The Conflicting Truths of Rutherford B. Hayes

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When my group and I first sat down in the archives on Friday, we read through the feedback from our classmates before the break. We then began to look at the personal files on our table, which were all about prominent Kenyon figures from around the time of the Civil War. We sifted through the personnel files of Edwin Stanton, Lorin Andrews, and Rutherford B. Hayes. The files contained stories about what each of these figures had done for Kenyon as students and the roles they each played in the Civil War. These people, each with a thick file, played a great role in the Kenyon Community and the United States. 

Rutherford B. Hayes, former Kenyon student and 19th president of the United States, is highly regarded in the Kenyon Archives. There are memorial issues of The Collegian in Hayes’ name, songs written about him, and even a building named after him that now stands in the science quad. As Professor Villegas was making his way around the room, he mentioned to my group another article from The Collegian that we didn’t see in his file. It was an op-ed written by a student from 2025 describing the reason why we should rename Hayes Hall. This article framed Hayes in a way that portrays him as a racist, saying that he was directly responsible for the end of Reconstruction, and how he paved the way for Jim Crow and the Klu Klux Klan (Ruffle, 2025). 

After reading about the two very different interpretations of who Rutherford B. Hayes was, what he did, and how Kenyon’s archives and articles invoked his memory reminded me of some of the concepts that Hajar Yazdiha mentioned in Chapter 2 of Struggling for People’s King (2023). She talks about memory work and its strategic use and misuse of it. She says that these extremely different interpretations of the past are neither original nor accidental. These interpretations of the past that those have are intentional and are oriented toward a group’s beliefs. In the case of Yazdiha’s work, some of the interpretations of history were more damaging to the history of MLK than others. When these groups craft their perceptions of history, they are obscuring a lasting system. Groups adopted a “framing approach”(Yazdiha 2023: 37) to invoke historical events to validate their assertions. 

The Kenyon archives strategically talk about Rutherford B. Hayes in a way that frames him as a hero. When looking at these files in the archive one will walk away with a positive perception of Hayes’ impact on Kenyon’s campus and beyond. For the archives to frame Hayes in this way is not accidental, it makes it so people look at Kenyon as an institution that produces people who create positive impacts. Kenyon intentionally emphasizes the parts of Hayes’ memory that make it so we view Kenyon in a positive light. When looking at the op-ed from The Collegian, the author frames it in a way that the reader is led to critique Kenyon. From this analytical lens, the author invokes these memories of Hayes to debunk the false narrative that he is an honorable alumni of Kenyon College and that he was not as great as Kenyon made him out to be. The Kenyon Archives and the author of this Collegian op-ed strategically invoke parts of Hayes’ past to confirm their drastically different assertions.


Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Ruffle, Mina. 2025. "Kenyon should confront ties to racism, rename buildings." The Kenyon Collegian, February 2025.

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