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William Henry Harrison Great song, horrible death

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: Here we are. It's possibly the most anticipated episode of the podcast. We're going to talk about , who's the president who gave us the longest inaugural address – it was nearly two hours long – and then had the shortest presidency.

He was in office for 32 days, and then he died. And the story goes that he died from pneumonia because it was a cold rainy day when he gave that speech and he refused to wear a coat. Died a month later.

William Henry Harrison's tragedy has become the laughing stock of presidential history. And so I know exactly whom to ask to be the main guest for this week's episode. And that's Alexandra Petri, who is the Washington Post's opinion writer and humor columnist.

I feel like presidential history would have suffered a great loss if Harrison hadn't died. Harrison's death is kind of, ironically, one of the things that really brings presidential history to life.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Yeah, I agree. I think he also serves as a valuable cautionary tale, because the trend towards longer and longer inaugural speeches can only be stopped when somebody literally dies 32 days into office. Whether or not that's actually correlated to his speech, it's a good thing to point to and say, “You know, you don't want to wind up like William Henry Harrison here.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, in this episode we're going to debunk that classic story that his long speech is what did him in. And the other thing we're going to investigate is the back story of his catchy campaign slogan, 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler, too.'

I'm Lillian Cunningham at The Washington Post and this is the ninth episode of 'Presidential.'

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

William Henry Harrison was president from 1841 to…1841.

Up until , Harrison was the oldest man to ever be elected president. He was 68-

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 years old when he took the oath of office. He was also the first president to ever die on the job, raising a ton of questions that the Founding Fathers hadn't quite thought through about what's supposed to happen in that scenario.

But let's start at the beginning. Harrison was born in in 1773. His father was a notable politician who signed the Declaration of Independence and served as Virginia's governor. So, Harrison grows up in this well-to-do family and then decides to go to medical school. But he eventually drops out and joins the military. He makes his name as a war hero, fighting battles against the Native Americans and the British in the early part of the 1800s, just like .

Based on his military success, Harrison becomes governor of the territory and then a congressman from . But Harrison is not a Democrat like Andrew Jackson. He's part of the other national party that has sprung up, called the Whigs. And the Whigs are fans of bigger, more powerful federal government. Harrison runs unsuccessfully for president in 1836, and he loses to .

But by the time the 1840 election rolls around, the Whigs have gotten very smart at campaigning. And they use all these really clever and modern campaign tactics that sweep Harrison to victory.

Alright, so in preparation for this episode, Alex Petri has been studying up on William Henry Harrison, which, admittedly, is really hard to do when there's been so little written about a person who was only president for a month.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Well, the sense that I've been getting of William Henry Harrison is pretty much entirely derived from a campaign biography from his failed 1836 presidential run.

And I'm frankly amazed that this man is not listed as our greatest president, because this campaign biography -- let me tell you. He's the Washington of the West. He leads troops against, really, the -- I had no idea the Native Americans were the aggressors in the wars that were being fought against them. I also learned this from his biography.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: According to his biography's take.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: You know, my eyes were opened. He was not only the greatest president, but he was fighting the greatest threat ever posed. And! He spared a man's life after that man tried to assassinate him. He gave only the most stirring speeches. At one point, they put someone else in charge of the Army, and the Army threatened to mutiny. And so he came back from being the , basically they kept putting him in charge of whatever sort of the territory was west of the Ohio. He kept doing such a remarkable job, at least according to this biography, that they could not bear to see him go. He kept trying to return to his farm, like did, and the efforts were always thwarted by the cries of the people for more William Henry Harrison!

So, just an amazing man. And the valor of his troops was constantly rewarded, and he said, 'Spare women and children.' I mean, it's interesting when you read what they were trying to sell people on at the time, which really reads a lot like Plutarch's Lives -- “The Life of the Caesar” -- where they keep talking about, 'Well, you know he was great because people held parades for him.' Like, big signs of respect.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, one thing I ask in all of the podcast episodes: What would it be like to go on a blind date with that president? So I'm just going to turn it on you for this episode, and ask if you have a better sense now of what it might be like to go on a date with William Henry Harrison.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Well, I imagine he would talk the whole time. I think I would be lucky to get in a word edgewise.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so he's long winded. What else?

