Rutherford B. Hayes and the Reform Tradition in the Gilded Age

in America. We are in a period when old questions are settled, and the new are not yet brought forward, observed President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878.' The old questions and spirit of the moral reformers and Jacksonians seemed dead to Hayes and most Americans. But the aggressive, romantic ante-bellum reformers had destroyed many old institutions and created many new ones with their faith in the infinite perfectibility of the individual, in treating social injustices as sins, in direct appeals to the consciences of men, in skepticism toward government and legislation. Somewhere in the future, as Hayes sensed, lay the Populists and Progressives and their emphasis on collective action, environmentalism and the confident use of laws to remake men and regulate their behavior. This transitional age has long interested scholars. Some have tried to show the continuity of white concern for the black American, from the abolitionists to the N.A.A.C.P.2 Others have found roots for progressivism reaching back to the Granger movement of the mid-1870s.3 Many have been fascinated by men like Henry George, Edward Bellamy and Lester Frank Ward whose writings would appeal to the progressives.4

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