Actually, Rutherford Hayes IS Important

Rutherford B. Hayes is getting a lot of attention these days thanks to President Obama, who in a recent speech, related an anecdote about our nineteenth president to make a point about openness to new technologies. The story tells how Hayes, upon being shown an early model of the telephone; remarked: "It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?" Obama then added his quip: "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

Apparently this is not accurate - Hayes welcomed new technologies and there is no proof he ever said that. However, all snark and needed corrections aside, having Rutherford B. Hayes enter the modern conversation is still useful. While the popular imagination essentially views the string of presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt as a somewhat indistinguishable mush, this is not accurate. Hayes in particular played an important role in solidifying conservatism in the United States. This was not because he was a strong ideologue, but someone who acted with great expediency and in a difficult political environment. However one apportions his exact role, it's impossible to question he presided over two major moments that helped set the course for U.S. politics: the end of federal Reconstruction and the great railroad strike of 1877.

Hayes of course came to the presidency after an incredibly close election and the "corrupt bargain" that followed. In the aftermath, Hayes put to a final close federal Reconstruction, pulling the last federal soldiers out of the South. To blame Hayes for "ending" Reconstruction is an overstatement - the program of aiding the former slaves and bringing democracy and modernization to the South had been suffering for some time. Some of this had to due with economic downturns, some with the desire of white northerners and southerners to put the war behind them, and also from the continued terrorist violence of white paramilitary groups in the South (if you want to find something anathema to U.S. ideals in the 1876 election, look less to Hayes and more to the White Line and other terrorists who suppressed the black vote with violence).

That said, by ending federal Reconstruction, Hayes signaled to the nation the essential abandonment by the federal government of any role in aiding the freed slaves to make a fairer society, thus paving the path for Jim Crow governance to overtake the whole south and entrench itself for almost a century. I would argue few events more dramatically altered the course of this nation's politics - by allowing a white reactionary elite to reclaim power in the South, a deep conservatism took hold, one which radical Reconstruction had begun to challenge. The South became a national filibuster of sorts on all manner of progressive change, from helping to undermine the late 19th century Populists to Southern Democrats constricting the New Deal's horizons to the South halting the spread of mass unionization in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hayes was also the first president to employ the full power of the U.S. federal government in strike-breaking - specifically by deploying troops to end the epic Great Railroad Strike of 1877. While Hayes was not a mustache-twirling villain in this case (he expressed real respect and sympathy for the strikers as individuals), he showed, at most, a patronizing sympathy to the workers' demands or to the very idea of collective action or industrial democracy. Writing in his diary shortly after the strike, Hayes remarked that "Every man has a right to decide for himself the question of wages, but no man has a right to decide that question for other men." His actions set a precedent for massive government interventionism in the workings of the free market through the regular dispatch of troops (federal and state) to crush strikes and other worker protests and the constant use of court injunctions and other legal mechanisms to undermine labor organizing.

These sentiments provide insight into the larger trend within the GOP of this time in which classic liberalism and laissez-faire ideology were gaining prominence. Not that the Republican Party's more progressive strand, represented in the 1860s and 1870s by figures such as Benjamin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens and in the early twentieth century by politicians like Robert La Follette, had disappeared from the party. However, such perspectives were being pushed into the minority and would suffer a major blow in 1912 when Taft's candidacy helped cement the conservatives as the leaders of the party.

Rutherford B. Hayes is an important figure for understanding how U.S. politics have been shaped - let's not get caught up on whether he liked the telephone.

The Fight for Reaction: Reconstruction and the Franchise

A new front in the modern Republican Party's effort to depress voter turnout has emerged from Pennsylvania, where the party seeks to alter the way the electoral college vote is counted to strengthen their hand. This comes along with a concentrated effort to restrict voting in a number of other key battleground states through restrictive voter ID bills (among other measures).

Such measures certainly fly in the face of the (generally agreed) U.S. consensus, built over our history, that democracy means people have easy access to the ballot. It also points to the way that reactionary forces in the nation's history have worked diligently to limit the vote to promote their agenda. No more dramatic example of this exists than the massive disenfranchisement of African-American voters that came as a core element of the rollback of Reconstruction in the 1870s and onward.

When discussing the fight and justice of African-American voting rights, we tend to disassociate access to the franchise from the political implications of its use. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s did not make partisan advantage a mainstay of their case; they rightly emphasized the basic immorality of denying people the right to vote in a nation which sees that power as core to its national identity. Yet, in pondering the implications of African-American men winning the right to vote in the late 1860s, and then losing it over the course of the next several decades, we should not only emphasize the basic civic and moral outrage, but the way these transformations affected the shape of American politics.

Put succinctly, it is certainly plausible, and I would say likely, that African-Americans' loss of the ballot box helped ensure an enduring and powerful conservatism at the heart of our politics. Counterfactuals are of course riddled with challenges. However, in the case of Reconstruction, we do not have to rely on pure speculation. After all, for several years in the late 1860s through the 1870s we can see how, particularly at the state level, politics would develop with the franchise available to African-American men. What one finds is a starkly different and certainly more progressive United States. Consider some of the programs and policies implemented by Reconstruction governments which included substantial African-American representation (this is all taken from pages 156 of Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction):

• Public schools, hospitals, enitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were either established for the first time or whose funding was increased
  
• South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens
• Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants
• Laws were changed expanding divorce rights, property rights for married women
• State legislatures excluded all manner of small farmers and workers from having their basic livelihoods upended by debt collectors
• Progressive taxation, primarily of large land holding implemented
  

Of course, not all policies passed by the Reconstruction governments were progressive or as extensive as one could hope. Republican governments in the South often did much to encourage big business investment through massive subsidies and cases of corruption were rampant. However, compared with the white-dominant governments that came after Reconstruction, it seems hard to argue that the trajectory of state politics in the South would have been as conservative with continued African-American enfranchisement. Remember the strength African-Americans as a voting bloc had in the South at this time; where they represented either major minorities or majorities in most of the former Confederacy (South Carolina during part of Reconstruction had a majority African-American state legislature, reflecting the state's demographics). At the national level, Reconstruction saw the election of a number of African-American congressman, as well as one Senator.

