BENJAMIN HARRISON | 1889-1893
Nominated for president at the 1888 Republican Convention, Benjamin Harrison conducted one of the first "front porch" campaigns, delivering short speeches to delegations that visited him in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Born in North Bend, Ohio, on August 20, 1833, Harrison, grandson of "Old Tippecanoe," attended Miami University in Ohio. He moved to Indianapolis, where he practiced law and campaigned for the Republican Party. In the Civil War, he was colonel of the 70th Volunteer Infantry. He served in the United States Senate throughout the 1880s, championing the rights of Indians, homesteaders and Civil War Veterans.
Once elected president, Harrison was proud of the vigorous foreign policy he helped shape. The first Pan American Congress met in Washington in 1889, establishing an information center which later became the Pan American Union. At the end of his administration, Harrison submitted to the Senate a treaty to annex Hawaii. President Cleveland later withdrew it.
Substantial appropriations bills were signed by Harrison for internal improvements, naval expansion and steamship lines. For the first time except in war, Congress appropriated a billion dollars. When critics attacked "the billion-dollar Congress," Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed replied, "This is a billion-dollar country."
President Harrison also signed the Sherman Anti-Trust act, the first federal act attempting to regulate trusts by protecting trade and commerce against "unlawful restraints and monopolies."
The most perplexing domestic problem Harrison faced was the tariff issue - some rates were intentionally prohibitive. He tried to make the high rates more acceptable by writing in reciprocity agreements. To cope with the Treasury surplus that the high rates had created, he removed the tariff from imported raw sugar and gave sugar growers in the United States two cents a pound bounty on their production. Long before the end of his term, the Treasury surplus had evaporated, and prosperity seemed about to disappear as well. The Congressional elections of 1892 went stingingly against the Republicans, and party leaders moved to abandon Harrison. Nevertheless, his party re-nominated him in 1892, but he was defeated by Grover Cleveland.
After he left office, Harrison, a widower, returned to Indianapolis and married his first wife’s former secretary. A dignified elder statesman, he died in 1901.
