Why I love Rutherford B. Hayes, and why I love his museum even more

Rutherford B. Hayes is my favorite president.

I'm kidding. Actually, as far as presidents go, he was fairly unimpressive. He is not very significant historically, and what he is best remembered for is often considered a low moment in American History. He was a one-term president whose presidency was not especially turbulent. Hayes has more or less vanished. His obscurity has even influenced my own interest in Hayes, as I like him for two rather superficial reasons.

First, his name - It's so silly. He sounds like a comic figure, or a folk hero. I like to deepen my voice and growl out his first name, lingering on the 'R' before gently sliding into 'utherford,' letting the final 'er'-sound spool out of my mouth. Then my favorite part, the middle initial, a sharper sound, followed by the last name, which I say all business-like, short and clipped. I find a rather perverse degree of pleasure in saying his name, possibly because I don't say it often.

And the second reason is that I'm related to him. (I said 'related,' and not 'descended.') He's along the lines of a second cousin, seven times removed, or seventh cousin twice removed, something ridiculous like that. Basically, it doesn't count. I enjoy my genealogical brush with historical significance without taking it too seriously - because really, who cares about Rutherford B. Hayes? It's not at all like my friend who is a direct descendant of John Adams - that's legitimately something to be paid attention to. Rutherford B. Hayes has a name that garners guffaws. Most people don't even know that he was president. Quite frankly, I enjoy having such an obscure relation to such an obscure figure, because in the end it doesn't mean anything. It's just goofy.

It makes sense to me that a figure so obscure to the point of goofiness should be memorialized in an equally goofy way. A few miles off of Interstate-80, in Fremont, OH, not far from Toledo, is located the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum. It is housed on Spiegal Grove, the estate where Hayes spent much of his adult life (minus the four in national office). After years of meaning to visit, finally - after deciding to take three days to drive home from our latest family visit in Chicago - we made a stop. There are two major attractions on the site, the Hayes house, and the Presidential library and museum. Due to timing we were only able to visit the museum, though I have hopes of returning to tour the house someday.

Now, despite its subject's relative obscurity, the Hayes Site seems to have the honor of being the nation's first Presidential Library and Museum. Quite frankly, it shows. The museum is housed in a large, Greco-Roman-type temple that, with its dusky stone coloring and visible seams in its masonry, came off as somewhat shabby despite its grandeur. Once inside we paid six dollars apiece to tour the museum. And oh my lord, what a museum.

It has everything I love in a history museum - pointless ephemera. They have the fireplace from the house where Hayes once lived, and on the mantle is a stuffed owl in a glass case. Turns out this owl freaked the shit out of the workers erecting the Washington Monument when it flew at them out of somewhere unexpected. They stopped construction for as long as it took to catch it, whereupon it was killed, stuffed, and presented to Lucy Hayes. Of course. The information card for this item is a masterpiece of the museum's good natured absurdity, which it seems completely unaware of - the card tells the story exactly as I have, narrating the owl's capture before indicating its importance in the life of the Hayes family, and once it does we amusedly scratch our heads and wonder - was that worth the build up?

The objects run from pure ephemera to what are the equivalent of medieval relics. They have campaign materials, sheet music for the campaign songs, but my favorite in the glass case with the campaign stuff was the plank on which Hayes delivered his inauguration speech. This plank seems to have been preserved by the builder of the platform upon which Hayes stood, who must have had a careful eye for posterity - after dismantling the platform, he remembered the plank, removed the spot and memorialized it in a frame, painting its significance across it in colorful paint ("The VERY SPOT upon which HIS EXCELLENCY RUTHERFORD B. HAYES stood..." I believe it read). Some of the best museum exhibits come from overestimations of the future. Similarly, Hayes himself seems to have had a somewhat inflated sense of his own posterity, or was just especially nostalgic - in the inauguration bible, yet another object on display, he himself marked the very spot where he placed his hand while taking the oath of office.

The museum contains run of the mill objects as well, clothing and furniture and letters, but there is also evidence of the truly morbid, as the museum is the home to the pair of ice skates that Hayes' brother was wearing when, at age nine, he drowned in a frozen pond. It's an incredibly electic collection of items, things with passing relation to the Hayes family and Rutherford's life, culled, I'm sure, from a variety of sources. There are things that family members and researchers must have found at one point or another and had no idea what to do with, ending up giving them to the museum. What results is a tremendous amount of mismatched stuff.

Given all of this, the museum has a hard time of organizing it into a coherent presentation, and perhaps to its credit, doesn't really try. I went in trying to make sense of the organization of the items, and soon realized that that wasn't really worth my time. The items are introduced for the most part with an eye to its historical significance and the context, but there's no linearity involved, no storytelling whatsoever. The result is a wonderfully entertaining museum, but not in quite the way that it could be.

What this form of presentation misses out on is a full view of who this person was and what he accomplished. The details of Hayes' life seemed mostly associated with the objects on display, and it often felt like something was missing even then. Now, I've heard that Hayes was a very, very nice man - he was never offensive or rude, and tried very hard to always make everyone feel comfortable. His morals and his politics came together in a truly laudable way, as he was, among other things, an early supporter of universal suffrage. His general niceness came through in the descriptions - but it always seemed like they were leaving something out. They quoted his sound bites on various bits of policy from his administration, and it all sounds hippy-dippy, especially in terms of the issues that we know to have been contentious. On the question of Native Americans in Indian Territory Hayes is bursting with optimism, sure that the reservations and the re-education and civilization programs were effective, all the while Native American tribes were being routinely slaughtered in the West, a point the caption card doesn't point out. He seems unimpressed by the question of Chinese Immigration, and by the time of his farewell speech, he points out that there really aren't big problems in the nation and that everything is running as smoothly as butter. Reading all of this, you have the feeling that either the museum is whitewashing, or else Hayes was out of touch.

