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Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford Birchard Hayes (October 4, 1822 – January 17, 1893) was the 19th president of the United States (1877–1881). As president, he oversaw the end of Reconstruction, began the efforts that led to civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Hayes, an attorney in Ohio, became city solicitor of Cincinnati from 1858 to 1861. When the Civil War began, he left a fledgling political career to join the Union Army as an officer. Hayes was wounded five times, most seriously at the Battle of South Mountain; he earned a reputation for bravery in combat and was promoted to the rank of major general. After the war, he served in the U.S. Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican. Hayes left Congress to run for Governor of Ohio and was elected to two consecutive terms, from 1868 to 1872, and then to a third term, from 1876 to 1877.

In 1876, Hayes was elected president in one of the most contentious and confused elections in national history. He lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden but he won an intensely disputed electoral college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. The result was the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election and Hayes ended all U.S. military involvement in Southern politics.

Quotes

 * The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.
 * Letter "to a leading editor" (10 April 1875), as quoted in The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876) edited by James Quay Howard, ch. X, p. 144

 * 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.
 * Speech, Marion, Ohio (31 July 1875)

 * Let me assure my countrymen of the Southern States that it is my earnest desire to regard and promote their truest interest — the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally — and to put forth my best efforts in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.
 * Inaugural Address (5 March 1877)

 * The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party, the members of which cherish with ardor and regard as of essential importance the principles of their party organization; but he should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.
 * Inaugural Address (5 March 1877)

 * If he had it would have deprived me of two reasons for feeling satisfied with this afternoon - one was that I escaped by leaving the other end of the city, and the other, what I gained by enjoying with you this pleasant occasion.
 * 13th Anniversary of the National Deaf Mute College, Washington, D.C. (7 April 1877)

 * It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear.
 * Fourth State of the Union Address (6 December 1880)

 * It will be the duty of the Executive, with sufficient appropriations for the purpose, to prosecute unsparingly all who have been engaged in depriving citizens of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution.
 * Fourth State of the Union Address (6 December 1880)

 * The only road, the sure road to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private, according to its letter and spirit.
 * Speech at New England Society Dinner, Brooklyn (21 December 1880)

 * In avoiding the appearance of evil, I am not sure but I have sometimes unnecessarily deprived myself and others of innocent enjoyments.
 * As quoted in Rutherford B. Hayes, and His America (1954) by Harry Barnard. p. 481

 * Fighting battles is like courting girls: those who make the most pretensions and are boldest usually win.
 * As quoted in The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (1991) by William A. DeGregorio, p. 290

Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

 * Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States (5 vols. 1922 - 1926) edited by Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society

 * For honest merit to succeed amid the tricks and intrigues which are now so lamentably common, I know is difficult; but the honor of success is increased by the obstacles which are to be surmounted. Let me triumph as a man or not at all.
 * Diary (7 November 1841)

 * Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.
 * Diary (21 December 1843), referring to Aristotle's Ethics

 * Youth, however, is a defect that she is fast getting away from and may perhaps be entirely rid of before I shall want her.
 * About Lucy Webb, nine years his junior, whom he later married, in a letter to his sister, Fanny Hayes Platt (23 October 1847)

 * We have now become pretty well acquainted with the sugar-growing part of Texas. The life of a planter who has a fair start in the world is one of the most independent imaginable. We here find the pleasures of fashionable life without its tyranny. I doubt, however, whether a person of Northern education could so far forget his home-bred notions and feelings as ever to be thoroughly Southern on the subject of slavery. We have seen none of “the horrors” so often described, but on the other hand I have seen nothing to change my Northern opinions.
 * Letter to his mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes (27 January 1849)

 * Is there anything in which the people of this age and country differ more from those of other lands and former times than in this — their ability to preserve order and protect rights without the aid of government? … We are realizing the paradox, “that country is governed best which is governed least.” I no longer fear lynch law. Let the people be intelligent and good, and I am not sure but their impulsive, instinctive verdicts and sentences and executions, unchecked by the rules and technicalities of law, are more likely to be according to substantial justice than the decisions of courts and juries.
 * Diary (23 July 1851)

 * Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation.
 * Diary (4 January 1861)

 * I never enjoyed any business or mode of life as much as I do this. I really feel badly when I think of several of my intimate friends who are compelled to stay at home. These marches and campaigns in the hills of western Virginia will always be among the pleasantest things I can remember. I know we are in frequent perils, that we may never return and all that, but the feeling that I am where I ought to be is a full compensation for all that is sinister, leaving me free to enjoy as if on a pleasure tour.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (25 August 1861)

 * I still feel just as I told you, that I shall come safely out of this war. I felt so the other day when danger was near. I certainly enjoyed the excitement of fighting our way out of Giles to the Narrows as much as any excitement I ever experienced. I had a good deal of anxiety the first hour or two on account of my command, but not a particle on my own account. After that, and after I saw that we were getting on well, it was really jolly. We all joked and laughed and cheered constantly.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (26 May 1862)

