Sharon McMahon  00:00

He really wanted to restore America to what he viewed as its proper constitutional balance, as an antidote to everything that had happened in the era of Jacksonian democracy, as a counterpoint to everything that had been happening with old Van Ruin over here. He viewed himself as the person who could right the ship.

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Colleen Shogan  00:25

On a cold and blustery day in March 1841, William Henry Harrison stood before a crowd of 1000s and delivered the longest inaugural address in American history. Few men were better prepared for the presidency. The 68-year-old Harrison had been a soldier, a senator, an ambassador, and a governor before his election to the nation's highest office. He was also the last man who had been born a British subject to win the presidency. While refusing to wear a coat and gloves in the frigid weather, Harrison reminded his fellow Americans what the revolutionary generation had won, and what could be easily lost. And then, only a month later, he was dead. Yet, as today's guest, Sharon McMahon argues, the shortest presidency left a lasting legacy. So, what might we learn from Harrison's last will and testament? I'm Colleen Shogan, and this is In Pursuit, a podcast that explores lessons from America's past to write the history of America's future. Episode Eight: William Henry Harrison Delivers A Warning. Sharon McMahon, welcome to In Pursuit.

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Sharon McMahon  01:48

I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

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Colleen Shogan  01:50

We're talking about William Henry Harrison today, perhaps best known for dying one month into his presidency. But you know, there's more to him than just that. Tell us about his early life before he became president of the United States.

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Sharon McMahon  02:07

Despite Harrison's image as sort of a log cabin dwelling man from the you know Northwest Territories, Harrison was actually born into the Virginia planter class. His father was a founding father of the United States and signed the Declaration of Independence. They were a slaveholding family, so he really grew up, you know, seeing his father as the governor of Virginia. So he didn't have humble origins, despite trying to portray himself in that way later on in his career. When he is 18, his father dies and leaves his older siblings with all of the inheritance, leaving very little for him. And he had wanted to become a physician, and in fact went to the University of Pennsylvania to study medicine. But when his father dies and leaves him little money, this of course was before things like student loans existed, and so he did not have the means to continue his medical studies. So he ultimately drops out, joins the army, and that ended up being very fateful decision because being in the army catapults him into national fame.

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Colleen Shogan  03:17

So how does he acquire the nickname "Old Tippy Canoe" or Old Tip.

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Sharon McMahon  03:23

That's related to his military service. He was involved in a very contentious battle with a Native American tribe, the Shawnee, who was they were led by Tecumseh, and the Harrison men were camped at the on the shores of the Tippecanoe River, and this battle was so legendary that people around the country got word of it when they heard what had happened. When they heard of the victory that Harrison had clinched, they started as as people are wont to do. They started calling him by this nickname, Old Tippecanoe, and then of course Tippecanoe is a long word. It got shortened to Old Tip, and he made use of that later in his political career.

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Colleen Shogan  04:08

Harrison is an anti-Jacksonian, and he becomes a member of the newly formed Whig Party, which doesn't last that long in American history. But who were the Whigs, and what did they believe?

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Sharon McMahon  04:24

You're right that the Whigs were formed in response to who they viewed as King Andrew, and that, of course, is King Andrew Jackson. They viewed Andrew Jackson's expansion of executive power as being too monarchical, as being overreach from the design of the founders. So this was a coalition. The Whig Party was a coalition of people who would later become Republicans, of people who were disgruntled with the aspects of the Democratic. Party, people who opposed Jackson's tactics and they opposed many of his domestic policies and formed their own party. And of course, we had several Whig presidents, and that coalition eventually fell apart and gave rise to the Republicans.

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Colleen Shogan  05:20

Now, when Harrison ran for the presidency in 1840, he's running against the sitting president Martin Van Buren. But what was the big issues in the country? What were on Americans' minds at that time?

