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Benjamin Harrison The president as conservationist

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's that time in the American presidency when we have reached the age of recordings, and our subject this week, , is the first president whose voice we can hear. It sounds like this:

VOICE OF BENJAMIN HARRISON

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, not very clear at all, but it's a start. This was recorded on an Edison wax cylinder sometime around Harrison's first year in office in 1889.

Also in this year, the Coca-Cola Company was created, and the first jukebox went into use in . It's the end of the 19th century and technology and industrialization are reshaping America. And amid all this excitement and the many benefits of innovation, there are also new fears and questions emerging among citizens that presidents have to address about who might be left behind in this process and what in our country might be getting destroyed.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Post, and this is the 23rd episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Benjamin Harrison was born in in 1833. He was one of 13 children, and he served as president from 1889 until 1893 -- so right smack in the middle of 's two terms.

The history books today barely even mention Benjamin Harrison, though, and when they do, the write-ups are usually not too praising. There was one historian I came across who wrote that Harrison would probably have been better liked and better remembered today if he'd at least died a month into office like his grandfather -- the 9th president, -- did.

So, the challenge I set for myself for this episode was to find at least a couple of the overlooked ways that Benjamin Harrison did leave an imprint on our country and on the presidency. And personally, I ended up most fascinated by the role that he played in land and wildlife conservation.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 We'll get to that a bit later in the episode, but first, I decided that the best way to neutralize the assumption that Harrison was just a bore would be to invite a huge Harrison enthusiast to come along with me when I talked with the historian Michelle Krowl at the .

And that enthusiast who came along with me is Washington Post opinion columnist Alexandra Petri, whom you may remember from our episode about William Henry Harrison and his .

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON SONG

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That William Henry Harrison episode was just kind of a teaser for Alex, because her real love is Benjamin Harrison.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Basically, this is the highlight of my wee. I called my grandparents and I'm like, "By the way, guess what I'm getting to see on Friday? Benjamin Harrison's papers," and they're like, “You're kidding me. We got to tell your aunt.” We had this family discussion. This is so exciting. They're all rooting for this.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you want to tell the little bit of backstory of how you and your family are such Benjamin Harrison fans?

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Well, basically, I think every state has their one president -- except, like, if you're state that's totally president-less, like Wisconsin. But Indiana has Benjamin Harrison, or as he liked to be called, General Harrison, because he wasn't all about being the president. And so, in , one of the many sites is the Benjamin Harrison house, which is full of such delights as his electrical wiring and you can see his cane and you can see his grandfather clock. He's sort of a local hero.

And since half my family on my mom's side are all proud Hoosiers, Benjamin Harrison is also something that they're proud of. So, I've heard a lot more than I think you expect to at your average family Thanksgiving about Benjamin Harrison's presidential accomplishments. It turns out, he did a lot -- national parks and anti-trust acts.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I've asked Michelle basically this question for all of the presidents, and so maybe I'll just ask you both in the same room -- what you think it would be like to go on a blind date with Benjamin Harrison?

MICHELLE KROWL: I'll let Alexandra start.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Oh, gosh. Well, shaking his hand was described as holding a dead fish wrapped in brown paper. And so, I'm not expecting much out of this date, I'm going to be honest. As a young man, his only vices were cigars and cucumbers, which -- when you list them together -- implies something that I don't think it was meant to imply at the time.

MICHELLE KROWL: A really bad combo.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: His father wrote to him being like, 'I hope you're not eating more of those cucumbers,' because this was back before they had burpless cucumbers, and they assumed that your body was basically going to explode if you consume cucumbers incorrectly. So, given that

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 those are his two hobbies, I'm just not sure the date is going anywhere too exciting.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Anything to add, Michelle?

MICHELLE KROWL: I actually have been thinking about this, and Harrison strikes me as someone who would be that stereotype of the kind of person you'd want to bring home to your parents. He was industrious. He's hardworking. He comes from a distinguished family. He's a lawyer. He doesn't have many vices. He doesn't drink, and when he's young man, he doesn't he doesn't dance. He's very religious. He’s all about duty and public service and helping his family out.

And, to some degree, you know, if those are qualities that make him a good, sturdy blind date, then he would be great to go out on a date with. Personally, he wouldn't be my first choice.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: He's perfect on paper. He's very impressive for your parents. You bring them home, you're like, 'This man served in the Civil War. He quit his job in the government to serve in the Civil War.’

