title: Aljamain Sterling

text: A rematch with Yan was expected to take place on October 30, 2021, at UFC 267. However, on September 25, Sterling withdrew from the contest due to lingering neck issues from surgery. The pair was initially rescheduled to meet at UFC 272 on March 5, 2022, but the bout was pushed back to UFC 273 on April 9. Sterling won the close bout and defended the title via split decision. 11 of 18 MMA media outlets scored the bout for Sterling, while 5 scored it as a draw.


title: Aljamain Sterling

text: Sterling successfully defended his title against T.J. Dillashaw on October 22, 2022, at UFC 280. Sterling won the one-sided bout via TKO in the second round, resulting in Sterling's first stoppage by strikes in eight years.


title: Grant Gustin

text: Thomas Grant Gustin (born January 14, 1990) is an American actor and singer. He is best known for his roles as Barry Allen / The Flash on The CW series "The Flash" as part of the Arrowverse, and as Sebastian Smythe on the Fox series "Glee".


title: Grant Gustin

text: Thomas Grant Gustin was born on January 14, 1990, in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the son of Tina Haney, a pediatric nurse, and Thomas Gustin, a college professor. During his high school years, he attended the Governor's School for the Arts program in Norfolk for musical theater. He also went to Hurrah Players Incorporated which is a theater organization in Virginia. In 2008, he graduated from Granby High School and went on to attend the BFA Music Theater Program at Elon University in North Carolina for two years. He has been a friend of actor Chris Wood since college.


title: Grant Gustin

text: Gustin's first known screen role came while he was still in high school in the film Rain (2004). In this student film, by director/producer Neil Grochmal, during his studies at Regent University. Gustin plays a young mute who dreams of a man's tragic loss of his wife in a robbery, then later crosses paths with the man, stirring visions that help the man solve the mystery of who murdered his wife. Grochmal said Gustin showed raw talent and figured the youngster would be a future achiever in acting.


title: Grant Gustin

text: Gustin left school to take the role of Baby John in the Broadway Revival Tour of "West Side Story", and performed with the tour from its opening on September 30, 2010, through September 23, 2011.


title: Grant Gustin

text: On November 8, 2011, he debuted on the television series "Glee" as Sebastian Smythe, an openly gay member of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Gustin won the recurring role of Sebastian, a promiscuous and scheming character, after "an exhaustive, weeks-long casting search". He originally auditioned for a background role as a tap dancer, but did not get the part. However, Ryan Murphy kept him in mind. He began filming the role early on Monday, September 26, 2011, after having finished his final "West Side Story" performance the previous Friday night. In January 2012, Naya Rivera (as her character Santana Lopez) and Gustin (as Smythe) performed "Smooth Criminal" as a duet in the season three episode "Michael", backed by musical duo 2Cellos. The song was filmed in a similar environment as the 2Cellos music video, in a room surrounded by empty chairs as the two musicians play. This cover debuted and peaked at number 26 at "Billboard" Hot 100, number 10 at "Billboard" Digital Songs, and number 28 at "Billboard" Canadian Hot 100 chart at the week of February 18, 2012.


title: Grant Gustin

text: Gustin began filming "A Mother's Nightmare", an original film for the Lifetime network, in late May 2012. The project also stars actresses Annabeth Gish and Jessica Lowndes, and was shot in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. On July 11, 2012, it was announced that Gustin had landed a major role in the independent film "Affluenza".


title: Grant Gustin

text: On September 13, 2013, it was announced that Gustin would play Barry Allen in the second season of "Arrow". He was initially supposed to appear in three episodes, the last one serving as the backdoor pilot for a potential spin-off "Flash" series. However, the backdoor pilot plan was dropped in favor of a stand-alone pilot, titled "The Flash". The pilot was picked up with an initial order of thirteen episodes, and the series premiered on October 7, 2014, with 4.8 million viewers, the most for a premiere on The CW in five years. the series had concluded its eighth season with 171 episodes aired in total, and was renewed for an ninth and final season on March 22, 2022. As part of the greater Arrowverse, Gustin has reprised his role as Allen on "Arrow", "Supergirl" and "Legends of Tomorrow", as well as the web series "Vixen".


title: Grant Gustin

text: On March 30, 2016, it was announced that Gustin would star in William H. Macy's film "Krystal". The film premiered in 2017 at the Virginia Film Festival, and was released on April 13, 2018, by Great Point Media and Paladin In March 2020, Gustin was cast in "Operation Blue Eyes" as Barry Keenan.


title: Grant Gustin

text: In January 2016, Gustin began dating Andrea "LA" Thoma after they met at a dinner party. They announced their engagement on April 29, 2017, and they married on December 15, 2018. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 2021.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Sufjan Stevens ( ; born July 1, 1975) is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He has released nine solo studio albums and multiple collaborative albums with other artists. Stevens has received Grammy and Academy Award nominations.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: His debut album, "A Sun Came", was released in 2000 on the Asthmatic Kitty label, which he co-founded with his stepfather. He received wide recognition for his 2005 album "Illinois", which hit number one on the "Billboard" Top Heatseekers chart, and for the single "Chicago" from that album. Stevens later contributed to the soundtrack of the 2017 film "Call Me by Your Name". He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song and a Grammy nomination for Best Song Written for Visual Media for the soundtrack's lead single, "Mystery of Love."


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens has released albums of varying styles, from the electronica of "The Age of Adz" and the lo-fi folk of "Seven Swans" to the symphonic instrumentation of "Illinois" and Christmas-themed "Songs for Christmas". He employs various instruments, often playing many of them himself on the same recording. Stevens' music is also known for exploring various themes, particularly religion and spirituality. Stevens' tenth and latest studio album, "A Beginner's Mind", was created alongside Angelo De Augustine and released in 2021.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens was born in Detroit, Michigan, and lived there until the age of nine, when his family moved to Alanson, Michigan, in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. He was raised by his father, Rasjid, and his stepmother, Pat, only occasionally visiting his mother, Carrie, in Oregon after she married her second husband, Lowell Brams. Brams later became the head of Stevens' record label Asthmatic Kitty. His brother Marzuki Stevens is a former professional road runner. Stevens is of Lithuanian and Greek descent.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens attended the Detroit Waldorf School, Alanson Public Schools and Interlochen Arts Academy, and graduated from Harbor Light Christian School. He then attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and then earned an MFA from The New School in New York City.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: While in school, Stevens studied the oboe and English horn, which he plays on his albums. Stevens did not learn to play the guitar until his time at Hope College.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: "Sufjan" means "comes with a sword." The name most famously belonged to Abu Sufyan, a figure from early Islamic history. The name was given to Stevens by the founder of Subud, an interfaith spiritual community to which his parents belonged when he was born.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens began his musical career as a member of Marzuki, a folk-rock band from Holland, Michigan, as well as garage band Con Los Dudes. He also played (and continues to play) various instruments for Danielson Famile. During his final semester at Hope College, Stevens wrote and recorded his debut solo album, "A Sun Came", which he released on Asthmatic Kitty Records. He later moved to New York City, where he enrolled in a writing program at The New School for Social Research. During his time at the New School, Stevens developed a preoccupation with the short story form, which he believed would lead him to write a novel, but ultimately returned him to songwriting.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: While in New York, Stevens composed and recorded the music for his second album, "Enjoy Your Rabbit", a song cycle based around the animals of the Chinese zodiac that delved into electronica.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens followed this with the album "Michigan", a collection of folk songs and instrumentals. It includes odes to cities including Detroit and Flint, the Upper Peninsula, and vacation areas such as Tahquamenon Falls and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Melded into the scenic descriptions and characters are his own declarations of faith, sorrow, love, and the regeneration of Michigan. Beginning with the album, Stevens announced his intent to write an album for each of the 50 U.S. states, which he termed the Fifty States Project. Following the release of "Michigan", Stevens compiled a collection of songs recorded previously into a side project, the album "Seven Swans", which was released in March 2004. Stevens did not leave his job in the children's book division at Time Warner until touring for "Seven Swans".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Next, he released the second in the Fifty States project, titled "Illinois". Among the subjects explored on "Illinois" are the cities of Chicago, Decatur and Jacksonville; the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the death of a friend on Casimir Pulaski Day, the poet Carl Sandburg, and the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Stevens had spent the second half of 2004 researching and writing material for the album. As with "Michigan", Stevens used the state of Illinois as a leaping-off point for his more personal explorations of faith, family, love, and location. Though slated for release on July 5, 2005, the album was briefly delayed by legal issues regarding the use of an image of Superman in the original album cover artwork. In the double vinyl release, a balloon sticker was placed over Superman on the cover art of the first 5,000 copies. The next printings had an empty space where the Superman image was, as with the CD release. "Illinois" was widely acclaimed and was the highest-rated album of 2005 on the review aggregator website Metacritic. The 2006 PLUG Independent Music Awards awarded Stevens with the Album of the Year, Best Album Art/Packaging, and Male Artist of the Year. "Pitchfork", "No Ripcord", and "Paste" magazine named "Illinois" as the editors' choice for best album of 2005, and Stevens received the 2005 Pantheon prize, awarded to noteworthy albums selling fewer than 500,000 copies, for "Illinois".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In April 2006, Stevens announced that 21 pieces of music he had culled from the "Illinois" recording sessions would be incorporated into a new album, called "The Avalanche", which was released on July 11, 2006. On September 11, 2006, in Nashville, Tennessee, Stevens debuted a new composition, a ten-minute-plus piece titled "Majesty Snowbird." On November 21, 2006, a five CD box set "Songs for Christmas" was released, which contains originals and Christmas standards recorded every year since 2001 (except 2004). Stevens undertook in the project initially as an exercise to make himself 'appreciate' Christmas more. The songs were the work of an annual collaboration between Stevens and different collaborators, including minister Vito Aiuto; the songs themselves were distributed to friends and family.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Although Stevens' subsequent work was sometimes speculated to tie into future "States" projects, and Stevens himself would make occasional statements alluding to the future of the project, Stevens later admitted that the project had been a "promotional gimmick" and not one he had seriously intended to complete. In November 2009, Stevens admitted to "Exclaim!" magazine, in regard to the fact that he recently called his fifty-state project a joke, that "I don't really have as much faith in my work as I used to, but I think that's healthy. I think it's allowed me to be less precious about how I work and write. And maybe it's okay for us to take it less seriously."


