Benjamin Harrison (No. 23) – Indianapolis
June 18, 2016
Introduction
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| Benjamin Harrison, President No. 23. |
Benjamin Harrison was the centennial president, taking
office exactly 100 years after George Washington. The young country had come a
long way. The United States had grown from 11 states and 3.8 million people in
1789 to 38 states and 61.5 million people by 1889. Now one of the world’s most
powerful nations, the country was just a decade away from the start of the
“American Century.”
* *
*
Harrison was born on Aug. 20, 1833, in Ohio. He and his new
bride, Caroline Scott, came to Indianapolis, a bustling, growing city, in 1854,
where young Harrison began a law practice.
Harrison was religious and became a deacon in the First
Presbyterian Church. Guided by his religious views, he believed slavery in any
form to be unjust. He soon joined the newly formed Republican Party and moved
up its hierarchy. He became secretary of the Republican State Central Committee
in 1858 and in 1860 won election as a Supreme Court reporter.
Once the Civil War began, Harrison left his wife and two
children (Mary and Russell), enlisted and raised troops to form the Indiana
70th regiment. He was made a full colonel in August 1862. Prior to his troops’
participation in the 1864 Battle of Resaca (GA), which was to include hand to
hand combat, Harrison wrote his wife:
“I send up to God this night
that should you lose a husband and they a father in the fight that you may find
abundant consolation... but let your grief be tempered by the consolation that
I died for my country and in Christ. If God gives me strength I mean to bear
myself bravely, and come what will, so that you may have no cause to blush for
me, though you should be forced to mourn.”
(http://www.presidentbenjaminharrison.org/13-learn/benjamin-harrison/45-civil-war)
After Harrison’s troops participated in General Sherman’s
Atlanta campaign, Lincoln —whom Harrison
admired greatly — promoted him to Brevet Brigadier General. Throughout the rest
of his life, Harrison preferred to be called General Harrison, because he
believed his fight to save the Union in the Civil War was more significant than
his presidency.
Once the war ended, Harrison joined an Indianapolis law firm
and enjoyed much success. It was the
money that Harrison made as a lawyer that allowed him to spend $28,000 in 1874
— $560,000 in today’s money — to build his family’s 16-room mansion.
* * *
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| The Harrison home. |
Soon said husband shows up to collect our group of about six
people. Before we leave the visitor’s center, he stop in front of a large black
and white photograph of dozens of mostly men gathered around the front of Harrison’s
home. Harrison can be seen standing by the door. Our guide explains that
Harrison was one of the first presidential candidates to use the “front porch”
campaign, when he met supporters and gave speeches on his front porch or inside
the house. One of the downsides was that the picket fence surrounding the home
disappeared because people stole the pickets off the fence as souvenirs following
the campaign speeches.
As our group walks the short distance to the front of the
house, our guide explains that Harrison built the house in 1874. Then we enter
the front door. He introduces us to another
guide, Robin, who takes over our group from him. We had gotten perhaps five
minutes of his time. So much for the history deep dive!
But Robin turns out to be an engaging and informative tour
guide. She takes us from room to
room on the first floor pointing out interesting items:
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| Reginaphone and copper music disk. |
·
The kitchen contains an “ice box” that consists
of a segmented box with a front swing door. On one side went the ice and on the
other, the food. The melted ice needed to be replaced periodically. The fridge
has a modern look except it isn’t electric.
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| Caroline's artwork. |
·
Robin also shows us paintings created by
Harrison’s wife, Caroline, that now hang on the formal dining room wall.
Caroline, who was an accomplished artist, relaxed by painting. She designed the
White House china for Harrison’s term, although she did not paint it herself.
She was also the first first lady to realize the value of all the stored White
House china and was responsible for having it all catalogued.
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| "Touch the bannisters!" |
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| Upstairs museum. |
* * *
Harrison became a larger presence in Indiana’s Republican
Party. During the Republican Convention of 1880, Harrison persuaded the Indiana
delegates to back James Garfield for president after more than 30 ballots. The
next year, Harrison was elected to the U.S. Senate.
