Benjamin Harrison

It is the last Sunday of the month, meaning it’s time for another president, making this moths president our 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, and the book of the week is Benjamin Harrison by Charles W. Calhoun.  

 Benjamin Harrison was born on August 20, 1833, in North Bend, OH and is the grandson of our 9th president, William Henry Harrison. Since political dynasties were not actually a thing back then, Benjamin Harrison was raised knowing his grandfather had been president, and the circumstances of his grandfather’s death, but did not grow up a pampered political prince.  

 In 1847 Harrison was 14 years old and he was sent to Farmer’s College to begin studying for college. This was a pretty prestigious move as Farmer’s WAS known to spit out congress critters and other politicians, so while he wasn’t of a political dynasty, his family clearly had hopes.  

 While at Farmer’s College, Harrison met his future wife Caroline Lavinia Scott, who was the daughter of Presbyterian Minister John W. Scott. Shortly after they met, Minister Scott moved his family and the girls’ school he operated 20 miles away. However, Harrison was not to be deterred by a little thing like distance and followed the family to Oxford, OH, to begin attending Miami University in Oxford, OH.  

 He graduated from Miami University in 1852 and continued to pursue Carrie until the reverend Scott consented to marry them on October 20, 1853. In 1854 Harrison was admitted to the Bar and relocated his small but already growing family to Indianapolis. The author delicately covers this as Carrie got pregnant immediately after they were married, but the next paragraph says she gave birth on April 12, 1854. That is only 5 months after their marriage, and in the 19th century, babies that were 4 months premature did not tend to survive to adulthood...yet Russell Harrison DID grow to adulthood so....it seems Benjamin Harrison managed to slip one past the goalie aka the Reverend John Scott.  

 So, having graduated and been accepted to the bar by age 19, married with a new baby, Harrison jumped into politics. Now, the Whig party was essentially defunct, and so Harrison joined the newly formed Republican party, stumping and voting for the first presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, John C Fremont, in 1856, and then for Lincoln in 1860.  

 Harrison did join the US Army, again following in his grandfather’s footsteps, and served honorably, achieving the ranks of colonel and brevet brigadier general in short order. 

 While serving in the Army, Harrison was elected to the position of recorder of the Supreme Court in Indiana, which brought with it a tidy salary, but took up a considerable amount of time. He ran for and lost Indiana Governor, which didn’t affect him at all as his law practice was thriving and he still had the salary from being recorder.  

 Now, Harrison is one of the delegates to the Republican convention that broke the deadlock that had Garfield receiving the 1880 Republican nomination. And after that, his political capital skyrocketed, and he was seen as the head of the Republican party in Indiana, which was not uncontested...unofficially of course. Officially, the united face was placed on display, but unofficially, he had enemies locally and nationally.

 This did not stop him from winning the Republican nomination for president in 1888 and winning on a promise to help the working man. Which he did by raising tariffs. Which, weirdly, did NOT help the working man, as prices for everything went up.

 He then took the budget surplus Cleveland had left him with and spent it down to nothing. Because he believed a budgetary surplus was a bad thing. So, he spent it down by inflating veteran’s benefits. Now, don’t get me wrong, our veterans should be supported. But the graft and corruption that Cleveland had cut out in his first four years, Harrison encouraged by throwing open the budgetary surplus to any who served in the Union Army. He also signed into law the veteran’s family benefits program, which was any wife or child of a Union Soldier who served during the Civil War, was also entitled to pension benefits. And if you were thinking that didn’t have long lasting consequences, the last beneficiary of this program received benefits until her death on December 16, 2020. She was the teenage bride of a 90-year-old civil war veteran, who married her so that she could receive the government pension after his death in exchange for the care she had provided him in life.

 So, he raised the tariffs, spent the surplus, and signed into law Sherman Silver Purchase act which required the US Government to purchase 4.5 million oz of silver per month. And then, because politicians are corrupt from the word go, those same politicians included language in the bill that allowed the treasury secretary to redeem the silver certificates for gold rather than silver. This keeps the silver high in the economy in general, while routing the gold to the federal government. And if that doesn’t strike you as hinky, then you might be a statist.

 Now, in general, I am not loving Harrison. The government grew tremendously under his watch, and he was deeply involved in guiding congress as to what he wanted passed and by who. The silver question being a big one, he flat out said he would only pass a silver bill if it was sponsored by a republican.

 Which is not to say he would never work with Democrats, there was at least one foreign policy issue that he behind the scenes sponsored that was put up by a democrat, although I don’t recall specifically which one. But by and large, Harrison was a partisan politician and especially encouraged partisanship in Congress.

