Hayes's ride: in 1876, a Democratic candidate won the presidency, but, through a lack of nerve lost the recount. Sound familiar?

Washington Monthly, March, 2003 by Jeff Greenfield

FRAUD OF THE CENTURY: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris Jr. Simon & Schuster, $27.00

THROUGHOUT THOSE REMARKABLE 37 days that followed Election Day, 2000, as the struggle for the presidency moved from the polling booths to the streets of Palm Beach to the courthouses of Florida and Washington, as we media types spoke of Constitutional crises and enough uncharted waters to re-launch Gilligan's Minnow, the voice of the American people seemed to be saying: "Um, excuse us, but could you figure out who the president is and let us know as soon as possible? Either one's more or less okay with us, but hey--Christmas is coming up, the NFL playoffs are around the corner, so could you wrap this up quick?"

In those days Of peace and prosperity, America was in the words of one observer, "a hotbed of rest" But what, I kept wondering, if we were in a different climate? What if the United States had been divided by an unpopular war, or by intense racial and cultural divisions? What if great numbers of Americans were prepared--literally--to take up arms if Gore or Bush had emerged the victor?

Is such a scenario unimaginable? The fact is, it happened--not in 2000, but in 1876, when New York Gov. Samuel Tilden, the Democratic nominee, went to bed on Election Night with a solid 250,000 plurality over Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes, only to see Hayes win the White House after a two-month battle where bribery, blackmail, extortion, voter fraud, and murder, were freely employed by partisans of both candidates. It may seem like the stuff of fiction--in fact, Gore Vidal's novel 1876 puts the contest at the center of its plot--but the real story, set down by author and onetime political correspondent Roy Morris Jr, has enough drama, melodrama, farce, and tragedy to power a dozen such books. Morris's blend of research, narrative skill, and historical perspective renders Fraud of the Century a compelling tale for anyone even remotely interested in American political history.

Morris begins with a brisk account of how the election came to be contested in the first place. While Hayes himself and most of his supporters believed that Tilden had won--the pro-Republican Chicago Tribune headline read: "Lost. The Country Given Over to Democratic Greed and Plunder"--a trio of Hayes supporters began to stoke the fires of resistance that night. (One of them was a New York Times editor named John C. Reid.) With telegrams sent to Republicans in key states, and with newspaper headlines proclaiming "A Doubtful Election," they enabled Republicans to argue that in three Southern states--South Carolina, Louisiana, and (historical precedent alert!) Florida, Hayes had in fact been the victor, which would have given him a one-vote electoral majority and thus the presidency.

Morris then steps back and provides the historical backdrop for the emerging post-election contest. In its centennial year, the United States was a nation still wounded by the Civil War that had ended barely a decade earlier. Republicans had held the White House for 16 years, in part by stoking resentment against the Democrats for being the party of rebellion. "Vote as you shot," the slogan went, and Republicans encouraged each other to "wave the bloody shirt." (This was no metaphor--in 1868, GOP Rep. Benjamin Butler took to the House floor to display the bloody shirt of an IRS tax collector who had been whipped by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.) But the corruption that had flourished under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant--corruption blatant enough to make an Enron executive blush with shame or envy--had given Democrats real hope that they could take the White House back.

Their candidate, Samuel Tilden, seemed the perfect choice. A civic leader, as well as a lawyer whose railroad work brought him enormous personal wealth, Tilden had taken on the notorious Tweed Ring that dominated New York City politics and had ridden that achievement into the New York governor's mansion in 1874. Two years later, under the battle cry "Tilden and Reform," he had become the consensus presidential choice of his party. (Well, not entirely: One Tweed loyalist, Honest John Kelly, repeatedly interrupted convention proceedings to denounce Tilden.) But, Morris notes, there was a weakness to Tilden that went beyond his physical frailty and congenital hypochondria. He was more cerebral than visceral, a man who believed in process and following the rules. In the post-election war that would be waged for the presidency, Tilden lacked the gifts of decisive command.

"His appeal was intellectual, not personal, and his tendency to aloof self-containment would cause him to be strangely passive at the most inopportune time--when the presidency itself was hanging in the balance," Morris writes. (Al Gore historical allusion, anyone?)

By contrast, Rutherford B. Hayes was a man with an instinct for battle; an instinct revealed by a remarkable record of Civil War heroism--he was wounded four times during the war, and repeatedly escaped death by the narrowest of margins. He went from the battlefield to Congress to the Ohio governor's mansion, and won the presidential nomination because the front-runner, Maine's James G. Blaine, Was too burdened by charges of corruption to be an effective candidate. (One of the many diverting accounts in the book is the story of Blaine taking to the floor of the House to read highly distorted excerpts from letters that in fact proved his corruption--thus anticipating President Nixon's bowdlerized tape excerpts by nearly a century.)