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Over the 2005 winter holidays, Stevens recorded an album with Rosie Thomas and Denison Witmer playing banjo and providing vocals. In April 2006, Pitchfork erroneously announced that Stevens and Thomas were having a baby together, and were forced to print a retraction. Witmer and Thomas later admitted it was an April Fools' prank. In December 2006, the collaborative recordings were digitally released by Nettwerk as a Rosie Thomas album titled "These Friends of Mine". The album was released in physical form on March 13, 2007.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On May 31, 2007, Asthmatic Kitty announced that Stevens would be premiering a new project titled "The BQE" in early November 2007. The project, dubbed a "symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City's infamous Brooklyn–Queens Expressway," was manifested in a live show. "The BQE" featured an original film by Stevens (shot in Super 8 film and standard 16 mm), while Stevens and a backing orchestra provided the live soundtrack. The performance used 36 performers which included a small band, a wind and brass ensemble, string players, horn players, and hula hoopers. There were no lyrics to the music. "The BQE" was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of their Next Wave Festival and performed on three consecutive nights from November 1–3, 2007.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: The performance sold out the 2,109 seat BAM Opera House without any advertising. After three weeks of rehearsing the piece with the three dozen musicians involved, he presented the 30-minute composition. "The BQE" was followed by an additional one hour of concert by Stevens and his orchestra. "The BQE" won the 2008 Brendan Gill Prize. In April 2007, in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, Stevens made unannounced appearances on Thomas's tour in support of this album. In 2007, he did a Take-Away Show acoustic video session shot by Vincent Moon standing on a roof in Cincinnati. In 2007, he played shows sporadically, including playing at the Kennedy Center to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Stage concerts.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens has also worked as an essayist, contributing to Asthmatic Kitty Records' "Sidebar" feature and "Topic Magazine". He wrote the introduction to the 2007 edition of "The Best American Nonrequired Reading", a short story about his early childhood education and learning to read titled "How I Trumped Rudolf Steiner and Overcame the Tribulations of Illiteracy, One Snickers Bar at a Time". That winter, he hosted an "Xmas Song Exchange Contest" in which winner Alec Duffy won exclusive rights to the original Stevens song "Lonely Man of Winter." The track could only be heard by attending private listening parties at Duffy's home in Brooklyn and at places around the world until 2018, when Duffy negotiated with Asthmatic Kitty Records to release the song with all proceeds going towards Duffy's organization JACK.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens has contributed to the music of Denison Witmer, Soul-Junk, Half-handed Cloud, Brother Danielson, Danielson Famile, Serena-Maneesh, Castanets, Will Stratton, Shannon Stephens, Clare & the Reasons, Little Scream, and Liz Janes. In 2007 alone, Stevens played piano on The National's album "Boxer", produced and contributed many instrumental tracks to Rosie Thomas's album "These Friends of Mine", multiple instruments on Ben + Vesper's album "All This Could Kill You" and oboe and vocals to David Garland's 2007 album "Noise in You".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: He has contributed covers of Tim Buckley ("She Is"), Joni Mitchell ("Free Man in Paris"), Daniel Johnston ("Worried Shoes"), John Fahey ("Variation on 'Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion at Magruder Park"), The Innocence Mission ("The Lakes of Canada"), Bob Dylan ("Ring Them Bells"), Drake ("Hotline Bling"), Prince ("Kiss") and The Beatles ("What Goes On") to various tribute albums. His versions of "Free Man in Paris" and "What Goes On" are notable for only retaining the lyrics of the original, as Stevens has taken his own interpretation on the melody and arrangement. His rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" has a similar rearranged melody and arrangement as well as a whole new verse.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: His songs "The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders" and "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" were featured in the 2006 British comedy-drama "Driving Lessons", starring "Harry Potter"s Julie Walters and Rupert Grint. In 2008, he produced "Welcome to The Welcome Wagon", the debut album of Brooklyn-based husband and wife duo Vito and Monique Aiuto, The Welcome Wagon.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In February 2009, Stevens contributed "You Are the Blood" to the AIDS benefit album "Dark Was the Night" produced by the Red Hot Organization. In April 2009, Stevens uploaded a song about director Sofia Coppola online. This song was written while Stevens was in college, from a series of songs about names.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: A few weeks later, our dog got hit by a snowplow and I forgot all about the problem of names. Until college, when I learned to play the guitar, and, as an exercise, started writing songs (very poorly executed) in the same way that Henry Ford produced the automobile: assembly-line-style. I wrote songs for the days of the week (poor Monday!). Songs for the planets (poor Pluto!). Songs for the Apostles (poor Judas!). And, finally, when all else failed, I started a series of songs for names. [...] Each piece was a rhetorical, philosophical, musical rumination on all the possible names I had entertained years before when my parents had given me the one chance to change my own. Oh fates! I sang these songs in the privacy of my dorm room, behind closed doors, pillows and cushions stuffed in the air vents so no one would hear. And then I almost failed Latin class, my grades plummeted, my social life dissolved into ping pong tournaments in the residence halls, and, gradually, my interest in music (or anything divine, creative, fruitful, enriching) completely waned. I turned to beer. And cigarettes. And TV sitcoms. And candy bars. Oh well! A perfectly good youth wasted on junk food! That is, until a few months ago, when I came across some of the old name songs, stuffed onto tape cassettes, 4-track recorders, forgotten boxes, forgotten shelves, forgotten hard drives. It was like finding an old diary, or a high school yearbook, senior picture with lens flare and pockmarks, slightly cute and embarrassing. What was I thinking?


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In September 2009, Stevens began performing four new songs while on his fall tour, "All Delighted People", "Impossible Soul", "Too Much" and "Age of Adz". That year Stevens contributed to an album with his stepfather, Lowell Brams, entitled "Music for Insomnia". The album was released December 8, 2009. On October 6, 2009, Stevens' label, Asthmatic Kitty Records, released an album of versions of his 2001 album "Enjoy Your Rabbit" rearranged for strings and performed by the Osso String Quartet, entitled "Run Rabbit Run".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In 2010, Stevens was featured on The National's album "High Violet", released in May, and sang backing vocals for the band on the "Late Show with David Letterman". Following the release of "High Violet", band frontman Matt Berninger mentioned that Stevens was recording a new album in the band's studio and that The National would appear on some of the tracks. In early August, Stevens announced North American tour dates across dozens of cities. On August 20, 2010, Stevens suddenly and unexpectedly released a new collection of tracks, the "All Delighted People" EP, for digital download. The EP is built around two versions of the title track, "All Delighted People". The EP surprisingly rose to #27 on the "Billboard" 200 albums solely through its digital sales. On August 26, Asthmatic Kitty announced that Stevens would release his newest full-length album, "The Age of Adz", on October 12. NPR streamed the album until it was released on October 12, 2010.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: The two albums featured a wide range of arrangements, from orchestral to electronic. Song lengths were also extended; the track "Djohariah" from "All Delighted People" is 17 minutes long, while "Impossible Soul" from "The Age of Adz" is 25 minutes long. The albums also feature many styles from disco to folk.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens has stated in interviews that in 2009 and 2010 he suffered from a mysterious debilitating virus infection that affected his nervous system. He experienced chronic pain and was forced to stop working on music for several months. He said: ""The Age of Adz", is, in some ways, a result of that process of working through health issues and getting much more in touch with my physical self. That's why I think the record's really obsessed with sensation and has a hysterical melodrama to it."


