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Benjamin Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 23rd President, 1889-1893

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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.

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.

Benjamin Harrison, like several other presidents during the post-reconstruction, gilded age, served only four years as president. He was also only one of three presidents--the second at that time--to win election while losing the popular vote to Grover Cleveland in 1888. He was nonetheless a rather activist chief executive, securing important, or at least controversial, passage of legislation addressing the tariff, the currency, and regulation of the emerging corporate "Trusts". Harrison also endeavored, less successfully, to pass more robust election reform for African Americans in the South. While seeking the maintenance of a protective tariff for American industry and laborers, Harrison nonetheless also sought lower barriers for some imports as a means of increasing the country's exports. This limited "free trade" reciprocity with the countries of Latin America was rescinded by Grover Cleveland and the congress that succeeded Harrison, but serves as a model, for good or for ill, of the more globally oriented country and economy that would reflect later years and presidents.

Harrison's legislative and executive activism, combined with sectional and economic divisions, however, spelled doom for Harrison's, and the Republican Party's, fortunes in the off-year elections of 1890 when the Democratic Party swept to landslide control of congress. While Harrison successfully fought off the mechanizations of long time Republican leader and his own Secretary of State James G. Blaine for renomination in 1892, Harrison went on to not only lose the presidential contest to the man he had defeated four years earlier, Grover Cleveland, but also lost his wife, Caroline, to complications from Tuberculosis, weeks before election day. Harrison's last two years in office witnessed the infamous killing of Indians at Wounded Knee, which ultimately proved to be the closing event of the Indian Wars. In Harrison's final months, the economic elite--including American business owners--revolted against the royalty who governed the Hawaian islands, spawning the Harrison administration to prepare for the annexation of the future 50th state. The annexation of Hawaii was negated by Cleveland and the new congress, however, when concerns over American involvement in the "revolution" surfaced.

Harrison returned, but did not retire to, his family home in Indianapolis, where the former president again took up the practice of law. As an attorney, Harrison represented the Latin American country of Venezuela in a losing cause with Great Britain over the proper delineation of the former colony's land boundaries. Harrison did not go out gracefully in a political sense. He resented his eventual Republican successor, William McKinley, for having allowed himself to be nominated in 1892 at the Republican convention. Harrison also later opposed McKinley's policies in the Phillipines and American expansion (despite his administration's support for annexing Hawaii) policies more generally, and after 1893, did not campaign actively for his party or its presidential candidates. Nor did Harrison go out gracefully on the domestic front, at least from the persective of his two children, as the former president remarried his late wife's niece, Mary "Mamie" Dimmick, who had long served as an aid and companion to Harrison while his wife Caroline lived (although no valid evidence existed of an affair between the two during those years). The marriage alienated Harrison from his son Russel and daughter Mary. Harrison had another daughter, Elizabeth, through Mamie but would die five years later, in 1901, from pneomonia.

Calhoun does a good job bringing Benjamin Harrison and his times to life, portraying the post-reconstruction, gilded age as more politically intriguing and contested than normally regarded, at least in comparison to the ideological struggles of the Civil War era that preceded it and the progressive-New Deal era that succeeded it. Calhoun could probably have provided greater insight, particularly as to its geographical aspect, on the electoral upheaval in 1890 when the Democratic Party returned to power in greater numbers than it had witnessed since the time of Andrew Jackson. But Harrison's evaluation of the electoral results--that they represented more of a hyccup in electoral fortunes than a long term realignment--ended up being born out by the equally cataclasmic Republican victories in 1894 and 1896 and the long Republican hegemony from McKinley to Taft.

I learned something from this book. I did not actually know too much about Ben Harrison but this short biography sure did teach me something about him. Harrison was a one term President who actually accomplished something in his four years. He fought the free silver coinage act, passed the Sherman antitrust act, lowered tariffs, but did not extinguish them, and worked for voting rights for black Americans. He also did alot of his own foreign relations, since his Secretary of State Blaine was constantly ill. He was a diligent hard worker who would shame some of our lazier presidents.

Due to all this activism, Harrison lost the mid term Congressional elections, and ultimately his office. He didn't seem to mind, because he thought he would be happier back home in Indianapolis. I enjoyed the author talking about Harrison's personal life. He married again after he left the White House. A nice biography of a little known President.

