Every Day Is Special: Harrison

Showing posts with label Harrison. Show all posts

February 9 - William Henry Harrison's Birthday

Posted on February 9, 2018

There are only two things that most people know about William Henry Harrison:

(1) He served the shortest term of any U.S. president - only 31 days! He was also the first U.S. president to die in office.

(2) He was the grandfather of another president, Benjamin Harrison.

But William Henry Harrison lived for 68 years before he died - surely SOMETHING interesting happened in all those years!

* He was born a British subject. That's because he was born on this date in 1773, a few years before the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.

* His family was political. His father (Benjamin Harrison V) signed the Declaration and served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and in the Virginia legislature, and as Virginia's governor.

* Harrison was studying medicine - but not enjoying it - when his father died. He discovered that the previously wealthy family had little money left, so he left medical school and joined the military.

* Harrison inherited a chunk of his family's Virginia estate, which included land and several slaves, but he sold his portion of the estate to his brother.

* He achieved quite a bit in the military, but still the father of his beloved refused to give permission for them to marry.

So...they eloped! (That means they got married in secret.)

His bride's father was worried about how Harrison would support a family - and maybe worrying was the right thing to do, because Harrison and his wife had TEN children!!!

(Granted, families tended to be large back then. Harrison came from a family of eight.)

* "When they go low..." Politics has always been a pretty dirty thing. When Harrison was running for president, a newspaper ridiculed him by saying that he would rather sit in a log cabin with a barrel of hard cider than to show any sort of class or culture. (Hard cider is a non-posh sort of alcoholic drink.) In actual fact, Harrison came from a land-owning, slave-owning Southern family, but his campaign was painting him as, not just a military hero, but also a skillful frontiersman. So he got criticism from the other party for his image rather than anything real.

Harrison's campaign capitalized on the criticism. They began handing out whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins! I think that many people liked his "everyman" image.

* In addition to his super short time as president, William Henry Harrison served as territorial secretary and acting territorial governor and congressional delegate in the U.S. Congress, for the Northwest Territory. He followed all of that up by being governor of the Indiana Territory, Representative and Senator for Ohio, and Minister to Gran Colombia.

* Harrison's inaugural address is the longest ever spoken by an incoming president. It took 90 minutes and included 8,445 words!

(The myth that the speech was so long that he caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia, and then he died - well, it's just that: a myth.

Harrison fell ill three weeks after that long speech, so it seems clear that the two aren't cause-and-effect. And it may not even have been pneumonia that killed him - it may have been a bacterial infection of his GI tract.)

Also on this date:

Physicist Brian Greene's birthday

Carnival de Oruro in Bolivia

Toothache Day

Doctor Aletta Jacobs's birthday

Read in the Bathtub Day

Feast of St. Maron in Lebanon

Mini-golf and Volleyball Day

Glaciologist and aerial photographer Erich Dagobert von Drygalski's birthday

Losar in Tibet

National Pizza AND Bagel Day

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February holidays
February birthdays
Historical anniversaries in February

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August 20 - Happy Birthday, Benjamin Harrison

Posted on August 20, 2017

His presidency created the only grandparent/grandchild pair of presidents in U.S. history.

William Henry Harrison, left. Benjamin Harrison, right.

Benjamin Harrison, born on this date in 1833, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia just 31 days into his term.

Benjamin Harrison served his whole term, however. He beat the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, and then, after four years, Grover Cleveland returned the favor and beat the incumbent-president Harrison!

This is only case of a president serving non-consecutive terms.

Here are some important aspects of Harrison's presidency:

Six, count'em, six states joined the union during his four-year term.

Not only did the country grow, but the government did, too. Harrison created a lot of protective tariffs, which gave the government a large income; he was the first to have a budget that exceeded $1 billion (when there wasn't a war).

Harrison spent a lot of money on improving harbors and updating the navy.

He signed an antitrust act that would stand up to big companies that were trying to create monopolies and unfair prices.

He tried to get laws ensuring voting rights and other human rights for African Americans. But...he failed in this important endeavor.

Harrison's home

Campaigns were different then.

Apparently, Harrison's first campaign for presidency was a traditional "front-porch" campaign. He didn't travel around the nation trying to convince people to vote for him. Instead, he let people come to his Indiana home, and he spoke to them from the front porch of his house.

At one point, 40,000 drummers from surrounding states visited him!

W-o-w!

During Harrison's second campaign for presidency, he was the sitting president. He didn't actively campaign at all! Harrison probably thought he had too much gravitas (dignity and seriousness of manner), as the president, to travel around asking people to vote for him.

As I mentioned above, however, Grover Cleveland was a former president. He might have thought he, too, had too much gravitas to be stomping a campaign trail. So he didn't actively campaign, either.

Both candidates had staff members campaign for them...

