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Presidential Rejects (3) Benjamin Harrison

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.

Presidential Rejects: (1) John Quincy Adams

The first time we had a contested presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. The next election, the electoral college REALLY fouled us up. The first time we had a popular-vote election, the electoral college fouled us up. The latest time we had a presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. And it’s fouled us up repeatedly in between.

The founding fathers were nervous about democracy, which was still a brand-new experiment. So they ruled that the people would elect the representatives in Congress, but an elite group – the state legislators – would elect the senators. And a SUPER-elite… the presidential electors… would elect the president and vice-president.

This fouled up the 1796 and 1800 elections so badly that they amended the Constitution, improving things a little. By 1824 there was a new wrinkle. Electors still chose the president, but in most states the VOTERS chose the ELECTORS. This made selection of the president MORE LIKELY to be the voters’ choice, but not ASSUREDLY the voters’ choice.

With four men running in 1824, nobody got a majority of the electoral votes. This meant that the House of Representatives picked the president from the top three, but – get this – the states got one vote apiece, no matter how many people they had! And if the state delegation split, they cast no vote at all!

Anyhow, Andrew Jackson was the clear winner by plurality, with 41% of the popular vote compared to 31% for John Quincy Adams, with Crawford and Clay splitting the remainder almost evenly. The House, though, chose Adams.

A popular book right now is about “accidental presidents” – those who’ve succeeded on the predecessors’ deaths or resignations. Quincy Adams was the first of six “loser presidents” or “presidential rejects” – those who had to assume the nation’s highest office after the nation rejected them.

Young Adams in many ways looked superbly qualified. He had been a senator, a representative, an ambassador, and secretary of state. He’d been active in the Revolution even as a boy, and he’d helped end the War of 1812. None of this would help very much.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams had two handicaps. First, that he was usually the smartest person in the room. And second, that he knew it. Each of them were good at behind-closed-doors politics – not meaning anything crooked, just that they were cerebral men who worked well by quiet, face-to-face negotiations. Neither one was happy with the broader politics of crowds and speeches and nationwide campaigns.

And, of course, Quincy Adams had to do his job even though the voters had decided NOT to have him do the job. It’s as if an employer had chosen to hire the other candidate, but the government swooped in and forced him to take you instead. He wouldn’t be very happy, and you’d be batting with two and a-half strikes against you.

President Adams had some successes, but failed in much of his program: a naval academy, a national observatory, a national university, uniform weights and measures. In 1828 Jackson was back, and by then 22 of the 24 states chose their electors by popular vote. Jackson outpolled Adams 56% to 44%, though winning the electoral college by more than two-to-one (another example of how ridiculous the system is).

John Quincy Adams was a patriot, and a brilliant man, and even after the White House he served our country with distinction until struck down by cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of Congress while loudly objecting (quite rightly) to the Mexican War. Carried to the Speaker’s Room, he died there in the Capitol two days later, in 1848. In the right circumstances, he could have been a great president. Forced to take office after being rejected, his leadership could only be poor. He was doomed to one indifferent term, and the country suffered accordingly. His greatest days came before and after his presidency.

Running for President — Here in Steuben

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For fifty years or so after the Civil War, railroad routes channeled the course of presidential campaigns. This very sensibly took candidates to major population centers, but also gave them a chance to “whistle stop” at in-between towns that never see major candidates nowadays. When Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign train stopped at Cameron Mills, he spotted the milk station manager with his nine children on the loading dock. “This is the most prosperous place I have been to yet,” TR quipped (he only had five himself).

Roosevelt (running for vice-president as a Republican) and William Jennings Bryan (Democratic presidential candidate) both stumped Corning in 1900. Bryan was one of the country’s greatest orators. Four years earlier, at 36 just barely eligible for the White House, he had come out of nowhere to seize the Democratic and Populist nominations, running on a reform ticket. In 1900 he was rematched against McKinley, who conducted a “front porch” campaign, meeting friendly groups in Ohio while sending the energetic, combative Roosevelt out on the hustings.

On arriving in Bath in October ‘00, Bryan led a parade from the station to the courthouse square. Many in attendance were enthusiastic supporters, though the crowd included opponents, one of whom carried a banner (now in Steuben County Historical Society’s collection) reading “Bryan is in the Enemy’s Country.” Some no doubt just wanted to experience the prairie wind with which Bryan was scouring the land. The Democratic and Republican newspapers disagreed widely as to what kind of welcome he got.

New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey (unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948) made frequent appearances in Corning. Dewey and IBM founder Tom Watson (of Campbell) made sure that their 1952 choice (Dwight D. Eisenhower) got good face time too. But by then campaign trips were revolving around airports, not depots. Local partisans were on their own, as Pulteney Democrats had been in 1892 when they slung a large banner for Grover Cleveland and Adlai Stevenson (grandfather of Eisenhower’s opponent 60 years later).

With TV, radio, and Internet to reach voters, major candidates mostly leave small communities to the “third parties” with their quixotic campaigns. Ralph Nader in 2000 let his hair down enough to freely express his surprise at discovering he was giving a press conference in Corning… it was a very busy tour, and he’d thought it was Binghamton.