One of the Gilded Age’s distinguished explorer-geologists, Ferdinand Hayden was born on September 7, probably in 1828, in Westfield, Massachusetts. He had a miserable childhood, which he later tried to hide. When he was 10, his mother left his father, a shiftless alcoholic, and around 1840 Hayden went to live with a paternal aunt in Rochester, Ohio, where he benefited from love and stability. Ambitious and intellectually curious, he enrolled in Ober-lin’s Preparatory Department in 1845 and five years later graduated from Oberlin College, where he demonstrated a marked interest in natural history, which was taught from a creationist standpoint. Hayden taught school for a year and a half until December 1851, when he began studying medicine and natural history in Cleveland with Jared Potter Kirtland and John Strong Newberry (who from 1869 to 1882 would direct the Ohio Geological Survey). Newberry introduced Hayden to James Hall, the paleontologist of the New York Geological Survey, who, in summer 1853, sent him along with Fielding Bradford Meek on a fossil-collecting expedition to the Bad Lands of Dakota. Upon his return Hayden completed his medical training at Albany Medical College in January 1854, but he had already found his life work of exploring the West, searching for its fossils and studying its geology.
From 1854 to 1860 Hayden went on four additional major expeditions (among his sponsors were the Smithsonian Institution and the U. S. Army), exploring a vast territory from the Dakotas west to Idaho and south to Kansas and Colorado. Hayden was intensely ambitious, aggressive, energetic, and difficult to get along with. He was a talented, prolific writer who popularized the scenic wonders of the West, while establishing his preeminence as a field geologist and hunter of fossils. In 1855 in an ascent of the Missouri River, he found the first fossils of American dinosaurs in Montana, was elected in 1856 a corresponding member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and that same year published his first article (with Meek) in its Proceedings. The next year he published his first geological map. From 1861 to 1862 he lived in Washington and wrote On the Geology and Natural History of the Upper Missouri (1862), offering evidence in support of Darwin’s theory of evolution (before reading On the Origin of Species), and Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley (1882), a linguistics study, demonstrating the breadth of Hayden’s interests.
From 1862 to 1865 Hayden utilized his medical training while serving in the Union army, and after the war he was appointed an auxiliary professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania (1865-72). On November 9, 1871, he married Emma Woodruff of Philadelphia. They had no children.
Hayden’s academic position did not interfere with his explorations of the West, which were conducted during the summer. In 1866 he was back in the Bad Lands, and in 1867 he was made the head of the Nebraska Geological Survey, which by 1873 evolved into the U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories but was informally known as “the Hayden Survey.” It continued until 1879. His explorations with it were primarily in Wyoming and Colorado, and as colleagues, he attracted a number of geologists and natural history specialists and through the survey sponsored the publication of their studies. The survey’s Atlas of Colorado (1877), covering its geology and geography, was very influential. Hayden continued his own studies, but also conveyed his love of the “Wonders of the West” to the general public in Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery (1870) and in magazines, such as Scribner's Monthly.
When Congress established the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1879, Hayden was a leading candidate to be its head. The USGS was to a large degree modeled on the Hayden Survey, he was popular among western congressmen, and he was a gifted field geologist. President Rutherlord B. Hayes, however, appointed Hayden’s chief rival, Clarence King, to be its head. Hayden’s ambitious, aggressive personality had by this point made enemies not only of his rivals, King and John Wesley Powell, but also of other scientists, such as Othniel Charles Marsh and Charles William Eliot (president of Harvard), and his benefactors Hall and Newberry. These men backed King and attacked Hayden’s science and character. Powell said he was a fraud, Eliot referred to “his low habits in camp,” Hall called him a “Charlatan in geology,” Marsh lobbied against him, and Newberry visited Hayes, who had appointed him to the Ohio Survey, to disparage Hayden and back King. Hayes nevertheless was justified in his decision. Hayden’s best work had been carried out in collaboration with Meek prior to the Civil War, his subsequent work was not as valuable as that of King or Powell, and few geologists of stature were likely to work for the irascible Hayden had he become director of the USGS.