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Sharon McMahon  05:32

People gave Martin Van Buren the nickname Martin Van Ruin because things were so fraught, especially in the economic sense, that people looked around and saw nothing but ruins when it came to the American economy. Jackson had actually, despite Jackson being famous for having no national debt during his presidency, actually created a number of the economic crises that were then handed to his vice president when Van Buren became president. So the Panic of 1837 is really at the top of people's minds. This is the worst economic conditions the country has ever faced, and would remain some of the worst economic conditions the country had would face for nearly 100 years until the Great Depression, so not only do we have these very serious issues with bank failures, with collapsing credit, with business closures, with lack of security surrounding the government's ability to handle these issues, we also have westward expansion being highly in top of mind for many people, we have tensions involving Native American groups and treaties with them, battles with them, the acquisition of territory, and then Americans too. This is important to remember that Americans have been grappling with what democracy actually means and looks like since before this country's inception, and they were still grappling with it during Harrison's rise to power.

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Colleen Shogan  07:13

Well, that's interesting. So, tell us more about how democracy had changed. We're in 1840 now, so that's 50 years after the Constitution is into operation. So, how are things changed from the origins from 1789? 

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Sharon McMahon  07:33

The first thing that comes to mind is that most states had expanded voting rights to allow all white men to vote, you no longer needed to be a property owner as you did at the founding of the country. Now they did not expand voting rights to include women or any minority groups, but that also leads to another very interesting development, which is the founders never conceived of a an electoral college system in which there was a winner take all, where one state all of one state's electors went to one candidate. They always viewed it in the founding era as every elector will be allowed to vote for whom they feel is the best candidate, and you can see that in early election results. There are sometimes the the electoral votes are very split amongst candidates, so we have the consolidation of power in relationship to political parties. Political parties have become more influential in politics, they had become their own sort of machine that had, before the founding era, they had existed as sort of loose identifiers of you know I'm a federalist, I'm an anti-federalist. There wasn't a party apparatus, but beginning in this era, we start to see the invention of these these apparatuses surrounding political parties like the Whig Party, and this actually becomes something that concerns Harrison and that he later speaks out against. But one other thing that I'll note about how democracy changed: it expanded voting rights to almost all white men, and voter turnout amongst white men is very different than it is today. Voter turnout in the election in which Harrison was elected president, voter turnout was over 80% So we have a actually a very high buy-in amongst white men, that they are meant to participate in democracy.

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Colleen Shogan  09:45

It's an extraordinary number. I read that as well. The 80% turnout compared to what our turnout overall electorate is in today's even national elections, our presidential elections.

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Sharon McMahon  09:57

I yeah, I totally agree. It's. I know political scientists have been studying this topic for decade about decades about you know what what increases voter turnout, what what decreases voter turnout, and it is interesting that there was such high voter turnout despite the economic unrest. Often, when things are not going well politically, or there's a perceived lack of economic opportunity. You get less buy-in into the democratic process, and that was not the case in 1840.

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Colleen Shogan  10:28

Right. Well, one of the reasons might have been that it was such an interesting campaign in 1840. It was a very, it was a different type of campaign. Tell us a little bit about how the campaign managers, particularly for William Henry Harrison, how did they approach 1840, and what were some of the things that they did to entice voters to support Harrison and Tyler and become engaged in the process?

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Sharon McMahon  10:58

You really, this is such an interesting campaign, and of course, a lot of people point to the Jackson v. John Quincy Adams as the advent of sort of the modern campaign structure in which candidates hated each other and actively insulted each other. But in this scenario, the political parties, specifically the Whig Party developed a campaign strategy that involved merch. It involved posters. It involved campaign rallies. It involved songs. It involved visual imagery, like a log cabin that was meant to be attached to people's perception of Harrison, and I mentioned earlier that despite his log cabin roots, alleged log cabin roots, he actually didn't grow up in a log cabin, and all of these things created a certain amount of hype surrounding Harrison and his VP candidate John Tyler, that had never been seen before. We're talking, you know, maple syrup branded maple syrup in bottles, parades in which people built sort of faux log cabin floats, rallies in which people stood and you know, kind of did their cheers. You know, campaign rallies are are still popular today, and now they tend to use signature songs. You know, like Kamala Harris's signature song was Beyonce's Freedom. That, of course, was not possible in 1840, but the people did have chance, and so they the participants in these rallies would have their chants and the songs that they would learn that they would then repeat as parades went down the street. So all of these things created a different amount of hype, and it was positive hype for the candidate as opposed to the fighting amongst the candidates that you saw between Jackson and John Quincy Adams,

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Colleen Shogan  13:04

I mean the management of his image is is really extraordinary because, like you said, he was born a Virginia of the Virginia elite, not in a log cabin. They portray him as as like sort of this like hard scrabble whiskey drinking guy, and he was really a scholar, and he also apparently really liked wine. So I don't know. That's a complete image makeover. 