MICHELLE KROWL: And his grandfather was a president and a war hero.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I mean, in a lot of the descriptions I've read, he really comes off as a stiff, right? That seems like the description people give of him.

MICHELLE KROWL: That is the description that comes out quite frequently, and it is used as a political tool, too. A political rival writes to another one of the political rivals, and he says, ‘He is narrow, unresponsive, and oh so cold. The town is full of grumblers. Nobody appears to like H., though, of course, many tolerate him for what he can give out.’

And, then somebody else refers to him and says, 'It's like talking to a hitching post.’ Again, these are political rivals, so you have to take that with a slight grain of salt. But that's his reputation -- that he's cold, that he's unresponsive, that he's sort of on the boring side.

But other people will point out that, with his family, he's incredibly loving, and that he does have dear friends, that he can be a different person. So politically and socially, he's not one of these hail-fellow, well-met. You know, he's not a backslapper. He's not that kind of a politician. But when you get him within a family circle or with people he's comfortable with, he does generate a lot of respect and friendship and love from those people.

A recollection about Harrison later on was that apparently he loved kids and dogs -- that dogs would follow him home because they just got a sense that he was a dog lover. And so, there were a couple of stories where, back in Indianapolis, he'd be going to the law office and he would be kind to some stray dog or give it a nice look or something, and the dog would try to follow him into the office.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: The dog must have thought he was a hitching post. I guess that's like the fire hydrant of the 19th century.

MICHELLE KROWL: But apparently, you know, he got along very well with children and animals.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Maybe just to back up for one second. Do you want to give a bit of a

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 portrait of his early life and how privileged he grows up, especially compared to some of these other presidents we've had born in log cabins teaching themselves to read and write.

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, Harrison -- he did come from that distinguished family. But actually his own circumstances -- he was portrayed later as a 'Kid Glove Aristocrat,' which makes you think that he grew up in a mansion and was surrounded by luxuries, which actually he wasn't. His father was a farmer, the son of William Henry Harrison. He was a farmer. So, he grew up in not luxurious circumstances, but enough that he was educated as a boy. He went off to college. He read law. That's actually the primary career he had -- as a lawyer.

And that was where he was going to make most of his income. Interestingly enough, though, even though he's a successful lawyer, throughout his career he always feels strapped for cash. So, you get a sense of somebody who comes from a good background, but never feels that he's getting ahead, in terms of finances.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you get the sense with Harrison that so much of what's driving his decisions is just a sense of duty, holding up the family name and the sort of expectations that have been put on him?

MICHELLE KROWL: I do. You get the sense from some of the letters that he writes that it is public service that is driving him to do good in the world -- to some degree, hold up a family legacy, as well. And it's both a boon to him because, of course, people know who the Harrisons are, particularly William Henry Harrison. And everywhere he goes, it's the 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler Too' song, or they're bringing out something. But then again it's sort of a challenge for him because if you want to be your own person, and not just be known as as the the grandson of the president, then it's hard to mark your own territory and stand out on your own.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: It's like, ‘Well, my grandfather was the president, so I guess my options are to be president and hope I do as good of a job or to just go totally another way.’

MICHELLE KROWL: He is kind of touchy about his name. For one thing, some people thought he was William Henry Harrison or thought he was Benjamin Franklin Harrison. He doesn't have a middle name, but he writes to the people who published the – it keeps being addressing to ‘the Honorable B. F. Harrison,’ and he says, “Would you please correct the address? I do not like to have it appear that my nearest neighbors and friends are so unfamiliar with my name.”

But then he says at a political rally, “Claiming credit on the fame or good deeds of those who preceded one reminded him a good deal of the remark relative to that very useful vegetable, the potato -- the best part of which lies underground.”

So he did have the opportunity to try to take on the family name front and center, or make a joke about it.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: That’s the best potato joke I’ve ever heard. “That useful vegetable, the potato.” And they called him a stick in the mud!

Speaking of, I was stacking up their campaign songs, and the best campaign song of all time is, of course, 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler, Too.’ But Benjamin Harrison's was just, 'What's the matter with

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 Harrison? He's all right,' which is sort of a letdown.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Benjamin Harrison gets the Republican presidential nomination in 1888. And many at the time think that Harrison got the nomination because he has this family reputation that they can leverage. During the campaign, the political cartoons of the time really zero in on this idea that Harrison is just dwarfed by the family legacy.

