President William Henry (“Old Tippecanoe”) Harrison died in office in 1841 at age 68, just 30 days into his presidential term. Scholars say the cause was pneumonia and pleurisy, which developed from a common cold acquired when he delivered his two-hour inaugural address (sans overcoat) in frigid, windy weather.
Other than serving as a poster child for the Kleenex Corporation, did WHH leave any meaningful imprint as U.S. president?
Carnac foresees a goldmine of cruel jokes about this man’s unfortunate death. Let’s keep the joking as short-lived as Old Tippecanoe’s term.
“William Harrison, how do you praise? That guy was dead in thirty days.”
By dying, he had an effect on American politics (a constitutional crisis, a shift in Whig politics, a warning to other would-be run-on speakers). But as far as I can see, Harrison accomplished nothing in his month in office.
Bolding mine. I think clearly the answer is no. As an indian fighter, WHH is notable. But as a President the best thing he ever did was die. That allowed the young nation to clarify the rules for the ascendance of the VP. Also, it let John Tyler (“His Accidency”) become President. I always liked him because he defied all the machinations of his cabinet and his party against him. Don’t see that too much anymore.
Tecumseh had placed a curse on Harrison, claiming that every President to be elected in a year ending with the number zero (which happens every 20 years) would die in office. Harrison, Lincoln (elected 1860), Garfield (elected 1880), McKinley (elected 1900), Harding (elected 1920), Roosevelt (elected 1940), and Kennedy (elected 1960) all died in office, falling prey to the Curse of Tecumseh, sometimes called the "zero-year curse". Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, broke the curse, though there was an assasination attempt on Reagan in 1981.
And Bush continues to buck tradition as well . . . so far.
Absolutely. Harrison died peacefully, and gave Tyler ample time to make it plain that he was really the President, not the Acting Replacement President.
I’m pretty sure this one has been debunked, perhaps even on this site.
You don’t catch cold from standing out in the cold. I believe the current theory is that he probably caught something shaking hands/etc. from all the well-wishers who came to see him in the White House that day and the next.
In Harrison’s day, the President took office in March, but Congress didn’t meet until December. There was nothing for the President to do in the meantime except make appointments.
(By way of compensation, appointments could be a time-consuming nuisance, since there was no civil service and new Presidents would be beseiged by patronage job-seekers–especially when their election involved a change of party.)
So if one is to look for a Harrison legacy, one must look to his appointees. Scanning his list of Cabinet members, I see that he did appoint Daniel Webster as Secretary of State, and Webster lingered long enough into the Tyler administration to negotiate the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which settled the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.
The potato farms of the northern Aroostook, then, represent the Harrison presidential legacy to America. Think of him when you chow down on spuds.
Actually, a study released two to three months ago demonstrated that one can indeed catch cold as described above, thus validating an old wives’ tale and adding no small measure of bunk to your errant debunking.
If Harrison had lived, he likely would have been Henry Clay’s puppet. Harrison’s inaugural address was very deferential to Congress and Clay ran the show there. Clay didn’t like military men being elected president, but he didn’t mind a general as president if the guy would do what he said as opposed to Andrew Jackson, whom, to put it mildly, was his enemy.
Clay had a laundry list of thing to get passed during Harrison’s presidency, the foremost being the chartering of another Bank of the United States. But once Tyler became president, that plan fell apart as Tyler vetoed the bill, which caused his entire cabinet to resign (except for Webster who waited to finish negotiating a treaty with Britain). Clay had Tyler formally read out of the Whigs.
Tyler only joined the Whigs shortly before the election of 1840 after more of a personal falling out with the Democrats than a political one. The Whigs miscalculated badly by putting him on the ticket.
Well, the US Mint thinks enough of his achievements that in the near future they will produce a $1 coin featuring President Harrison on the obverse. If that isn’t a sign of respect then I don’t know what is.
OK, this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Tecumseh died in 1813. How would Tecumseh know that Harrison would be elected President in 1840? Why would Tecumseh want to curse any president besides Harrison? And why, since the prophecy obviously had to have been made prior to 1820, did James Monroe survive his term in office? If Tecumseh really could put such effective curses on people, why would he put a curse on Harrison that allowed him to continue to kill Indians for another 27 years before he died? Why not curse him to die a painful death the next day, along with everyone else who wanted to do harm to Indians?
And even if one disagrees with this, surely the difficult weather can weaken the immune system, with the result that an otherwise minor cold could be major.
WHH wasn’t in office long enough to do much, and for most of his time in the White House, he was sick as a dog. Most presidential rankings and polls of historians on the Presidency don’t even bother including WHH, for good reason.
The Tyler precedent for the VP actually becoming President, rather than just serving as Acting President, was certainly important (although not actually enshrined in the law until the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967). WHH gave the longest inaugural address ever, IIRC - so perhaps his successors in office have been a little more brief in their first official remarks than they might have otherwise. And that’s a good thing, right?
