Politics & Power Quote by Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes is doing something sly here: he dresses up a partisan problem as a patriotic solution, then makes it sound like basic hygiene. The line is a piece of post-Civil War political deodorant, issued at a moment when the air stank of patronage, machine politics, and the lingering legitimacy crisis of the contested 1876 election that put him in office. “Should strive” signals moral aspiration rather than enforceable rule; it’s the voice of a leader who knows the system can’t be purified by decree, only pressured by norms.

The subtext is a rebuke aimed as much inward as outward. Hayes is a Republican, but he’s warning Republicans that treating the presidency as party property is self-defeating. He reframes discipline as enlightened self-interest: the party “best” served by good government, not by spoils. That’s a clever inversion. Instead of denying parties matter, he grants their primacy in Washington and then yokes them to something larger, implying that any party demanding loyalty at the expense of the nation is, by definition, asking to be harmed.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s symmetrical and compressed. “Serves his party best who serves his country best” has the logic of a proverb, the kind of maxim that’s hard to argue with without sounding corrupt. It also quietly reasserts the presidency as a national office, not a factional one, a necessary claim for a man whose own ascent depended on raw party maneuvering. Hayes is trying to build legitimacy by performing restraint: a promise that the office will not be used as a partisan cudgel, even if politics all but demands it.