 * These semi-traitors [Union generals who were not hostile to slavery] must be watched. — Let us be careful who become army leaders in the reorganized army at the end of this Rebellion. The man who thinks that the perpetuity of slavery is essential to the existence of the Union, is unfit to be trusted. The deadliest enemy the Union has is slavery — in fact, its only enemy.
 * Diary (5 June 1862)

 * We have dancing … from soon after sundown until a few minutes after nine o’clock.... Occasionally the boys who play the female partners in the dances exercise their ingenuity in dressing to look as girlish as possible. In the absence of lady duds they use leaves, and the leaf-clad beauties often look very pretty and always odd enough.
 * Letter to Sophia Birchard Hayes (10 July 1862)

 * You use the phrase “brutal Rebels.” Don’t be cheated in that way. There are enough “brutal Rebels” no doubt, but we have brutal officers and men too. I have had men brutally treated by our own officers on this raid [to Lynchburg, Va.]. And there are plenty of humane Rebels. I have seen a good deal of it on this trip. War is a cruel business and there is brutality in it on all sides, but it is very idle to get up anxiety on account of any supposed peculiar cruelty on the part of Rebels. Keepers of prisons in Cincinnati, as well as in Danville, are hard-hearted and cruel.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes, whose cousin was a prisoner and died at Andersonville prison (2 July 1864)

 * We now talk of our killed and wounded. There is however a very happy feeling. Those who escape regret of course the loss of comrades and friends, but their own escape and safety to some extent modifies their feelings.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (25 October 1864)

 * When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents — about like a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and “the rest of mankind,” are growled about in “old-soldier” style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (23 November 1864)

 * General Crook gave me a very agreeable present this afternoon — a pair of his old brigadier-general straps. The stars are somewhat dimmed by hard service, but will correspond pretty well with my rusty old blouse. Of course I am very much gratified by the promotion. I know perfectly well that the rank has been conferred on all sorts of small people and so cheapened shamefully, but I can’t help feeling that getting it at the close of a most bloody campaign on the recommendation of fighting generals like Crook and Sheridan is a different thing.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (9 December 1864)

 * We had an inspection today of the brigade. The Twenty-third was pronounced the crack regiment in appearance, … [but] I could see only six to ten in a company of the old men. They all smiled as I rode by. But as I passed away I couldn’t help dropping a few natural tears. I felt as I did when I saw them mustered in at Camp Chase.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (17 December 1864)

 * Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn’t break and that the enemy’s did.
 * About the success of the crucial charge he led at Opequon, in a letter to Sardis Birchard (20 December 1864)

 * While your rheumatism stays with you I naturally feel anxious to hear often. If you should be so unlucky as to become a cripple, it will certainly be bad, but you may be sure I shall be still a loving husband, and we shall make the best of it together.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (12 March 1865])

 * As to Mr. Lincoln’s name and fame and memory, — all is safe. His firmness, moderation, goodness of heart; his quaint humor, his perfect honesty and directness of purpose; his logic his modesty his sound judgment, and great wisdom; the contrast between his obscure beginnings and the greatness of his subsequent position and achievements; his tragic death, giving him almost the crown of martyrdom, elevate him to a place in history second to none other of ancient or modern times. His success in his great office, his hold upon the confidence and affections of his countrymen, we shall all say are only second to Washington’s; we shall probably feel and think that they are not second even to his.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (16 April 1865)

 * I feel the desire to be with you all the time. Oh, an occasional absence of a week or two is a good thing to give one the happiness of meeting again, but this living apart is in all ways bad. We have had our share of separate life during the four years of war. There is nothing in the small ambition of Congressional life, or in the gratified vanity which it sometimes affords, to compensate for separation from you. We must manage to live together hereafter. I can’t stand this, and will not.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (17 June 1866)

 * I am a freeman and jolly as a beggar.
 * On retiring as governor of Ohio, in a letter to William Johnston (7 January 1872)

 * I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.
 * Diary (20 November 1872)

 * I regard the inflation acts as wrong in all ways. Personally I am one of the noble army of debtors, and can stand it if others can. But it is a wretched business.
 * Letter to Austin Birchard (21 April 1874), when he was approximately $46,000 in debt.

 * My only objection to the arrangements there is the two-in-a-bed system. It is bad.... But let your words and conduct be perfectly pure — such as your mother might know without bringing a blush to your cheek.... If not already mentioned, do not tell your mother of the doubling in bed.
 * Letter to his son, Rutherford P. Hayes (26 February 1875)

 * I hope you will be benefitted by your churchgoing. Where the habit does not Christianize, it generally civilizes. That is reason enough for supporting churches, if there were no higher.
 * Letter to his son, Webb Hayes (26 February 1875)

 * Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.
 * Diary (11 May 1875)

 * My speaking is irregular. Sometimes quite good, sometimes not, but generally will do... I am too far along in experience and years both for this business. I do not go into [it] with the zest of old times. Races, baseball, and politics are for the youngsters.
 * Letter to Lucy Webb Hayes (14 August 1875)

