Rutherford Hayes is an unsung exceptional president. He began the fight for civil service reform, thre out crooks and cronies from govenrment office, appointed a unity cabinet following a bitter election, began limited trust busting while still protecting the rights of business, fought to protect Chinese immigrants from mob violence in California and retired after one succesful term.
If that is not enough, I don't know what is.
I fault him for being an excessive pragmatist. There wasn't a single principle he wouldn't compromise on. During his earlier years in politics, Hayes was moderately pro-free trade, but to win Republican support for his candidacy, he became a protectionist. He made no effort to ensure blacks' civil rights would be protected after federal troops were removed from South. His support for civil service was certainly commendable, but he again compromised on it in another effort to mend relations with Southern Democrats, appointing them to important posts within the civil service with little regard to their merit. He did veto a bill to restrict Chinese immigration in 1879, but in 1882 he approved a bill that banned the entrance of Chinese laborers for ten years. Another negative aspect of his administration was his support for the odious Blaine amendments, motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment among Republicans at the time. Hayes himself once lamented the fact that "Catholic foreigners" were becoming a majority in his home state of Ohio.
Hayes' presidency was mediocre and will forever be stained by the fact that in ending Reconstruction so abruptly he abandoned the freedmen, naïvely hoping Southern governments would protect their civil rights. Tilden would have been a vastly superior president.
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