We really want to put Hayes in a Superman costume here. (Partly because that beard would look amazing.) We can't, sadly, because his relationship toward the idea of Chinese exclusion isn't as black and white as we'd like it to be.

It's true he vetoed the first attempt at a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1879. His problem wasn't that it was wrong to single out a single ethnicity for special laws, but that this would contradict a treaty with a foreign power—the Burlingame Treaty with China.

Hayes still needed to keep the western states on his side, where Chinese exclusion was getting more and more popular, so the next year, he sent diplomat James Angell to negotiate a brand new treaty with China. The treaty allowed the United States to restrict, but not end, Chinese immigration into the United States.

Two years later, we had the Chinese Exclusion Act.