 * My policy is trust, peace, and to put aside the bayonet. I do not think the wise policy is to decide contested elections in the States by the use of the national army.
 * Diary (14 March 1877)

 * I am not liked as a President by the politicians in office, in the press, or in Congress. But I am content to abide the judgment — the sober second thought — of the people.
 * Diary (1 March 1878)

 * General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property.
 * Diary (15 May 1878)

 * There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage. Legislation is required to establish the reform. No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents.
 * Diary (14 February 1879)

 * We can travel longer, night and day, without losing our spirits than almost any persons we ever met.
 * Diary (6 June 1879)

 * I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility, and toil. I wish it was at an end.... We are both physically very healthy.... Our tempers are cheerful. We are social and popular. But it is one of our greatest comforts that the pledge not to take a second term relieves us from considering it. That was a lucky thing. It is a reform — or rather a precedent for a reform, which will be valuable.
 * Diary (6 June 1879)

 * 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.
 * Diary (13 July 1879)

 * Nobody ever left the presidency with less regret, less disappointment, fewer heart burnings, or any general content with the result of his term (in his own heart, I mean) than I do. Full of difficulty and trouble at first, I now find myself on smooth waters and under bright skies.
 * Letter to Guy M. Bryan (1 January 1881)

 * Coming in, I was denounced as a fraud by all the extreme men of the opposing party, and as an ingrate and a traitor by the same class of men in my own party. Going out, I have the good will, blessings, and approval of the best people of all parties and sections.
 * Diary (23 January 1881)

 * One of its [James A. Garfield’s assassination] lessons, perhaps its most important lesson, is the folly, the wickedness, and the danger of the extreme and bitter partisanship which so largely prevails in our country. This partisan bitterness is greatly aggravated by that system of appointments and removals which deals with public offices as rewards for services rendered to political parties or to party leaders. Hence crowds of importunate place-hunters of whose dregs Guiteau is the type. The required reform [of the civil service] will be accomplished whenever the people imperatively demand it, not only of their Executive, but also of their legislative officers. With it, the class to which the assassin belongs will lose their occupation, and the temptation to try “to administer government by assassination” will be taken away.
 * Letter to Emile Kahn (1 October 1881)

 * The debt was the most sacred obligation incurred during the war. It was by no means the largest in amount. We do not haggle with those who lent us money. We should not with those who gave health and blood and life. If doors are opened to fraud, contrive to close them. But don’t deny the obligation, or scold at its performance.
 * About the Arrears of Pensions Act (1879) for disabled Union veterans, which Hayes cheerfully signed, which was roundly criticized as too expensive and too open to fraud by unscrupulous veterans fabricating service-related injuries.
 * Letter to William Henry Smith (19 December 1881)

 * Constitutional statutes … which embody the settled public opinion of the people who enacted them and whom they are to govern — can always be enforced. But if they embody only the sentiments of a bare majority, pronounced under the influence of a temporary excitement, they will, if strenuously opposed, always fail of their object; nay, they are likely to injure the cause they are framed to advance.
 * Diary (17 February 1882)

 * The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.
 * Diary (17 February 1882)

 * Personally I do not resort to force — not even the force of law — to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example — of fashion. Until these resources are exhausted I would not think of force.
 * On attempts at an alcohol prohibition amendment, in his Diary (9 October 1883)

 * Every good cause gained a victory when the Union troops were triumphant. Our final victory was the triumph of religion, of virtue, of knowledge.... During those four years, whatever our motives, whatever our lives, we were fighting on God’s side. We were doing His work. What would this country have been if we had failed?
 * Diary (27 October 1883)

 * The [Loyal] legion has taken the place of the club — the famous Cincinnati Literary Club — in my affections.... The military circles are interested in the same things with myself, and so we endure, if not enjoy, each other.
 * Letter to Fanny Hayes (1 November 1885)

 * Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.
 * Diary (6 April 1886)

 * The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — How is this?
 * Diary (11 March 1888])

 * The sacred obligation to the Union soldiers must not — will not be forgotten nor neglected.... But those who fought against the Nation cannot and do not look to it for relief.... Confederate soldiers and their descendants are to share with us and our descendants the destiny of America. Whatever, therefore, we their fellow citizens can do to remove burdens from their shoulders and to brighten their lives is surely in the pathway of humanity and patriotism.
 * Letter to Oliver Downing (15 March 1889)

 * Unjust attacks on public men do them more good than unmerited praise. They are hurt less by undeserved censure than by undeserved commendation. Abuse helps; often praise hurts.
 * Diary (14 July 1889)

 * Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers.
 * Diary (16 February 1890)

 * The progress of society is mainly—is, in its proper sense, the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.
 * Diary(27 February 1890)

 * Do not let your bachelor ways crystallize so that you can’t soften them when you come to have a wife and a family of your own.
 * Letter to his son, Webb Hayes (20 March 1890)

 * 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.
 * Diary (11 August 1890)

 * The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth.
 * Diary (12 December 1890)

