A few thoughts and quotes from each...
Hayes is an interesting figure. His election in 1876 was the subject of great dispute. His Democratic challenger, Samuel J. Tilden, amassed a greater popular vote. But the results of the election were not decided upon until long after the ballots had been cast. Particularly controversial were the votes of African-Americans in Florida. Does all of this read like deja vu all over again?
In truth, the parallels between the Hayes-Tilden race of 1876 and the Bush-Gore race of 2000 are superficial. Back in Hayes' day, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, was widely seen as being the advocate for Blacks, while the Democratic Party had yet to shake off its racist past. Democrats of that era didn't want the votes of African-Americans to be counted, not only because of their prejudices, but also because Blacks would have voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Republicans and Hayes.
Ultimately, an electoral commission decided by a one-vote majority that Hayes was the winner of the presidency. Many Democrats continued to harbor resentments against Hayes throughout his single term in office and for the rest of his life.
Hayes was a champion of civil service reform, pacifying the South, equal rights for African-Americans, and the kind of progressive reform of American business that later became a trademark of the Republican Party under Theodore Roosevelt.
Although he entered the White House under a cloud, Hayes emerged four years later---he had pledged in 1876 that he would serve only one term---as a popular president whose policies were affirmed in the 1880 election of a Republican President and Congress.
Perhaps no American president before Jimmy Carter---with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland---had a more productive, active, or publicly meaningful life after his time in office than Hayes. He gave his efforts to a number of important causes, especially to education. (He even served on the Board of Trustees of my alma mater, The Ohio State University.)
Trefousse writes of the many worthy efforts in which Hayes was involved and then says:
Another one of his causes was the control of the growing inequality of wealth. At a time when theories of laissez-faire predominated, and when it was believed that the iron law of wages could not be disturbed, to say nothing of the ever-present ideas of the survival of the fittest, [Hayes'] concern about this subject was quite unusual and forward-looking...Believing that in America the development of a permanent aristocracy of inherited wealth should not be allowed, he thought the answer might be a limitation on inheritance with the public the beneficiary of the remainder of the estate.
In this era of a large middle class and concern over the "death tax," Hayes' flirtation with limits on inheritance would be anathema. (And rightly so.) But his concern about the establishment of an American aristocracy is a typical, and appropriate, concern of conservative Republicans.
After all, it was a wealthy Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who, a generation after Hayes was in office, would rail against "malefactors of great wealth." TR did more than rail: he actively broke up trusts and monopolies.
And he did so not because he was a raging socialist who wanted to bring down the free enterprise system. Roosevelt wanted to preserve that system. The monopolists, who have their modern counterparts, were the ones opposed to free enterprise and the cost reductions and product innovation that result. In his book, Theodore Rex, the second volume of his biography of Roosevelt, Edmund Morris quotes one of the monopolists of the day claiming that by controlling markets, mega-corporations were sparing consumers the brain-addling dilemma of choosing between competing products and services.
Reformers like Hayes and TR were responsible for conserving the best in America, keeping "malefactors of great wealth" from becoming unbridled American royalty. The added benefit to their party of course, is that their reforms secured popular support. Hayes surely had this in mind; in his 1877 Inaugural Address, he said, "He serves his party best who serves his country best."
The reform-mindedness of conservatives like Hayes and more especially Theodore Roosevelt, were responsible for a Republican domination of the White House that, with the exceptions of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, held from the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) all the way through that of Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). Had later Republican presidents like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover heeded the lessons of history, they would have seen how imperative it is for conservatives to take the lead in reform, in conserving what is best from the past in order to do things better in the future. The Great Depression might have even been avoided.
Liberals have long been upset at the reforming efforts of Theodore Roosevelt, feeling that he co-opted Democratic progressives like William Jennings Bryan. One book that gives vent to this view is The Triumph of Conservatism by the New Left historian, Gabriel Kolko.
Reform is an inherently conservative pursuit. The revolutionary wants to do away with the old; the reformer wishes to conserve, while improving, it. King Josiah, in Old Testament times instituted reform, not to throw out "the faith of his fathers," but to preserve it for the next generation. Martin Luther has been aptly described by insightful historians as a "conservative reformer." He sought to unleash true, Biblical faith in a Church laden with cultural and legalistic accretions.
Rutherford B. Hayes was a reformer. We could use a few conservative reformers today.
Merton P. Strommen is one of the most distinguished and helpful voices in Lutheran Christian circles today. He's a pastor, research psychologist, and founder of the Search Institute, which has blazed the trail in showing communities how to nurture young people. His wife, A. Irene Strommen, teaches peer counseling and parenting with the Augsburg Youth and Family Institute.
Back in 1986, the Strommens' fifth and youngest son, twenty-five year old David, was struck by lightning on a Colorado mountain. He died immediately. Seven years later, the Strommens presented their journey from the moment of David's death. Each chapter presents first, Irene's and then, Merton's, reflections on that journey. The book is organized by those five "cries," which they explain early on:
...we found that the oft-quoted grief stages of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross did not fit out grief journey. True, her conceptual model may describe the stages through which grief progresses in linear fashion for persons coping with terminal disease. But for us and others whose accounts we have read, the stage theory is misleading. Rather than passing through stages in sequential fashion, we experienced at different times varying intensities of these facets of grief:
the cry of pain
the cry of longing
the cry for supportive love
the cry for understanding
the cry for significance
As I reflect on the Strommens' list and their insistence that such cries can crop up at any time in various ways throughout the journey of grief, it matches my own observations and experiences.
This is a poignant book that refuses to sugar coat, but is shot-through with a resilient faith in Jesus Christ.
Granger E. Westberg was a pastor, hospital chaplain, and college professor who wrote Good Grief, destined to be regarded as a classic, back in 1962. It's a short little book and the writing isn't eloquent. At times, it feels a bit dated. But Westberg seems on target to me when he says that there are such things as bad grief and good grief. As he puts it:
Suffering is not good, but you need not be devastated by it.
Grief, which he insists can be triggered by everything from job transfers to death in the family, is "good," he claims in the Preface when:
1. We come out of our grief experience at a slightly better level of maturity than before.
2. We come out of our grief as deeper persons, because we have been down in the depths of despair and know what it is like.
3. We come out of it stronger, for we have had to learn how to use our spiritual muscles to climb the rugged mountain trails.
4. We come out of it better able to help others. We have walked through the valley of the shadow of grief. We can understand.
Westberg then proceeds to delineate ten stages of grief, culminating in the four outcomes listed above. Westberg, in an understated way, shows how faith in God contributes to our grief coming to a "good" place.
Jesus tells us that there really is such a thing as good grief when, in the Beatitudes, He says:
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." (Matthew 5:4)
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