The governor of Ohio had come to the White House seeking a favor, but as he stood in front of Benjamin Harrison, the president’s gaze seemed distracted—or maybe not, since Harrison could be looking at a person but appear to be looking somewhere else. The president pointed to a stack of reports on his desk. "I’ve got all these papers to look after,” he said in a soft but firm and impatient voice, "and I’m going fishing at two o’clock.” A chill filled the room. Yet the governor felt nothing more than almost everyone else did when 193 194 Benjamin Harrison they met Harrison. "For God’s sake, be human,” a friend once told the president. "I tried it, but I failed,” he responded. "I’ll never try it again.” Sandwiched between the two dominating features of his personality, distant and frigid, and the two presidencies of Grover Cleveland, by most accounts Harrison forged a forgettable term in office, one whose end even his fellow Republicans welcomed. Still, he recorded at least two notable deeds when he protected the environment and built a stronger navy. k Benjamin Harrison was born on August 20, 1833, on his grandfather’s estate at North Bend, Ohio, near Cincinnati. He came from a long line of political leaders. His great-grandfather, also named Benjamin Harrison, had signed the Declaration of Independence; his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had served as president, though for only one month before he died; and his father, John Scott Harrison, had been elected to Congress. John and his wife, Elizabeth Irwin Harrison, raised Benjamin on their farm, called The Point, at the confluence of the Miami and Ohio rivers. There the youngster hunted, fished, and helped raise corn and wheat. From his front porch he could see the rough-hewn flatboats, arks, and skiffs floating down the Ohio laden with men, women, animals, and household goods, all destined to build the American West. Benjamin obtained an education from private tutors and from the local country school before enrolling at Farmers’ College in Cincinnati in 1847. He later transferred to Miami University, where he met and fell in love with Caroline Scott. As graduation neared in 1852, Benjamin remained uncertain about his future work. He felt pulled toward the ministry by his parents’ religiosity, his attendance at revivals, and his recent acceptance of the Presbyterian faith. Yet throughout his life he carefully weighed alternatives. He would allow no one to pressure him and gave as much thought to the law as he did the church. While considering his options, he observed: "That all rogues are lawyers may in some sense be true, but that all lawyers are rogues, no syllogistic reasoning can prove. Where is the justice in denouncing the whole profession on account of the unworthy conduct of some of its members?” That said, he decided to follow the legal route and in 1852 moved to Cincinnati to study with a law firm. The following year he married Caroline, and in 1854 they left Ohio and settled in Indianapolis. For all of his legal training, he remained devoutly religious and joined the city’s First Presbyterian Church, where he served first as deacon and then nearly 40 years as an elder. Reserved and studious, Harrison worked hard to advance his career. In 1855 William Wallace, a young lawyer, approached him about forming a partnership, and he agreed. Within months their firm’s business surpassed all others in Indianapolis. As Harrison’s contacts expanded, he ran for Indianapolis city attorney as a Republican in 1857 and won. Three years later he was elected state supreme court reporter. Then the Civil War interceded. In July 1862 Governor Oliver P. Morton asked Harrison to recruit men for the 70th Indiana Volunteers. He agreed, and as a colonel he led his regiment on a mission to guard the Louisville and Nashville Railroad in Kentucky. Realizing that his men had little discipline and even less military knowledge, he imposed stern training. His cold personality and abrupt manner made him unpopular, yet he whipped his regiment into a fighting force and compiled a commendable record. In 1864, the 70th took part in the Union army’s Georgia campaign. To his wife, Harrison offered a revealing self-portrait: Behind my saddle I have a comfort rolled up in my rubber coat . . . strapped as small as possible. In front of my saddle I have my blue coat rolled up and strapped on. The small cavalry saddle bags are filled to their utmost capacity . . . my little tin bucket for making tea, Benjamin Harrison 195 swings clattering by my side. About my person I have my sword and belt. . . . The bundle behind my saddle is so large that it is a straining effort to get my leg over it in getting on or off and when in the saddle I feel like one who has been wrapped up for embalming . . . it is very disagreeable. At the town of Resaca, Harrison led a charge that his commander, General Joseph Hooker, called "brilliant.” After the battle, Harrison’s soldiers gave him the nickname "Little Ben,” in salute to his courage and in reference to his size—just five feet, six inches tall. He led the 70th in another charge at Golgatha Church near Kenesaw Mountain. "My Regiment was advanced without any support to within three hundred yards of a strong rebel breastwork . . . ,” he reported. "We stood there fighting an unseen foe for an hour and a half without flinching, while the enemy’s shells and grapes fell like hail in our ranks, tearing down large trees and filling the air with splinters. Two or three of my men had their heads torn off close down to the shoulders and others had fearful wounds.” As injuries mounted, he took to the operating table. "Our