 * Partisanship should be kept out of the pulpit... The blindest of partisans are preachers. All politicians expect and find more candor, fairness, and truth in politicians than in partisan preachers. They are not replied to — no chance to reply to them.... The balance wheel of free institutions is free discussion. The pulpit allows no free discussion.
 * Diary (3 January 1892)

 * Conscience is the authentic voice of God to you.
 * Letter to his son, Scott R. Hayes (8 March 1892)

 * One of the tests of the civilization of people is the treatment of its criminals.
 * Diary (30 October 1892)

 * All appointments hurt. Five friends are made cold or hostile for every appointment; no new friends are made. All patronage is perilous to men of real ability or merit. It aids only those who lack other claims to public support.
 * Letter to William McKinley (27 December 1892)

Disputed

 * That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?
 * Reportedly to Alexander Graham Bell after a demonstration of the telephone, as quoted in Future Mind : The Microcomputer-New Medium, New Mental Environment (1982) by Edward J. Lias, p. 2 but  author did not footnote or in any other way cite a source for the quotation, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center has found no primary-source evidence that Rutherford B. Hayes made the comment. The same article erroneously states that President Hayes had his first experience with the telephone in 1876 in a "trial conversation between Washington and Philadelphia." Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States in the years 1877-1881. His well documented experience with the telephone occurred in 1877 while Hayes was in Rhode Island. Prior to becoming disputed here, this statement was treated as probably spurious in "Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone" in the Washington Post (16 March 2012), which asserts Hayes installed a phone only months later, and that the Providence Journal (29 June 1877) reported his words during the demonstration as "That is wonderful!"

Quotes about Hayes

 * His public service extended over many years and over a wide range of official duty. He was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.
 * Benjamin Harrison, Executive Order (18 January 1893)

 * Torpedoes in His Path: Can he, with that load, get through without exploding them?
 * Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, in a cartoon for Puck Magazine Centerfold, Vol. 1 No. 1, (14 March 1877)

 * The purity of his private and personal life was never questioned, and during his term of office at Washington there was a distinct elevating of the tone and standard of official life. There is no doubt that his Administrations served a very useful purpose in the transition from sectional antagonism to national harmony, and from the old methods of dealing with the public service as party spoils to the new method of placing ascertained merit and demonstrated fitness above party service or requirements. It was an inevitable consequence that he should lose popularity and political influence in serving these important ends, but the value of his services will nevertheless be permanently recognized.
 * Front page report "Ex-President Hayes Dead" in The New York Times (18 January 1893)

 * In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to make a strong case for universally available public education. "Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education," he said in his inaugural address, adding, "Liberal and permanent provision should be made for the s support of free schools." For Hayes, a Republican, education was the basis for full economic and political participation, and the basis for prosperity. I agree.
 * Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)

 * Had West Virginia been nothing more than a mountainous bulwark around which rushed the main currents of American life, its fate would probably have resembled that of Vermont. In fact, Rutherford B. Hayes made this comparison and concluded that there was "Nothing finer in Vermont or New Hampshire" than the western Virginia scenery he enjoyed. If the resemblance had continued to hold, West Virginia would have remained a backwater during the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century but still would have enjoyed two compensating mid-twentieth-century trends: the federal policies and programs that have worked to iron out differences in material standards of living among the various states, and the rise of tourist and recreational industries. Even today, notwithstanding all the violence that has been visited on the landscape, West Virginia's scenery and the recreational potential of its mountains, forests, and streams have proved its most enduring economic resources. Thus for states like Vermont and for those small portions of eastern West Virginia that have nothing but scenery to depend on, modern affluence and aesthetic values may finally break down the barriers that once separated mountain regions from full participation in the nation's economic life.
 * John Alexander Williams, West Virginia: A History (1976), p. 200

title: Rutherford B. Hayes


text:
William McKinley

William McKinley, Jr. (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1897, until his assassination in September 1901, six months into his second term. McKinley led the nation to victory in the Spanish–American War, raised protective tariffs to promote American industry, and maintained the nation on the gold standard in a rejection of inflationary proposals.

1890s

 * Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man. [It is said] that protection is immoral.... Why, if protection builds up and elevates 63,000,000 [the U.S. population] of people, the influence of those 63,000,000 of people elevates the rest of the world. We cannot take a step in the pathway of progress without benefiting mankind everywhere. Well, they say, "Buy where you can buy the cheapest".... Of course, that applies to labor as to everything else. Let me give you a maxim that is a thousand times better than that, and it is the protection maxim: "Buy where you can pay the easiest." And that spot of earth is where labor wins its highest rewards.
 * Speech in Boston, MA (Oct. 4, 1892) William McKinley Papers, Library of Congress.

 * War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.
 * First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1897)

 * Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.
 * First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1897).

 * We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.
 * Remark to personal secretary George Cortelyou (1898).

 * The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
 * Letter (December 21, 1898).

1900s

 * Our differences are policies; our agreements, principles.
 * Speech in Des Moines, Iowa (1901).

 * The American flag has not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity's sake.
 * Quoted from July 12, 1900, on 1900 US campaign poster, of McKinley and his choice for second term Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt.

 * Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.
 * Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).