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On October 12, 2010, Stevens began his North American tour in Montreal, featuring virtually all new material. The tour lasted just over a month and ended on November 15, 2010, in New York City. Stevens toured Australia and New Zealand in early 2011, featured as part of the Sydney Festival, and appeared on-stage with The National during the last of three sold-out Auckland shows. He also toured Europe and the United Kingdom in April and May 2011, playing there for the first time in five years. His shows mostly consisted of new material, but he did play many older tracks from "Seven Swans" and "Illinois". Stevens ended the Age of Adz tour with two shows in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On February 27, 2012, it was announced Stevens would release a collaborative EP titled "Beak & Claw", on March 20, with artists Son Lux and Serengeti under the name S / S / S on the Anticon record label. Stevens released a 7" with close friend Rosie Thomas for Record Store Day 2012, titled "Hit & Run Vol. 1". He also collaborated with choreographer Justin Peck on two ballets for the New York City Ballet: "Year of the Rabbit" (2012) and "Everywhere We Go" (2014), both to great critical acclaim. Stevens, along with fellow Brooklyn musicians Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner, began performing their classical project "Planetarium", a song-cycle based around the planets in our solar system in countries such as England, The Netherlands, Australia and France from March to July 2012.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On October 2, 2012, it was announced that Stevens would release a second set of Christmas albums, titled "", on November 13, 2012. "Silver & Gold" contains 58 songs, allowing for a total of 100 when combined with his first set of Christmas albums, "Songs for Christmas". To support this new release, Stevens performed in 24 cities around the United States for his 2012 tour titled "The Sirfjam Stephanapolous Christmas Sing-a-Long Seasonal Affective Disorder Spectacular Music Pageant Variety Show Disaster". On December 11, 2012, Stevens released "Chopped and Scrooged", a Christmas-themed hip-hop mixtape featuring music from "Silver & Gold".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: As a part of Joyful Noise's 2013 Flexi Disc Series, Stevens and Cat Martino, of Stranger Cat, recorded the single "Take the Time". Martino has contributed to many of Stevens' past projects, including "The Age of Adz". On March 18, 2014, Stevens released the self-titled album, "Sisyphus", with Son Lux and rapper Serengeti.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On January 12, 2015, Asthmatic Kitty Records announced that Stevens would release a new album called "Carrie & Lowell". Stevens shared the first single from the album, "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross", on February 16, 2015. "Carrie & Lowell" was released on March 31, 2015. The album garnered critical acclaim upon its release. "Stereogum" placed the album on its best albums of the decade list in 16th place and described it as "an elegant heartbreaker of an album", while "Consequence of Sound" ranked it the 43rd best album of the decade, calling it "a special brew that makes even the most intimate personal moment feel parabolic".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: The album follows the nuances and trials of life with Stevens' mother, Carrie, who was diagnosed bipolar and schizophrenic, was addicted to drugs, and abandoned him when he was a year old; it also includes Stevens' stepfather, Lowell Brams. Stevens also stated that the songwriting for the album was incited by his process of grieving and coming to terms with his and his mother's relationship following his mother's death due to stomach cancer in 2012. On January 26, 2015, Asthmatic Kitty Records announced a tour of North America, which began in April 2015, to coincide with the new album. Stevens also headlined the End of the Road Festival in the United Kingdom in September. On July 21, a second set of U.S. tour dates, which took place in October and November 2015, was announced.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: After Stevens performed new compositions about the solar system alongside composers Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner in Amsterdam in April 2012, it was reported in March 2017 that the three and James McAlister would produce an album. The "80-minute concept album", titled "Planetarium", was released in July 2017. On April 28, 2017, a live album and concert film, "Carrie & Lowell Live" was released, featuring new interpretations, re-workings and expansions of the songs from "Carrie & Lowell". In addition to the live album, Stevens announced another "Carrie & Lowell" companion piece, "The Greatest Gift", released on November 24. It includes four unreleased songs from the album sessions, as well as several remixes and a demo.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In January 2017, it was announced that Stevens would contribute original songs written and recorded by himself for the coming-of-age romantic drama film "Call Me by Your Name". The film was released on November 24, 2017, by Sony Pictures Classics. features two new songs and a remix of an existing song by Stevens: "Visions of Gideon", which has been described as containing "lush orchestrations" and "staccato-heavy piano refrains", "Mystery of Love", which was featured in the film's trailer as well as the film itself, and an "ethereal piano arrangement" of "The Age of Adz" track "Futile Devices". In his review of the film, "Consequence of Sound" writer Dominick Suzanne-Mayer praised Stevens' work as a composer on the film, noting that he "has a perfect ear for the film's portrayal of a summer that's getting shorter by the day." In January 2018, "Mystery of Love" earned a nomination for the year's Academy Award for Best Original Song. Later in the year, the song received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Song Written for Visual Media. The song was featured in the second season of the Netflix series "Sex Education".


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In December 2017, Stevens released two versions of "Tonya Harding", a song about the figure skater of the same name. The song's video shows a clip of the eponymous skater performing at the 1991 US Figure Skating Championships. Two days later, the single was offered for digital download and streaming, to be followed later by a cassette and vinyl release, in two versions, the one featured in the video (subtitled "in D major") and a piano-only arrangement ("in E♭ major"); in a short essay, Stevens revealed his intention to write a song about Harding since 1991. According to Stevens, "I've been trying to write a Tonya Harding song since I first saw her skate at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in 1991. She's a complicated subject for a song partly because the hard facts of her life are so strange, disputable, heroic, unprecedented, and indelibly American." Stevens later revealed that the song was offered to the producers to the biographical film "I, Tonya", which was released in the same period, but that they decided not to include it in the film.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: In October 2018, Stevens performed and recorded with indie folk musician Angelo De Augustine a collaborative duo of the latter's "Time" single. On May 29, 2019, Stevens released two new songs, respectively entitled "Love Yourself" and "With My Whole Heart", which were released in celebration of Pride Month. Sam Sodomsky of "Pitchfork" called "With My Whole Heart" "five minutes of unabashed and (relatively) unadorned inspirational soft rock" and "Love Yourself" "similarly glowing". Pride-themed T-shirts designed by Stevens also debuted alongside the singles. He later stated that a portion of the song and shirts' proceeds would go to the Ali Forney Center in Brooklyn and the Ruth Ellis Center in Detroit, two organizations which aim to help LGBT youth. In October 2019, Stevens released an album entitled "The Decalogue" with pianist Timo Andres. It is based on a ballet of the same name by Justin Peck, composed by Stevens.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On March 24, 2020, Stevens released a collaborative album with his stepfather, Lowell Brams, titled "Aporia". In June, Stevens announced his eighth studio album, titled "The Ascension", along with the album's lead single "America", which was released on July 3. The album's second single, "Video Game", was released on August 13, and the third single, "Sugar", was released on September 15. "The Ascension" was released in full on September 25.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: On May 6, 2021, Stevens released a five-volume album of meditation music, called "Convocations". On July 7, 2021, Stevens announced the release of a collaborative album, called "A Beginner's Mind", that he recorded with fellow folk singer-songwriter Angelo De Augustine. On the same day, they unveiled the cover and the first two singles, "Reach Out" and "Olympus". "A Beginner's Mind" is a concept album, each track being inspired by a different film from either the 20th or 21st century.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens' sound has been most generally associated with genres such as indie folk, alternative rock, indie rock, indie pop, baroque pop, chamber pop, folk pop, avant-garde folk, lo-fi folk, and electronica. A multi-instrumentalist, Stevens is known for his frequent use of the banjo, but also plays guitar, piano, drums, woodwinds, and several other instruments on his records, layered through the use of multitrack recording.


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Despite many of his songs having spiritual allusions, Stevens does not identify as a contemporary Christian music artist or frequently discuss religion with the press. He told "The Village Voice": "I don't think music media is the real forum for theological discussions. I think I've said things and sung about things that probably weren't appropriate for this kind of form. And I just feel like it's not my work or my place to be making claims and statements because I often think it's misunderstood."


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: During a 2004 interview with Adrian Pannett for "Comes with a Smile" magazine, when asked how important faith was to his music, he said "I don't like talking about that stuff in the public forum because, I think, certain themes and convictions are meant for personal conversation." In a 2006 interview, he said "It's not so much that faith influences us as it lives in us. In every circumstance (giving a speech or tying my shoes), I am living and moving and being."


title: Sufjan Stevens

text: Stevens has resided in Upstate New York near the Catskill Mountains since 2019. Before this, he lived in New York City for 20 years. He identifies as a Christian. Stevens also stated in 2005 that he attended an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Kathryn Lee Gifford (née Epstein; born August 16, 1953) is an American television presenter, singer, songwriter, actress and author. From 1985 to 2000, she and Regis Philbin hosted the talk show "Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee". Gifford is also known for her 11-year run with Hoda Kotb, on the fourth hour of NBC's "Today" show (2008–2019)"." She has received 11 Daytime Emmy nominations and won her first Daytime Emmy in 2010 as part of the "Today" team.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford's first television role was as Tom Kennedy's singer/sidekick on the syndicated version of "Name That Tune" in the 1977–1978 season. She also occasionally appeared on the first three hours of "Today" and was a contributing NBC News correspondent.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Kathie Lee married Paul Johnson, a composer, arranger, producer and publisher of Christian music, in 1976. After their divorce in 1982, she married sportscaster and former NFL player Frank Gifford in 1986. He died in 2015. Kathie Lee has released studio music albums and several books.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford was born Kathryn Lee Epstein in Paris, France, to American parents, Joan (born Cuttell; January 20, 1930 – September 12, 2017), a singer and Aaron Epstein (March 19, 1924 – November 19, 2002), a musician and former US Navy Chief Petty Officer. Aaron Epstein was stationed with his family in France at the time of Gifford's birth. Gifford grew up in Bowie, Maryland, and attended Bowie High School.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford's paternal grandfather was a Russian Jew from Saint Petersburg and her paternal grandmother had Native American ancestry. Her mother, a relative of writer Rudyard Kipling, was of French Canadian, German and English descent.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: After seeing the Billy Graham produced film "The Restless Ones" at age 12, Gifford became a born-again Christian. She told interviewer Larry King, "I was raised with many Jewish traditions and raised to be very grateful for my Jewish heritage."