Surgeons got separated from us,” he said, "and putting our wounded in a deserted house, I stripped my arms to dress their wounds myself. Poor Fellows! I was but an awkward surgeon . . . but I hope I gave them some relief.” With such service he earned his men’s respect, and if Harrison is to be believed, his aloofness melted. He said: "I have got to love them for their bravery and for dangers we have shared together. I have heard many similar expressions from the men towards me.” Harrison was promoted to brigadier general before leaving Georgia in September 1864 and returning home. He resumed his law practice and campaigned successfully throughout the state for the Republican gubernatorial candidate and for his own candidacy as state supreme court reporter, a post taken from him two years earlier by the Democrats. But Harrison waited several years for greater political prominence. After hoping for, but failing to get, the Republican nomination for governor in 1872, he obtained it in August 1876 when the party nominee was forced to withdraw from the race amid charges of corruption. Harrison had little time to campaign, yet he waged a strong fight against the Democrat James Douglas Williams, who won by a narrow margin. In 1880 Harrison chaired the Indiana delegation to the Republican National Convention and delivered 27 important votes to James A. Garfield for president. After Garfield won the White House that fall, he offered Harrison a cabinet post, but the Indianan had been elected to the Senate and decided to serve there. Although independent in thought, Harrison aligned himself with the Republican moderates who supported a limited protective tariff and laws to regulate railroads and provide pensions to veterans. Harrison lost his Senate seat in 1886 after Democrats in the state legislature gained a majority and replaced him with one of their own. When Republicans considered the 1888 presidential campaign, they thought little about Harrison but much about James G. Blaine, the former Speaker of the House who had run against Grover Cleveland, the incumbent president, four years earlier. Blaine, however, refused another try, and other Republicans thought the party needed to put forward an honest politician with a clean record if they were going to win against Cleveland, who was known for his reform programs. They began looking at Harrison. The Indianan at first expressed reluctance about running for the White House and refused to make himself available. When the national convention met that summer in Chicago, the delegates cast seven ballots without reaching an agreement. They anxiously awaited word from Blaine, hoping the former standard bearer would change his mind and run after all. Finally a friend of Blaine’s, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, sent the delegates a telegram: "Blaine 196 Benjamin Harrison immovable. Take Harrison and Phelps.” The convention took Harrison, but for vice president it rejected William Walter Phelps, a former congressman, and instead selected Levi Morton, a Wall Street banker. Many wealthy businessmen liked Benjamin Harrison’s pro-tariff stand, and after department- store magnate John Wanamaker rallied industrial leaders behind him, Harrison’s campaign raised more money than any previous one in American history. The Indianan traveled little but gave 94 front-porch speeches. His criticisms of the opposition included the following: There are two very plain facts that I have often stated—and others more forcibly than I—that it seems to me should be conclusive with the wage-earners of America. The policy of the Democratic party— . . . a revenue-only tariff, or progressive free trade—means a vast and sudden increase of importations. Is there a man here so dull as not to know that this means diminished work in our American shops? In an unusual result, Harrison lost the popular tally to Cleveland by a plurality of about 10,000 votes but won in the electoral college 233 to 168, thus capturing the White House. He ran strong in northern New York and carried that state with its rich vein of electoral votes by a plurality of just 13,002 ballots out of 1,315,409 cast. He won his home state by an even slimmer margin of 2,348 ballots out of 536,964 cast, yet he lost Indianapolis. "Now I walk with God,” he said. After a rain-swept inauguration, President Harrison opened the White House doors to the usual barrage of office seekers, for despite civil service reform many jobs depended on presidential appointment. He disliked the pleading and the hours taken from his day for this chore and he hoped Congress would expand the merit system. As with most of his decisions, when it came to naming officeholders he took a middle ground, trying to avoid anyone corrupt but generally making party loyalty the critical credential. When his first assistant postmaster general, James S. Clarkson, swept Democrats from smaller post offices and gained renown for "decapitating a fourth-class postmaster every three minutes,” newspapers harped on this point rather than Harrison’s support for the civil service. Yet he earned praise when he named two reformers, Hugh S. Thompson and Theodore Roosevelt, to the civil service commission. Although Harrison protected presidential power, he believed Congress should lead the country. He did, however, offer his opinions about measures under consideration, and as a way to shape bills he sometimes threatened to wield his veto power. He refused to use patronage as a way to gain congressional support, and in several instances his appointments so angered Republican leaders that he won their lasting enmity. Harrison quickly