 * Our earnest prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness, and peace to all our neighbors, and like blessings to all the peoples and powers of earth.
 * Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).

 * Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.
 * Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).

 * Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.
 * Speech delivered at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York (September 5, 1901).

 * When I next realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them … And one night late it came to me this way…:
 * That we could not give them back to Spain — that would be cowardly and dishonorable;
 * that we could not turn them over to France and Germany-our commercial rivals in the Orient — that would be bad business and discreditable
 * that we not leave them to themselves — they are unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's wars; and
 * that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
 * Attributed by James F. Rusling "Interview with President McKinley" The Christian Advocate (22 January 1903), as remarks from a meeting with clergymen on 21 November 1899. The overtly religious part is disputed in Lewis Gould (1980) The Presidency of William McKinley.

Attributed

 * I could not have told where those damned islands were within 2,000 miles."
 * McKinley's supposed reaction to the capture of Manila, as quoted in Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts, pages 360-361.

About William McKinley

 * I am deeply affected by the news of the untimely death of President McKinley. I hasten to express the deepest and most heartfelt sympathy of the German people to the great American nation. Germany mourns with American for her noble son, who lost his life while he was fulfilling his duty to his country and people.
 * William II, German Emperor. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 396.

 * The ocean is not wide enough to hold all the sympathy that is streaming from the Old World to the New.
 * Austrian response to McKinley's death by Vienna newspaper Neues Wiener Tageblatt. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 397.

 * Mr. McKinley was one of the most popular figures in American history and one of the best representatives of American ideals. On account of the extraordinary purity of Mr. McKinley's character, the American people will find sympathy wherever civilized men dwell. Opinion in Europe regarding Pan-Americanism may possibly be divided, but it is comprehensible from the American point of view. Mr. McKinley died firmly believing that the work he had begun in domestic and foreign policy would find suitable instruments for its continuation.
 * Russian response to McKinley's death by St. Petersburg newspaper Boerse Gazette. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 397.

 * I learn with deep pain that his Excellency Mr. McKinley has succumbed to the deplorable attempt on his life. I sympathize with you with all my heart in this calamity which thus strikes at your dearest affections and which bereaves the great American nation of a President so justly respected and loved.
 * President of France Émile Loubet telegraph to Mrs. McKinley. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 398.

 * I have been deeply shocked by this crime. President McKinley was not a ruler of exclusive or aristocratic tendencies. He was a good friend of the people, a genuine democrat in the best sense of the word. With regard to Mexico, President McKinley had ever evidenced such friendly sentiments that his death will be mourned in this country hardly less keenly than in the United States.
 * President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 398.

 * All our people loved their dead President. His kindly nature and lovable traits of character, and his amiable consideration for all about him will long live in the minds and hearts of his countrymen. He loved them in return with such patriotism and unselfishness that in this hour of their grief and humiliation he would say to them: 'It is God's will; I am content. If there is a lesson in my life of death, let it be taught to those who still live, and leave the destiny of their country in their keeping.' Let us, then, as our dead is buried out of our sight, seek for the lessons and the admonitions that may be suggested by the life and death which constitutes our theme.
 * Former President Grover Cleveland, Address to the students of Princeton University. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 409.

 * One evening, while engrossed in a book, I was surprised by several detectives and reporters. "The President has just died," they announced. "How do you feel about it? Aren't you sorry?" "Is it possible," I asked, "that in the entire United States only the President passed away on this day? Surely many others have also died at the same time, perhaps in poverty and destitution, leaving helpless dependents behind. Why do you expect me to feel more regret over the death of McKinley than of the rest?" The pencils went flying. "My compassion has always been with the living," I continued; "the dead no longer need it. No doubt that is the reason why you all feel so sympathetic to the dead. You know that you'll never be called upon to make good your protestations." "Damned good copy," a young reporter exclaimed, "but I think you're crazy."
 * Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)

 * One of its first steps had been the annexation of the Philippines, an act of treachery to the people whom America had pledged to set free during the Spanish War. McKinley also typified a hostile and reactionary attitude to labor: he had repeatedly sided with the masters by sending troops into strike regions. All these circumstances, I felt, must have exerted a decisive influence upon the impressionable Leon, finally crystallizing in his act of violence.
 * Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931)

 * When the history of his time is written he will stand forth as the great figure in the years which have been so crowded with events. He gained the entire confidence of the nation by his patriotism, wisdom and ability, just as he won its love by his kindness and goodness to all men.
 * Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 413.

 * Thousands of armed white paramilitaries then destroyed the black area of Wilmington, killing as many as three hundred people and overthrowing its government. Jeter C. Pritchard, the Republican senator from North Carolina, had written a letter to McKinley in October warning of "race war" in the state: McKinley had done nothing. Nothing was also McKinley's response after the fact. A procession of black Republicans beseeched McKinley for intervention, but the president would offer nothing-not troops, not an investigation, not even so much as a sternly worded condemnation. McKinley "did not make a single public reference to the killings in Wilmington," Zucchino wrote. The black journalist Ida B. Wells would later observe that McKinley was "too much interested... in the national decoration of Confederate graves to pay any attention to the Negro's rights." Wilmington showed Democrats across the South that the party of Lincoln would no longer stand in their way. And they took the lesson to heart.