With King and Powell (who succeeded King in 1881) running the USGS, Hayden, although named its fourth principal geologist, worked primarily out of Philadelphia. He continued to do fieldwork in Montana and in 1883 completed a superb geological map, summarizing the 12-year work of the Hayden Survey. His health failed in 1886, and on December 22, 1887, he died in Philadelphia. Although overshadowed by King and Powell, Hayden amassed a substantial body of research essential for geological syntheses in the United States and is primarily responsible for the establishment of Yellowstone National Park.
Further reading: Mike Foster, Strange Genius: The Life of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1994); William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966).
Hayden, Sophia Gregoria (1868-1953) architect Sophia Hayden was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 17, 1868, but after 1874 lived with her grandparents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. In 1886 she became the first woman to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her instructor was Eugene Letang, who had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Echoing that training, Letang was interested primarily in monumental buildings, but his program went beyond design to include architectural engineering and the history of architecture. Hayden graduated with honors in 1890; her thesis project was “A Design for a Museum of Fine Arts” in the neoclassical style, illustrated by superb watercolors. As the president of MIT remarked, she also was as capable as any male architect to build a railroad bridge. Although Hayden intended to practice as an architect, her first job was teaching mechanical drawing at the Eliot School in Jamaica Plain.
The following year the opportunity of a lifetime came Hayden’s way. The World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) in Chicago, like its predecessor, the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876), called for a Woman’s Pavilion and set up a Board of Lady Managers headed by Bertha Palmer to supervise the project. A social leader, labor reformer, as well as a stylish woman, Palmer fought for “equal pay for equal work” for women, entertained factory workers and milliners as well as wealthy Chicagoans in her home, and was noted for her ostentatious display of her seven-strand necklace of 2,268 pearls. In 1891 the Board of Lady Managers solicited, under the heading of “An Unusual Opportunity for Women Architects,” plans for a monumental Woman’s Building. Its exhibits were to show “woman’s progress and development, and her increased usefulness in the arts, sciences, manufactures, and industries of the world.” The winning architect would be awarded $1,000 plus expenses.
Despite her youth and her lack of experience, the competition was tailor-made for Hayden. Her training with Letang emphasized monumental buildings, and her thesis project was not a townhouse or a country cottage but an art museum with adequate spaces for exhibitions. Furthermore, her admiration of the neoclassical style echoed the preferences of Daniel Hudson Burnham and his team of architects, who created the same Chicago fair’s memorable neoclassical White City.
Designing a building in the Italian Renaissance style, Hayden won the prize and became the first woman to design a major building in the United States. Because of its size and probably because of the contemporary perception of women, Hayden aimed to make it “more delicate and refined” than other White City buildings. Over the next year, with less than $500 extra compensation for planning the $150,000 building, Hayden drew working plans for the building and supervised its construction. Male architects at the fair received three to 10 times more compensation. Hayden refused to be pressured by Palmer or other members of the Board of Lady Managers to make what Hayden considered unsuitable changes or to use women-produced material and designs she deemed inappropriate. She was also frustrated by the demands of the male-dominated Board of Construction. Hayden was prompt with her drawings, and her building was the first of the fair’s buildings to be completed.
Hayden was on hand for the formal dedication of the Woman’s Building on October 21, 1892, 400 years after Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Palmer used the occasion to protest the treatment of women—their inadequate education, poor pay, and their enforced dependence on men. Ironically, the career of the architect, whose building she was dedicating, illustrated the evils Palmer denounced.
Sick of arguing with her clients and exhausted by her long months of work, Hayden was not present in May 1893 when the fair belatedly opened. Wanting their profession to remain a male bastion, the editors of American Architect and Building News claimed that rumors of Hayden’s “mental collapse” were a “telling argument against the wisdom of women entering” their profession. When Hayden received three awards for the Woman’s Building, male architects put her down. They claimed her building’s “graceful timidity” revealed “the sex of its author.” Burnham, however, praised the building’s “delicacy of style, artistic taste, and geniality and elegance of the interior hall” and awarded Hayden the Artists Medal. Hayden could not have been seriously indisposed in May 1893, because by 1894 she had designed a memorial building for American Women’s Clubs. Possibly because of the economic depression of the 1890s, it was never built. Lacking a base and encouragement, she became, despite her splendid start and training, an artist, rather than an architect. Hayden married a fellow artist, William Blackstone Bennett, in 1900. She died in Win-throp, Massachusetts, on February 3, 1953.
Further reading: Madeleine B. Stern, We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Schulte Publishing, 1963); Susana Torre, ed., Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977).