MICHELLE KROWL: Of course, the 20th century has wonderful editorial cartoons and political cartoons, but the 19th century, boy, they have some really ,really good ones. And they're somewhat vicious, too.

So when you think politics today is vicious in terms of personal attacks and cartooning, it really has nothing on the previous centuries. And in most of the editorial cartoons that you see, Benjamin Harrison's got this gigantic fur hat on, and it's often used by the Democrats as a way of [indicating] he's not big enough to fill his grandfather's hat. Harrison himself was only about 5'6. So he is on the shorter side of our presidents. So he's always portrayed as this tiny little guy with this gigantic big hat that's almost swamping him.

And that's the image that repeats over and over and over again in these political cartoons -- this teeny little guy who's not quite measuring up to the family ancestry.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: But Benjamin Harrison manages to win the election, and he bumps Grover Cleveland from the . And though some of the campaign tactics and the coverage may have been nasty, this was still a time when the two candidates themselves mostly stayed out of the fray.

MICHELLE KROWL: One thing that strikes me about both of them is that they're just very decent individuals. And so, apparently in 1889, when they were going up to Harrison's inauguration, it was bad weather and Cleveland stood there with the umbrella over his head -- over Harrison's head.

I don't get a lot of political animosity between the two of them. They were both men who saw that they were doing their duty. Neither one of them had a burning passion to be president.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What does it tell us about the country at the time -- and what Americans want in their president, and what they're going through -- that there's Cleveland and then Harrison and then Cleveland?

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, the thing to remember is that with Cleveland and Harrison -- not so much with Cleveland's second administration, but at least in '84 and '88 -- the margins by which these men win are very, very small. In fact, in the '88 election, Cleveland actually won the popular vote, but Harrison won the Electoral College. So this is a time period where parties are fairly evenly balanced in terms of how many voters that they tend to get, and it tends to be a couple of swing states -- if you lose , then you've lost the presidency.

We're getting third parties in here as well. So, there's the rise of the populists. So, we're starting to get farmer's alliances and more labor unions. So, it's not just Republicans and Democrats, necessarily. Now, you've got other parties that are challenging the agenda -- are bringing up issues

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 that hadn't been there before.

And this is also a time period when we're not really seeing incredibly strong presidents, to be honest. Well, Garfield didn't have much of a chance because he was only there for a few months, really. But Arthur's not an activist president. And Cleveland is not as an activist president. So, you don't get people who are really taking the reins of the presidency and running with it in the way that, when we get to , he runs down the block with it. He's a very energetic man and believes in a different kind of leadership.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: But with Harrison we do see a bit more of an active presidency than we have been lately, right? I mean, maybe just a hint, at least, of a precursor to what we'll see with Teddy. So, what's your sense of what Harrison thought presidential leadership should look like?

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, I mean he was part of the Republican Party that agreed with more government intervention and activism. So, when you look at the 51st Congress, it accomplishes quite a lot and he signs those bills. So, unlike his predecessor Grover Cleveland, who vetoed a lot of things that he didn't agree with or thought were fiscally irresponsible, Harrison is clearly going along with the Acts, for example, and the Sherman Antitrust Act and some of these other things.

So, I think that he probably felt that his role was a more active role. And, you know, he had been in the Senate, so he understood the legislative process. James Blaine, the secretary of state, was also ill for a lot of his tenure. And so, Harrison was very active in foreign affairs. So I think he maybe was more of a model of what we think about the president doing. Now, whether he was successful at that or not --

ALEXANDRA PETRI: He didn't get much headway made with Congress on African-American civil rights. But he did deliver an annual message where he was like, 'So what are you doing about voting rights? Seems like people say, leave it to the local communities, and they're not doing a lot of movement.’

He says, “If it is said that these communities must work out this problem for themselves, we have a right to ask whether they are at work upon it. Do they suggest any solutions? When and under what condition is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he, in fact, to have those full civil rights, which have so long been his in law. I earnestly invoke the attention of Congress to the consideration of such measures within its well-defined constitutional powers, as we'll secure to all our people of free exercise of the right of suffrage and every other civil right under the Constitution and laws of the .”

So he was doing his best.