 * The distinctions between McKinley's call for unity and Biden's are the difference between a party that had already abandoned its multiracial coalition, and a party that remains reliant on one.
 * Adam Serwer, The Cruelty is the Point (2021)

 * Through the two months between the blowing up of the Maine and the declaration of war I vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him, as they were in the end. I honestly believed then as I do now that he was doing his best, and this in spite of the fact that my heart was hot with resentment for what I considered his cowardly desertion of my Poland friends in 1893. McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined.
 * Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (1939)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: William McKinley


text:
Chris Berman

Christopher ("Boomer") James Berman (born May 10, 1955, in Greenwich, Connecticut) is a sportscaster who anchors SportsCenter, Monday Night Countdown, Sunday NFL Countdown, Baseball Tonight and other programming on ESPN.

Quotes

 * Do I wish I didn't say a few things nine years ago? Yes. But if that's the worst thing I ever did, I can live with it.

title: Chris Berman


text:
Warren G. Harding

Warren Gamaliel Harding (2 November 1865 – 2 August 1923) was the 29th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1921 until his death. Although Harding died one of the most popular presidents in history, the subsequent exposure of scandals that took place under him, such as Teapot Dome, eroded his popular regard, as did revelations of an affair by Nan Britton, one of his mistresses. In historical rankings of the U.S. presidents, Harding is often rated among the worst.

1910s

 * In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.
 * Address to the 1916 Republican convention.

 * "It is good to meet and drink at the fountains of wisdom inherited from the founding fathers of the Republic."
 * 1918 address to the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution.

The Republic Must Awaken (1917)

 * The Republic Must Awaken (1917).

 * My countrymen, the surpassing war of all times has involved us, and found us utterly unprepared in either a mental or military sense. The Republic must awaken. The people must understand. Our safety lies in full realization the fate of the nation and the safety of the world will be decided on the western battlefront of Europe.

 * Primarily the American Republic has entered the war in defense of its national rights. If we did not defend we could not hope to endure. Other big issues are involved but the maintained rights and defended honor of a righteous nation includes them all. Cherishing the national rights the fathers fought to establish, and loving freedom and civilization, we should have violated every tradition and sacrificed every inheritance if we had longer held aloof from the armed conflict which is to make the world safe for civilization. More, we are committed to sacrifice in battle in order to make America safe for Americans and establish their security on every lawful mission on the high seas or under the shining sun.

 * We are testing popular government's capacity for self-defense. We are resolved to liberate the soul of American life and prove ourselves an American people in fact, spirit, and purpose, and consecrate ourselves anew and everlastingly to human freedom and humanity's justice. Realizing our new relationship with the world, we want to make it fit to live in, and with might and fright and wrathfulness and barbarity crushed by the conscience of a real civilization. Ours is a small concern about the kind of government any people may choose, but we do mean to outlaw the nation which violates the sacred compacts of international relationships. The decision is to be final.

 * If the Russian failure should become the tragic impotency of nations, if Italy should yield to the pressure of military might, if heroic France should be martyred on her flaming altars of liberty and justice and only the soul of heroism remain, if England should starve and her sacrifices and resolute warfare should prove in vain, if all these improbable disasters should attend, even then we should fight on and on, making the world's cause our cause.

 * A republic worth living in is worth fighting for, and sacrificing for, and dying for. In the fires of this conflict we shall wipe out the disloyalty of those who wear American garb without the faith, and establish a new concord of citizenship and a new devotion, so that we should have made a safe America the home and hope of a people who are truly American in heart and soul.

1920s

 * I think it's an inspiration to patriotic devotion to safeguard America first, to stabilize America first, to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first.
 * Speech during his presidential campaign, as quoted in The Triumphant Foreign Policy of Warren G. Harding, Mises Institute

 * America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
 * Speech in Boston, Massachusetts (24 May 1920); Harding is often thought to have coined the word "normalcy" in this speech, but the word is recorded as early as the 1850s as alternative to "normality".

 * Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. … I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by U.S. Marines.
 * Speech during Warren Harding's 1920 presidential campaign, criticizing Woodrow Wilson's Haitian policies; quoted in Democracy at the Point of Bayonets (1999) by Mark Penceny, p. 2. (The Assistant Secretary of the Navy he refers to is Franklin Roosevelt, who was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1920).

 * I want to acclaim the day when America is the most eminent of the shipping nations. A big navy and a big merchant marine are necessary to the future of the country...The United States, before the war, never seriously contested and had no thought of contesting Great Britain’s dominance in shipping, but since, as an incident of the war, we installed a huge shipbuilding plant and became the owners of what was, for us, an unprecedented quantity of tonnage, we have come to be ambitious in this field. If the aggregate mind of our business world were distilled, it would probably be found, consciously or unconsciously, that we now have a national ambition to contest Great Britain’s shipping dominance. If we are to achieve a position in shipping and foreign trade comparable with that which Great Britain has had for many generations, we can only do so through time, patience, and the building up of the reputation for commercial skill and integrity that makes Great Britain’s prestige in every part of Asia and Africa...We are witnessing and participating in one of those great incidents in world-history which occur only once in several centuries, and which will be a subject for poets and historians for generations to come.
 * Speech at Norfolk, Virginia (4 December 1920), quoted in The Times (6 December 1920), p. 17.

 * Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little.
 * Inaugural address (4 March 1921).

 * The success of our popular government rests wholly upon the correct interpretation of the deliberate, intelligent, dependable popular will of America.
 * Inaugural address (4 March 1921).

 * There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation.
 * Inaugural address (4 March 1921).

 * Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly representative democracy.
 * Speech (12 April 1921).

 * I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizens. We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population . . . set off from real contribution to solving national issues, because of a division on race lines.
 * Speech delivered to a segregated, mixed race audience at Woodrow Wilson Park in Birmingham, Alabama on the occasion of the city's semicentennial, published in the Birmingham Post (27 October 1921).

 * Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.
 * Speech at Birmingham, Alabama, published in the Birmingham Post (27 October 1921) quoted in Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921 (1977) by Carl V. Harris (1977) University of Tennessee Press, ISBN 087049211X.

 * The black man should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.
 * Speech delivered in Birmingham, Alabama, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1921, p. 2.

 * I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my god-damned friends, White, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor nights!
 * Remark to editor William Alan White, as quoted in Thomas Harry Williams et al. (1959) A History of the United States.

 * I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.
 * Remark to Judson Welliver, as quoted in Francis Russell (1968) The Shadow of Blooming Grove.

 * I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.
 * Quoted in Nicholas Murray Butler (1939) Across the Busy Years vol. 1.

Nationalism and Americanism (1920)

 * Nationalism and Americanism (1920).

 * My countrymen, the pioneers to whom I have alluded, these stalwart makers of America, could have no conception of our present day attainment. Hamilton, who conceived, and Washington, who sponsored, little dreamed of either a development or a solution like ours of today. But they were right in fundamentals. They knew what was faith, and preached security. One may doubt if either of them, if any of the founders, would wish America to hold aloof from the world. But there has come to us lately a new realization of the menace to our America in European entanglements which emphasizes the prudence of Washington, though he could little have dreamed the thought which is in my mind.

 * When I sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and listened to American delegations appealing in behalf of kinsman or old home folks across the seas, I caught the aspirations of nationality, and the perfectly natural sympathy among kindred in this republic. But I little realized then how we might rend the concord of American citizenship in our seeking to solve Old World problems. There have come to me, not at all unbecomingly, the expressed anxieties of Americans foreign born who are asking our country's future attitude on territorial awards in the adjustment of peace. They are Americans all, but they have a proper and a natural interest in the fortunes of kinsfolk and native lands. One cannot blame them. If our land is to settle the envies, rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds of all civilization, these adopted sons of the Republic want the settlement favorable to the land from which they came.

 * The misfortune is not alone that it rends the concord of nations. The greater pity is that it rends the concord of our citizenship at home. It's folly to think of blending Greek and Bulgar, Italian and Slovak, or making any of them rejoicingly American, when the land of adoption sits in judgement on the land from which he came. We need to be rescued from divisionary and fruitless pursuit of peace through super government. I do not want Americans of foreign birth making their party alignments on what we mean to do for some nation in the old world. We want them to be Republican because of what we mean to do for the United States of America. Our call is for unison, not rivaling sympathies. Our need is concord, not the antipathies of long inheritance.

 * Surely no one stops to think where the great world experiment was leading. Frankly, no one could know. We're only learning now. It would be a sorry day for this republic if we allowed our activities in seeking for peace in the Old World to blind us to the essentials of peace at home. We want a free America again. We want America free at home, and free in the world. We want to silence the outcry of nation against nation, in the fullness of understanding, and we wish to silence the cry of class against class, and stifle the party appeal to class, so that we may ensure tranquility in our own freedom. If I could choose but one, I had rather have industrial and social peace at home, than command the international peace of all the world.

The American Soldier (1920)

 * The American Soldier (1920).

 * My countrymen, though not in any partisan sense, I must speak of the services of the men and women who rallied to the colors of the Republic in the World War. America realizes and appreciates the services rendered, the sacrifices made, and the sufferings endured. There shall be no distinctions between those who knew the perils and glories of the battlefront or the dangers of the sea, and those who were compelled to serve behind the lines, or those who constituted the great reserve of a grand army which awaited the call in camps at home. All were brave. All were self-sacrificing. All were sharers of those ideals which sent our boys twice armed to war.