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: During high school, Gifford was a singer in a folk group, "Pennsylvania Next Right", which performed frequently at school assemblies. After high school graduation in 1971, Gifford attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, studying drama and music. During a summer in the early 1970s, she was a live in secretary/babysitter for Anita Bryant at her home in Miami. Her first regular appearances on national TV was as a singer on the game show "Name That Tune," hosted by Tom Kennedy in the late 1970s, in which she would sing small portions of songs that contestants would have to identify.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford's career took off in the 1970s as a vocalist on the game show "Name That Tune" with Tom Kennedy. In 1978, she joined the cast of the short-lived "Hee Haw" spinoff, "Hee Haw Honeys". She was also a correspondent and substitute anchor on ABC's "Good Morning America" in the early 1980s.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On June 24, 1985, Gifford replaced Ann Abernathy as co-host of "The Morning Show" on WABC-TV with Regis Philbin. The program went into national broadcast in 1988 as "Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee", and Gifford became well known across the country. Throughout the 1990s, morning-TV viewers watched her descriptions of life at home with her sportscaster husband Frank, son Cody, and daughter Cassidy.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: In 1990, when TV Guide held a poll for readers to select the most beautiful woman on television, "Live!" presented a week-long mock campaign to garner votes for Gifford. Gifford wound up winning the poll, receiving more than four times as many votes as the runners-up, Jaclyn Smith and Nicollette Sheridan.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Philbin and Gifford were jointly nominated eight consecutive years in a row (1993 to 2000) for Outstanding Talk Show Host during the Daytime Emmy Awards. Gifford left the show on July 28, 2000.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On March 31, 2008, NBC announced that Gifford was to join its morning show, "Today", as co-host of the fourth hour titled "Today with Kathie Lee and Hoda", alongside Hoda Kotb. This marked her return to morning television; in many markets, she aired directly after her old show, currently called "Live with Kelly and Ryan". Because the fourth hour of "Today" airs live at 10:00 am ET, and "Live with Kelly and Ryan" airs live at 9:00 am ET, Gifford's hour did not compete directly with her former show in most markets. Kotb and Gifford replaced Ann Curry and Natalie Morales. In the weeks prior to Gifford's arrival, ratings indicated 1.9 million viewers of the fourth hour of "Today". As of 2014, the fourth hour of "Today" with Gifford and Kotb has averaged 2.15 million total viewers, an increase of 13 percent over the 2008 ratings. On December 11, 2018, it was announced that she would be leaving "Today" in April 2019. Her final Today Show appearance was on April 5, 2019 with a party, including a video by her children Cody and Cassidy Gifford. In 2019, they won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informative Talk Show Host.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford has made guest appearances in films and television series, and has several independently released albums on CD, including 2000's "The Heart of a Woman", featuring the single "Love Never Fails".


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: She appeared as a spokesperson for Slim Fast diet shakes after her son Cody was born. She also was the face of Carnival Cruise Lines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, singing "If my friends could see me now!" In 1991 she christened the Carnival Ecstasy, the 2nd of the Fantasy Class of cruise ships. In 1994, she appeared as herself in an episode of the NBC sitcom "Seinfeld".


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: She did a number of voice overs most notably as Echidna in the 1998 TV series "Hercules" and in Higglytown Heroes as the Mail Carrier Hero in 2004.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: In September 2005 she became a special correspondent on "The Insider", a syndicated entertainment magazine television show, ending her relationship with that program upon her co-hosting role with "Today".


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: She played the role of Miss Hannigan in a concert performance of "Annie" at Madison Square Garden in December 2006.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On an episode that aired March 27, 2010, she guest starred on "The Suite Life on Deck", along with her real-life daughter, Cassidy.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: She has written numerous autobiographical books, "Just When I Thought I'd Dropped my Last Egg: Life and Other Calamities" in 2010, "The Rock, the Road and the Rabbi" in March 2018, and "It’s Never Too Late: Make the Next Act of Your Life the Best Act of Your Life" in 2020. Her book regarding the Christian faith, "The Jesus I Know: Honest Conversations and Diverse Opinions about Who He Is" was released in 2021. She has also written a number of children's books.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford left "Today" in order to pursue a movie career as an actress, director, and producer. In 2018, she filmed "Then Came You" in which she co-stars with Craig Ferguson. That same year, she also filmed a Hallmark Christmas movie for Hallmark Movies & Mysteries called "A Godwink Christmas". Gifford intends to make movies about the experiences of losing a loved one and being a widow, which she considers an underrepresented topic in Hollywood. Gifford has several projects in the works including sequels to "Then Came You".


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On April 28, 2021, Gifford was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the television industry. Her star is located at 6834 Hollywood Boulevard, only five stars away from that of her former co-host Regis Philbin.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: In the late 1990s, Gifford began working in musical theatre. She contributed a number of musical numbers to "Hats", and wrote and produced "Under The Bridge", based upon the children's book "The Family Under The Bridge" by Natalie Savage Carlson. In 2000 she released the album "The Heart of a Woman" on Universal.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford wrote the book and lyrics for "Saving Aimee", a stage musical about evangelist Aimee McPherson, which premiered in 2007 at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia. The premiere starred actress Carolee Carmello in the lead role. The show, retitled as "", ran on Broadway from November 15, 2012, through December 9, 2012, with Carmello reprising her role as McPherson. On April 30, 2013, Carmello received her third Tony Award nomination for the performance.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On April 16, 2007, Gifford was a guest presenter at the Washington, D.C. Helen Hayes Award Ceremony, honoring contributions and professional accomplishments in theatre.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: In 2008, Gifford and David Friedman wrote a junior high school musical entitled "Key Pin It Real". The play depicts a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Key Pin. The first production took place in December 2008 in Kendallville, Indiana, at East Noble High School.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford is currently working on a musical adaptation of "It's a Wonderful Life" with John McDaniel; McDaniel is composing music while Gifford is writing lyrics.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford is a celebrity ambassador for the non-profit organization Childhelp. She regularly makes appearances at fund raisers and events for the child abuse prevention and treatment organization and is an ardent supporter.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford raised the money to build and continued to financially support two shelters in New York City for babies born with HIV, or a congenital crack cocaine addiction. These shelters were named in honor of her children, Cody and Cassidy.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: In 1996 Gifford was earning $9 million annually licensing her name to a brand of clothing sold at Walmart. Part of the proceeds went to charity. Charles Kernaghan's human rights group called the National Labor Committee reported that sweatshop labor was being used in manufacturing the Kathie Lee Gifford branded clothing.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford called Kernaghan's report "a vicious attack" on a TV broadcast called "Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee". Gifford explained during this broadcast that she was not responsible for the contract manufacturers that made her products.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Kernaghan in his congressional testimony of April 1996, said that to make Gifford’s clothing, girls as young as 15 worked for 31 cents an hour, 75 hours a week. Kernaghan reported that a worker in Honduras smuggled a piece of clothing out of the factory, which had a Kathie Lee label on it. One of the workers, Wendy Diaz, came to the United States to testify about the conditions under which she worked. She commented, "I wish I could talk to [Kathie Lee]. If she's good, she will help us."


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Gifford later contacted federal authorities to investigate the issue and worked with US federal legislative and executive branch agencies to support and enact laws to protect children against sweatshop conditions. She appeared with President Bill Clinton at the White House in support of the government's initiatives to counter international sweatshop abuses.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Kathie Lee married Paul Johnson, a composer/arranger/producer/publisher, in 1976. They gained fame in Christian music, appearing on covers of Christian magazines. The marriage was strenuous from the start and in 1981, Johnson moved out. The couple divorced in 1982.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: On October 18, 1986, Kathie Lee married a second time, this time to Frank Gifford, an American football player and television sports commentator. It was his third marriage after marriages with Maxine Avis Ewart and Astrid Lindley. With Ewart he had three children.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: Kathie Lee was 23 years younger than Frank. They had two children together, Cody Newton Gifford (born March 22, 1990) and Cassidy Erin Gifford (born August 2, 1993). They also shared a birthday: August 16. Frank died on August 9, 2015, from natural causes at their Greenwich, Connecticut, home at the age of 84. In 2017, she released "He Saw Jesus", a very personal song Kathie Lee co-wrote (with songwriter Brett James) and dedicated to her husband. All proceeds from the song went to the international evangelical Christian humanitarian aid charity Samaritan's Purse.


title: Kathie Lee Gifford

text: A fictionalized version of Kathie Lee Gifford appears in the "South Park" episode "Weight Gain 4000", voiced by Karri Turner. Gifford later re-appears in the episodes "The City on the Edge of Forever", "The Return of Chef", "200" and "201".


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: Amblin Entertainment, Inc., formerly named Amblin Productions and Steven Spielberg Productions, is an American film production company founded by director and producer Steven Spielberg, and film producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall in 1980. Its headquarters are located in Bungalow 477 of the Universal Studios backlot in Universal City, California. It distributes all of the films from Amblin Partners under the Amblin Entertainment banner.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: Amblin is named after Spielberg's first commercially released film, "Amblin'" (1968), a short independent film about a man and woman hitchhiking through the desert. Costing $15,000 to produce, it was shown for Universal Studios and won Spielberg more directing roles. Although Amblin is an independent production company, Universal distributes many Amblin productions, and Amblin operates out of a building on the Universal lot.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: Its logo features the silhouette of E.T. riding in Elliott's bicycle basket flying in front of the moon from the 1982 movie, "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". The company dates back to 1969, and it was properly incorporated in 1970. On July 14, 1975, Spielberg signed a four-picture agreement with Universal Pictures to produce its feature films through his Amblin label, aiming to build upon the success of its first two theatrical pictures "The Sugarland Express" and "Jaws".


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: Amblin first produced its film "Continental Divide" in 1981, with Steven Spielberg serving as executive producer. Founding partners Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall of Amblin caught the attention of film producer Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1982, of which they both produced "Poltergeist", which was directed by filmmaker Tobe Hooper. The following week, Kathleen Kennedy, another founding partner of Amblin produced the film "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", which ended up being the highest-grossing film of the year.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1983, one of the founding partners produced "". Amblin went on to produce the successful films "Gremlins", "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and the "Back to the Future" trilogy.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1985, Spielberg and Don Bluth started a partnership to produce animated feature films. The only two films that were made from the Spielberg-Bluth deal were "An American Tail" (1986) and "The Land Before Time" (1988).


