Content area
Full Text
Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President. By Ari Hoogenboom. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. xii, 626 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-7006-0641-6.)
In recent decades historians have not treated Rutherford B. Hayes kindly. With insufficient attention to his character and the context in which he moved, scholars have dismissed him as a mediocre president who owed his office to a shameless deal, betrayed the freedpeople, and crushed the railway strike of 1877. But, as Ari Hoogenboom's magisterial biography demonstrates, Hayes merits a closer look. Revealed here is a complex man and subtle leader whose limited options constrained his performance but who nonetheless served his country well.
In tracing Hayes's development from childhood and youth through gallant service in the Civil War, Hoogenboom limns the essentials of his emerging personality: honesty, decency, hard work, sympathy...