Welcome to Blogging the Presidents: A Voting While Intoxicated™ Almost Original Series. We will be taking a serious look at the 42 men who have led our country and hopefully finding a few laughable details.
PART XIX
As I mentioned in our last section, Hayes lost the popular vote, but won the electoral college by one vote. Due to some concern about the accuracy of the vote in a few states, a congressional commission was tasked with determining the legitimate victor. Hayes prevailed on a party line vote. Sounds eerily like 2000, only in the more recent case, it was decided by the Supreme Court on a party line vote. Don’t you love democracy? Some argue that the Electoral College should stay because it has only differed from the popular vote on two occasions, as if only two is a reasonable allowance (our electoral system has on two other occasions left the decision up to the House due to a lack of a majority Electoral College winner).
In his Inaugural Address, Hayes, a Republican, offered some useful advice for his modern contemporaries:
He serves his party best who serves his country best.
Hayes seems to have been well intentioned on civil rights, insisting on sufficient protection of black rights before allowing the end of Reconstruction, though clearly this did not hold. He allowed women to argue in front of the Supreme Court He committed the sin of bipartisanship, trying to curry some favor with the Democrats by allowing them into the civil service, though probably undercutting civil rights.
On the other hand, he used the military to quell union riots. Using the military against Americans is always a bad idea, and it certainly didn’t help here. Not that I’ll ever claim sympathy for rioters.
Hayes is apparently a hero in Paraguay for siding with them in a war with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. This may seem insignificant, but there are a lot of Presidents who aren’t national heros in any country.
