World Famous Comics: Benjamin Harrison (The American Presidents)
Benjamin Harrison (The American Presidents)
By: Charles W. Calhoun Publisher: Times Books Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Times Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 224 Publication Date: June 06, 2005 Release Date: May 12, 2005
The scion of a political dynasty ushers in the era of big government
Politics was in Benjamin Harrison's blood. His great-grandfather signed the Declaration and his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, was the ninth president of the United States. Harrison, a leading Indiana lawyer, became a Republican Party champion, even taking a leave from the Civil War to campaign for Lincoln. After a scandal-free term in the Senate-no small feat in the Gilded Age-the Republicans chose Harrison as their presidential candidate in 1888. Despite losing the popular vote, he trounced the incumbent, Grover Cleveland, in the electoral college.
In contrast to standard histories, which dismiss Harrison's presidency as corrupt and inactive, Charles W. Calhoun sweeps away the stereotypes of the age to reveal the accomplishments of our twenty-third president. With Congress under Republican control, he exemplified the activist president, working feverishly to put the Party's planks into law and approving the first billion-dollar peacetime budget. But the Democrats won Congress in 1890, stalling his legislative agenda, and with the First Lady ill, his race for reelection proceeded quietly. (She died just before the election.) In the end, Harrison could not beat Cleveland in their unprecedented rematch.
With dazzling attention to this president's life and the social tapestry of his times, Calhoun compellingly reconsiders Harrison's legacy.
BH BH and I share the same fraternity, so he is high on my list. Brief book, but a great example of a President overlooked due to his era.
Thorough Yet Concise Take on the Hoosier President Calhoun's biography came highly recommended by the staff at President Harrison's home and museum in Indianapolis. I found Calhoun's book to be concise and thorough. The author's self-confessed OCD is evident in the amount of footnotes included (more than most of the other American Presidents Series books I've read thus far). These footnotes, I must admit, inspired me to further reading on Harrison in early biographies by Harry Sievers. Calhoun's book is a great option for both the novice and the well-versed Harrison historian.
ANOTHER 19TH CENTURY PRESIDENT WHO'S BARELY REMEMBERED TODAY! A new biography on Benjamin Harrison, our 23rd president, has been written by Charles Calhoun who is a professor of history at East Carolina University. Harrison is solely remembered now for being the one-term president who served between rival Grover Cleveland's two non-consecutive stints in office.
Harrison was elected for one term in 1888 by defeating incumbent Grover Cleveland. He then lost to Cleveland four years later in a re-match over pretty much the same issues once the president's popularity dropped when the nation's economy tanked in a recession so he was shown the White House door by the voters.
Harrison's time in the White House more resembles the tenure of George Herbert Walker Bush, our current incumbent's father, who was also a somewhat popular president yet got tossed out after one term when it appeared he was out of touch with the public. The younger Bush seemed to have learned the lessons from the defeat of Harrison, his father and other one-term presidents who lost their second term chances by making sure he attacked first on the issues in his re-election contest instead of being put on the defensive to criticism of his administration by Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election.
Harrison grew up with privilege, just like the current officeholder, being the grandson of a chief executive and a descendant to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He ably served in the Civil War, then entered politics against the advice of his father to rise through the ranks of political positions until he was the Republican Party presidential nominee of 1888.
That contest was a close race and Harrison won the electoral count for the win even though Cleveland actually got more votes from the public in the same manner the younger Bush did in his 2000 election triumph over Al Gore. And he took office with his party controlling both houses of Congress just like our current leader.
But the Republicans of the late 1880's were complete opposites to the GOP politicians of today. Then, they were in favor of tariffs on imported goods from other countries to pay for government services. Today, they encourage open borders and the constant arrival of foreign-made products to power the economy and the elimination of all government interference in global commerce to the detriment of American manufacturers who must now compete with cheap labor outside our country and are forced to keep wages as low as possible to the American worker in order to stay in business.
Most of the money coming into the U.S. Treasury in those years was through the fees raised by tariffs on those imports. Harrison campaigned in the 1888 election against Cleveland to keep those protective tariffs in place since there was no federal income tax on citizens to raise government revenues at that time. His strategy was successful and he defeated the first Democrat to be elected to the presidency since 1856. But things began to immediately go wrong for the Indiana politician upon arriving in Washington and taking the oath of office.
Calhoun makes the argument that Harrison's presidency soured when he tried to please too many special interest groups of his own party as the nation had its first billion dollar peacetime budget and Harrison's Republican Party subsequently lost control of both houses of Congress in the 1890 mid-term contest as a result of voter dissatisfaction. An ill-advised attempt to annex Hawaii as part of the growing nation and the constant fighting between his administration and both parties in Congress led to his sliding popularity as his upcoming re-election approached.
His opponent in the 1892 contest would be former President Grover Cleveland who was trying to win his job back. A lackluster campaign on Harrison's part plus the death of his wife two weeks before Election Day took away all of his interest in keeping the presidency so only got 43 percent of the vote and left office a dispirited man.
Harrison paid the price from a scorned populace by trying to please too many special business interests when the country was becoming less agrarian and relying more on manufacturing to spur economic growth in order to compete with the other nations of the world.
