19th President

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES: STATESMAN OF REUNION--H. J. Eckenrode--Dodd, Mead ($5)-Rutherford Birchard Hayes, igth U. S. President, perhaps had no legal right to be President at all. Biographer Eckenrode thinks Hayes was not legally elected in 1876, that Democratic Candidate Samuel J. Tilden was the majority's choice. The electoral vote was 185 to 184. But Hayes' election, whether or not strictly legal, gave the U. S. four years of good government. Tilden was "one of the ablest public men in the country, if not the ablest," but Hayes was "one of the best Presidents the U. S. has ever had." Says Author Eckenrode: a Democrat in the White House so soon after the Civil War might well have caused more bloodshed. Rutherford Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, in 1822, a posthumous child, descendant of sturdy New England yeomen gone pioneering westward. Studious, ambitious, active, Hayes was "of a rather gay nature, a good talker, fond of men and fonder of women." He studied law, practiced it, but was glad when the Civil War came. One of the things he liked about war was freedom from shaving. He started to let his beard grow; thereafter to the end of his life only checked it from time to time. Hayes did well enough in the Civil War to be sent to Congress; in 1868 his friends got him in as Governor of Ohio. In 1876 they put him through the Republican Convention as a compromise candidate. His Administration did much to restore a feeling of nationality to the U. S.. "showed that the industrial North could give as honest and efficient government as the agricultural South." No paragon, Hayes was ''a plain, shrewd, capable, honest business man." Author Eckenrode believes Hayes was just what the country needed.

A man of moral passion but no religious convictions, Hayes believed in temperance, served no liquor at the White House. Once visiting diplomats thought he had slipped when they tasted a punch and detected the flavor of rum; but the Presi dent had fooled them, it was only the flavor they tasted. Hayes would have liked a second term, but believed one was enough, stuck to his conviction. His party politicians were glad of his decision, hoped their next man would not prove so uncompromising against the spoils system. Back in Ohio, Hayes enlarged his house, saw his friends, read many a book, served as chairman on many a platform. When Death came to him in 1893, he had been pallbearer for most of his friends. The Author. Hamilton James Ecken rode, 49, unmarried, onetime (1914-16) professor of economics at the University of Richmond, has been State Historian of Virginia since 1927. Rutherford B. Hayes is the first of a series on political leaders, from the time of Andrew Johnson to Herbert Hoover, which Publishers Dodd, Mead will issue, under the editorship of youthful Historian Allan Nevins. Other books by Biographer Eckenrode: History of Virginia During the Reconstruction. Life of Nathan B. Forrest, Jefferson Davis, President of the South.

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