Worst. President. Ever. by Robert Strauss

Author:Robert Strauss [Strauss, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2016-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

I was teaching an advanced writing class at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s when we discovered that William Henry Harrison was the only president of the United States who went to Penn. Well, sort of.

Harrison was the son of Benjamin Harrison V, who was the chairman of the Committee of the Whole that reviewed and then passed the Declaration of Independence. The elder Harrison returned home to Virginia soon after signing the document and became first governor and then Speaker of the state house.

Benjamin Harrison—his great-grandson also becoming president, bearing his name—hated war and was horrified when his son, William, wanted to become a soldier. Meanwhile, Benjamin’s Philadelphia buddy, Benjamin Rush, had started the first hospital in the United States. He told William that he was not going to go to war, but to medical school with Rush, who had aligned the hospital and medical school with Benjamin Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania.

A few months after young William got to Philadelphia to study with Rush, Benjamin Harrison was reelected Speaker of the state house in Virginia, but fell ill while celebrating at a dinner party and died. William went home to preside at the funeral and never returned to Penn, becoming instead a military hero, despite his father’s demands.

On Presidents’ Day during that class, Kia/Hyundai ran a cute TV advertisement, saying that while most businesses would promote Lincoln or Washington, Kia would be giving away souvenir William Henry Harrison towels to Presidents’ Day customers. During one class we called the PR guy at the car company and put him on speaker phone. We asked him if we could get a towel, being as we were from Harrison’s alma mater. The guy said, “There is one towel. It is from the ad. It is in the CEO’s office. And you are not getting it.”

I shrugged my shoulders, having given it, literally, the old college try. I bought a dozen white T-shirts, enough for the class, had an image of Harrison silk-screened on each and had “Our Bill” stenciled underneath.

Harrison, though his Penn connection was at best tangential and at worst dubious, was a substantial man, serving as a military governor and battlefield general off and on. The first of the Harrisons had come to the New World in 1630, and his forebears were large landholders and contributors to the colonial government.

Unfortunately, like his father, William Henry Harrison had his greatest triumph fall through or at least short, catching a fever soon after his inauguration as president and dying only a month into his term.

There is no telling whether Harrison would have been as substantial in the presidency as he was before it, but he was clearly the only president between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln to have had a shot. OK, maybe James Knox Polk, but upon later reflection, he was an opportunist who did the country no real favors. The early to mid decades of the nineteenth century were a repository of the also-run and afterthoughts of national politics:

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