When the election of 1888 rolled around, it was Harrison himself
who was nominated on the eighth ballot. His opponent was Grover Cleveland, running for
his second term.
As we mentioned above, Harrison ran a front porch campaign,
with groups coming to visit his house to hear him speak. He eventually switched
to a nearby park because of the large crowds (and perhaps because his fence had
been stolen for souvenirs.) He gave more
than 90 speeches to a total of 300,000 people. The speeches were published in
the newspapers the next day.
 |
| Giant metal campaign ball. |
"Old
Allegany in 1840 started the ball for Harrison;
In '88
as they did then, We roll it on for Gallant Ben.
Roll
along, Roll away,
Keep the
ball in motion;
The
spirit of our men is up from Rocky Hills to Ocean."
The election was tight and marred by trickery and fraud. The
Republican Party tricked the British minister into supporting Grover Cleveland
on the tariff issue. That prompted Irish American voters, who couldn’t stand
anything the British did, to vote against Cleveland in New York. There were
also allegations of the GOP of buying votes, and the Democrats suppressing
black votes in the South. Just another
American election…
It ended up being a close contest that Harrison actually
lost by 100,000 votes. But Harrison won more of the big states. He squeaked by
in his home state of Indiana by 0.4 percent and in New York by only 1.1 percent.
But he clobbered Cleveland in the Electoral College, 223 to 168, which was what
mattered. The Republican Party also won both houses of Congress. It was the
first time since 1875 that the same party had won the presidency and both
chambers.
President Harrison — and the Republican 51st Congress — passed
531 public laws, the most until Teddy Roosevelt’s tenure of 1901-1909. It was
known as the lavishly spending “Billion Dollar Congress.” Gone was the
conservatism of the Democrats.
Harrison signed the Silver Purchase Act requiring the
Treasury to purchase $4.5 million ounces of silver every month. This was a
political move to placate the silver mining interests in the Western
states.
Harrison also signed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first
law to target monopolies that worked to illegally restrain trade or commerce. This
law is still in existence and still rigorously enforced.
Because of his service in the Civil
War, Harrison was a strong supporter of the veterans. In 1891, he signed a
pension-spending bill that raised the cost of pension payments to $144M/year. This
was 40 percent of the national budget!
Another contentious issue continued to be tariffs. Harrison
and the Republican Party supported tariff-based protectionism. Harrison signed
the McKinley Tariff Bill, which helped to bring in money but hit consumers hard
in the wallet. (It would also cost the Republicans control of the House in the
mid-term elections of 1890.)
The protective tariffs were supposed to protect wages and
jobs, but workers did not see those benefits. By 1892, there were strikes throughout
the nation. At the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, PA, strikers fought with
Pinkerton security agents, leaving 12 dead and 60 wounded.
 |
| The snowy fields of Wounded Knee, December 1890. |
— the same cavalry that had lost badly to the Sioux at the Battle of Little Big Horn 14 years earlier. With the imminent arrival of the Seventh Cavalry, many of the Indians fled the reservation to the Badlands of South Dakota. The Seventh pursued. When the cavalry found the Indians, things were initially peaceful.
Adding to the woes, there persisted in the country a strong
anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1891, 11 Italian-Americans were lynched in New
Orleans by an angry mob that believed them guilty of killing a policeman. It
was the largest mass lynching in the United States. In 1892, there was a
cholera scare; public officials traced the outbreak to vessels carrying Russian
Jews and quarantined all ships coming from Europe into New York Harbor. Nobody
wanted the passengers to enter the United States, and they continued to live
(and die) aboard the vessels in squalid conditions. Also in 1892, Harrison
extended the Chinese Exclusion Act, originally signed by Chester Arthur in
1882, for 10 more years. (And at this
writing in 2016, anti-immigrant sentiment is once again going strong.)