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: On November 5, 1986, Walt Disney Pictures and Amblin Entertainment teamed up to make "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", its first collaboration of such after collaborations working with Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, which had a pre-existing joint deal, which was directed by Robert Zemeckis, and it was slated for a G-rated feature, but it was upped to a PG-rated feature under the Touchstone Pictures label.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1987, Amblin Entertainment had named Brad Globe, former head of Lorimar's marketing division, as vice president of marketing at the production company, and Globe himself would be joined by two special consultants, which were Martin J. Lewy and Gerry Lewis, and will work closely with the marketing department of the companies that released Amblin's product.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1989, a dispute over film-making budgets caused Spielberg and Bluth to part ways, and Amblin's animation department was rebranded to Amblimation, which was headquartered in London. The only three films that were released under the Amblimation banner were "" (1991), "We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story" (1993) and "Balto" (1995). A fourth film, an animated film adaptation of "Cats", was in development, but it was cancelled following the studio's closure in 1997.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1992, Amblin launched a visual effects studio Amblin Imaging, headed by visual effects pioneer John Gross. It was later shut down in 1995.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1991, founding partner Frank Marshall left the company after 10 years. The next year, Kathleen Kennedy left the company.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: In 1989, they set up an animated unit Amblimation. It was defunct in 1997 and was transferred to DreamWorks Animation. In 1993, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald joined the company.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: On June 21, 2021, it was announced that Amblin Entertainment signed a deal with Netflix to release multiple new feature films for the streaming service. Under the deal, Amblin is expected to produce at least two films a year for Netflix for an unspecified number of years. It is possible that Spielberg may even direct some of the projects.


title: Amblin Entertainment

text: While Amblin has never had its own theme park, theme parks have made rides based on Amblin films and co-productions.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Rutherford Birchard Hayes (; October 4, 1822 – January 17, 1893) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881, after serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and as governor of Ohio. Before the American Civil War, Hayes was a lawyer and staunch abolitionist who defended refugee slaves in court proceedings. He served in the Union Army and the House of Representatives before assuming the presidency. His presidency represents a turning point in U.S. history, as historians consider it the formal end of Reconstruction. Hayes, a prominent member of the Republican "Half-Breed" faction, placated both Southern Democrats and Whiggish Republican businessmen by ending the federal government's involvement in attempting to bring racial equality in the South.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As an attorney in Ohio, Hayes served as Cincinnati's city solicitor from 1858 to 1861. At the start of the American Civil War, he left a fledgling political career to join the Union Army as an officer. Hayes was wounded five times, most seriously at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. He earned a reputation for bravery in combat and was promoted to brevet major general. After the war, he served in Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican. Hayes left Congress to run for governor of Ohio and was elected to two consecutive terms, from 1868 to 1872. He served half of a third two-year term from 1876 to 1877 before his swearing-in as president.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: In 1877, Hayes assumed the presidency following the 1876 United States presidential election, one of the most contentious in U.S. history. Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, and neither candidate secured enough electoral votes. According to the U.S. Constitution, if no candidate wins the Electoral College, the House of Representatives is tasked with selecting the new president. Hayes secured a victory when a Congressional Commission awarded him 20 contested electoral votes in the Compromise of 1877. The electoral dispute was resolved with a backroom deal whereby the southern Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election on the condition that he end both federal support for Reconstruction and the military occupation in the former Confederate States.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes's administration was influenced by his belief in meritocratic government and in equal treatment without regard to wealth, social standing, or race. One of the defining events of his presidency was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which he resolved by calling in the US Army against the railroad workers. It remains the deadliest conflict between workers and strikebreakers in American history. As president, Hayes implemented modest civil-service reforms that laid the groundwork for further reform in the 1880s and 1890s. He vetoed the Bland–Allison Act of 1878, which put silver money into circulation and raised nominal prices; Hayes saw the maintenance of the gold standard as essential to economic recovery. His policy toward western Indians anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of 1887.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: At the end of his term, Hayes kept his pledge not to run for reelection and retired to his home in Ohio. He became an advocate of social and educational reform. Biographer Ari Hoogenboom has written that Hayes's greatest achievement was to restore popular faith in the presidency and to reverse the deterioration of executive power that had established itself after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. His supporters have praised his commitment to civil-service reform; his critics have derided his leniency toward former Confederate states as well as his withdrawal of federal support for African Americans' voting and civil rights. Historians and scholars generally rank Hayes as an average to below-average president.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Rutherford Birchard Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on October 4, 1822, to Rutherford Hayes, Jr. and Sophia Birchard. Hayes's father, a Vermont storekeeper, had taken the family to Ohio in 1817. He died ten weeks before Rutherford's birth. Sophia took charge of the family, raising Hayes and his sister, Fanny, the only two of the four children to survive to adulthood. She never remarried, and Sophia's younger brother, Sardis Birchard, lived with the family for a time. He was always close to Hayes and became a father figure to him, contributing to his early education.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Through each of his parents, Hayes was descended from New England colonists. His earliest immigrant ancestor came to Connecticut from Scotland in 1625. Hayes's great-grandfather Ezekiel Hayes was a militia captain in Connecticut in the American Revolutionary War, but Ezekiel's son (Hayes's grandfather, also named Rutherford) left his Branford home during the war for the relative peace of Vermont. His mother's ancestors migrated to Vermont at a similar time. Hayes wrote: "I have always thought of myself as Scotch, but of the fathers of my family who came to America about thirty were English and two only, Hayes and Rutherford, were of Scotch descent. This, on my father's side. On my mother's side, the whole thirty-two were probably all of other peoples beside the Scotch." Most of his close relatives outside Ohio continued to live there. John Noyes, an uncle by marriage, had been his father's business partner in Vermont and was later elected to Congress. His first cousin, Mary Jane Mead, was the mother of sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead and architect William Rutherford Mead. John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, was also a first cousin.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes attended the common schools in Delaware, Ohio, and enrolled in 1836 at the Methodist Norwalk Seminary in Norwalk, Ohio. He did well at Norwalk, and the next year transferred to the Webb School, a preparatory school in Middletown, Connecticut, where he studied Latin and Ancient Greek. Returning to Ohio, he attended Kenyon College in Gambier in 1838. He enjoyed his time at Kenyon, and was successful scholastically; while there, he joined several student societies and became interested in Whig politics. His classmates included Stanley Matthews and John Celivergos Zachos. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with highest honors in 1842 and addressed the class as its valedictorian.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: After briefly reading law in Columbus, Ohio, Hayes moved east to attend Harvard Law School in 1843. Graduating with an LL.B, he was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1845 and opened his own law office in Lower Sandusky (now Fremont). Business was slow at first, but he gradually attracted clients and also represented his uncle Sardis in real estate litigation. In 1847 Hayes became ill with what his doctor thought was tuberculosis. Thinking a change in climate would help, he considered enlisting in the Mexican–American War, but on his doctor's advice instead visited family in New England. Returning from there, Hayes and his uncle Sardis made a long journey to Texas, where Hayes visited with Guy M. Bryan, a Kenyon classmate and distant relative. Business remained meager on his return to Lower Sandusky, and Hayes decided to move to Cincinnati.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes moved to Cincinnati in 1850, and opened a law office with John W. Herron, a lawyer from Chillicothe. Herron later joined a more established firm and Hayes formed a new partnership with William K. Rogers and Richard M. Corwine. He found business better in Cincinnati, and enjoyed its social attractions, joining the Cincinnati Literary Society and the Odd Fellows Club. He also attended the Episcopal Church in Cincinnati but did not become a member.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes courted his future wife, Lucy Webb, during his time there. His mother had encouraged him to get to know Lucy years earlier, but Hayes had believed she was too young and focused his attention on other women. Four years later, Hayes began to spend more time with Lucy. They became engaged in 1851 and married on December 30, 1852, at Lucy's mother's house. Over the next five years, Lucy gave birth to three sons: Birchard Austin (1853), Webb Cook (1856), and Rutherford Platt (1858). A Methodist, Lucy was a teetotaler and abolitionist. She influenced her husband's views on those issues, though he never formally joined her church.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes had begun his law practice dealing primarily with commercial issues but won greater prominence in Cincinnati as a criminal defense attorney, defending several people accused of murder. In one case, he used a form of the insanity defense that saved the accused from the gallows; she was instead confined to a mental institution. Hayes also defended slaves who had escaped and been accused under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. As Cincinnati was just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state, it was a destination for escaping slaves and many such cases were tried in its courts. A staunch abolitionist, Hayes found his work on behalf of fugitive slaves personally gratifying as well as politically useful, as it raised his profile in the newly formed Republican Party.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: His political reputation rose with his professional plaudits. Hayes declined a Republican nomination for a judgeship in 1856. Two years later, some Republicans proposed Hayes to fill a vacancy on the bench and he considered accepting the appointment until the office of city solicitor also became vacant. The city council elected Hayes city solicitor to fill the vacancy, and voters elected him to a full two-year term in April 1859 with a larger majority than other Republicans on the ticket.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As the Southern states quickly began to secede after Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860, Hayes was lukewarm about civil war to restore the Union. Considering that the two sides might be irreconcilable, he suggested that the Union "[l]et them go." Though Ohio had voted for Lincoln in 1860, Cincinnati voters turned against the Republican party after secession. Its residents included many from the Southern United States, and they voted for the Democrats and Know-Nothings, who combined to sweep the city elections in April 1861, ejecting Hayes from the city solicitor's office.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Returning to private practice, Hayes formed a very brief law partnership with Leopold Markbreit, lasting three days before the war began. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Hayes resolved his doubts and joined a volunteer company composed of his Literary Society friends. That June, Governor William Dennison appointed several of the officers of the volunteer company to positions in the 23rd Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Hayes was promoted to major, and his friend and college classmate Stanley Matthews was appointed lieutenant colonel. Joining the regiment as a private was another future president, William McKinley.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: After a month of training, Hayes and the 23rd Ohio set out for western Virginia in July 1861 as a part of the Kanawha Division. They did not meet the enemy until September, when the regiment encountered Confederates at Carnifex Ferry in present-day West Virginia and drove them back. In November, Hayes was promoted to lieutenant colonel (Matthews having been promoted to colonel of another regiment) and led his troops deeper into western Virginia, where they entered winter quarters. The division resumed its advance the following spring, and Hayes led several raids against the rebel forces, on one of which he sustained a minor injury to his knee. That September, Hayes's regiment was called east to reinforce General John Pope's Army of Virginia at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Hayes and his troops did not arrive in time for the battle, but joined the Army of the Potomac as it hurried north to cut off Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which was advancing into Maryland. Marching north, the 23rd was the lead regiment encountering the Confederates at the Battle of South Mountain on September 14. Hayes led a charge against an entrenched position and was shot through his left arm, fracturing the bone. He had one of his men tie a handkerchief above the wound in an effort to stop the bleeding, and continued to lead his men in the battle. While resting, he ordered his men to meet a flanking attack, but instead his entire command moved backward, leaving Hayes lying in between the lines.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Eventually, his men brought Hayes back behind their lines, and he was taken to hospital. The regiment continued on to Antietam, but Hayes was out of action for the rest of the campaign. In October, he was promoted to colonel and assigned to command of the first brigade of the Kanawha Division as a brevet brigadier general.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The division spent the following winter and spring near Charleston, Virginia (present-day West Virginia), out of contact with the enemy. Hayes saw little action until July 1863, when the division skirmished with John Hunt Morgan's cavalry at the Battle of Buffington Island. Returning to Charleston for the rest of the summer, Hayes spent the fall encouraging the men of the 23rd Ohio to reenlist, and many did. In 1864, the Army command structure in West Virginia was reorganized, and Hayes's division was assigned to George Crook's Army of West Virginia. Advancing into southwestern Virginia, they destroyed Confederate salt and lead mines there. On May 9, they engaged Confederate troops at Cloyd's Mountain, where Hayes and his men charged the enemy entrenchments and drove the rebels from the field. Following the rout, the Union forces destroyed Confederate supplies and again successfully skirmished with the enemy.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes and his brigade moved to the Shenandoah Valley for the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Crook's corps was attached to Major General David Hunter's Army of the Shenandoah and soon back in contact with Confederate forces, capturing Lexington, Virginia on June 11. They continued south toward Lynchburg, tearing up railroad track as they advanced, but Hunter believed the troops at Lynchburg were too powerful, and Hayes and his brigade returned to West Virginia. Hayes thought Hunter lacked aggression, writing in a letter home that "General Crook would have taken Lynchburg." Before the army could make another attempt, Confederate General Jubal Early's raid into Maryland forced their recall to the north. Early's army surprised them at Kernstown on July 24, where Hayes was slightly wounded by a bullet to the shoulder. He also had a horse shot out from under him, and the army was defeated. Retreating to Maryland, the army was reorganized again, with Major General Philip Sheridan replacing Hunter. By August, Early was retreating up the valley, with Sheridan in pursuit. Hayes's troops fended off a Confederate assault at Berryville and advanced to Opequon Creek, where they broke the enemy lines and pursued them farther south. They followed up the victory with another at Fisher's Hill on September 22, and one more at Cedar Creek on October 19. At Cedar Creek, Hayes sprained his ankle after being thrown from a horse and was struck in the head by a spent round, which did not cause serious damage. His leadership and bravery drew his superiors' attention, with Ulysses S. Grant later writing of Hayes, "[h]is conduct on the field was marked by conspicuous gallantry as well as the display of qualities of a higher order than that of mere personal daring."