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, and again, as you as you said, he doesn't make a lot of headway -- because when you're looking at the grander context of this time period, race relations are just getting worse and worse, particularly for African-Americans. They're losing civil rights that they'd gained after the Civil War. The racial violence just continues to escalate. And so, for African- Americans, the situation has not been improving as the century wore on.

But Harrison was in favor of trying to give education to African-Americans and give them a right to vote and a right to participate, partially. And remember, he's a Civil War veteran too, so he's seen

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 what the racial situation was like and the effects of slavery. And he was somebody for whom that made an impression on him. And the only way for African-Americans to be able to advance and progress in the United States was to have education, to be able to participate. And that was increasingly being denied to them.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: One notable thing Harrison does is he includes -- who, at the time, is by far the nation's most prominent black leader -- he includes him in his administration by appointing Douglass as the minister to .

In terms of monetary issues, Harrison supports a bill for a very high tax on imported goods, and he also supports the Silver Purchase Act, which would basically have the government buy up silver out west and start basing part of the U.S. currency on silver.

We're going to talk more about some of these monetary issues in the McKinley episode because this is seen, in part, as what triggers the Financial .

There are also a couple things Harrison does that start to lay a foundation for what we'll see really come to fruition in Teddy Roosevelt's administration. And one of those things is that Harrison signs into law the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is essentially what creates a precedent and a platform for the trustbusting that we'll see in the early 20th century under T.R.

Another thing that's famously associated with Teddy but that we do see some seeds of actually here in the Harrison administration is support for the West and for conservation. Harrison admits six Western states into the Union during his presidency. North and , , Washington, , -- more states than have been admitted under any other president, other than .

On top of that Harrison, signs the Forest Reserve act which turns 13 million acres of land into reserves, and these are what then become what we now know as the national forests. He also authorized the creation of our second, third and fourth national parks, one of which was Yosemite. And to top it all off, we're going to now explore in some depth another very interesting conservation story that comes out of Harrison's time in office.

I'm joined in the studio by Will Gartshore, who leads government work on wildlife issues for the World Wildlife Fund. It's great to have you here, Will.

WILL GARTSHORE: It's great to be here, thanks for asking.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, you're here because Benjamin Harrison got into an interesting international dispute during his administration that involved fur seals in the Bering Sea. I want to ask you the details of what happened. As I understand it, there were fur seals in this water between Russia and . And Benjamin Harrison wants to protect these seals because they're being overly fished, and he's worried about their extinction. And he gets into sort of a fight with Great Britain and over whether there should be fishing of these seals allowed in the open seas. Is that's accurate?

WILL GARTSHORE: Yea, I mean -- it's one of the interesting after effects I guess of the purchase of Alaska from Russia in the mid-1800s, where the U.S. got jurisdiction not just over the landmass of Alaska but all those islands in the Bering Sea, including a group of islands called the Pribilof Islands,

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 which are home to 50 percent of the breeding fur seal colonies in the Bering Sea region and are responsible -- or were responsible -- for something like 80 percent of the production of fur seal skins, an industry that was kind of ramping up over the course of the 19th century.

And so, you had the U.S. with these onshore colonies, rookeries of fur seals. Russia had some as well, though smaller. And then you had Great Britain/Canada, which, of course at the time they weren't entirely independent and they didn't have any onshore fur seal colonies, but most of the fur seal industry was in London. And so they were trying to harvest seals in the open water, and the U.S. fought back against this, saying, 'We have jurisdiction over these waters, as well as these islands.’ Not just the three-mile limit offshore, which was recognized, but out into the open seas. And part of the reason that they pushed hard on this was they recognized that the open sea hunting of the seals was having a negative impact on the population.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And do you have a sense of why Harrison cared?

WILL GARTSHORE: Well, I think, as was the case with a lot of early conservation efforts, it was a commercial interest, right? You were talking about an industry. And so, the Americans recognized that this was a resource that they were managing -- that because of the tragedy of the commons, others were coming and harvesting and leading to an overall decline and everyone in the end was going to lose out. And because the U.S. was managing these rookeries, where most of the harvesting was happening, they're the ones who had the conservation spark.

But it was, in large part, inspired by the fact that they were losing revenue, right? You wanted a sustainable population so that they could keep a sustainable economy -- even if they weren't using those words at the time -- and they recognized a need for an international agreement to manage this population. And it's interesting, because Harrison was ultimately unsuccessful in getting that in place. There was an international arbitration.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right, so what happened? Or didn't end up happening?

