February 23, 2024 – Theme Week Day 5

We’ve come to the final day of our Obscure Presidents theme week. We’re closing it out with Rutherford B. Hayes, our 19th president who served from 1877-1881.
Although several previous presidents were lawyers, Hayes was the first to graduate from law school. As an attorney in Ohio, he served as the city solicitor of Cincinnati from 1858 to 1861. At the start of the Civil War, he left his fledgling political career and joined the Union Army, even though he was nearly 40 at the time. Hayes is one of 7 presidents who served in the Civil War, but the only one wounded in action. He was wounded 5 times, and earned a reputation for bravery in combat, rising to the rank of brevet major general. After the war, he served in Congress from 1865 to 1867 and was elected governor of Ohio.
Hayes won the Republican nomination in the 1876 presidential election. It would be one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history. Hayes was up against New York governor Samuel Tilden. Tilden won the popular vote, but neither man secured enough electoral votes to win the election. It ended with a Congressional Commission that awarded Hayes 20 contested electoral votes. It remains the election with the highest voter turnout in American history, at 82.6%. It’s also the only presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors. Many Democrats never accepted the results of the election, calling Hayes “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency”.
Hayes’ administration was influenced by his belief in equal treatment without regard to wealth, social standing, or race. He implemented modest civil service reforms and in foreign policy he was a moderate and took few initiatives. Hayes and his wife Lucy kept an alcohol-free White House, leading to her nickname of “Lemonade Lucy”. In 1878, the Hayes family received the first documented Siamese cat in America, which they named Siam. In 1880, he became the first president to visit the West Coast when he embarked on a 71-day tour that took him through Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and California. He was also the first president to have a typewriter and a telephone in the White House, and started the tradition of the White House Egg Roll.
Hayes declined to seek reelection in 1880, retiring to his home in Fremont, Ohio. The former president dedicated himself to humanitarian work like educational issues and prison reform. Hayes died of complications of a heart attack at the age of 70 in 1893. He’s generally regarded as an average to below-average president.
While Hayes is relatively obscure here, he’s a really big deal in Paraguay. In 1878, Hayes arbitrated a dispute between Argentina and Paraguay, ruling in favor of Paraguay and giving it 60% of its current territory. He’s seen as a national hero there, with a province and a local soccer team named for him, and an official holiday on the anniversary of the decision. Learn more here.