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Cedar Creek marked the end of the campaign. Hayes was promoted to brigadier general in October 1864 and brevetted major general. Around this time, Hayes learned of the birth of his fourth son, George Crook Hayes. The army went into winter quarters once more, and in spring 1865 the war quickly came to a close with Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Hayes visited Washington, D.C. that May and observed the Grand Review of the Armies, after which he and the 23rd Ohio returned to their home state to be mustered out of the service.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: While serving in the Army of the Shenandoah in 1864, Hayes was nominated by Republicans for the House of Representatives from Ohio's 2nd congressional district. Asked by friends in Cincinnati to leave the army to campaign, he refused, saying that an "officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped." Instead, Hayes wrote several letters to the voters explaining his political positions and was elected by a 2,400-vote majority over the incumbent, Democrat Alexander Long.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: When the 39th Congress assembled in December 1865, Hayes was sworn in as a part of a large Republican majority. Hayes identified with the party's moderate wing, but was willing to vote with the radicals for the sake of party unity. The major legislative effort of the Congress was the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, for which Hayes voted and which passed both houses of Congress in June 1866. Hayes's beliefs were in line with his fellow Republicans on Reconstruction issues: that the South should be restored to the Union, but not without adequate protections for freedmen and other black southerners. President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded to office following Lincoln's assassination, to the contrary wanted to readmit the seceded states quickly without first ensuring that they adopted laws protecting the newly freed slaves' civil rights; he also granted pardons to many of the leading former Confederates. Hayes, along with congressional Republicans, disagreed. They worked to reject Johnson's vision of Reconstruction and to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Reelected in 1866, Hayes returned to the lame-duck session. On January 7, 1867, he voted for the resolution that authorized the first impeachment inquiry against Andrew Johnson. He also voted during this time for the Tenure of Office Act, which ensured that Johnson could not remove administration officials without the Senate's consent, and unsuccessfully pressed for a civil service reform bill that attracted the votes of many reform-minded Republicans. Hayes continued to vote with the majority in the 40th Congress on the Reconstruction Acts, but resigned in July 1867 to run for governor of Ohio.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: A popular Congressman and former Army officer, Hayes was considered by Ohio Republicans to be an excellent standard-bearer for the 1867 election campaign. His political views were more moderate than the Republican party's platform, although he agreed with the proposed amendment to the Ohio state constitution that would guarantee suffrage to black male Ohioans. Hayes's opponent, Allen G. Thurman, made the proposed amendment the centerpiece of the campaign and opposed black suffrage. Both men campaigned vigorously, making speeches across the state, mostly focusing on the suffrage question. The election was mostly a disappointment to Republicans, as the amendment failed to pass and Democrats gained a majority in the state legislature. Hayes thought at first that he, too, had lost, but the final tally showed that he had won the election by 2,983 votes of 484,603 votes cast.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As a Republican governor with a Democratic legislature, Hayes had a limited role in governing, especially since Ohio's governor had no veto power. Despite these constraints, he oversaw the establishment of a school for deaf-mutes and a reform school for girls. He endorsed the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and urged his conviction, which failed by one vote in the United States Senate. Nominated for a second term in 1869, Hayes campaigned again for equal rights for black Ohioans and sought to associate his Democratic opponent, George H. Pendleton, with disunion and Confederate sympathies. Hayes was reelected with an increased majority, and the Republicans took the legislature, ensuring Ohio's ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed black (male) suffrage. With a Republican legislature, Hayes's second term was more enjoyable. Suffrage was expanded and a state Agricultural and Mechanical College (later to become The Ohio State University) established. He also proposed a reduction in state taxes and reform of the state prison system. Choosing not to seek reelection, Hayes looked forward to retiring from politics in 1872.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As Hayes prepared to leave office, several delegations of reform-minded Republicans urged him to run for United States Senate against the incumbent Republican, John Sherman. Hayes declined, preferring to preserve party unity and retire to private life. He especially looked forward to spending time with his children, two of whom (daughter Fanny and son Scott) had been born in the past five years. Initially, Hayes tried to promote railway extensions to his hometown, Fremont. He also managed some real estate he had acquired in Duluth, Minnesota. Not entirely removed from politics, Hayes held out some hope of a cabinet appointment, but was disappointed to receive only an appointment as assistant U.S. treasurer at Cincinnati, which he turned down. He agreed to be nominated for his old House seat in 1872 but was not disappointed when he lost the election to Henry B. Banning, a fellow Kenyon College alumnus.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: In 1873, Lucy gave birth to another son, Manning Force Hayes. That same year, the Panic of 1873 hurt business prospects across the nation, including Hayes's. His uncle Sardis Birchard died that year, and the Hayes family moved into Spiegel Grove, the grand house Birchard had built with them in mind. That year Hayes announced his uncle's bequest of $50,000 in assets to endow a public library for Fremont, to be called the Birchard Library. It opened in 1874 on Front Street, and a new building was completed and opened in 1878 in Fort Stephenson State Park. (This site was per the terms of the bequest.) Hayes served as chairman of the library's board of trustees until his death.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes hoped to stay out of politics in order to pay off the debts he had incurred during the Panic, but when the Republican state convention nominated him for governor in 1875, he accepted. His campaign against Democratic nominee William Allen focused primarily on Protestant fears about the possibility of state aid to Catholic schools. Hayes was against such funding and, while not known to be personally anti-Catholic, he allowed anti-Catholic fervor to contribute to the enthusiasm for his candidacy. The campaign was a success, and on October 12, 1875 Hayes was returned to the governorship by a 5,544-vote majority. The first person to earn a third term as governor of Ohio, Hayes reduced the state debt, reestablished the Board of Charities, and repealed the Geghan Bill, which had allowed for the appointment of Catholic priests to schools and penitentiaries.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes's success in Ohio immediately elevated him to the top ranks of Republican politicians under consideration for the presidency in 1876. The Ohio delegation to the 1876 Republican National Convention was united behind him, and Senator John Sherman did all in his power to get Hayes the nomination. In June 1876, the convention assembled with James G. Blaine of Maine as the favorite. Blaine started with a significant lead in the delegate count, but could not muster a majority. As he failed to gain votes, the delegates looked elsewhere for a nominee and settled on Hayes on the seventh ballot. The convention selected Representative William A. Wheeler from New York for vice president, a man about whom Hayes had recently asked, "I am ashamed to say: who is Wheeler?"