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Sharon McMahon  13:30

You know, like you can picture. I don't know. This wasn't true, but if he were to, if he were, you know, born today, the the maple syrup would come in a maple leaf shaped bottle. Like that's the kind of vibes that were given out. But this was a jug that had you know their campaign slogans on it, and so you would take this home. And of course, we all know that a bottle of maple syrup is it's precious. It takes a lot of work to make, and you have it for a long time. It's not just eaten and  you know thrown away. It's not quickly consumed. So you have this bottle with his campaign slogan and his face on it at your house for months. For months. That is. That's actually really smart.

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Colleen Shogan  14:12

That is smart

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Sharon McMahon  14:12

branding. Yeah.

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Colleen Shogan  14:13

Very. You

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Sharon McMahon  14:14

see his face every morning at breakfast.

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Colleen Shogan  14:17

So you know, Harrison. Why is he running for president? What does he want to do for the nation?

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Sharon McMahon  14:23

He really wanted to restore America to what he viewed as its proper constitutional balance, as an antidote to everything that had happened in the era of Jacksonian democracy, as a counterpoint to everything that had been happening with old Van Ruin over here, he viewed himself as the person who could right the ship, as the person who could, you know, realign what the the direction America was meant to point in, and there are, I think, many things that you know we can look. At his writings and his feelings that are instructive and valuable to today, it's also worth pointing out. I think that throughout his political life, he advocated for or at minimum tolerated the idea of enslaving other individuals and felt like every state should be allowed to choose for themselves how they want to handle that issue. So, despite his advocacy for democracy, that did not extend to a fully inclusive democracy. It still, in his mind, meant democracy for white Americans.

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Colleen Shogan  15:41

Harrison is victorious. He defeats Martin Van Buren pretty handily in 1840. And let's fast forward to inauguration day on March 4th, 1841, in Washington D.C. Take us there. What was that day like in our nation's capital?

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Sharon McMahon  16:01

What a day! It was a it was a day that went down in infamy, as they say. It's a very cold day. It's a very rainy day. The wind is blowing very hard. If you've been to DC in early March, the weather can be very fickle. Can be beautiful. It can be absolutely terrible. And there were quotes from people who were there that talk about you know the cold being carried up the street and that you know no amount of like wrapping yourself in your winter coat seemed to keep the chill at bay. So it is remarkable that despite the really bad weather that is happening that day, that crowds pack the streets. They are there to see old tip. They want to see this new era of American democracy be ushered in, and fatefully, Harrison decides that he is not going to wear appropriate attire, and this became national news. His lack of appropriate attire for the weather is something that, for for many many decades, if not more than a century, was cited as the reason for his death a month after he assumes the presidency. His lack of, you know, gloves. His lack of a warm coat. He does not dress himself appropriately, and at the time, people believed that caused illness.

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Colleen Shogan  17:26

Well, why wouldn't he wear an overcoat and gloves? It was a cold day in in Washington D.C.

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Sharon McMahon  17:33

I mean, it's it's one of those things that we can speculate about, but but the our best guesses about why he is not attired appropriately is he is old. This is the first thing. He's the oldest president ever elected at that point. He was 60-eight years old, and I also think it's very interesting that his wife Anna is a couple of years younger than him, but she is so infirm that she actually does not make the journey to Washington D.C. for his inauguration, and in fact never got there before he died.

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Colleen Shogan  18:12

Wow!

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Colleen Shogan  18:13

So they sent along, you know, their daughter-in-law to sort of help settle him into the White House and act as a White House hostess. The role of the first lady was still evolving at the time, but that just speaks to the first thing: is that they wanted him to appear vital and not elderly,

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Colleen Shogan  18:33

like all bundled up or something. Right? Exactly. Like he's

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Sharon McMahon  18:36

he's an old man who can't keep out the cold. They don't want he wants to appear like strapping and Kevin Costner-esque, you know, like set on the set on a the set of Yellowstone. So he wants to appear young and vital, given his age. I think it also has to do with the fact that he wants to be seen as a man of the frontier, and men of the frontier, they don't need gloves. You know what I mean.

