Like Herbert Hoover, almost a century later, President Martin Van Buren faced a national depression soon after taking office. They were called “panics” in those days, to describe the fear that sent people running on banks they had come rightly to believe stood on flimsy pillars of paper. The destruction of the Bank of the United States by the Jacksonians, with Van Buren an eager participant, shifted the financial center of the country from Philadelphia to New York but deprived the economy of central governance and gave rise to risky private banks, from which rivers of paper money flowed, with little backing.

The Panic of 1837, more widespread than the earlier one in 1819 that had ended James Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings, caused profound suffering in the agricultural West, as it was then known, and the South. The Jacksonian Democrats had ridden high since the election of 1828; now the Whigs had their opportunity. From the Northwest they drew for a second time that region’s great hero, William Henry Harrison. He was a public figure somewhat in the Andrew Jackson mold, only genteel and less controversial, a man approaching 70, with his noble deeds well in the past. Harrison’s name had been enrolled in the history books early in the century during the Indian war against Tecumseh and the Prophet. Harrison, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, became the Whig candidate.

The presidential campaign of 1840 was heated and, to an extent, hilarious. At that time it was still considered improper to campaign for oneself, so apart from a speech at his state capitol Harrison remained for the most part at home in North Bend, Ohio. Otherwise, no presidential campaign had ever been like this, and it would prove to be a harbinger of campaigns to come. The Whigs put on an organized program of promotion that cast a broad net. When the Democrats sniffed that Harrison was a hick, the Whigs took it for a theme and gloried in it, proclaiming Harrison a plain sort of fellow at heart, a “hard cider man” (no fine spirits or wines) who lived in a log cabin (not true). The electorate drank it in and delighted in the campaign stunts. Whig supporters put on a thousand fancy acts to draw the public. For example, a large party of Kentucky folk rolled a large paper ball all the way from their hometown to Baltimore, singing:

What has caused this great commotion, motion
Our country through?
It is the ball rolling on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler too
And with them we’ll beat the little
Van, Van, Van
Van is a used-up man!

Log cabins rose where cabins had not been, as scenes for subscription banquets and balls. Campaign coffers filled, as merrymakers danced reels and swilled hard cider. Large campaign paintings of Harrison showed him the youthful military hero of Northwest legend, not the man of 67 who easily remembered the American Revolution.

The public took to the Harrison idea in a big way, while President Van Buren, crushed by the national panic, for which he was able to offer little relief, simply had no response to his critics. Other issues of his administration subsided before the mighty visage of the panic. Van Buren’s name was carved in blame on the terrible event.

In the early spring of the campaign year, perhaps the most devastating spear was thrown at Van Buren not wholly in scorn, but with laughter, by a little-known congressman named Charles Ogle. It is Ogle’s great joke, phrased as an oration before the Congress, that is republished in this issue of White House History, for the first time in its entirety since it rolled off the presses 160 years ago and made Charles Ogle a celebrity.

Van Buren, a self-made man well-known for his personal refinement and taste, had been suffering criticism for being a dandy who did not understand the problems of the average American. Many a president has felt the same barb, but Martin Van Buren’s very being seemed to support the charge. His Manhattan tailor dressed him in the latest styles. A fine horseman, he rode spirited mounts, and his carriage with its soft satn lining, “V.B.” imperiously engraved on its silver buckles, was positively regal. In his years in Washington during Jackson’s administration as secretary of state and vice president, the widower had lived in notable comfort, part of the time occupying the beautiful Decatur House, former home of the tragic commodore.

Van Buren’s White House was a magnificent place; not that he did a lot to the house, but his manner of living there was very formal and elegant and rather lived up to the improvements made by Andrew Jackson. To his table he brought the best wines; in parlors, newly centrally heated on his orders, guests sat on fashionable banquettes he introduced to the more somber furniture already there. Sometimes the White House windows glowed with lamp- and candlelight until 2:00 a.m., and the lineup of widows interested in the president was legendary. President Van Buren was uncomfortable at the big public receptions, so he seemed snobbish: and presidents can’t appear snobs, nor can their families. Van Buren was not helped in this particular by his daughter-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren who stood on a dais to receive the public, surrounded by her women friends all dressed in white, suggesting a charming custom of young Queen Victoria. It was the wrong house for that.

With the financial picture gloomy everywhere, people began to take notice of the apparent high life at the White House. Fashionably dressed New Yorkers poured from the trains into rented carriages to attend the president’s late parties. Guest lists were mixed with locals and politicians. Whig Congressman Landaff Watson Andrews, from Kentucky, attended one of the dinners. The story was widely told that he picked up a “golden spoon” from the table and said, “Mr. Van Buren, if you will let me take this spoon to Kentucky and show it to my constituents, I will promise not to make use of any other argument against you: this will be enough.”