Unlike some of the authors in the AP series, Charles Calhoun is a professional historian who has written previously about his subject's era. He clearly has the depth of knowledge to analyze Harrison and place him properly in the context of his time.
While Benjamin Harrison had a successful career prior to his election as President, he really was no more distinguished than any number of 1880s politicos. A respected Civil War officer and successful lawyer, he was a candidate because of his famous name and his popularity in the swing-state of Indiana. After his election however, Harrison was not able to hold his party together. He could not subdue or satisfy his party rival J. G. Blaine, or enact all of the desired Republican legislation. His presidency was crippled by losses in 1890 congressional elections and dissatisfaction among western Republicans. The death of wife Caroline Harrison in 1892 sapped Ben's desire to wage a strong second campaign.
I was surprised to learn that Harrison was a strong advocate of black civil rights. However, he was not very successful in stepping up federal protection for blacks in the South. Calhoun also covers Harrison's somewhat creepy relationship with his wife's niece, whom he would marry after he left the White House.
If you are not up to reading the three-volume biography of Harrison, this a good place to turn. Recommended for anyone interested in the Gilded Age.

Was Benjamin Harrison a good president or a bad one? I suppose that depends on one's point of view. It is certain, however, that he is an obscure president. The thing he's most know for is being the grandson of another - also obscure - president (William Henry Harrison, who died just a month into his term). The second most well-known fact is that his term was the creamy middle of the Oreo cookie that was Grover Cleveland's presidency.

Charles Calhoun's biography is a good if brief overview of Harrison's life (all the books in the American Presidents series are under 200 pages). Calhoun presents Harrison as a decent, though not outstanding president. Competent in the various positions he held, from lawyer to Civil War general to president, he did an able enough job; fortunately for him (but unfortunately for his legacy), his presidency was a time without major crises. As a result, he lacked the sort of defining moments that distinguish a president for good (Lincoln, FDR, etc.) or ill (Grant, Hoover, etc.).

Few will be motivated to getting this book just out of interest in Harrison; instead, it will be more out of a need for completeness. For me personally, his was the last presidential biography I needed to complete my set. This is an interesting book, an educational book, but for many, it will not be a necessary book.

The American Presidents series is a nice set of short bios of many of our Presidents. Most are well done, providing brief entree to the lives and performance of our chief executive. This volume examines Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and one of those who became president while winning fewer popular votes than his opponent.

The book begins with his youth and his Civil War experience. He was one of the many Republican presidents in the latter part of the 19th century who had served during that bloody conflict. He entered the bar in 1854 and married Caroline. His law business languished; he became interested in politics. Thus began his career, although he was not always successful in his elections. The war intervened, and Harrison became an officer. After the war, his legal career became lucrative. However, politics beckoned and he became a figure in Republican politics in Indiana.

He served in a variety of roles, before being nominated for President in 1888. He won by collecting more electoral votes--but fewer popular votes--than the incumbent, Grover Cleveland. His presidency was a vigorous one--both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. He hewed to a strong tariff policy, but one made more flexible for bilateral negotiation with other countries. He was open toward labor and was dismayed by the withdrawal of voting rights for southern blacks and fought hard (and, in the end, unsuccessfully) to address that and restore voting rights. In foreign policy, with James G. Blaine as his secretary of State, he played a strong hand, becoming very much involved in development and implementation of foreign policy.

He did not triumph in his quest for reelection, as Grover Cleveland won back the presidency. Thereafter, he became once more a high profile attorney. The book does a nice job of depicting his final years and some internal family turmoil.

Another good entry in the series. For me, I prefer longer and more detailed biographies, but this will serve well those who prefer something accessible and brief.

Sadly for Benjamin Harrison he is either remembered for being sandwiched by Grover Cleveland or for being the grandson of a president. Charles Calhoun does a great service by demonstrating how Harrison was a hands on, hardworking individual who did more in one term than Cleveland did in two. He is presented as the rare break in the laize-faire Presidents of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries who dared not to buck the power of congress.

Calhoun does a remarkable job demonstrating that Harrison is a man who worked for all he got in life and never took anything for granted. He was the last president until JFK to pay more than lip service to African-American and he was a man who while holding to his beliefs, was fair minded enough to try and see the other side. In some sense it is a shame that he never served that second term. It would be easy to see he could have done better than Cleveland.

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.

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.