ALEXANDRA PETRI: In the biography, the Washington parallels are pretty strong – the George Washington parallels. The things that people know about Washington, besides that he was a military commander, were that he was associated with returning power to people at every possible opportunity, and going back to his farm, and handing over and resigning his commission. These were sort of the moments for Washington where they say, 'Oh, he was given great power and he used it wisely.’

And they keep trying to drive in that parallel with Harrison. They'll say, “He went back to his farm - - he's been entrusted with great responsibility, and he's never once overstepped his mandate,” which I think is an interesting concern. You have a fledgling republic, so you need to be reassured that the guy who's going to take the reins is not going to go rampaging and bring in new reforms and try to overreach. This is a guy who very much stays within his purview.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Barbara Bair is a historian with the Library of Congress. She's the keeper of the William Henry Harrison documents, and one of the very few people who can lay claim to the title of being a William Henry Harrison expert.

BARBARA BAIR: I see William Henry Harrison as a kind of bridge with the past. He had one foot in the origins of the United States, and one foot in the modern era. He dated back to the American Revolution and then was part of this very modern campaign at the end of his life. This campaign pioneered several techniques that we'd recognize today -- most notably, Harrison's team totally mastered the art of crafting a political narrative.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: If you listened to the Andrew Jackson episode, you'll remember that Jackson had a personal story that resonated with the common voter. Well, Harrison had a common-folk life story, too, except his wasn't true.

What happened in 1840 was that Harrison was running against Van Buren, who's up for his second term as president. And Van Buren's campaign tries to attack Harrison as a tired old man by printing something in the newspaper where they joke, 'Give him hard cider and a pension, and he'll happily spend the rest of his days in a .'

Well, Harrison's political operatives were really smart. And so they took that jab at Harrison, and in a move that we now see all the time on the campaign trail, they spun it to their advantage.

They plastered images of log cabins and hard cider all over the campaign materials and used it to play up the impression that Harrison was salt of the earth -- just a man whom poor, hardworking voters could identify with. These populist images became the main iconography of Harrison's

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 presidential campaign.

BARBARA BAIR: They used all these popular mechanisms for influencing and winning enthusiasm from voters, including song books that were passed out. We have some of them in our collection. So, you see on the cover of this song book the distinguished Harrison in his war uniform, shaking hands with yeoman farmer in front of the log cabin with the barrel of hard cider there.

Coonskin caps were also part of the iconography. It was a very sort of backwoods, frontier, Western appeal -- which, again, was framing him as a Washington outsider. Well, the fact of the matter was William Henry Harrison was from a very distinguished in Virginia. His father had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the and later the governor of Virginia. They were from a very prominent planter family, and he had an aristocratic upbringing. He certainly was not living in a log cabin or drinking hard cider.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Whether it was true or not, the narrative they built was exactly what the public wanted to hear -- and what they wanted to vote for in their president.

They packaged him in this backwoods way because it would move ordinary voters that were working class and rural to come out in support of him. There was a real anti-aristocratic tendency, and they kind of erased that whole part of his character. What his strategists focus on instead is making him seem like an ordinary guy you'd want to have a drink with.

And also, in part because of his older age, they dig back into his past and they resurrect his accomplishments as a war hero. They're working off of the same narrative that carried Andrew Jackson to the presidency, which is the belief that military leaders make great presidential leaders. Both Jackson and Harrison were two of the big heroes in the battles against Native Americans and against the British in the early 1800s. And even though Harrison's big victories happened a couple of decades earlier, they're still using it as the basis of his 1840 presidential run.

BARBARA BAIR: During the , Harrison in particular, as the governor of the , focused on the . And the campaign slogan when he ran for president was 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler Too.' Tippy Canoe is a reference to a battle that he instigated against the Shawnee; and of course Tyler is a reference to , his vice president.

One of those things that maybe people learned in school about William Henry Harrison was just the campaign slogan 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler Too,' and how that's become the most famous presidential campaign slogan.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It is really good. What was successful about that? Is it just the power of alliteration? He has the song. He has the slogan. They were passing out booze and hard cider at campaign rallies. What is it that they mastered about political spin in this campaign?

