Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes enters national memory under gaslight—calm voice, careful eyes, a lawyer’s temper tucked into a soldier’s frame—and for more than a century the shorthand that follows his name is a quarrel about legitimacy. The most contested election in American history lifted him into the presidency by a whisker measured in affidavits and midnight negotiations; the story’s machinery is so noisy that it can drown out the person who had to live with the noise. Yet to see Hayes whole is to watch an unshowy reformer try to keep his footing on a floor that was still shaking from war. He did not speak like a prophet. He did not perform the office like a general returned to his parade. He worked, and he tried to make the government work better, while persuading a country tired of virtue’s cost that reform was not a luxury but the only way republican government could continue to deserve consent. Selenius Media