revealed himself to be an ineffective party leader. One sympathetic observer said, "He loved politics but disliked politicians; he possessed a fine sense of humor but kept it a carefully guarded secret; and he displayed a superb ability in the analysis of problems but none in the management of men.” That he often failed to make his desires known when talking to congressmen, and that he appeared arrogant made him unpopular with many in his own party. In July 1890, Congress responded to public discontent with big business when it passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first major law under Harrison’s presidency. In more than one instance, Harrison had called trusts harmful, but he had little to do with the act as it was largely written by two of his friends, Senators George E. Edmunds of Vermont and George F. Hoar of Massachusetts. It declared illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations. . . .” Later, critics said the law’s vague wording made it ineffective, and the Supreme Court ruled it could be applied to labor unions—hardly the restraint on big business reformers wanted. In any event, Harrison showed his indifference to the issue when under Benjamin Harrison 197 his presidency the government filed only seven antitrust suits, and those originated not from the White House but primarily from ambitious district attorneys. As with the trust controversy, the initiative for changing the tariff came from Congress. Late in 1889, William McKinley, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, offered a bill that raised rates. Harrison disliked the proposal and worked behind the scenes to change it. He wanted Congress to establish reciprocity, an idea pushed by Secretary of State James G. Blaine, under which the United States would adjust its rates with other countries provided they did likewise. Harrison’s effort, along with public anger over yet another tariff hike, caused Congress to amend the bill. The McKinley Tariff raised rates on average by 49.5 percent, but it gave the president authority to arrange lower duties with foreign governments. Harrison eventually negotiated 12 reciprocal agreements. In a compromise deal involving those who backed the McKinley Tariff, Congress acted on another economic issue in 1891 when it passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Early in his presidency, Harrison wrote: "I have been an advocate of the use of silver in our currency. We are large producers of that metal, and should not discredit it.” The act required the treasury to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver each month, roughly the amount coming from the country’s mines. Under the law Harrison could use gold to redeem treasury certificates and hold down inflation, so he did. He thus once again showed his desire to take a moderate path, in this case between those who supported silver and those who supported gold. From the start of his presidency, Harrison defended black voting rights. In his first message to Congress in December 1889, he said: "The colored people did not intrude themselves on us; they were brought here in chains and held . . . by a cruel slave code. . . . When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?” After a bill to provide for federal supervision of congressional elections that was introduced by Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge became bogged down, Harrison urged Congress to pass it. Although the Senate reacted by killing the bill in 1891, the president’s stand earned him much praise from African Americans. Harrison wasted no time in using a new power given him by Congress in March 1891 when it passed the Land Revision Act. The act included Section 24, which enabled the president to set aside public forestlands as reservations. A year earlier Harrison had asked Congress to take adequate steps "to prevent the rapid destruction of our great forest areas and the loss of our water supplies.” He now established America’s first forest reserve, adjacent to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming (first set aside as "a public park or pleasuring ground” by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872) and followed that with 14 reserves in several western states, encompassing 22 million acres. When Secretary of State James G. Blaine fell ill in March 1891, reportedly from a nervous collapse, President Harrison took over foreign affairs. (Blaine continued in office until June 1892.) Here he displayed toughness and set the stage for Teddy Roosevelt’s display of bravado some 10 years later. When running for president, Harrison had presented himself as a strong nationalist who disliked England; now he wanted to show that America was every bit a power on the international scene, as was Britain. Harrison’s first test came in October 1891, when the captain of the Baltimore, a U.S. ship, granted his crew shore leave in Chile despite a rebellion there that had made relations with the United States tense. When a bar fight broke out between the Americans and a gang of Chileans and several of the sailors were wounded and two of them killed, the captain of the ship claimed that Chilean police had fired on his men and jabbed them with bayonets. In December Harrison insisted Chile must agree to a settlement. The following month he began preparing for war and readying ships for the Chilean coast. He considered this action 198 Benjamin Harrison necessary to exert pressure on Chile. On January 21, 1892, he gave the Chilean leaders an ultimatum, and Blaine sent them a note equating the attack on the sailors with an attack on the U.S. Navy. Four days later, Harrison