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The campaign strategy of Hayes and Wheeler emphasized conciliatory appeals to the Southern Whiggish element, attempting to "detach" old Southern Whigs from Southern Democrats. When Frederick Douglass asked whether the Republican Party would continue its devotion to protecting black civil rights or "get along without the vote of the black man in the South", Hayes and Wheeler advocated the latter.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The Democratic nominee was Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York. Tilden was considered a formidable adversary who, like Hayes, had a reputation for honesty. Also like Hayes, Tilden was a hard-money man and supported civil service reform. In accordance with the custom of the time, the campaign was conducted by surrogates, with Hayes and Tilden remaining in their respective hometowns. The poor economic conditions made the party in power unpopular and made Hayes suspect he would lose the election. Both candidates concentrated on the swing states of New York and Indiana, as well as the three southern states—Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—where Reconstruction Republican governments still barely ruled, amid recurring political violence, including widespread efforts to suppress freedman voting. The Republicans emphasized the danger of letting Democrats run the nation so soon after southern Democrats had provoked the Civil War and, to a lesser extent, the danger a Democratic administration would pose to the recently won civil rights of southern blacks. Democrats, for their part, trumpeted Tilden's record of reform and contrasted it with the corruption of the incumbent Grant administration.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As the returns were tallied on election day, it was clear that the race was close: Democrats had carried most of the South, as well as New York, Indiana, Connecticut, and New Jersey. In the Northeastern United States, an increasing number of immigrants and their descendants voted Democratic. Although Tilden won the popular vote and claimed 184 electoral votes, Republican leaders challenged the results and charged Democrats with fraud and voter suppression of blacks (who would otherwise have voted Republican) in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Republicans realized that if they held the three disputed unredeemed southern states together with some of the western states, they would emerge with an electoral college majority.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: On November 11, three days after election day, Tilden appeared to have won 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. Hayes appeared to have 166, with the 19 votes of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina still in doubt. Republicans and Democrats each claimed victory in the three latter states, but the results in those states were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties. To further complicate matters, one of the three electors from Oregon (a state Hayes had won) was disqualified, reducing Hayes's total to 165, and raising the disputed votes to 20. If Hayes was not awarded all 20 disputed votes, Tilden would be elected president.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: There was considerable debate about which person or house of Congress was authorized to decide between the competing slates of electors, with the Republican Senate and the Democratic House each claiming priority. By January 1877, with the question still unresolved, Congress and President Grant agreed to submit the matter to a bipartisan Electoral Commission, which would be authorized to determine the fate of the disputed electoral votes. The Commission was to be made up of five representatives, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices. To ensure partisan balance, there would be seven Democrats and seven Republicans, with Justice David Davis, an independent respected by both parties, as the 15th member. The balance was upset when Democrats in the Illinois legislature elected Davis to the Senate, hoping to sway his vote. Davis disappointed Democrats by refusing to serve on the Commission because of his election to the Senate. As all the remaining Justices were Republicans, Justice Joseph P. Bradley, believed to be the most independent-minded of them, was selected to take Davis's place on the Commission. The Commission met in February and the eight Republicans voted to award all 20 electoral votes to Hayes. Democrats, outraged by the result, attempted a filibuster to prevent Congress from accepting the Commission's findings. Eventually, the filibusterers gave up, allowing the House to reject the objection in the early hours of March 2. The House and Senate then reassembled to complete the count of the electoral votes. At 4:10 am on March 2, Senator Thomas Ferry announced that Hayes and Wheeler had been elected to the presidency and vice presidency, by an electoral margin of 185–184.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: As inauguration day neared, Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders met at Wormley's Hotel in Washington to negotiate a compromise. Republicans promised concessions in exchange for Democratic acquiescence to the Committee's decision. The main concession Hayes promised was the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and an acceptance of the election of Democratic governments in the remaining "unredeemed" southern states. The Democrats agreed, and on March 2, the filibuster was ended. Hayes was elected, but Reconstruction was finished, and freedmen were left at the mercy of white Democrats who did not intend to preserve their rights. On April 3, Hayes ordered Secretary of War George W. McCrary to withdraw federal troops stationed at the South Carolina State House to their barracks. On April 20, he ordered McCrary to send the federal troops stationed at New Orleans's St. Louis Hotel to Jackson Barracks.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Because March 4, 1877, was a Sunday, Hayes took the oath of office privately on Saturday, March 3, in the Red Room of the White House, the first president to do so in the Executive Mansion. He took the oath publicly on March 5 on the East Portico of the United States Capitol. In his inaugural address, Hayes attempted to soothe the passions of the past few months, saying that "he serves his party best who serves his country best". He pledged to support "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government" in the South, as well as reform of the civil service and a full return to the gold standard. Despite his message of conciliation, many Democrats never considered Hayes's election legitimate and referred to him as "Rutherfraud" or "His Fraudulency" for the next four years.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes had firmly supported Republican Reconstruction policies throughout his career, but the first major act of his presidency was an end to Reconstruction and the return of the South to "home rule". Even without the conditions of the Wormley's Hotel agreement, Hayes would have been hard-pressed to continue his predecessors' policies. The House of Representatives in the 45th Congress was controlled by a majority of Democrats, and they refused to appropriate enough funds for the army to continue to garrison the South. Even among Republicans, devotion to continued military Reconstruction was fading in the face of persistent Southern insurgency and violence. Only two states were still under Reconstruction's sway when Hayes assumed the presidency and, without troops to enforce the voting rights laws, these soon fell to Democratic control.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes's later attempts to protect the rights of southern blacks were ineffective, as were his attempts to rebuild Republican strength in the South. He did, however, defeat Congress's efforts to curtail federal power to monitor federal elections. Democrats in Congress passed an army appropriation bill in 1879 with a rider that repealed the Enforcement Acts, which had been used to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. Chapters had flourished across the South and it had been one of the insurgent groups that attacked and suppressed freedmen. Those Acts, passed during Reconstruction, made it a crime to prevent someone from voting because of his race. Other paramilitary groups, such as the Red Shirts in the Carolinas, however, had intimidated freedmen and suppressed the vote. Hayes was determined to preserve the law protecting black voters, and vetoed the appropriation.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The Democrats did not have enough votes to override the veto, but they passed a new bill with the same rider. Hayes vetoed that bill too, and the process was repeated three times more. Finally, Hayes signed an appropriation without the offensive rider, but Congress refused to pass another bill to fund federal marshals, who were vital to the enforcement of the Enforcement Acts. The election laws remained in effect, but the funds to enforce them were curtailed for the time being.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes tried to reconcile the social mores of the South with the recently passed civil rights laws by distributing patronage among southern Democrats. "My task was to wipe out the color line, to abolish sectionalism, to end the war and bring peace," he wrote in his diary. "To do this, I was ready to resort to unusual measures and to risk my own standing and reputation within my party and the country." All his efforts were in vain; Hayes failed to persuade the South to accept legal racial equality or to convince Congress to appropriate funds to enforce the civil rights laws.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes took office determined to reform the system of civil service appointments, which had been based on the spoils system since Andrew Jackson's presidency. Instead of giving federal jobs to political supporters, Hayes wished to award them by merit according to an examination that all applicants would take. Hayes's call for reform immediately brought him into conflict with the Stalwart, or pro-spoils, branch of the Republican party. Senators of both parties were accustomed to being consulted about political appointments and turned against Hayes. Foremost among his enemies was New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, who fought Hayes's reform efforts at every turn.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: To show his commitment to reform, Hayes appointed one of the best-known advocates of reform at the time, Carl Schurz, to be Secretary of the Interior and asked Schurz and Secretary of State William M. Evarts to lead a special cabinet committee charged with drawing up new rules for federal appointments. Treasury Secretary John Sherman ordered John Jay to investigate the New York Custom House, which was stacked with Conkling's spoilsmen. Jay's report suggested that the New York Custom House was so overstaffed with political appointees that 20% of the employees were expendable.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Although he could not convince Congress to prohibit the spoils system, Hayes issued an executive order that forbade federal office holders from being required to make campaign contributions or otherwise taking part in party politics. Chester A. Arthur, the Collector of the Port of New York, and his subordinates Alonzo B. Cornell and George H. Sharpe, all Conkling supporters, refused to obey the order. In September 1877, Hayes demanded their resignations, which they refused to give. He submitted appointments of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., L. Bradford Prince, and Edwin Merritt—all supporters of Evarts, Conkling's New York rival—to the Senate for confirmation as their replacements. The Senate's Commerce Committee, chaired by Conkling, voted unanimously to reject the nominees. The full Senate rejected Roosevelt and Prince by a vote of 31–25, and confirmed Merritt only because Sharpe's term had expired.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes was forced to wait until July 1878, when he fired Arthur and Cornell during a Congressional recess and replaced them with recess appointments of Merritt and Silas W. Burt, respectively. Conkling opposed confirmation of the appointees when the Senate reconvened in February 1879, but Merritt was approved by a vote of 31–25 and Burt by 31–19, giving Hayes his most significant civil service reform victory.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: For the remainder of his term, Hayes pressed Congress to enact permanent reform legislation and fund the United States Civil Service Commission, even using his last annual message to Congress in 1880 to appeal for reform. Reform legislation did not pass during Hayes's presidency, but his advocacy provided "a significant precedent as well as the political impetus for the Pendleton Act of 1883," which was signed into law by President Chester Arthur. Hayes allowed some exceptions to the ban on assessments, permitting George Congdon Gorham, secretary of the Republican Congressional Committee, to solicit campaign contributions from federal officeholders during the Congressional elections of 1878. In 1880, Hayes quickly forced Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson to resign after Thompson accepted a $25,000 salary for a nominal job offered by French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps to promote a French canal in Panama.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes also dealt with corruption in the postal service. In 1880, Schurz and Senator John A. Logan asked Hayes to shut down the "star route" rings, a system of corrupt contract profiteering in the Postal Service, and to fire Second Assistant Postmaster-General Thomas J. Brady, the alleged ringleader. Hayes stopped granting new star route contracts but let existing contracts continue to be enforced. Democrats accused him of delaying proper investigation so as not to damage Republicans' chances in the 1880 elections but did not press the issue in their campaign literature, as members of both parties were implicated in the corruption. Historian Hans L. Trefousse later wrote that Hayes "hardly knew the chief suspect [Brady] and certainly had no connection with the [star route] corruption." Although Hayes and the Congress both investigated the contracts and found no compelling evidence of wrongdoing, Brady and others were indicted for conspiracy in 1882. After two trials, the defendants were acquitted in 1883.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: In his first year in office, Hayes was faced with the United States' largest labor uprising to date, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. To make up for financial losses suffered since the panic of 1873, the major railroads had cut their employees' wages several times in 1877. In July of that year, workers at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad walked off the job in Martinsburg, West Virginia, to protest their reduction in pay. The strike quickly spread to workers of the New York Central, Erie, and Pennsylvania railroads, with the strikers soon numbering in the thousands. Fearing a riot, Governor Henry M. Mathews asked Hayes to send federal troops to Martinsburg, and Hayes did so, but when the troops arrived there was no riot, only a peaceful protest. In Baltimore, however, a riot did erupt on July 20, and Hayes ordered the troops at Fort McHenry to assist the governor in suppressing it.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Pittsburgh exploded into riots next, but Hayes was reluctant to send in troops without the governor's request. Other discontented citizens joined the railroad workers in rioting. After a few days, Hayes resolved to send in troops to protect federal property wherever it appeared to be threatened and gave Major General Winfield Scott Hancock overall command of the situation, marking the first use of federal troops to break a strike against a private company. The riots spread further, to Chicago and St. Louis, where strikers shut down railroad facilities.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: By July 29, the riots had ended and federal troops returned to their barracks. No federal troops had killed any of the strikers, or been killed themselves, but clashes between state militia troops and strikers resulted in deaths on both sides. The railroads were victorious in the short term, as the workers returned to their jobs and some wage cuts remained in effect. But the public blamed the railroads for the strikes and violence, and they were compelled to improve working conditions and make no further cuts. Business leaders praised Hayes, but his own opinion was more equivocal; as he recorded in his diary:


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: "The strikes have been put down by "force;" but now for the "real" remedy. Can't something [be] done by education of strikers, by judicious control of capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious."


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes confronted two issues regarding the currency, the first of which was the coinage of silver, and its relation to gold. In 1873, the Coinage Act of 1873 stopped the coinage of silver for all coins worth a dollar or more, effectively tying the dollar to the value of gold. As a result, the money supply contracted and the effects of the Panic of 1873 grew worse, making it more expensive for debtors to pay debts they had contracted when currency was less valuable. Farmers and laborers, especially, clamored for the return of coinage in both metals, believing the increased money supply would restore wages and property values. Democratic Representative Richard P. Bland of Missouri proposed a bill to require the United States to coin as much silver as miners could sell the government, thus increasing the money supply and aiding debtors. William B. Allison, a Republican from Iowa, offered an amendment in the Senate limiting the coinage to two to four million dollars per month, and the resulting Bland–Allison Act passed both houses of Congress in 1878. Hayes feared the Act would cause inflation that would be ruinous to business, effectively impairing contracts that were based on the gold dollar, as the silver dollar proposed in the bill would have an intrinsic value of 90 to 92 percent of the existing gold dollar. He also believed that inflating the currency was dishonest, saying, "[e]xpediency and justice both demand an honest currency." He vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto, the only time it did so during his presidency.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The second issue concerned United States Notes (commonly called greenbacks), a form of fiat currency first issued during the Civil War. The government accepted these notes as valid for payment of taxes and tariffs, but unlike ordinary dollars, they were not redeemable in gold. The Specie Payment Resumption Act of 1875 required the treasury to redeem any outstanding greenbacks in gold, thus retiring them from circulation and restoring a single, gold-backed currency. Sherman agreed with Hayes's favorable opinion of the Act, and stockpiled gold in preparation for the exchange of greenbacks for gold. But once the public was confident that they could redeem greenbacks for specie (gold), few did so; when the Act took effect in 1879, only $130,000 of the outstanding $346,000,000 in greenbacks were actually redeemed. Together with the Bland–Allison Act, the successful specie resumption effected a workable compromise between inflationists and hard money men and, as the world economy began to improve, agitation for more greenbacks and silver coinage quieted down for the rest of Hayes's presidency.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Most of Hayes's foreign-policy concerns involved Latin America. In 1878, following the Paraguayan War, he arbitrated a territorial dispute between Argentina and Paraguay. Hayes awarded the disputed land in the Gran Chaco region to Paraguay, and the Paraguayans honored him by renaming a city (Villa Hayes) and a department (Presidente Hayes) in his honor. Hayes became concerned over the plans of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then part of Colombia. Worried about a repetition of French adventurism in Mexico, Hayes interpreted the Monroe Doctrine firmly. In a message to Congress, Hayes explained his opinion on the canal: "The policy of this country is a canal under American control ... The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or any combination of European powers."


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: The Mexican border also drew Hayes's attention. Throughout the 1870s, "lawless bands" often crossed the border on raids into Texas. Three months after taking office, Hayes granted the Army the power to pursue bandits, even if it required crossing into Mexican territory. Mexican president Porfirio Díaz protested the order and sent troops to the border. The situation calmed as Díaz and Hayes agreed to jointly pursue bandits and Hayes agreed not to allow Mexican revolutionaries to raise armies in the United States. The violence along the border decreased, and in 1880 Hayes revoked the order allowing pursuit into Mexico.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Outside the Western Hemisphere, Hayes's biggest foreign-policy concern dealt with China. In 1868 the Senate had ratified the Burlingame Treaty with China, allowing an unrestricted flow of Chinese immigrants into the United States. As the economy soured after the Panic of 1873, Chinese immigrants were blamed in the American West for depressing workmen's wages. During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, anti-Chinese riots broke out in San Francisco, and a third party, the Workingman's Party, formed with an emphasis on stopping Chinese immigration. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1879, abrogating the 1868 treaty. Hayes vetoed the bill, believing that the United States should not abrogate treaties without negotiation. The veto drew praise from Northeastern New England Republicans, but Hayes was bitterly denounced in the Western United States. In the subsequent furor, Democrats in the House of Representatives attempted to impeach him, but narrowly failed when Republicans prevented a quorum by refusing to vote. After the veto, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick W. Seward suggested that the countries work together to reduce immigration, and he and James Burrill Angell negotiated with the Chinese to do so. Congress passed a new law to that effect, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, after Hayes had left office.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Interior Secretary Carl Schurz carried out Hayes's American Indian policy, beginning with preventing the War Department from taking over the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hayes and Schurz carried out a policy that included assimilation into white culture, educational training, and dividing Indian land into individual household allotments. Hayes believed his policies would lead to self-sufficiency and peace between Indians and whites. The allotment system under the Dawes Act, later signed by President Grover Cleveland in 1887, was favored by liberal reformers at the time, including Schurz, but instead proved detrimental to American Indians. They lost much of their land through sales of what the government classified as "surplus lands", and more to unscrupulous white speculators who tried to get the Indians to sell their allotments. Hayes and Schurz reformed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reduce fraud and gave Indians responsibility for policing their reservations, but they were generally understaffed.


title: Rutherford B. Hayes

text: Hayes dealt with several conflicts with Indian tribes. The Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, began an uprising in June 1877 when Major General Oliver O. Howard ordered them to move to a reservation. Howard's men defeated the Nez Perce in battle, and the tribe began a 1,700-mile retreat to Canada. In October, after a decisive battle at Bear Paw, Montana, Chief Joseph surrendered and William T. Sherman ordered the tribe transported to Indian Territory in Kansas, where they were forced to remain until 1885. The Nez Perce war was not the last conflict in the West, as the Bannock rose up in spring 1878 in Idaho and raided nearby settlements before being defeated by Howard's army in July. War with the Ute tribe broke out in Colorado in 1879 when some Ute killed Indian agent Nathan Meeker, who had been attempting to convert them to Christianity. The subsequent White River War ended when Schurz negotiated peace with the Ute and prevented white settlers from taking revenge for Meeker's death.