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Colleen Shogan  19:02

Or a fancy overcoat, something that's what a gentleman might wear.

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Sharon McMahon  19:06

Yeah, exactly. Like you don't. You know what I'm out here doing with these cows every morning. I don't need no gloves. You know, I'm of course making that up. But yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with the image that he wanted to project-that he was tough and young, strong.

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Colleen Shogan  19:22

So we don't have that much of the Harrison presidency to study because he only lasts 32 days in office. But we do have the inaugural address, which is the longest in American history. He goes for this. Probably also exacerbates the problem. He goes for about two hours for the inaugural address, but there's a lot of important messages contained in that address that you talk about in your essay for "In Pursuit." Tell us a little bit about those.

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Sharon McMahon  19:54

Yeah, his his inaugural address was over 8400 words and. Daniel Webster actually had the opportunity to edit it before he delivered it, and Daniel Webster bragged about having cut 17 different things from his from his address. So even though Daniel Webster does all of this editing, he still has 8400 words to deliver, and as you can imagine, that's a very long time for the audience to stand there in the cold, listening to him speak. So he hit on a few important themes that I think are worth remembering from somebody who had who was born. He was the last president born as a British subject, and so again, his father is a founding father. All of the people he studied under in college, founding father. So he had a very unique perspective on on these issues. But some of the themes that he talked about in his inaugural address were warnings about the separation of powers. That we cannot have too much power concentrated in the hands of any individual. This, of course, is a direct answer to Jacksonian democracy. We cannot have an executive that is has unchecked power around the country. The next thing that he talked about was that majority rule has limits. Sometimes we hear people talk about democracy as being mob rule, and that's not true in representative democracy. But it's still a an idea that persists in in that if you have two wolves and a sheep going for dinner, the you know guess what's going to get eaten. So this idea that the majority does rule in a democracy, but the majority's power has limits; it cannot just run amuck and completely disregard the rights of the minority. He also talks to people about being being aware of political frauds, and these are people that he viewed sort of as he didn't use this phrase, but another way to phrase it might be a silver-tongued serpent. People who were co-opting or usurping the language of democracy in an effort to make themselves sound trustworthy, but in reality, they had ulterior motives

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Colleen Shogan  22:19

A soft demagogue, I think, in the Federalist, a soft demagogue. 

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Sharon McMahon  22:24

Yes, he talked about true liberty being mild and tolerant, and this political, the spirit of the political fraud is harsh and vindictive and intolerant, and reckless; those are the words he used. So he's comparing and contrasting what American government should look like with what some people think, or some people were attempting, or did do in the past. And then the fourth thing that he warns about, which I think is an interesting warning, is about the danger of political parties, and it's an interesting warning because he became president because of a political the political party apparatus. You know, like this, as we were just talking about the merch and the rallies, and you know this entire organization that props him up. He warns to that people should not; they should use vigilance to avoid the spirit of party, as people have talked about in American history. He is worried about the allegiance to, say, the Democratic Party, which at the time Andrew Jackson had been at the helm of, and their the people's allegiance to this party and the person at the top of the party led them astray from the foundational civic virtues of what he viewed America as as what he viewed American democracy should be.

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Colleen Shogan  24:03

That's a lot to pack in. You know, one inaugural address.

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Sharon McMahon  24:06

I think one of the things I take away is something that he said: that party loyalty must never replace loyalty to democratic principles. And this is a concept that I am still talking about today-that the principles of democracy should have higher allegiance in our consciousness than the allegiance to any political organization.

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Colleen Shogan  24:30

Well, a lot of his observations are very relevant to what we're facing today and some of the challenges.

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Sharon McMahon  24:36

Absolutely, they again-it speaks to the idea that Americans have been wrestling with democracy since the beginning.

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Colleen Shogan  24:43

So, what happened to Harrison a month after his inauguration?

