EXCEPT for history buffs and fans of presidential beards, few Americans today have heard of Benjamin Harrison. But there are lessons to be learned this President’s Day weekend from the experiences of our little-known 23rd president.
When he entered the White House in 1889, his pedigree was unparalleled in the history of American presidents.
He was the son of John Scott Harrison, an Ohio farmer and two-term member of Congress. He was the grandson of William Henry Harrison, a war hero who was elected the ninth president of the United States. He was a great-grandson Benjamin Harrison Wa founding father who served in the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence and was both governor of Virginia and speaker of the elected House of Delegates. He was the great-great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison III, a gifted 17th-century Virginia politician who, at the age of just 24, became attorney general of the colony and later speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of Virginia. before his untimely death at the age of 36.
But while politics ran in the family, Harrison was no ordinary politician.
On paper, he fit the role. As an aspiring lawyer in Indianapolis, where he and his wife moved after their wedding, he became known as a gifted speaker and steadily rose through the ranks of the Republican Party. He won election as reporter of the Indiana Supreme Court, narrowly lost the governor’s race, and in 1880 was elected to the U.S. Senate. However, his attitude towards politicians was almost always cool and distant. He was described as a “refrigerator” by the GOP national chairman and as a “human iceberg” by the most powerful Republican in Congress, House Speaker Thomas Reed. Unlike the cheerfully back-slapping Harrison, he didn’t like shaking hands (and always wore gloves when doing so). However, he had a talent for speaking to crowds, which made him very popular as a Republican Party activist.
“Harrison can give a speech to ten thousand people and everyone will leave as a friend,” it was said of him. “Let him meet privately with these same ten thousand people, and they will all depart from his enemy.”
But according to Republican strategists looking for a candidate to challenge Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1888 election, Harrison had advantages that outweighed his stiffness and lack of good nature. Most notably, he was the recognized Republican leader in Indiana and led the state party to significant success in the 1886 midterms. At the time, Indiana was one of the two most crucial “questionable” states – or as we would say today, swing states – in presidential politics. The second was New York, President Cleveland’s home state, where Democrats appeared to be in a robust position.
At the 1888 Republican convention, seven candidates ran for the nomination. Harrison was not the favorite, but everyone picked him second, and he gradually gained strength with seven appeals as the favorites weakened. On the eighth ballot, Harrison won the nomination. In the next campaign, he played to his strengths, delivering speech after speech to delegations that traveled to Indianapolis to meet him. On Election Day, Cleveland won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of 90,000, but Harrison narrowly defeated Indiana and New York, thus winning a majority in the Electoral College and becoming the 23rd president of the United States.
From the perspective of a 21st-century American, the 1888 election and the Harrison administration that followed it are a reminder of an uncomfortable truth about political parties: they exist to fight and win elections, not to uphold lasting principles.
For true believers Republicans or Democrats, it may seem sacrilegious to deny that their parties stand for enduring values or that those values are why voters choose to become Republicans or Democrats. But in the long run, there are no timeless articles of faith for Republicans and Democrats.
In recent years, established GOP conservatives have been stunned by Donald Trump’s changes to Reagan’s party; Centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton felt similarly squeezed out of their party’s mainstream.
But that’s nothing compared to the way the party has changed since Harrison’s time.
The 1888 GOP was the party of unbridled protectionism, higher tariffs, increased spending, and expanded entitlements (in the form of generous pensions for Civil War veterans). In turn, Cleveland and the Democrats favored government restraint; they called for lower tariffs to lower consumer prices and argued that Washington should not spend the government surplus but return it to the private economy.
The Republicans in the 1880s were also the party of black civil rights.
Harrison repeatedly and eloquently called for robust federal action to combat the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South. “When and under what conditions,” he demanded, “will the black man have a free ballot? When will he actually have the full civil rights that he has had for so long?” On the other hand, Democrats strongly opposed Harrison’s voting rights resolution. They denounced it as a “power bill” that would bring federal bayonets to the polls in the South and allow whites to be “taken over and trampled” by blacks, whom they considered inferior. The legislation failed due to a Senate filibuster, but Harrison’s sincerity was never in doubt. Frederick Douglass stated that his suffrage efforts “should endear him to the people of color as long as he lives.”
Unfortunately for Harrison, he was never able to win over the leaders of his own party. Almost from the moment of his election, the “human iceberg” began to alienate leading Republicans, bypassing them for cabinet positions and ignoring their patronage recommendations.
“The grudges were famous,” wrote political scientist Karen Orren in a 2004 essay. “Speaker Reed lamented that he had only two enemies in Maine, and Harrison appointed one of the customs officers. Harrison refused [Ohio Senator Marcus] Hanna, who raised unprecedented funds for the campaign of 1888, patronage of the Cleveland Lighthouse.” New York’s powerful Republican boss, Thomas Platt, “went to his grave claiming Harrison had broken his promise to appoint him Treasury secretary.”
Harrison managed to lose support even as he made pleas.
“I suppose he treated me as well… as any other senator,” Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois later recalled, “but whenever he did anything for me, it was so rude that the concession was more likely to evoke anger than please.”
As the 1892 election approached, more than a few Republicans were fed up with Harrison. Some maneuvered to replace him as the party’s standard-bearer with Secretary of State James Blaine, who had been the GOP nominee in 1884. The insurrection failed – then, as now, refusing to renominate a sitting president was virtually impossible.
But then, as now, even an unsuccessful intra-party fight could fatally weaken a president seeking a second term. Foreshadowing the fate of later presidents such as Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush – all of whom ran for re-election with only lukewarm support from party loyalists – Harrison had no chance of winning. Grover Cleveland was again the Democratic candidate, collecting almost the same number of votes as four years earlier. But Harrison fared much worse when hundreds of thousands of Republicans in the West defected to a up-to-date third party, the populists. New York and Indiana returned to the Democrats. Cleveland prevailed in defeat, and both houses of Congress admitted Democrats for the first time in decades.
On Presidents Day, Harrison’s experience could be read as a cautionary tale about the limits of a celebrated family brand or the ability to talk with your stumps. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to overcome the consternation and division the 23rd president had caused within his own party. Democrats, united in their opposition, reclaimed the White House and sent the president with a troublesome personality back to Indianapolis.
