Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president. It's a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo. He should have fought much harder.
Hayes' most famous sentence dates from his 1877 inaugural address: "He serves his party best who serves his country best." It's an admirable principle -- and one that that has been thoroughly violated by Mr. Bush and the pack of clowns and schmegeggies that he has installed to ruin our government.
After Hayes left office, he wandered to the political left. Although as president he had intervened to crush the railroad strikes, he later came to believe (according to Trefousse) that "the taxation system was unfair, taking a much smaller share of the estates of millionaires than of ordinary people." "The real difficulty," Hayes wrote, "is that vast wealth and power reside in the hands of the few and unscrupulous. Hundreds of laws are in the interest of these men and against the interest of the workingmen. Lincoln was for government of the people. The new tendency is for government 'of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.'"
These are words of remarkable pertinence. It woult appear that we haven't moved very far from the mark -- the more shame to us. If Hayes had said these same words today, he would not doubt have been accused of fomenting "class warfare." (Class warfare: redistributing money from rich to poor. Normal state of affair (not class warfare): taking money from the poor to give to the rich.)
“Reform in the United States tends to come in bursts. The model is the Hundred Days of Franklin Roosevelt... Finally the rush of innovation begins to choke the body politic, which demands time for digestion. Sustained public action, moreover, is emotionally exhausting... Nature insists on a respite. People can no longer gird themselves for heroic effort. They yearn to immerse themselves in the privacies of life...
“So public action, passion, idealism and reform recede. Public problems are turned over to the invisible hand of the market. ‘Everything was slack-water,’ Henry Adams said of the 1890s. The pursuit of private interest is seen as the means of social salvation. These are times of ‘privatization’... of materialism, hedonism, and the overriding quest for personal gratification. Class and interest politics subside; cultural politics – ethnicity, religion, social status, morality – come to the fore. These are also often times of consolidation, in which innovations of the previous period are absorbed and legitimized.
“And they are times of preparation. Epochs of private interest breed contradictions, too. Such periods are characterized by undercurrents of dissatisfaction, criticism, ferment, protest. Segments of the population fall behind in the acquisitive race. Intellectuals are estranged. Problems neglected become acute, threaten to become unmanageable and demand remedy. People grow bored with selfish motives and vistas, weary of materialism as the ultimate goal. The vacation from public responsibility replenishes the national energies and recharges the national batteries. People begin to seek meaning in life beyond themselves... They are ready for the trumpet to sound. A detonating issue – some problem growing in magnitude and menace and beyond the capacity of the market’s invisible hand to solve – at last leads to a breakthrough into a new political epoch.”
Arthur Schlesinger, 1986
“The Cycles of American Politics”
Posted by: Otis Jefferson Brown | October 07, 2008 at 11:53 AM