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Summary
Summary
The president who served the shortest term--just a single month--but whose victorious election campaign rewrote the rules for candidates seeking America's highest office
William Henry Harrison died just thirty-one days after taking the oath of office in 1841. Today he is a curiosity in American history, but as Gail Collins shows in this entertaining and revelatory biography, he and his career are worth a closer look. The son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison was a celebrated general whose exploits at the Battle of Tippecanoe and in the War of 1812 propelled him into politics, and in time he became a leader of the new Whig Party, alongside Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. But it was his presidential campaign of 1840 that made an indelible mark on American political history.
Collins takes us back to that pivotal year, when Harrison's "Log Cabin and Hard Cider" campaign transformed the way candidates pursued the presidency. It was the first campaign that featured mass rallies, personal appearances by the candidate, and catchy campaign slogans like "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too." Harrison's victory marked the coming-of-age of a new political system, and its impact is still felt in American politics today. It may have been only a one-month administration, but we're still feeling the effects.
Author Notes
Gail Collins was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1945. She received a B.A. in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
She writes an op-ed column for The New York Times every Thursday and Saturday. She was also the first woman to hold the position of Editorial Page Editor at the Times, which she held from 2001 to 2007.
She has also written several books including America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines and When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barely a footnote as chief executive because he died after a month in office, Harrison (1773-1841) receives a surprisingly entertaining biography from Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present), who with the occasional wry aside on political shenanigans that characterizes her New York Times op-ed column, tells everything the average reader might want to know about our ninth president. Despite the legendary 1840 campaign featuring a "log cabin, hard cider" frontiersman with humble origins, Harrison was born on a Virginia plantation, built himself a mansion as governor of the rough Indiana frontier territory, and avoided alcohol. His fame rested on two victories: the 1811 battle of Tippecanoe against the Shawnee Indians, and the 1813 Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812, in which the Indian leader Tecumseh was killed. For decades afterward, he struggled as a farmer and Ohio politician; he lost the 1836 presidential election but won four years later. While he accomplished nothing as president, his earlier achievements are well served in this excellent addition to the American Presidents series. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
That William Henry Harrison was president requires his entry in the American Presidents series, this one written by an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Harrison's mark on presidential history was that his administration was the briefest in U.S. history. He died of pneumonia only 31 days after taking office. Harrison sprang from a fine old Virginia family, his father a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Harrison made the military his career, rose to general, and earned a reputation (though a questionable one) in the Indian skirmish called the Battle of Tippecanoe. He later added the offices of governor of the Indiana Territory and congressman and senator from Ohio to his resume. But the real story Collins has to tell is Harrison's against-all-odds presidential candidacy in the 1840 election as the Whig contender. Calling it one of the most ridiculous presidential campaigns in history, Collins sees how the Whig leaders put an incredible spin on Harrison, selling this Virginia aristocrat as a humble soldier with log-cabin origins marketing genius, as Collins has it.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
New York Times columnist Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009) admits that Harrison (17731841) accomplished little before dying a month after inauguration. His career peaked nearly 30 years earlier, but he was not the first politician to milk earlier triumphs. The son of a prosperous Virginia planter, he served several years in the Army before using family influence to win appointment as Indiana Territory governor in 1800, where his job was to encourage white settlement and remove Indians. He won a national reputation after the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, a bloody skirmish in which far more whites than Indians died. As a general in the War of 1812, he won the Battle of the Thames in Canada, another glorified skirmish that was acclaimed because the widely feared Indian leader, Tecumseh, was killed. Resigning in 1814, Harrison retired to his Ohio estate and a mediocre political career, winning some offices, losing others. He was the first Whig candidate for president in 1836 and lost, but won in the famously lowbrow "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too" 1840 campaign, which began the American tradition (unique among democracies) of candidates boasting that they are no smarter than the electorate and that this ordinariness makes them fit to lead the nation. Although more a journalist than a historian, Collins has done her homework and written a lively, opinionated portrait of early-19th-century America and the modestly talented general who briefly became president.