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Well, I think the alliteration certainly helps. Also, the song itself stands head and shoulders above most other presidential campaign songs. I've been listening to a lot of the songs from the time, much to the irritation of my neighbors. You have something like, 'Monroe, yes, Monroe. He indeed is the man’ -- which is great and catchy in its own way, but doesn't stack up against, 'Tippy Canoe and Tyler too, and with him we'll beat Little Van. Yes, Van is a used-up man…’ etc, etc. I think the sheer musicality of this tune was rewarded, as well as the fact that it's tied into a sort of heroic battle thing.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Obviously, we don't have any original recordings of the song. But we have something that's possibly even better. The band 'They Might Be Giants' recorded an amazing version using the original lyrics and tune.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS MUSIC CLIP

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I love it so much.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: It's way cooler than most of the songs from the time, which were just like: Let's just dump it onto a popular melody like 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS MUSIC CLIP

ALEXANDRA PETRI: I also love in that song he acknowledges that there's no such thing as bad publicity. “Let them talk about hard cider and log cabins, too. It only helps to speed the ball for Tippy Canoe and Tyler, too.” And he's right.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was another thing actually that I learned: The phrase 'to keep the ball rolling' came from their campaign, because they actually made like big papier-maché-and-- whatever-else balls that they would roll down the street through towns as part of their campaign.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: That's such -- why don't we do that anymore, either? I would love to follow a rolling papier maché ball around from town to town. The song itself is terrific and it's a positive song, which I think people -- like, “we're gonna beat little Van, he's a used-up man”…As I'm hearing myself saying it, maybe it's not actually a positive song. It doesn't sound terribly positive, but you're coming off of someone like , who was desperately trying to keep people like Jackson out of the and had one of the most nightmarishly negative campaign songs, possible.

It was just like: “Little know you what is coming if John Quincy not be coming.” And you've got lyrics, “Like robing’s coming, and jobing’s coming. Famine's coming. Mammin's coming.” Or, “Hating's coming. Satan's coming.” Literally Satan's comin', if John Quincy not be coming. That was always the kicker in there.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So one thing I found really interesting and smart about their campaign is this ‘log cabin, hard cider’ spin that they do. Can we just deconstruct the brilliance of that? The way that, even today in campaigns, we see political tricks --

ALEXANDRA PETRI: Who would you like to have a hard cider with in a log cabin? I think even these days, in [presidential] debates, you see people say, 'Oh, you know, my grandfather used to lift giant rocks in a factory, and he came on a boat that was made only of dreams.' You can't plausibly tie yourself back to a log cabin anymore, but it's the same basic narrative. [Candidates are] saying, 'I came from a hardscrabble place. I'm just like you.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What is it that makes people, though, want to elect a president who's like them, as opposed to [thinking] “Great -- I would love someone who's smarter and more talented and more capable”?

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 ALEXANDRA PETRI: Well, don't get me wrong. They're definitely selling him as smarter and more talented and more capable and given a gold medal by Congress. They read excerpts of speeches that have been delivered, just full of encomia for this man.

But I think, especially after Jackson, the idea that a common man can ascend to this high office – that it's not sort of the prerogative of the elites -- is a cool thing that still does resonate. You want to think, 'Well, you can come from the territories and you can have this sort of up-by-the- bootstraps story. Even if it's a narrative, you can have it.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The campaign spin works. The 1840 election has one of the highest voter turnouts in history. Eighty percent of those who were legally allowed to vote, did.

Harrison wins the election in a huge victory, and the Whigs also win both houses of Congress. As soon as he gets into office, though, it's pretty clear that Harrison's backwoods, 'Fun Guy' narrative is kind of a hoax.

Harrison proceeds to deliver the longest, most academic inaugural address in history. It's not the kind of address a man in a log cabin would give at all. It's completely filled with obscure references to ancient republics.