Hayes, Rutherford B. (1822-1893) 19th president of the United States
Born in Delaware, Ohio, on October 4, 1822, three months after his father died, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, had a happy, although sheltered childhood and found a role model in his uncle Sardis Birchard, who prospered as a merchant and land speculator. Hayes was a good student, graduating from Kenyon College as valedictorian of his class in 1842 and from Harvard Law School in 1845. Admitted to the Ohio bar that year, he then spent five unchallenging years in Lower Sandusky (later Fremont), the home of his uncle Sardis.
Hayes moved to Cincinnati, the largest city in the West, on Christmas Eve 1849 to make his mark or fail. His practice grew slowly but picked up as he gained a reputation as a defender of murderers. He also enjoyed the cultural advantages and social life of a large city and fell in love with Lucy Webb, whom he married on December 30, 1852. Lucy, a strong believer in Methodism, abstinence from alcoholic beverages, and abolition, influenced but did not radically change Hayes. He never joined a church but in time attended services regularly; he drank temperately but, as president, he became a teetotaler; and after marriage he abandoned his tepid antislavery stance and became a noted defender of runaway slaves. He opposed the extension of slavery into western territories and helped establish the Republican Party in Ohio. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Hayes enthusiastically supported the Union cause, was commissioned in June as a major in the 23rd Ohio Voluntary Infantry, was wounded five times while serving for four years, and emerged from the war a major general and a popular war hero.
Elected to and a member of Congress from 1865 to 1867, Hayes supported Radical Republican Reconstruction measures before he resigned to make the first of three successful runs for governor of Ohio. While in that office (1868-72, 1876-77), he fought successfully for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (voting rights for blacks) to the U. S. Constitution, for the establishment of Ohio State University, and for the nonpartisan administration of asylums and prisons. His gubernatorial victory in 1875, despite a resurgent Democratic Party (capitalizing on a severe economic depression and political corruption in the Ulysses S. Grant administration), made Hayes a candidate for the 1876 Republican presidential nomination. He proved to be more “available” than other contenders, since he combined a distinguished military career with a radical record on Reconstruction issues, a reform record as governor, and the capacity to carry a big swing state. Republicans nominated Hayes in hopes that he would unite the party and prevent defections to the Democrats.
Hayes and the Republicans had an uphill fight. Not only was the party identified with hard times and sleaze, but the Democrats also nominated Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, who was renowned as a reformer and as a political organizer. The Republican tactic of identifying the Democrats with treason during and persecution of black Americans after the Civil War had lost its appeal to those who yearned for prosperity and political purity. Til-den had a majority of votes cast, but violence and intimidation in the South kept thousands of Aerican Americans from the polls and enabled Republicans to void Democratic votes and claim that not Tilden but Hayes had carried South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, giving him a majority of one electoral vote (185 to 184) and the presidency. But Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives and a majority in the joint session of Congress in whose presence the electoral votes would be counted, accused the Republicans of fraud and claimed those states and victory for Tilden. This disputed election was finally resolved in Hayes’s favor on March 2, 1877, two days before Grant’s term expired.
When Hayes took office, Republican Reconstruction governments existed only in South Carolina and Louisiana, and these governments held sway only in the vicinity of the state capital buildings, where small detachments of federal troops upheld their authority. Extralegal Democratic governments, supported ardently and violently by the white minority, controlled the rest of those states, and Republican authority could only be restored by sizable armies of occupation, which neither northern public opinion nor the House of Representatives would condone. Reinforcement was not a realistic option. Hayes himself had no faith in military coercion as a long-range cure for the South’s problems and would rely instead on the school and the vote for blacks, the goodwill of the “better class” of whites, and erasing the color line in politics. Using his eroding bargaining position, Hayes extracted pledges from South Carolina and Louisiana Democrats to respect the civil rights of black and white Republicans before he ordered the troops to cease their support of the Republican governments. White southerners, including the so-called better people, reneged on those pledges by the next election, and the solid white-supremacy Democratic South became a reality.