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue People sometimes ask me why I volunteered to write a biography of William Henry Harrison. Actually, it comes up quite a lot. Harrison's one-month term in office was really nothing more than a list of nonachievements (only president never to appoint a federal judge; his wife the only first lady since the construction of the White House who never saw it) and a cautionary tale about the importance of not making long speeches in the rain. My answer is that I felt I owed him. This goes back to a time when I was in Cincinnati, on a publicity tour for a book I'd written about gossip and its effect on politics in American history. Cincinnati is my hometown. It's also the place where Harrison settled, after a childhood in plantation Virginia and a stint governing the Indiana Territory. When I was in high school I won the local Veterans of Foreign Wars' "Speak for Democracy" contest and my reward was to read my speech to some of the veterans and my loyal parents at Harrison's tomb, which was large but rather bleak. William Henry was a character in my gossip book--mainly to illustrate my theory that his embarrassment over having been criticized as too old and feeble to be president had led him to demonstrate his strength and virility by giving a nearly two-hour-long inauguration speech in bad weather, which made him sick and then--with the help of a team of overenergetic doctors--dead. Since it is always a good idea to push the local angle, I was interviewed by an Ohio TV station while standing in front of a statue of Harrison, mounted on a steed I presumed was Whitey, the faithful companion he rode in the inauguration parade and which the ever-quotable John Quincy Adams dismissed as "a mean horse." Later, visiting my family, I was telling the story of how Harrison was born a Virginia aristocrat but was marketed to the voters as a humble old soldier drinking cider in a log cabin. "And he really had this big, beautiful house," I said, in what I thought was going to be the final word on the subject. "Yes," my father said matter-of-factly. "That was a really big house." Several seconds of silence. "How do you know about William Henry Harrison's house?" I asked. "I tore it down," he said somberly. My father worked for the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company, and he said that back in the 1960s he was told to get together a crew of workers and demolish the "Harrison Mansion," which was still standing on part of the site of the North Bend, Ohio, power station, where he worked. I looked this up, my family's big intersection with presidential history. It turns out that the house was part of a Harrison family compound on two thousand acres of farmland that the Harrisons owned along the Ohio River. It was called The Point and was occupied by one of the Harrison sons, John Scott. William Henry's own sixteen-room home burned down before the Civil War. By then he was dead, as were nine of his ten children. His widow, Anna, moved into The Point with John Scott and his family, which included a Harrison grandson, Benjamin, who would eventually become president of the United States himself. It was a serious landmark--home of one future president and proof of the lifestyle choices of his alleged log-cabin-dwelling grandfather. By the time the modern era came around, the two Presidents Harrison had become so blurred in history that the preservationists couldn't raise money to restore it. "The house now so desolate a picture, is of brick built in colonial style," a Cincinnati newspaper reported in 1940. "That hardware and glass in it, most of which is still intact, was brought over the Allegheny Mountains and down the river by boat . . . two features of unusual beauty are the circular staircase in the entrance hall and the original leaded glass transom over the front door." Cincinnati Gas and Electric declared itself perfectly willing to hand over the house to any public-spirited group that wanted to move it someplace else, but the management was clearly a little worried that it would be declared a historic monument right there in the middle of the power plant. And one day they quietly ordered a crew of men, including my father, to decimate it. So this book began as an act of familial penance. Researching it, I was relieved to learn that there's another Harrison home that has been preserved--Grouseland, the house William Henry built for his family in Vincennes, Indiana, when he was sent there as territorial governor when he was still a young man in his twenties. It's a very impressive place even now, but back in 1801, when the territory had no roads and Vincennes had only about seven hundred people, it was regarded as the eighth wonder of the world. Everything had to be imported, often from Europe. Grouseland tells you more about Harrison than the North Bend home ever could have--how he wanted the people he was responsible for governing to see that, even though he was very young, he was a man to be reckoned with. How determined he was to make sure his children were raised at the same level of privilege that he had been on the Virginia plantation. Why Harrison, a man without any large personal fortune, was going to spend his entire life desperately searching for cash. Besides catching pneumonia during his inauguration, Harrison is famous for things he didn't actually do. He didn't win a big military victory at Tippecanoe--it was a minor fight against an outnumbered village of Indians, and because Harrison screwed up the defense of his camp the white Americans suffered most of the casualties. He did better during the War of 1812. But his real impact on history arguably came from the work he did in the Grouseland years--acquiring several states' worth of territory from the Indians in deals that cost the federal