I myself vote for some middle road of the two, based on the museum's treatment of Hayes' election. The election of 1876, you may know, was about the most contentious one until 2000. In 1876, four states were unable to cast their electoral votes towards either candidate. The Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, had won the popular vote. The issues at stake in this election were of major importance, and hinged around the end of Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War. Tilden had run on a platform of troop withdrawal from the South, which had been occupied since the War's end in order to enforce the new Civil Rights laws added to the Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Had Tilden won, the occupation would have ended, with, as many northern Republicans predicted, distasterous consequences for the freed slaves and the general character of the South.

When the election could not be called, the Democratic party made an agreement with the Republican party - Tilden would conceed the election if the Republicans promised to end Southern Reconstruction. Hayes thus became president. It is generally thought that this worsened racism in the South, and was the catalyst for the institution of Jim Crow across the region.

The museum makes very little mention of this story, or its historical consequences. Neither does it discuss reconstruction in any sense, the issues surrounding and stemming from it, or Hayes' association with it. From the way the material is presented, it seems he turns a blind eye to the problems in the South after his election - the quote from his farewell address seems particularly ironic (in an incredibly painful way - after all, Hayes was a likeable guy) when we think about the horrors of Southern racism, raging away once the federal government, and Hayes had washed their hands of it.

And simultaneously, I can't blame the museum for these omissions. Reconstruction, after all, is a difficult subject. For all of the Southern resentment and terrorism, there was as much Northern incompetence and arrogance - historians feel that the government was as frustrated and as lukewarm about Reconstruction as the South was. Despite Hayes' association with the period, and the importance of his administration in the future of Civil Rights, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum is not a Reconstruction Museum. It's about Hayes, and is about Hayes in its own goofy way. With its odd collection, it seems to me that this museum functions more as a home - a place to keep all these things. The museum seems to want to show me the things it's collected from Hayes' life, present it to me in a way such that it doesn't understand its own omissions, gaps, and frequent sillinesses. Nor does it seem to care, and you come to understand that maybe you shouldn't, either. As a museum, it good naturedly takes itself seriously, when probably it shouldn't.

Next time you're on I-80 in Ohio and have a bit of time, check this place out.

a note on the name

My blog's name comes from a quote - "History is the great dust heap" - attributed to Augustine Birrell. Birrell, an Irishman, was a politician in the early 20th century, at the time of the Easter Uprising (I direct you to At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill, a lovely bit of historical fiction with that event at its center). I won't pretend to know much about European history, but there's a good wikipedia article about Birrell (doubting my reliability yet? You should be).

The quote reminds me of some of the better landmarks I've visited - the enormous repositories of pure stuff. Birthplaces of forgotten Presidents, replicas of oldtime stores, or my personal favorite, the Smithsonian American History Museum. These places, and others like it, house the kind of stuff everyone else had forgotten about. They have the things that no one remembered until they were rescued for that purpose, and then forgotten in a completely different way. These artifacts are at once preserved and neglected, leaving us to wonder why anyone would have kept that and simultaneously thrilled that someone did. They are items that, for an hour or two, have a real importance. We'd never have imagined them before. We might never think of them again. But they are there for us in these museums, presented to us as living memory from this great dust heap, this pile of information and ideas, eras and figures, facts and fictions. We look at them, think on them, draw conclusions - and let them gently gather dust in our memories.

I plan to celebrate these tidbits, in a fashion similar to the way these museums have done so - with reverence, love, and humor, but also with criticism. I'd like to pick through the heap, evaluate it, and attempt to make sense of it. I'd love for you to join me.

Mission Statement?

I think I know what this is.

For years I've been visiting historic sites of a variety of types, all around the country. Most of these have coincided with vacations and road trips - my family enjoys this kind of thing (surprise surprise). We've been visiting State Capitols, Civil War battlefields, and Presidential estates since I was just a small one, and we've kept it up - partly due to my insistence. We've done Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Gettysburg, we've been to living history museums and watched re-enactments. Recently, spearheaded by my father and me, we've also been on the look-out for smaller things, little gems of roadside historical tourism, both local and alongside major highways. My list of sites visited is already long, and my list of places to go seems to grow the more I study and read history.

So earlier it occurred to me (under the spell of a limited series of National Historic Sites, as well as Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic and Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation), that a blog about history and tourism might be, if maybe not fascinating, at least kind of fun. I've been itching to blog for a while now, but didn't want to fall into the "pointlessness" trap ("no one cares what you had for lunch," my dad reminded me when I told him about this blog). I'm glad to have a theme. I'm looking to write about my experiences of some of the historic sites I've visited, relate some of the history involved, and my impressions of the presentation of that history here.

Sound terrible yet? It'll be fun, I promise. Stick with me.

Coming tomorrow - Rutherford B. Hayes! Stay tuned.