Twelve years after fouling up the 1876 presidential election, our electoral college once again cheated the voters. There were still people around who had lived through the electoral foul-ups of 1796, 1800, and 1824.

Benjamin Harrison certainly had the wherewithal to be a good president. He commanded first a company, then a regiment, and finally a brigade in the Civil War. He was a successful lawyer, and served six years as U. S. senator from Indiana. His grandfather William Henry Harrison had won the election of 1840, ousting President Martin van Buren only to die after a month in office. William Henry’s father, Benjamin Harrison V, had been a governor, a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

All Benjamin needed was the will of the people. The 1824 mess was darkened by accusations (probably untrue) of a “corrupt bargain.” The 1876 fiasco DEFINITELY required corruption and crime to steal the election from Tilden, and send Hayes to the White House.

Things were more sedate and straightforward in 1888, requiting no intervention by commissions (1876), courts (2000), or Congress (1800, 1824). Cleveland won re-election, but the votes in certain states fell out so that Harrison had a majority of electors. He had matched his grandfather’s record of unseating a sitting president, but the voters had actually chosen to KEEP Cleveland. They got Harrison instead.

Harrison announced that Providence had made him president, starting a gag-inducing list of losers proclaiming that God wanted them to be president, and so intervened to overrule the voters. One of the first to gag was the Republican party boss of Pennsylvania, who growled about “how close a number of men were compelled to approach…the penitentiary to make him President”. The Republicans had adopted the grassroots corruption of buying an adequate number of votes.

Having taken the White House by kicking out the president that the voters wanted to keep, and not getting along very well with many of his own party leaders, Harrison struggled in office. The surplus and the gold supply both went down. He couldn’t get civil rights legislation passed. He raised tariffs, tried and failed to annex Hawaii, agreed to carve up Samoa with the British and Germans. He DID enlarge and modernize the navy, and pushed for new technologies, installing electricity in the White House.

For some reason he went to the well again in 1892, and once again came up short, but this time the electoral vote echoed the people’s votes. Cleveland returned to the White House, right where the voters wanted him, serving the only non-consecutive terms as president. He shared with Andrew Jackson the honor of being elected president three times – the only men to accomplish that, other than Franklin Roosevelt – but like Jackson, the electoral college pulled the rug from under his feet, and limited him to two terms.

History is my profession, my calling, and an avocation. In getting ready for this blog I realized that I literally knew less about Benjamin Harrison than about any other president. He had been in the Civil War, he lost the popular vote, he had a distinguished ancestry – and that was it. Every other president I could tell you of their careers, their lives, their ups, their downs. Not Benjamin Harrison. I even knew more about his 30-day-wonder grandfather than I knew about him!

And history in general has done the same, treating him as the most justly forgettable of American presidents. Honest, conscientious, and qualified, he and the nation both suffered from having him installed in the White House for four years, after being told by the voters to go back home. The system was legal and constitutional, but it cheated the voters, and it cheated Cleveland. It didn’t do Harrison any good either.