WILL GARTSHORE: It sort of got thrown into the international arena. You had, at that point, three/four countries involved, depending on how you defined Canada at the time. And so, it went to an international arbitration, a panel of other countries, and they ultimately decided in favor of Great Britain, saying the open-water sealing could continue.

They did extend the protection from 3 miles to 60 miles off of the islands. But that wasn't sufficient, because the seals were forging much further. And so through the , 1890s, you see a precipitous decline in the seal populations. And then in the first part of the 20th century, initially under the Roosevelt administration, they negotiated a convention called the Northern Pacific Fur Seal Convention, which then was signed and ratified under the Taft administration.

And the convention they ended up ratifying in 1911 was really probably the first international treaty on wildlife conservation, when you think about it. And that derives from the Harrison administration's initial efforts to say we need to either unilaterally or multilaterally solve this problem. It took 20 years to get the outcome he was looking for, but in the end, it worked. And it was an interesting innovation in international law that was developing at the time.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you know -- is he the first president we've seen, or we've had, who made an effort to protect a particular species?

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8

WILL GARTSHORE: As far as I can tell, yes. It really was specifically targeted towards this one species. The only earlier example I can find is sort of a negative example, in that there was legislation passed a decade earlier under the Grant administration to try and protect the American bison. But Grant pocket-vetoed it because his military advisers saw extripating the bison as a military strategy against the Native American tribes that they were fighting in the West.

And so, he didn't sign it, and ultimately that law did not pass into effect. So, the only example I can find prior is not so great. But as far as actively trying to conserve a species, even if there's a commercial component to it? Yeah, it is Benjamin Harrison, I think.

And then afterwards, under the McKinley administration, you get the Lacey Act in 1900, which was to prevent illegal trade of wildlife that have been poached in other states, initially, and then ultimately in other countries. And that law, the Lacey Act, which has been amended several times since, is the most important and powerful law we have on the books now to combat wildlife trafficking -- which of course has become a huge issue with elephant and rhino poaching, which the current administration has really focused on.

And from that point on, then you see passage of -- in 1966 they pass a Fur Seal Act; obviously within a decade, you've got the Endangered Species Act; you've got the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the early '70s, which sort of overtakes these previous agreements and becomes the regime protecting mammals like fur seals. President Nixon, President Johnson…President Reagan signs into law the African Elephant Conservation Act. George H.W. Bush puts in effect the first unilateral ban on importation of ivory into the United States, when you've got the poaching crisis of elephants in the '80s. And then you see laws on tigers, great apes, marine turtles, signed in the '90s and 2000s.

President Obama recently put forward an to combat wildlife trafficking, and then just last week the Fish and Wildlife Service under this current administration put out a ban -- a near total ban -- on commerce in ivory in the U.S. And what's interesting is that it was the secretary of state under the Roosevelt administration who negotiated this treaty on the fur seals, right? It became a foreign policy priority. And right now, Secretary Kerry is in talking to the Chinese, as part of the strategic and economic dialogue, on how to curtail ivory trafficking.

So, you can sort of trace all of these efforts around international negotiations to protect species back to these initial efforts -- using international law for wildlife conservation came out of the Harrison administration.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's so fascinating to me is to see this moment where the purview of responsibility for a president seems to shift in this direction, where that becomes part of what a president would think of as his presidential responsibility -- to protect and conserve.

So, I wanted to ask you what this might tell us about how attitudes were changing in the country at the time toward conservation. Obviously, this is a time where industrialization is picking up and so some of that activism that's starting is coming in response to the rise of industrialization and technology -- where you see the impact that the human population can have on nature in a much more extreme fashion, right?

WILL GARTSHORE: I think the rise of locomotives and the kinds of weaponry you see, where folks

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 are saying, 'Alright, we can really wipe out a species, especially if we put our minds to it.’ And what are the follow-on impacts of that. And in this case, because there was that sense that, ‘Wait, this is also commercially valuable species, and we can't manufacture more. We're reliant on a healthy population,’ that was sort of the first dawning that in order for us to have sustainable economies, we need to actually take a conservation mindset in terms of species management. How we harvest the seas in this case are not boundless.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It is around this time that there are also machines, all of the sudden, that can make that process of turning an animal skin and fur into clothing a lot faster. They can sell these items more cheaply than they ever have before, and process them at a greater volume than ever before.

