Leadership Quote by Rutherford B. Hayes

Progress, for Hayes, is a pocketbook metric with a moral alibi. By centering "the workingmen of the world", he frames history as something you can audit: if laborers are safer, better paid, less precarious, then society is advancing; if not, all the parades of civilization are just scenery. It is a deliberately leveling claim from a Gilded Age president presiding over an economy that made tycoons into folk heroes and workers into replaceable parts.

The wording carries its own political sleight of hand. "Improvement in the condition" is broad enough to sound humane while staying vague about mechanisms. It implies uplift without naming the fights that create it: unions, regulation, strikes, redistribution, coercive state power. That omission matters in Hayes's context. His presidency is remembered for ending Reconstruction and, more directly to this line, for the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when federal troops were used to quell labor unrest. In that light, the quote reads as both aspiration and damage control: an attempt to claim progress as an end even when the means of maintaining order cut against the worker's leverage.

There's also a quiet globalizing move: "of the world". It's expansive, almost missionary, suggesting American leadership in a modernizing project. But it also softens responsibility. If the standard is worldwide, domestic failures can be reframed as one difficult chapter in a larger march.

Rhetorically, Hayes borrows the authority of inevitability. He doesn't argue for a policy; he defines the scoreboard. It's a way of pressuring elites while reassuring everyone else that the nation is still, somehow, on the side of the people who do the work.