 * Worthy sons and daughters these. Fit successors to those who christened our banners in the immortal beginning. Worthy sons of those who saved the Union and nationality when civil war wiped out the ambiguity from the Constitution. Ready sons of those who drew the sword for humanity's sake the first time in the world in 1898. The four million defenders on land and sea were worthy of the best traditions of a people never warlike in peace and never pacifist in war. They commanded our pride. They have our gratitude, which must have genuine expression. It's not only a duty -- it's a privilege to see that the sacrifices made shall be requited, and that those still suffering from casualties and visibilities shall be abundantly aided and restored to the highest capabilities of citizenship and its enjoyments.

 * Much has been said of late about world ideals. But I prefer to think of the ideal for America. I like to think there's something more than the patriotism and practical wisdom of the founding fathers. It's good to believe that maybe destiny held this New World republic to be the supreme example of representative democracy and orderly liberty by which humanity is inspired to higher achievement. It is idle to think we have attained perfection, but there is the satisfying knowledge that we hold orderly processes for making our government reflect the heart and mind of the Republic.

 * Ours is not only a fortunate people, but a very commonsensical people, with vision high, but their feet on the earth, with belief in themselves and faith in God. Whether enemies threaten from without or menaces arise from within, there is some indefinable voice saying, Have confidence in the Republic. America will go on. Here is the sample of liberty no storms may shake. Here are the altars of freedom no factions shall destroy. It was American in conception, American in its building. It shall be American in the fulfillment. Factional once, we are all American now. And we mean to be all Americans to all the world.

 * I would not be my natural self if I did not utter my consciousness of my limited ability to meet your full expectation or to realize the aspirations within my own breast. But I'll gladly give all that is in me, all of heart, soul, and mind and the fighting love of country, to service in our common cause. I can only pray to the omnipotent God that I may be as worthy in service as I know myself to be faithful in thought and purpose. One cannot give more.

Attributed

 * It is my conviction that the fundamental trouble with the people of the United States is that they have gotten too far away from Almighty God.
 * Relayed by Bishop William F. Anderson as a remark by a friend of Harding, in "Pictures Harding as Man of Prayer" (2 April 1922) New York Times

Misattributed

 * I don't know much about Americanism, but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election.
 * Actually an exchange between journalist Talcott Williams and Sen. Boies Penrose (1919)
 * What is Americanism? Damn if I know, but it's going to be a damn good word with which to carry an election.

Quotes about Harding

 * The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle, it appears to be shaped like a scandal. The government had placed a large amount of oil under this land for safekeeping, but in 1921 it was stolen. The mystery was solved later that same evening when an alert customs inspector noticed former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall attempting to board an oceanliner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum products, which he claimed had been a "gift" from a "friend." At this point, President Harding, showing the kind of class that Richard Nixon can only dream about, died.
 * Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989), p. 104-105

 * The League of Nations had no sooner been created than it received an almost mortal blow. The United States abandoned President Wilson’s offspring. The President himself, ready to do battle for his ideals, suffered a paralytic stroke just as he was setting forth on his campaign, and lingered henceforward a futile wreck for a great part of two long and vital years, at the end of which his party and his policy were swept away by the Republican Presidential victory of 1920. Across the Atlantic on the morrow of the Republican success isolationist conceptions prevailed. Europe must be left to stew in its own juice, and must pay its lawful debts. At the same time tariffs were raised to prevent the entry of the goods by which alone these debts could be discharged. At the Washington Conference of 1921, far-reaching proposals for naval disarmament were made by the United States, and the British and American Governments proceeded to sink their battleships and break up their military establishments with gusto. It was argued in odd logic that it would be immoral to disarm the vanquished unless the victors also stripped themselves of their weapons. The finger of Anglo-American reprobation was presently to be pointed at France, deprived alike of the Rhine frontier and of her treaty guarantee, for maintaining, even on a greatly reduced scale, a French Army based upon universal service.
 * Winston Churchill, The Second World War Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948), ISBN 0-395-41055-X, pp. 12
 * The conservative Republicans who recaptured the Congress in 1918 and the White House in 1920 had small use for any form of government activism. The Republican administrations of the 1920s abandoned or reversed many progressive policies and eviscerated most others. Harding’s attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, extinguished a railroad workers’ strike in 1922 by successfully petitioning a federal judge for the most stifling antilabor injunction ever issued. In the same year, Congress reverted to traditional Republican protectionism, as the Fordney-McCumber Tariff raised import duties to the forbidding levels that obtained before the World War. Coolidge appointed to the chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission in 1925 a man who believed the commission was ‘‘an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury,’’ a statement that only slightly exaggerated conservative opinion about all regulatory agencies. Both the Harding and Coolidge administrations resisted progressive proposals for federal development of hydroelectric generating stations on the Tennessee River, notably at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. And Harding’s minions displayed their rapacious regard for the nation’s environmental endowment in the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills scandals, when they tried to lease the U.S. Navy’s oil reserves in Wyoming and California to private interests with which they were associated.
 * David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 (1999), ISBN 0-19-503834-7, p. 6

 * Not until the administration of President Warren Harding would the U.S. Constitution guarantee a woman's right to vote.
 * Michael Zak, "Congratulating the Republican Party for according women the right to vote" (15 March 2016), Grand Old Partisan

title: Warren G. Harding