ALEXANDRA PETRI: “It was the remark of a Roman Consul in an early period of that celebrated Republic that a most striking contrast was observable in the conduct of candidates for offices of power and trust before and after obtaining them, they seldom carrying out in the latter case the pledges and promises made in the former. However much the world may have improved in many respects in the lapse of upward of 2,000 years since the remark was made by the virtuous and indignant Roman, I fear that a strict examination of the annals of some of the modern elective governments would develop similar instances of violated confidence…”

BARBARA BAIR: It was certainly a long-winded and meandering inaugural address, and he was famous for this. This is how he always gave speeches.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that was just one sentence. There were two hours of this.

So, for a long time, basically everyone has thought that this crazy-long speech is what killed Harrison -- that because he stood out in the cold without a coat on for almost two hours delivering it, that he caught pneumonia and died. Well, it turns out Dr. Philip Mackowiak with the University of Maryland School of Medicine decided, not too long ago, to go back and do a really thorough medical investigation.

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: Apparently, the weather was not that cold and not that damp, and so the whole scenario really doesn't fit with that -- the association between the inaugural address and the illness -- because he didn't become sick until three weeks later. And so, it'd be hard to imagine that there was a cause and effect between that exposure and the illness he came down with three weeks later.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so we have a medical mystery. A deep dive into Harrison's medical records allowed Dr. Mackowiak to piece together a vivid account of his sickness.

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: It began with non-specific symptoms. He was feeling fatigued. He was feeling

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 nervous. He felt like it was due to this hard-fought campaign he had and the early pressures of being in office.

And then, he had gastrointestinal abdominal problems, and in particular, abdominal aching, discomfort and constipation -- and constipation that was so severe and so protracted, we give it a special name. We call it obstipation. His pulmonary symptoms came on later and were not as progressive as his abdominal complaints.

This is the principal reason why I believe that his primary illness was gastrointestinal rather than pulmonary.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, if it's not pneumonia, what is it?

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: Trying to figure out what could possibly have been the reason for Harrison's illness led us to investigate the water supply to the White House, and what we found were several things. Number one -- that Washington's city had no sewage system.

Sewage just drained from wherever it happened to be deposited to wherever water took it. In the case of the White House, there was a night-soil repository -- night soil being human feces -- that was collected and carted to this spot, which was six blocks directly above the White House.

The theory that seems inescapable is that the White House water supply was contaminated by fecal material that was flowing from that night-soil repository, and chances are it would have included fecal material from people who were ill with various diseases – cholera and, unfortunately in the case of Harrison, probably .

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, one thing I came across was the original physician's report after his death that said t”opical depletion, blistering, inappropriate internal remedies subdued in a great measure the disease of the lungs and liver.”

Could you give me a little bit more of a sense of what kind of remedies they're talking about here? What were some of the techniques that they were using at the time to try to cure him?

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: Right. He was given a host of medications. Two of the most important were repeated doses of mercury, which we now realize is toxic. But also he was given opium in the form of laudanum.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This is basically the opposite of helpful. The mercury in opium just exacerbated his issues. But, at the time, doctors didn't really understand modern medicine, and they definitely didn't know about typhoid fever.

So, William Henry Harrison dies of the sickness and of the flawed ways they try to treat him. His doctor suggested in the final report that there were innumerable questions about Harrison's illness that he just couldn't figure out, and so he put the official cause of death down in the medical record as pneumonia because that was one ailment he did recognize.

PHILIP MACKOWIAK: And I think what was going on there is that he, himself, was under attack by a very anxious, concerned, confused public who wanted an answer. And that was the best he could do. So that's what he gave them -- but he was ambivalent about that diagnosis.

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Subsequent historians have latched onto that particular diagnosis and perpetuated it ever since. And historians, in general, pay very little attention to the health record of their subjects. They tend to be dealt with as simply a footnote to the life and legacy of these famous people. And so, only when a physician -- with the kind of interest that I've had for 20 years -- gets involved in these cases is there a concerted effort to try to wade through the medical information and come up with a diagnosis that fits the information that's available.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, it turns out: Being in the White House itself was actually what killed William Henry Harrison. And what's even crazier is that Dr. Mackowiak found that that contaminated White House water supply was actually the secret killer of a couple more presidents we're about to encounter in upcoming episodes.

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