Throughout his life as well as during his presidency,
Harrison supported black voting rights. He knew it would take a great deal of
time to wipe out the ingrained prejudices of the day. “The prejudices of
generations are not like marks upon the blackboard, that can be rubbed out with
a sponge. These are more like the deep glacial lines that the years have left
in the rock; but the water, when that
surface is exposed to its quiet, gentle, and perpetual influence, wears even
these out, until the surface is smooth and uniform,” he said. Toward that end,
he appointed the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass as ambassador to Haiti.
But after the 1890 mid-term elections, the Voting Rights election bill that he
supported died in the new Democratic Congress.
Harrison loved the outdoors and in 1891 and pushed Congress to
pass the Forest Reserve Act. It gave the President the authority to create
forest reserves to protect pristine forests from development. He set aside
Forest Reserve lands 17 times during his administration. Harrison also established three national
parks and one historical park: Sequoia
National Park, Yosemite National Park, General Grant National Park (now part of
Kings Canyon National Park) and Sitka National Historical Park.
To relax, Harrison liked to write to his wife’s niece, Mame
Dimick. When she visited — which was often — Harrison and Mame would go for
long walks. In 1889 she moved into the White House to help Caroline with her first
lady duties. Daughter Mary felt something amiss and resented Harrison’s
attention to Mame. In a note to her husband she wrote, “I freely confess that I
so thoroughly despise the woman that I can not form an unbiased opinion nor a
wise one.”
Harrison
was renominated by the Republican Party in 1892. But tragedy struck — Caroline
became ill with tuberculosis and Harrison didn’t have the heart or energy to
campaign much. The nation was concerned with her health. At the house we saw
displayed a neatly written letter from 12-year-old Helen Keller sending “tender
sympathy” to Caroline. But Caroline did not survive and died on Oct. 25, 1892.
And Harrison lost the election to
Grover Cleveland 277-145.
* * *
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| Lunch at the Penn & Palate. |
Our young waitress is covered in tattoos, some self-applied.
Apparently it is possible to use a needle and ink and make drawings on your arms.
One of the self-applied tattoos reads, “Shining.” Stephen King? On one of her
swings to the table, Tom asks her, “Did you move here to be closer to the
Benjamin Harrison home?” “No,” she replies, “it’s just one of the perks of
living here.”
* * *
Our next mission is to find the Harrison family. We drive a
few miles northeast to the Crown Hill Cemetery — huge, beautiful grounds that
unfortunately are marred by an ugly and tacky bright blue fountain at the
entrance. We finally locate the family buried in a shady plot under a big oak
tree halfway up a hill.
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| The family plot minus daughter Mary. |
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| Harrison and his second family. |
Harrison’s son, Russell, is also buried there, but not Mary —
probably because she cut off ties with Harrison following his marriage to Mame.
* * *
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| The Canal Walk. |
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| Dinner at the Weber Grill. |
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| Weber Grill! |
We stroll to Monument Circle to gawk at the Indiana State
Soldiers & Sailors Monument, an enormous 284-ft tall limestone structure—it’s
only 15 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty. It even has an observation
deck accessible by a mix of an elevator and stairs, but it was closed. The base
is surrounded by sculptures including two large scenes called “War and
Peace.” Even a statue of Harrison’s
grandfather is included. President
Harrison attended the cornerstone laying ceremony on August 22, 1889.
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| 284-ft. tall Indiana State Soldiers & Sailors Monument. |
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| Bear hug at the South Bend Chocolate Cafe. |
Directions and Hours
The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site is located at 1230
North Delaware Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202.
It is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. During June
and July it is also open on Sunday from noon to 3:30 p.m.
The admission is $10 for adults and $5 for children.
References
Calhoun, C.W.
2005. Benjamin Harrison. The American
Presidents. Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr.,
General Editor. Times Books, Henry Holt
Company. New York, NY.
Current, R.N., T.H. Williams, and F. Freidel. 1975. American History: A Survey.
Fourth Edition. Volume
II: Since 1865. Alfred A. Knopf. New York, NY.
Moore, K. 2007. The
American President. Fall River
Press. New York, New York.
The Top 10 Political Dynasties, American History, April 2016
Vol 51, No 1. P. 412.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldiers%27_and_Sailors%27_Monument_(Indianapolis)