"Little Ben" was bigger than we thought Benjamin Harrison lived most of his adult life in Indianapolis, and his handsome brick Victorian home on Delaware Street has long been a memorial open to the public. Yet even the citizens of his hometown are vague on who he really was. Many confuse him with his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, "Old Tippecanoe" as he was called, who also served in the White House, albeit for only thirty days. Some see the signature of "Benj Harrison" on the Declaration of Independence and assume that the Indianapolis resident was in Philadelphia in 1776. If they only stopped to think, they would realize that the city of Indianapolis was not founded until 1821 and that their Benj Harrison was not born until 1833. The signer was the great-grandfather of the 23rd President. Charles Calhoun has done a scholarly job of helping stamp out the ignorance and confusion surrounding Benjamin Harrison, the last President to sport a beard and the first to decorate a Christmas tree in the White House. He and his wife Caroline were occupants of the Executive Mansion when electricity was first installed, replacing the gaslight fixtures. The old story goes that they were both afraid of the strange new utility and refused to touch the light switches. Harrison was the second shortest of our Presidents, coming in at 5' 6" and was affectionately referred to as "Little Ben" by the 1000 soldiers of the 70th Indiana Regiment who followed him into the Civil War. His bravery in battle was recognized by General Joseph Hooker ("Fighting Joe") who awarded Harrison a battlefield promotion to Brigadier General. Calhoun makes a good case that Harrison could be considered one of the earliest "activist" Presidents, long before Theodore Roosevelt became the poster boy for the position. He makes the point that Harrison's term helped to restore the power of the Presidency that had been nearly destroyed by the impeachment attempt on Andrew Johnson. Harrison surprised and irritated his own party when he bucked their directives and insisted that party hacks would not automatically get patronage. He wanted to make sure his appointees were qualified for their jobs. It sounds like a "no-brainer" today, but it was liberal thinking in those days. Six states came into the Union under Harrison, more than any other Presidential term. Oklahoma was opened for settlement, 13 million acres of land were put into reserve for national forests, the size of the Navy was greatly increased, and Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the McKinley Tariff. So it's not like nothing happened under Benjamin Harrison. Calhoun points out that Harrison often had to serve as his own Secretary of State as a result of frequent "illness" on the part of James G. Blaine, whose relationship with Harrison can only be described as "chilly." Toward the end of his term, in the midst of a re-election campaign, Harrison's beloved wife Caroline was dying of tuberculosis. He stayed at her bedside. "I was so removed from the campaign that I can scarcely realize that I was a candidate," Harrison wrote to one supporter. Two weeks after Caroline died in the White House, Grover Cleveland won another term. But it was just as well to Harrison. He wrote, "It does not seem to me that I could have had the physical strength to go through what would have been before me if I had been re-elected, with the added burden of a great personal grief." He returned to his beloved home on Delaware Street and resumed the job he really liked from the beginning - attorney at law. Charles Calhoun, a scholar of the "Gilded Age," provides a very readable account of a President who helped lay the foundation for the 20th century.
Nice presentation of a lesser-known president If you ask most people what they know about Benjamin Harrison they might tell you two things they remember from history class...that he was the grandson of a president (William Henry Harrison) and that his term was sandwiched in between the two non-consecutive terms of Grover Cleveland. Beyond that, Benjamin Harrison remains a mystery to most, but author Charles Calhoun has done a crisp and clear job of relating Harrison's life and term in office.
This is the third of the American Presidents series I have read and I think that these books serve better in telling the stories of the more obscure presidents. The brief length of the Harrison book (as well as the ones I've read about Arthur and Harding) give just enough overview regarding these men. They are nice "starter" books, which might, one would hope, prompt the reader to seek out deeper accounts of the lives of these presidents. That said, Calhoun's book offers a good flow of information. Harrison is usually rated in the middle of the presidential mix, and Calhoun creates no impression that Harrison should be moved up or down. He was a solid, if stoic president with some notable legislative accomplishments. While never rising to the stature that a more forceful president might have, Harrison nonetheless fought for rights of blacks to vote and was keen on providing a pension for Union veterans of the Civil War. It was fascinating to read that Frederick Douglass said of Harrison, "to my mind, we never had a greater president". That's certainly high praise coming from one of the leading abolitionists of the nineteenth century and a man who knew Abraham Lincoln personally. Harrison had a few challenges abroad, but his four years were generally quiet as the country saw the passage of such landmark legislation as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Harrison's political problems as president seemed to stem as much from members of his own Republican party, especially his wily Secretary of State, James G. Blaine. Through a combination of forces against him, Harrison lost badly to Grover Cleveland in 1892.
Calhoun tells of the president's dalliance with and subsequent marriage to his wife's niece, Mary (Mame) Dimmick...it's a colorful addition to the life of a pious president. The rift that this marriage caused seems never to have healed with his two adult children as Harrison died just five years after his second wedding.
Benjamin Harrison may have been a footnote in history but Charles Calhoun has rightly written about him. After all, there have been only forty-two different occupants of the presidential chair...and Harrison was one of them. I recommend this book for its insight and easy narrative style.
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