Centennial Crisis

February 16, 2004
It's fitting that Rehnquist, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court played his own role in the contested presidential election of 2000, would offer an account of a similar case 125 years earlier. But Rehnquist is a lesser narrator of popular history than he is a jurist; the only interest in this account may be his rueful regret over the lack of "tolerance" shown for political proclivities shown by the Supreme Court justices recruited to help resolve the disputed 1876 election. They were part of a commission appointed by Congress, which because of its own political division could not resolve the electoral impasse. Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular majority nationwide, but fell a single vote short of the electoral majority of 185 needed to win. Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes took 165 electoral votes, and 20 votes were disputed—19 from three states that still had Reconstruction governments (South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida), and one from Oregon. So Congress impaneled a commission of 10 congressmen and five U.S. Supreme Court justices who, voting along party lines, awarded the presidency to Hayes. Rehnquist narrates these well-known facts in a workmanlike but uncompromisingly dry manner, adding nothing new in fact or analysis. Readers interested in the election of 1876 would do better to consult Roy B. Morris Jr.'s critically acclaimed Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Disputed Election of 1876
, published last year. Illus. not seen by PW
.