WILL GARTSHORE: And you see an industry starts springing up in the U.S. -- I think initially it was in St. Louis and in South Carolina -- it was sort of a company around turning these island harvested fur seals into furs. And that persisted through something like the 1970s. But it's interesting how industrialization and technology helps drive how quickly you can wipe out a species, right?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, I did see that around this time, too -- at the end of the 19th century - - the Audubon Society was starting to form because of women in Boston who were trying to build efforts to discourage other women from buying hats that had bird feathers in them. So, it does seem like there's there some sort of grassroots efforts beginning around the moral component.

WILL GARTSHORE: If you think of conservation more broadly -- John Muir and all that movement around national parks -- I mean, it's all coming out of that same period. In the West, obviously, there are more people. And this is another byproduct of technology: the railways that get built in the middle part of the 19th century get more people out there, and they see how beautiful their country is, and then for some people, they think, 'Oh, that's great --I can exploit that.’ And others think, 'I need to protect that because, how amazing is this planet?' And so, that conservation movement writ large -- not just wildlife, but national parks and forests – all that really starts ramping up right around this time.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Usually we look to Teddy Roosevelt as the first president who made really significant strides, but a lot of it seems to have been set in motion, at least, under Harrison.

WILL GARTSHORE: It puts Teddy in a different light because then it's not just force of personality that he's bringing these issues to the people and convinces everyone to care about them. If they've been put out there and debated and the ground is already laid, then he becomes a bit of a product of the movement versus sort of the originator of the idea. He gets to ride the foundation that's been built a bit, and that's a fascinating way to kind of look at him.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Now, as you already know from last week's double Grover Cleveland spoiler episode, Harrison does not win a second term. After four years, he is out, and Cleveland comes back in to take over the presidency. But one thing we haven't talked about yet in this episode is Harrison's marriage.

And this is relevant because his wife Caroline Scott -- she dies two weeks before what might have been Harrison's re-election. She died of tuberculosis.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 MICHELLE KROWL: Almost this entire quite large scrapbook are various telegrams and letters that are being sent to the family because of her death. And so, for example, the first one is Queen Victoria.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Oh.

MICHELLE KROWL: And poor Queen Victoria -- she has to keep sending these things. She's had to send telegrams to the widows Mary Lincoln and Lucretia Garfield, and now the president's wife has died.

And also, this is just one of the culminating tragedies of Harrison's official , because unfortunately they kept meeting with disaster -- people kept dying. The secretary of the Navy -- he had a terrible tragedy. His house was consumed by a fire and his wife and his daughter were killed. And Secretary Blaine -- if I'm remembering correctly -- secretary of state, two have his children die within a couple of months of one another.

So, it's been a rather unlucky administration for people in the Harrison administration. And, of course, with him, it just continues to go. So, yes, unfortunately, Harrison loses his wife of almost 40 years, since they had been married very young. And he tells people when they send condolences, both for the loss of his wife and for the loss of the presidency -- because he doesn't win in '92 -- he says, 'You know, I've scarcely even thought about the presidency. I feel like I've been in a prison here, anyway. I'm not really suited to public office. I don't have that correct temperament. And for me the loss of the presidency is nothing compared with the loss of my wife.'

He writes to one of his cousins, I think it is, and says, in March of 1893, when they've gotten back to Indianapolis, ‘This was supposed to be such a happy time, if we had an unbroken household, and now everything reminds me of my loss.'

So, you know this is something -- he really did love his wife very deeply. But then he also was very close with his wife's niece, Mary Dimmick.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You can guess where this is going. Harrison eventually ends up marrying the niece -- well, technically she's a first cousin of his wife, but she's a lot younger so they kind of refer to her as a niece. And I know you're probably like, ‘Are you kidding? You're not going to talk more about Harrison marrying this young relative?' But, you know, Google it.

I'd rather end this episode with a couple other details like: the fact that Harrison had two opossums in the White House named Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity. And he also had a goat named Old Whiskers, which he once chased down after it escaped.

Now another interesting little detail that relates to the conservation efforts is that Harrison went to visit Yosemite three times, which was quite a trip in those days. And of course, what would a Presidential podcast episode ending be without a poignant quote from him?

Maybe one like: “No other people have a government more worthy of their respect and love, or a land so magnificent in extent.” Or this bonus quote: “Great lives never go out. They go on.”

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