government only pennies per acre. This is not a part of our history that we celebrate, and even back in 1840 the voters preferred the stories of battlefield heroics. Politically, Harrison's greatest achievement was to star in what is still celebrated as one of the most ridiculous presidential campaigns in history. But even then, other men came up with the story line about Harrison the humble soldier and pushed it into the national memory forever with months of singing from The Log Cabin Songbook and dancing "The Log Cabin Two-Step." William Henry's own contribution was to become the first presidential candidate to personally campaign for the job, and he willingly plowed into crowds to shake endless hands and at least pretend to remember all the veterans who wanted to reminisce about serving under him. Then he won and then he died. I am going to take a big historic leap and guess that if he had lived--if Anna Harrison had accompanied her husband to Washington and demanded that he carry an umbrella at all times--William Henry would still not have been the sort of chief executive who gets his head carved on the side of a mountain. He was living in a bad time for presidents, that long gray period between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln when the great cloud of slavery and approaching civil war would make everybody--even an effective president like James Polk--seem like a historic asterisk. There was nothing in Harrison's history that suggests transformational leader. If he had lived, the country would still have made its long march toward the Civil War. Perhaps the Whig Party would have made a bigger, longer impact if he had spent four years in the White House instead of John Tyler. But it is my experience that there are not many Americans, or even many American historians, who are particularly interested in speculating on what it would have meant if things had worked out better for the Whigs. The William Henry Harrison story is less about issues than about the accidents of fate and silly campaigns. It's always tempting to look back on American history and marvel about how things were just like today. They weren't. In 1840, the nation was full of wide-open spaces, but it was also dark and dirty. In the countryside, people lived in small, gloomy homes. The cities were dangerous places full of violence, horse dung, and men who chewed tobacco and spit everywhere. Women could not vote, and the average baby had a life expectancy of about forty-five years. Yet the campaign of 1840 seems so . . . modern. Besides the cold pragmatism of the Tippecanoe mythmakers, what stuns us about the Harrison campaign is the apparent gullibility of the voters. The Whigs were describing him as a simple product of a log cabin in one breath and bragging about his father signing the Declaration of Independence in the next. Didn't they think the people were listening? Well they were, in the same way we are today, although we can hear the rapid responses in less than a minute, while they had to wait a couple of weeks for the mail. The voters had their ears open for any suggestion that one of the candidates had an answer to their problems. And if not, they looked for the one who might have their trials in mind when he had to make a decision about banks or budgets or foreign affairs. And William Henry Harrison answered the bill, sort of. He was very good at things paternal. As a general he was extremely kind to his men, willing to share their privations and the dangers to which he exposed them. He was open and friendly with people of every station. As a politician, his only consistent and passionate cause was getting federal aid for disabled veterans and for the families of those who had fallen. His own dinner table, which was crowded enough with his many relatives, was also filled with the widows and children of dead comrades. His central mission was actually just taking care of his family. He had ten kids, plus quite a few orphan wards. If the land along the Ohio had produced enough money to support them all in a Virginia-gentry lifestyle, he probably would have spent his post-military life worrying about crops and livestock and going to the occasional testimonial dinner where his neighbors would recall the glories of the War of 1812. But as it was, he spent much of his time nagging important politicians to give him a job that would provide enough cash to bridge the difference between the farm's income and his household budget. He reminds me in many ways of my own father, although unlike William Henry my dad really did come from humble roots. And unlike William Henry, his hard work did not pay off in the end with a sudden burst of fortune that would propel him into American history. But they both had to make their own way from the time they were young. They both found themselves responsible for a passel of kinfolk and they readily accepted the burden of providing for them. If the Harrison mansion in Cincinnati had been preserved, school groups could go through it today, take note of the awesomeness of the architectural embellishments, and be tasked to compare the site to the vision of the log cabin homestead that the Whig Party marketed in 1840. It would be an excellent lesson in the unreliability of campaign literature, but my impression is that the youth of America is already cynical enough on this point. Maybe someday he'll be repackaged in a way that's more inspiring--not as the guy who got elected president by pretending to be something he wasn't and then made a fatal inauguration speech in the rain, but as a struggling American dad in a difficult era, trying to keep food on the table and a roof over everybody's head. And maybe an imported leaded-glass transom over the door. Copyright (c) 2012 by Gail Collins Excerpted from William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.