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Sharon McMahon  24:51

Several weeks after he is inaugurated, he gets sick, and as I mentioned, people attributed this to having gone outside with. Without a coat, attributed to having gone outside without his appropriate outerwear, and had he not been standing out in the rain and the wind for two hours without a coat, this would have never happened. That was the sort of prevailing prevailing sentiment. So he catches what you might describe today as a cold, and then that worsens into pneumonia. It worsens into pleurisy, where he has inflammation in his, you know, around his lungs. He was treated with, you know, the best that modern medicine had to offer at the time, which involved things like ipecac, mercury-based remedy. remedies, crude oil, heated suction cups-you know, like they really are throwing everything they can at the problem. This man is the president. No president had ever died in office before, and they didn't really want to find out what was going to happen if somebody did. So they tried their best, but eventually he becomes delirious. He his fever eventually starts to overcome him. He declines relatively quickly. He's he doesn't linger. You know, he gets sick three weeks after taking office, and he's dead by you know dead within the week or thereabouts. His last words were they're presumed by historians to be directed at the vice president John Tyler, but his his last words were, "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

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Colleen Shogan  26:47

Wow, amazing! And of course, that precipitates. And this is, of course, the subject of another discussion. But precipitates what will actually happen when the vice president ascends to the presidency. Will the vice president act with the powers of the presidency, or will the vice president become the president of the United States?

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Sharon McMahon  27:08

Exactly right. Yes, that was a legitimate debate that people were having at the time, and we have gone through and updated the Constitution now to better clarify exactly when the vice president can take over, and how long they can be in office, and we've clarified the role of presidential succession, or I should say, we've clarified the manner in which presidential succession is meant to work. But having never done it before, it was a very novel legal concept. Will somebody act as the president, as you mentioned, which is a different legal status than being the president, right? It's almost like being an interim. I'm like the interim administrator versus I am the administrator of this thing. You know, like I'm the president, or

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Colleen Shogan  27:53

acting as the president of the United States. And Tyler makes the decision pretty quickly that he's going to take the oath and he's going to be the president of the United States.

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Sharon McMahon  28:03

That's right, and of course that's a story for another another day. Of course, but it it's very it's it's an important ending to Harrison's story.

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Colleen Shogan  28:14

It is

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Sharon McMahon  28:15

That there is a peaceful transition of power, and that there is not a fight over this, you know, line of succession of like, well, if you're just the acting president, I'm going to be the real president. Like it could have gone in a different direction. Absolutely, but that peaceful transfer of power that we now view as a very important aspect of American democracy, Harrison's death laid the foundation for what that would look like for centuries to come, for 150 years to come.

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Colleen Shogan  28:48

Sharon, In Pursuit, of course, aims to find relevant lessons in our nation's past. So, what can we learn from William Henry Harrison?

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Sharon McMahon  28:59

I think the many of the cautions, warnings, and also invitations that he has in his inaugural address are important to remember that power must not fall into one set of hands alone. That power is shared, and it was designed to be shared amongst three branches of government and multiple levels of government at the national, state, and local levels, and that that makes government more responsive to the needs of citizens, and it also prevents tyranny. So the the idea of that 50 years after you know the Constitution is nearly 50 years after the Constitution is written, that we have a president who feels it incumbent to reaffirm these democratic principles because he saw the nation from his viewpoint begin moving away from them. So we have to be vigilant that power. Cannot be concentrated in the hands of a single individual. I also, as I mentioned before, I think the concept of allegiance to the principles of democracy and not allegiance to a single individual or allegiance to a political party should be the highest held in the highest regard in our minds, much like members of the military, people who serve in in high appointed office, they swear an oath to the Constitution. They don't swear an oath to serve an individual, and this isn't the the layperson's the lay person's version of that. That we our allegiance is to the principles of democracy and not to a political party, and then I think it's also worth remembering that we have to protect the rights of the minority in a in a representative democracy. That this is something that America still struggles with. To what extent must we protect people with whom we disagree? To what extent must we protect people who we don't think are deserving of rights, and that is these are tensions that continue to exist, existed in 1840, and I do think some of Harrison's advice would be well heeded today.

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Colleen Shogan  31:19

Sharon McMahon, one of our nation's most effective communicators for both history and civics education. Thank you so much for joining In Pursuit today. My pleasure. Thank you, Colleen. To read Sharon McMahon's essay on William Henry Harrison and to enjoy other great In Pursuit essays and podcasts, visit inpursuit.org In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan is a podcast by More Perfect. The series is written and produced by Jim Ambuske. Production services provided by Stand Together. Our theme music is Kleos by Charlie Ryan. Audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app, and tell us which Americans inspire you.

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