It's June here, but on our calendar, it's still February, the shortest month. Plenty of time to squeeze in a second president, especially since the first of the month only served for a few weeks. So let's read Edward Crapol's John Tyler: the Accidental President.
Here's the single most interesting thing about Tyler: he's the first man to appoint himself president. Seriously. We now understand the Vice-President to be the natural successor to the President, but when William Henry Harrison drops dead in the spring of 1841, no one has any real idea who gets to be President. Tyler steps up and announces he'll do the job--not as acting President, but as President for the rest of the term. He's headstrong and independent. This will cost him.
I'm writing this post in a house built in 1791, or, as I keep thinking of it, during Washington's first term. It's a stone farm house in Kentucky, which, at the time, was perhaps the wildest bit of wilderness in America--some serious Daniel Boone-Cumberland Gap-type stuff going on here.
It's easy in America to be overwhelmed by time. We are still so young, relatively, even if we have a steady presence in the world that other, long-lived countries (such as Poland, founded around 1000 but which did not exist as a political entity at two different periods last century) do not. We are young, we lack--as they say--institutional memory. We create ideas about ourselves as a country that do not reflect the facts: the founders were all Christian, the slaves were better off under slavery, the whites destroyed the Indians without prejudice or hesitation.
William Henry Harrison: he does his work in the wilderness of Indiana Territory, defeating Tecumsah at Tippicanoe and cementing his legend, but only as a vaguely remembered campaign slogan, confused with "54-40 Or Fight!" in a junior high school class. But that historical fact--William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumsah at Tippicanoe--becomes the basis for the first true presidential campaign. The well-to-do Harrison, son of a Virginian who signed the Declaration of Independence and who was born in a plantation, is presented as a cider-drinking, log-cabin-residing plain-spoken Everyman for the Whig voters. And it works. He's elected as the ninth president, defeating the incumbent Van Buren.
He dies a month into his presidency, which is fitting, because it means he is only an idea, which is maybe all he ever was, all any president can ever be to his constituents, his country.
From age two to age seven, I lived (with my family, as was custom those days), in Warsaw, Indiana, a town so conservative that it actually held a book burning while we lived there--Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; I have to admit that it's a little upsetting to think about that happening in the town with my first public library.
And while I don't really have a whole treasure trove of memories--I was in single digits the whole time, let me remind you--I do remember a few things that run counter to the popular conception of the Midwest as flyover country: a barn burning by the side of the highway, an ice skating rink in the middle of a mall's food court, a praying mantis walking along the cement of our front porch.
Small things, indeed, but they remind me that Indiana still holds the possibility of being a place of wilderness and wonder, a place that hangs out in the back of my mind while reading Mr. Jefferson's Hammer. We've gone back in time here, even from Harrison's month as President in 1840, to the early days of America, when Indiana Territory was about as far west as any white man went, and Harrison, fighter and territorial governor, made his fame and fortune. And although nothing as clear as we might like--the Battle of Tippicanoe, which makes WHH's reputation, gets exaggerated, and this is less cowboys-vs-Indians than it is the federal government pitting tribes against each other (and inter-tribal relationships aren't a whole lot better)--the Indiana of 1800 still feels like a place of potential, of danger and wildness, of the elements that make a history exciting.
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