presented Congress with the story and urged it to take whatever action it deemed best. "The evidence of our sailors shows,” he said, "our men were struck and beaten by police officers before and after arrest.” The American display of power forced Chile to admit its liability and to make a complete apology. It also showed that the United States would assert its expanding military might in Latin America. Harrison simultaneously extended U.S. power into the Pacific. In 1889 the white ruling class in Hawaii, largely prosperous sugar and fruit planters, proposed a treaty whereby the United States would establish a protectorate over the islands. Many Hawaiians protested the move, and Harrison deployed marines to restore order and stationed a ship off the coast. Two years later, Queen Liliuokalani proclaimed a new constitution that took power from the white elite and restored it to native Hawaiians. The whites reacted by forming a provisional government, and the American minister provided them with soldiers. On January 17, 1893, the planters declared a new government under Sanford Dole. The American minister sent a message to Harrison: "The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour to pluck it.” The president, who earlier had told Blaine, "The necessity of maintaining and increasing our hold and influence in [Hawaii] is very apparent and very pressing,” now forwarded a treaty to the Senate calling for annexation of the islands. "The overthrow of the monarchy was not in any way promoted by this Government,” he claimed. His words displayed American machismo stripped bare when he called the Hawaiian monarchy "effete” and "weak.” In just two days the Foreign Relations Committee sent Harrison’s treaty to the Senate floor, but Democrats rallied against it and prevented it from passing; later, President Grover Cleveland revoked it. In another Pacific adventure, the United States joined Britain and Germany in establishing a protectorate over Samoa. Harrison took an active role in writing the agreement, which frustrated efforts by Germany to gain complete control of the islands. He believed that increased trade in the Pacific and the prospect of a canal across Central America made Samoa valuable to the United States. Exerting power required more weapons, and President Harrison enthusiastically backed his secretary of the navy, Benjamin F. Tracy, who wanted bigger, more modern ships. Harrison called for more steel cruisers and said, "The construction of a sufficient number of modern warships and of their necessary armament should progress as rapidly as is consistent with care and perfection.” In 1892 Congress agreed to build two additional ships, including America’s first battleship, the Iowa. Despite the small number built, Harrison said shortly before leaving office: "The wholesome influence for peace and the increased sense of security which our citizens . . . in other lands feel when these magnificent ships . . . appear is already most gratefully apparent.” Money for the navy, along with generous pensions given Civil War veterans, produced the "billion-dollar Congress” that spent much of the treasury surplus. Voters so disliked the high tariff and massive spending, however, that they elected a Democratic House in 1890 and sent a warning message to the Republicans for the next presidential campaign. Benjamin Harrison originally decided he would serve only one term, but his enemies raised his ire. In 1892 Thomas B. Reed, a powerful congressman and former Speaker of the House, Pennsylvania Senator Matthew S. Quay, and ex-New York Senator Thomas Platt, all fellow Republicans, organized a "dump Harrison” campaign. They disliked him perBenjamin Harrison 199 sonally and disliked his patronage appointments. The president reacted by declaring, "No Harrison has ever retreated in the presence of a foe without giving battle, and so I have determined to stand and fight.” Harrison’s opponents could find no one to seek the nomination except Blaine; still in poor health, he really did not want it. As a result, at the national convention in Minneapolis, Harrison won on the first ballot. Platt quickly wrapped himself in an overcoat, scurried from the convention hall, and boarded the first train for New York. Benjamin Harrison once more faced Grover Cleveland. During the campaign, Harrison’s wife took seriously ill, and in October 1892 she died. The blow hurt him, and he lost interest in the political fight. Both he and Cleveland ignored the Populists, largely discontent farmers who wanted reform (though Republicans and Democrats fused with Populist groups on the local level), and as the election neared, labor strikes and violence rocked the country. Yet the campaign aroused little excitement, and Cleveland defeated Harrison by 277 to 145 electoral votes. The voter discontent expressed in the 1890 congressional elections had doomed the colorless Indianan. In March 1893 Benjamin Harrison left the White House and returned to his law practice in Indianapolis. Three years later, he married Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, a 38-year-old niece of his deceased wife, and in 1898 they had a daughter. The union, however, estranged him from his two children by his previous marriage. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Harrison wrote several articles on politics for the Ladies’ Home Journal, and in 1899 he represented Venezuela in a boundary dispute with Britain. Benjamin Harrison died on March 13, 1901, after catching pneumonia. In later years few remembered his term in the White House except as an interlude between Grover Cleveland’s
more forceful presidencies.