The massive step forward Reconstruction represented would never be fully reversed and to push affairs backward required a multifaceted effort. Examinations of the Civil War sometimes raise the question of why the Confederates did not adopt a guerrilla warfare approach near the conflict's end. Yet, in the late 1860s they did, only targeted specifically at African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic insurgent group, in some ways like a U.S. version of al-Qaeda in Iraq. KKK violence was often quite targeted, for example intensifying around election time to scare African-American voters from the polls. As reactionary elements in the South started to regain power, they moved to more "legal" means such as literacy tests and poll taxes. And thus, to this day, we still live in the shadow of a bright shining moment in our history, followed by a horrendous descent into darkness, one which took decades of struggle and blood to overcome.

If By "Anybody" You Mean "Most Men"

Anton Scalia has raised a ruckus with his statement that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect women or GLBTQ folks from discrimination. I will leave to those more knowledgeable to parse the legal questions. What I found troubling were certain underlying assumptions embedded in the language of the question and Scalia's response. Here is the text of the question:

California Lawyer: "In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation."

What appears problematic is the idea that it is foolish to think "anybody" would have conceived of the Fourteenth Amendment protecting women at that time. Tell it to Susan B. Anthony! As noted in this piece, feminist activists of the time advanced their own interpretation focusing on section 1's use of gender neutral language to make the case that the Fourteenth Amendment did protect suffrage rights, at the very least. This in fact led to a great act of symbolic protest as women activists in 10 states attempted (and in a few cases) succeeded in casting ballots, leading to Anthony being put on trial.

More broadly, we must be wary of statements regarding prevailing views in society which it is said that "everybody" or "nobody" held a certain belief. Such assertions usually consist of taking a certain sub-group of people (often "most white men") and universalizing their perspective to all of society. In doing so, we erase whole populations and histories; making unjust ideas and structures seem a universal norm. Men had greater power in the 1860s and could create laws and social structures enforcing that superiority; that does not mean everyone believed that this was "the way it ought to be."

Forgetting Reconstruction

The end of last year witnessed a perfect storm hit of news stories on race and history in the United States. At one end was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nostalgic reminisces of the Citizens Councils, which attempted to put a “respectable” (and more effective) face to white supremacy. The story breaking on the 150^th anniversary of South Carolina’s declaration of secession seemed too perfect as a demonstration of how alive the gap between ideals and realities of equality remain.

At the same time, these incidents illuminate a profound deficit in how the history of racism and the struggle for equal rights are remembered. For in our popular imagination, the great struggles over these issues exist at two poles separated by exactly a century: the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. With regards to historical memory, the Civil War in the next years is sure to burn brightly, as the 150^th anniversaries of innumerable battles, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc arrive. However, as obviously significant as the Civil War is, focusing on the actual conflict does a disservice to understanding the full history. Certainly the war created many dramatic and concrete transformations, most notably the end of slavery and the intensification of modern capitalism’s emergence. Yet, especially when talking about the African-American community, the war’s greatest importance lies in the possibilities it created for even deeper changes and which, albeit with limitations, were seized upon during Reconstruction.

As well known as the Civil War’s contours are, outside of academics who study it, Reconstruction appears lost in a haze. The single best known depiction of the period remains Gone With the Wind, which traffics in the frankly racist viewpoint which received academic validation from historians of the “Dunning School” (think a somewhat toned down Birth of a Nation in footnoted book form). For the Dunning school, Reconstruction was a tragedy in which the North (or more specifically the Radical Republicans) imposed unfairly harsh conditions on Southern states' re-entry to the Union and Northern opportunists (so-called “carpetbaggers”) swept into the South to take financial advantage of a defeated land. Furthermore, in this interpretation, African-Americans were unable to take advantage of freedom; proving dangerously incompetent at governing or building independent lives. The advent of Jim Crow and the return to Democratic rule are thus seen as the forces that rescued the South from further misery.

Corruption and exploitation by Northern businessmen, entrepreneurs, and politicians of the Southern states did exist. To see Reconstruction as a tragic period is certainly apt, yet the tragedy lies not in its severity, but in its limitations. Many of the struggles for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s were in fact efforts to regain rights that African-Americans enjoyed, briefly, one hundred years earlier. The period saw significant reforms to southern society beyond those directly concerned with the freedmen and women, such as the establishment of public school systems, economic development (such as railroad lines and non-agricultural industry). The reversal of the period’s gains, especially regarding African-American rights and dreams of fairness, represented a severe blow to creating a United States whose policies reflected its highest ideals. To forget it is to forget one of the most concentrated attempts to build a true “land of the free.”

Note: In a second post (and I’ll actually do it!), I’ll go into more detail on the specific history of the period, its gains and failures.