Having settled on a southern policy, Hayes turned next to civil service reeorm. His cabinet appointments, especially that of reformer Carl Schurz, offended Republican spoilsmen in Congress who were using federal patronage to maintain their hold on local party organizations. Hayes believed that the so-called senatorial courtesy of allowing senators and representatives to dictate who should be appointed politicized the civil service, reduced its efficiency, and deprived the president of his power to be an effective administrator. In June 1877 Hayes prohibited forced political contributions (assessments) by civil servants and forbade their management of party organizations and political campaigns. Feeling that Chester A. Arthur, head of the New York customhouse, was not sympathetic to reform, Hayes succeeded in removing him after a long struggle with his political patron, RoscoE Conkling, over senatorial courtesy. Hayes then insisted that the merit system of appointing on the basis of competitive examinations be introduced in the customhouse, and its success in what was the largest federal office in the land helped secure the Pendleton Civil Service Reeorm Act of 1883.
The severe economic depression with its wage cuts and layoffs led to the Great Strike oe 1877. Beginning on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, it quickly spread to other roads and industries. As unemployed men and boys joined strikers, unprecedented riots, violence, and arson broke out, especially in Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Hayes did not break the strike, and he dispatched federal troops (who never fired a shot) only at the call of state and local officials. Despite the begging of Thomas Alexander
Rutherford B. Hayes (Library of Congress)
ScOTT of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Hayes would not order troops to run the trains on the pretext that the strike interfered with the U. S. mail. Although Hayes favored an eight-hour day for industrial workers, he disliked labor agitators. He also disliked railroad moguls and favored federal regulation of railroads.
Hard times also led to demands for currency inflation, which Hayes adamantly opposed on moral and practical, but certainly not political, grounds. Believing that inflation was dishonest and that fears of it prolonged the depression, Hayes insisted the United States return to the gold standard in 1879 (as scheduled by Congress in 1875) and opposed the popular 1878 Bland-Allison act, which allowed the limited coinage of silver dollars at the ratio of 16 to one part of gold and which passed over his veto. The stunning business revival that accompanied the resumption of specie payments confirmed for Hayes his monetary orthodoxy.
Having offended spoilsmen and inflationists in his own party while failing to attract “better” southerners, who later also turned out to be racists, Hayes saw the Republican Party lose control of the Senate as well as the House in 1878. Ironically, the Democrats helped Hayes reunite Republicans and made possible their victory in 1880. Realizing that Hayes would veto any direct attempt to repeal the election laws designed to enforce the civil - and voting-rights principles of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Democrats attached riders to necessary appropriations bills that they thought Hayes would be forced to sign lest the government be shut down. They were wrong; Hayes relished this “battle of the riders,” vetoed appropriations bills, and rallied public opinion and his party behind him with his stirring messages. Realizing the Democrats wished to stuff ballot boxes in northern cities and to intimidate southern blacks at the polls, Hayes argued for the sanctity of the ballot and defended executive power by maintaining that the riders unconstitutionally deprived the president of his veto power.
Hayes was a precursor of modern 20th-century presidents. He rallied public opinion to his side with his well-publicized vetoes and the short speeches he made while traveling extensively. By shrewdly expounding principles, exploiting issues, enhancing executive power, and introducing modern bureaucratic procedures, Hayes stressed the politics of reform that presidents have come to embrace. Ironically, Republican congressmen, wedded to the politics of organization, thought Hayes an inept politician, but his presidency illustrated his belief “that he serves his party best who serves his country best.”
After leaving office, Hayes campaigned tirelessly for social causes. His major emphasis was on education, which was for him a panacea for society’s ills. He served on the boards of three universities in Ohio but was especially committed to the education of disadvantaged black and white children in the South. He was on the boards of the philanthropic Peabody and Slater funds and campaigned vigorously, but unsuccessfully, for distributing federal funds to impoverished school districts throughout the nation. He believed that education was the key to economic improvement, and for African Americans, economic improvement was the key to civil rights. He advocated industrial education for all children, whether their parents were rich or poor. If politicians and capitalists knew what it was like to work with their hands, they would understand labor’s demands and industrial strife would be mitigated. Hayes also believed education could rehabilitate criminals and was president of the National Prison Reform Association. As governor and president he had been generous with pardons and in time opposed the death penalty. He thought poverty caused crime and that wealth should be more evenly distributed through confiscatory inheritance taxes. He also saw the growing power of the corporation as a threat to the government and “the Standard Oil monopoly. . . a menace to the people.” In his remarkably active retirement, Hayes was a precursor of the Progressives. He died on January 17, 1893.
Further reading: Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
World History