The story spread into the press. Congressman Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania demanded to respond to it on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the House sat as a committee to hear him. As the tall, rather striking Ogle, began to speak, Congressman Andrews interrupted to deny that he had ever said such a thing to the president and to claim he had never seen any gold spoons at the White House. Undaunted, Ogle kept the floor and, turning his piercing black eyes and thundering voice to his colleagues and a packed gallery, began an oration that must have lasted a greater part of the day. He was a small-town lawyer and well-liked militia general. No stranger to the stump, he soon captivated his audience and kept it roaring with laughter.

Ogle and many of his Whig colleagues had been annoyed by the civil and diplomatic bill sent by the executive. It was a long and complicated series of unrelated requests for money that was an ordeal for Congress to untangle. The bill had much in it that the Whigs disliked. Ogle addressed one part in particular, which called for an appropriation of $3,665 “for alterations and repairs of the President’s house, and for the purchase of furniture, trees, shrubs, and compost, and for superintendence of the President’s grounds.” Upon this he based the “Gold Spoon Oration” that, for awhile at least, made him a famous man.

Ogle did his homework. A smart, indeed learned man who read Greek and Latin with ease, the congressman did not hesitate invading the complexities of public records. Where better to start than household accounts, in stirring the old coals of kingliness and monarchial affectation, which had haunted the presidency since Washington’s time? In the office of the commissioner of public buildings, William Noland, he went through the receipts and bills of the White House. In his oration he traced the purchases of furniture, tableware, and gardening supplies. The historian today journeys over the same papers, now darkened with age, all written out in ink, some on decorative letterhead of long ago. One can only imagine the loyal Noland’s reaction to Ogle’s scrutiny of the plain pine boxes of folded papers, all bound up in red ribbon by subject, as files were kept then. Ogle’s “Gold Spoon Oration,” or “Address,” is a mirror of politics and democratic attitudes in the United States at the time. In tone and language it springs from the works of the humorists of the day, who were developing an American humor that would culminate later in Mark Twain.

One is reminded of Seba Smith’s Down East dialogues, put in the mouth of his character Jack Downing. James Russell Lowell’s Hosea Biglow is akin to the character Ogle makes of himself in his oration. There is a touch of the more bawdy humorists of the Southwest at the time, such as Johnson J. Hooper and Thomas Bangs Thorpe; the flavor of Davy Crockett’s stories is there, too. Scholars familiar with the “Gold Spoon Oration” puzzle why, although often quoted, it has not made its way in full into anthologies of American humor. It is a classic political oration, not dissimilar to those ascribed to Sam Houston and Thomas Hart Benton in the same period. Perhaps its length has kept it in hiding. Certainly the original, diminutive typeface and its cumbersome variations within the text make it difficult to follow in the original. White House History has corrected that.

The oration went to press immediately and was distributed as a string-bound pamphlet in tens of thousands. It found its way to the newspaper offices across the nation, and into many hands otherwise. Not until the Civil War era did Ogle’s ringing words fade at last away from the White House. Until then it was common for newsmen to refer to the Blue Room as “Ogle’s Elliptical Saloon.” The oration gave a language for political mockery of the White House, until the issue of a president’s being nondemocratic or “kinglike” no longer meant much. Van Buren, though a toughened politician, was naturally unable to overlook being the butt of popular merriment. He pressed William Noland to do something to help redeem him. The commissioner finally issued this statement: “I . . . certify that no gold knives or forks or spoons of any description have been purchased for the President’s house since Mr. Van Buren became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.”

William Henry Harrison carried the Whigs to victory. He journeyed to Washington in triumph, embarking first up the Ohio River by steamboat, then on the National Road in a caravan of coaches, and, for the last 60 miles of the journey, aboard the steam cars. On the way he was feted in log cabins, crowned by white-clad maidens singing, and presented with glasses of cider. He was always affable and presidential, dressed in a blue suit with gilt buttons, a full, crimson-lined blue cloak, with his hair brushed forward à la Titus. After a few days rest in Washington at the National Hotel, he took a trip down into Virginia to his birthplace, the fine old brick mansion known as Berkeley. No one seemed to mind that it was not a log cabin.

The day he went to live in the White House, Harrison delivered the longest Inaugural Address in history, his frail frame fighting the bitter cold. Van Buren vacated the White House on foot, walking with some other men to the Capitol for the inauguration, then walking on to a friend’s house to watch from a window the jubilation that accompanied Harrison’s progress down Pennsylvania Avenue. It took Congress only a few days to appropriate for President Harrison the household money it had denied to Van Buren, upping the figure to $6,000. A month later “Old Tippecanoe” lay in state in the same house Ogle had so vividly anathematized, the first president to die in office.