Greatness of Rutherford B. Hayes

                    Rutherford Birchard Hayes was born October 4, 1822 and died January 17, 1893.  He served as President of the United States from 1877 until 1881.  Reconstruction ended and the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States began during the Hayes Administration.  President Hayes was a reformer, and he started the country moving towards reform of the civil service.  He also attempted to reconcile the divisions in the nation that led to the American Civil War. 

                    The 1876 presidential election was "one of the most contentious and hotly disputed elections in American history.  Although he lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, Hayes won the presidency by the narrowest of margins after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty disputed electoral votes.  The result was the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes' election and Hayes accepted the end of military occupation of the South."   President Hayes "believed in meritocratic government, equal treatment without regard to race, and improvement through education."  

                    President Rutherford B. Hayes was in the news recently when Barack Obama took aim at him and Rick Moran wrote about the incident.  Moran wrote that our Progressive President Obama quoted President Hayes as saying, "One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone:  `It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'  Then Obama said, "That's why he's not on Mt Rushmore.  He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward.  He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something…. The point is there will always be cynics and naysayers."

                    Moran then wrote that Nan Card, the curator at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, corrected Obama.  She said that Hayes was delighted with the "magic of the telephone".  According to the curator, President Hayes was the "first president to have a telephone in the White House" and "the first to use the typewriter".  He also invited Thomas Edison to "come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph".  Obama not only bad-mouthed a Republican predecessor, but he did so with a lie.

                    Mark Steyn wasn't all that impressed with Obama's knowledge of history or his ability to look forward.  "But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn't as `forward-looking' as a 21st-century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal-sized entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody's seen since the Weimar Republic.  If that's not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don't know what is."

                    After Rutherford B. Hayes was in the news I decided to look for ways that he was a great President and found some of his quotes.  His quotes make him sound conservative and willing to make the tough decisions for the good of the country.

                    "Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt.  It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times."  [Oh, if only our nation and its citizens had followed his counsel!]

                    "Conscience is the authentic voice of God to you."  [He obviously was a believer in God!]

                    "The President of the United States should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves his country best."  [I believe that there would be less of a divide in our nation if President Obama and all of our politicians put the good of the country before what their party.]

                    "To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible."  [In order to have a government of the people, for the people and by the people, WE THE PEOPLE must fulfill our duty to vote.]     

          

                    "Wars will remain while human nature remains.  I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone."  

                    "We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects.  It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties.  We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion both suffer by all such interference."  [First Amendment - Freedom of Religion]

                    "It will be the duty of the Executive, with sufficient appropriation for the purpose, to prosecute unsparingly all who have been engaged in depriving citizens of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution."  [The entire Obama Administration would be prosecuted!]

                    "The only road, the sure road to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfillment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private, according to its letter and spirit."  [He believed in living within our means - individuals, counties, states and nations.]