Also on this date:

Anniversary of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture

Birthday of Bernardo O'Higgins, the “Liberator of Chile”

St. Stephen's Day in Hungary

Anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2

Restoration of Independence Day in Estonia

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March 29 – Happy Birthday, John Tyler

Posted on March 29, 2017

He was never elected as President of the United States, but he served almost a full term as such.

He was a Vice President (briefly), but he didn't have a Vice President!

Back in 1840, the United States was still a relatively young nation, and political parties and political traditions weren't as well established back then.

At the time, the Whigs were the more elite - the industrialists and big-business guys who wanted a strong federal government. The Democrats (let's call them Jacksonian Democrats so you won't get them mixed up in your mind with today's Democratic Party) were in favor of states' rights and considered themselves the party of the common man, the little guy, the farmer. (Remember, when I use the words "man" and "guy" when discussing politics in the 1800s, WOMEN COULDN'T VOTE!)

In the 1840 election, William Henry Harrison was a war hero and a Whig. The Whig Party was fairly new, having only participated in one other presidential election, in 1836. Apparently, the Whigs didn't give too much thought to who Harrison's running mate would be. Typically, especially then, political parties would chose northern VP candidates to accompany southern presidential candidates, and vice versa, to "balance out" the ticket, but the Vice President had few official powers and duties. And at this point, no president had ever NOT served his full term.

So, when the running mate for Ohio resident Harrison became Virginia resident John Tyler, it might have been mostly a "balance the ticket" sort of deal. Or maybe it was because Harrison's war name was "Old Tippecanoe," and folks were already looking forward to a catchy election slogan of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!"

Running against Harrison was incumbent President Martin Van Buren. He was a Jackson Democrat whose 1936 running mate, Richard M. Johnson, served as Vice President. But - strangely, by today's standards - in the 1840 election, apparently Van Buren had no running mate!

Also strangely-by-today's-standards, back then, political traditions dictated that Van Buren didn't personally campaign. The party campaigned for him, but Van Buren maintained his presidential dignity. I'm not sure whether or not candidates who weren't president became personally involved with their own campaigns.

The popular vote was fairly close, but Old Tippecanoe smushed Van Buren in the electoral college, 234 to 60. But here is a case when winning short-term was losing long-term:

William Henry Harrison served the shortest presidential term in history because he died just 31 days after being inaugurated. He died of complications from pneumonia. (The story that he died because he spoke too long at his inauguration, in bad weather, was the way people thought about illness at the time, but since Harrison's illness didn't arise until three weeks after the inauguration, we now know that the two events were not cause-and-effect.)

John Tyler, the Vice President, became president. This was the first time that a U.S. President died in office, and the line of succession we have now wasn't put into place until 1947 (and confirmed in the 1960s with the 25th Amendment). I was surprised to read that Tyler served as president for almost four years without nominating and gaining confirmation for a new Vice President.

That wouldn't happen today, thanks to the Vice Presidential succession portion of the 25th Amendment.

Tyler had been a Democrat, not a Whig, for most of his life - but a Jeffersonian Democrat, not a Jackson Democrat. He believed in limited federal power. Although many people thought that Tyler should have been a "caretaker" president, acting as he knew that Harrison would've acted and going along with Harrison's already-established practices. (Harrison discussed issues with his Cabinet and made policy with a majority vote, for example.)

But Tyler did not do this - he immediate informed his Cabinet that he would not be dictated to by them, and he went on to say, "I, as president, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty co-operation in carrying out its measures. So long as you see fit to do this, I shall be glad to have you with me. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted."

Most of the Cabinet resigned, pretty pronto.

Tyler was sometimes mocked as "His Accidency," and some critics never accepted Tyler as a legitimate president.

And the Whigs who were thrilled with Harrison's victory in the election were soon dismayed by Tyler's actions, because the latter thought that many parts of the Whig Party's platform were unconstitutional, and he vetoed several of his own party's bills. He became the first president to have his veto overridden by Congress, and the Whigs "expelled" Tyler from the party before the end of the year 1841.

As a man basically without a party, during his almost four years as president, Tyler cobbled together some allies to form a third party, and in 1844 he ran for his first elected term (and second actual term). He ended up dropping out of the race a few months before the election, and he endorsed the Democratic Party nominee, Jame K. Polk, who went on to win.

Tyler has been praised by some historians, but has mostly been criticized by historians. He certainly is one of the least known or recognized U.S. Presidents.

By the way, the Whig Party only won one other presidential election, Zachary Taylor in 1848. By the mid 1850s, the party was basically defunct.

So, in a way, the 1840 election victory for Harrison, Tyler, and the Whigs was the prelude to a story of loss. Harrison soon lost his life, Tyler exerted himself and his own philosophy and ideas as president but ended up an obscure and little-regarded figure, and the Whigs lost one out of only two chances to enact their platform.