly two states (Maine and Vermont) in ’36.

*When Roosevelt ran for governor in 1928, Republicans pulled long faces, insisting that while he was a fine, likeable fellow, they just feared that the office would be too much for his delicate health (he having been crippled by polio seven years earlier). Roosevelt’s response was to barnstorm through every county in the state by auto (mostly on dirt roads), giving multiple speeches every day and asking crowds “Do I look sick to you?” He didn’t, and he won. Locally he gave speeches at Elmira, Corning, Bath, Hornell, and onward, touting his progressive credentials to cheering crowds.

*Governor Al Smith was running for President that year – a CATHOLIC! Thousands of western New Yorkers, including ministers and public officials, openly joined the Ku Klux Klan to defend America from what they insisted was devilish plot by foreigners and immigrants to rule America by stealth. They flooded the region with anti-Catholic hate propaganda, burned crosses on hill after hill (and sometimes on people’s lawns), and goose-stepped down to the polls to vote for Republican Herbert Hoover.

*Franklin’s fifth cousin Theodore campaigned in and around Steuben County, more or less forced into our area by the routes of the railroads. Seeing a local man with nine children at Cameron Mills, TR shouted out that this was the most prosperous place he’d seen on his travels. (He only had five, himself.)

*William Jennings Bryan campaigned for president here in 1900, trying in vain to convince Americans to stop taking over other countries. He and his supporters marched from the depot in Bath to the courthouse square, where the “boy orator” made one of his famed speeches, then marched back to the train.

*Steuben County Historical Society has a photo, circa 1900, of the Bath Socialists meeting in Pulteney Park. Three of them.

*The Town of Fremont was named for “the Pathfinder,” military man and western explorer John C. Fremont. When he ran for President in 1856, the new town voted overwhelmingly in favor of their namesake.

*The 1835 directory states that there were three black voters in Steuben County, and three more in Livingston. By then just about any 21 year-old white male could vote, but New York went through a period when it loaded lots of extra property requirements onto African American men before THEY were allowed to vote.

*People in other parts of the country sometimes ask me, “What’s politics like out in your area?” I used to answer, “All you need to know is that in 1918 our U.S. Representative was a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works. And today, our U.S. Representative is a Republican named Houghton from the Corning Glass Works.”

*Ralph Nader some years ago came through our area on one of his symbolic campaigns for president. Having no hope of winning more than a trace amount of votes, he had no qualms about freely admitting his surprise when reporters at a press conference told him he was in Corning. It had been a very busy trip, and he’d thought it was Binghamton.