 But he was alarmingly honest and forthright. One of the good policies he wanted enacted was to reform federal election laws to ensure that the large black population in the south actually got to vote. Nominally, the 15th amendment enfranchised the former slave population nationwide. In practice, the south had many creative ways to ensure that the largely republican black vote was heavily suppressed and effectively silenced. Harrison wanted to fix that. And when the Democrats cried that this was a “force bill” meaning the federal government was trying to force laws on a part of the country that had not enacted those laws on a state level, Harrison said “Every law, whether national or stat, has force behind it; the courts, the marshal or constable, the posse comitatus, the prison, are all and always behind the law.”

 Well….at least that’s honest. He said out loud what every politician since has tried to deny. And remember that quote next time you’re filing your taxes.

 Harrison also believed that it was the governments job to stop big business, and so was happy to sign into law the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which outlawed every contract, combination, trust or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce, imposing fines and jail time for each violation.

 Now, this has been broadly hailed as a landmark piece of legislation, with ripple effects felt through to today, as the DoJ uses this to sue Microsoft, google, Facebook, Activision blizzard…. you get to X size; the government will accuse you of malfeasance. And sometimes, to be fair, the government is right. Sometimes, the government is overreaching. Like when the Supreme Court in 1993 ruled “The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market.” Government trying to protect the public from market failures is how we end up with a bloated, unsustainable corpse of a government, wherein the government feels like it has to bail out everything from banks to airlines, to protect the public interest, i.e., jobs. The only way to correct this is to let bad business fail.

 Anyway, in the mid-term elections of 1890, the nation spoke in droves, and Harrison’s narrow Republican control margin in congress vanished in a massive turnover, with the Democrats now controlling 235 seats to the Republicans 88. And with that loss, Harrison turned his sites from Domestic improvement to foreign affairs, working on treaties to create a canal crossing in Latin America, attempted to create naval ports in the Caribbean, and tried to annex Hawaii.

 However, the Latin America situation remained not awesome due to an incident in Chile between locals and US Navy personnel which resulted in several people dead. Harrison did manage to convince Chile that the Navy was ready to go to war if they didn’t apologize, and Chile did apologize. When trying to set up Naval bases in the Caribbean, he had wisely sent Frederick Douglass as minister to Haiti to try and set up a base there…but when negotiations weren’t going fast enough for Harrison’s pleasure, he sent Rear Admiral Bancroft Gherardi to assist Douglass. Gherardi was arrogant and intimidating, which derailed negotiations. Dominican Republic then reached out and offered to allow a base there; however, before negotiations could be undertaken, American bankers stepped in and offered to refinance Dominican Republican’s debts, and the lease deal with the government fell through…. this might have been a fuck you for the anti-trust act. Not saying it WAS, just that it might have been.

 Before Hawaii could be annexed, Harrison lost the 1892 election to Cleveland, who took a look at the fuckery going on there and realized all the problems in Hawaii were the result of bad faith American actors who were forcing their policies on the queen, and Cleveland backed America out, sending new diplomats.

 Now, sadness did befall Harrison in his last year in the White House as Caroline, his wife of 39 years, contracted tuberculosis and died on October 25, 1892. Harrison returned to Indianapolis to bury his wife, but could not bring himself to return to vote, and was relieved when he lost, although he would have preferred anyone but Cleveland to be replacing him. He looked down on how Cleveland handled the panic and depression of 1893, never once acknowledging how his own policies contributed to that panic, with his spending of the surplus and silver policies leading to conditions where the treasury was bankrupt, and Cleveland had to bargain with the devil to pull America out of the fire. The Sherman Anti-Trust and Sherman Silver acts seem to have set the stage for the Fed a decade and a half later.

 After his wife died, Harrison remarried his wife’s niece, Mary “Mame” Dimmick. Dimmick had been a family friend for decades at this point and Harrison had always had a special relationship with her, so much so that his own two children came to loath Dimmick and did not speak to Harrison again after he married her on April 6, 1896.

 Now, they were definitely close all her life, but there is no indication of anything hinky occurring between them, but after Caroline died, he fell in love again, and had a small second family, with Dimmick giving birth to his third child and second daughter in 1896. And Harrison himself died on March 13, 1901.

 I am not, overall, a fan of Harrison. But then again, I sort of loved the small, contained government of the hundred years preceding him, and he burst that door wide open. He’s the one who seemed to feel that the government should be the nation’s father and mother, a policy stance I loathe with every fiber of my freedom loving heart.

 I don’t think he was the worst president, I’m pretty sure Jackson is still holding that position in my heart, but he’s somewhere at the bottom, for his infantilizing of an entire nation.

This book was originally reviewed on April 30, 2023 on YouTube, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.