But backroom etiquette and a silver tongue do not a president make (at least, they didn’t in 1838), and the little magician found his hat woefully empty of rabbits while in the White House. The financial panic of 1837, though largely the result of Jackson’s emasculation of the Bank of the United States, hit the country with its economic pants down, and the blame immediately fell on the new president. It was the worst economic crisis yet in American history, and Van Buren—convinced, like his predecessor, that government shouldn’t interfere with such things—embraced a policy of inactivity. This worsened both the economy and his popularity. When the economy took another hit in 1839, Van Buren, having learned his lesson, took action by creating a strong and independent treasury. But it was too late—by then known popularly as “Martin Van Ruin,” he failed to win reelection in 1840.
His single term as chief executive also witnessed the continued resettlement of American Indians, resulting in the infamous “Trail of Tears” that decimated the Cherokees. To his credit, though, Van Buren managed to avoid a war with Great Britain (yes, the British again!) that was sparked by a rebellion in Canada.
Van Buren’s White House was criticized for its lavish furnishings and infamous golden spoons.
In the end, his necromantic nicknames couldn’t have been more apt. For there was more to Martin Van Buren than meets the eye . . .
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COATS, SOOTHES, RELIEVES . . .
Van Buren’s angst over the financial panic of 1837 gave him a chronic upset stomach. His remedy: a concoction of soot and charcoal mixed in water. Granted, this was long before the days of modern medicine, but still, the poor fool dumped soot, charcoal, and water into his agitated stomach.
COMMITTED WAFFLER
Martin Van Buren was renowned for not taking a stand. One story, which Van Buren admits to in his autobiography, tells how one senator accepted a bet that he could actually make Van Buren admit to something with finality. “It’s been rumored that the sun rises in the east,” said the senator to Van Buren. “Do you believe it?” “Well, Senator,” came the reply, “I understand that’s the common acceptance, but as I never get up till after dawn, I can’t really say.”
Loony Spoons
There is a paradox about Martin Van Buren: Though born of middle-class means and a champion of populist politics, he aspired to the aristocracy his whole life. Even before becoming president, he was widely accused of taking on airs and of throwing lavish, decidedly unrepublican parties and dinners. He wore clothes that other Democrats thought effete and generally avoided the bustling public gatherings that other presidents—particularly Jackson—used to congregate with voters. (Van Buren was the first president not to hold a Fourth of July reception, deciding instead to join a garish parade in his native New York.) Such behavior would eventually be his undoing.
The man who would most effectively use Little Van’s reputation against him was Pennsylvania congressman Charles Ogle. During the election of 1840, Ogle, a longtime opponent of Van Buren’s, gave a lengthy speech on the alleged extravagance of the president’s lifestyle. According to Ogle, the White House had become “a palace as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” It would go down in history as the “gold spoons” speech, for Ogle made reference to the gold utensils that Van Buren held with his gloved hands to daintily sip his rich food. Though mostly hogwash, it made an impression—Ogle’s speech would even be distributed as a pamphlet. As a result, voters had “golden spoons” dancing in their heads when they cast their ballots for contender William Henry Harrison, who went on to win.
Most of Ogle’s speech was utterly inaccurate (much of the White House furniture was old and falling apart), but the White House did indeed possess a set of golden spoons—purchased twenty years earlier by James Monroe.
HANNAH WHO?
Martin Van Buren wrote an autobiography that is notable for two reasons:
1. It is as dry as unbuttered toast.
2. It fails to mention, even once, the author’s wife, Hannah Hoes Van Buren.
9 WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
February 9, 1773–April 4, 1841
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1841
PARTY: Whig
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 68
VICE PRESIDENT: John Tyler
RAN AGAINST: Martin Van Buren
HEIGHT: 5′8″
NICKNAMES: “Tippecanoe,” “Old Granny”
SOUND BITE: “Some folks are silly enough to have formed a plan to make a president of the U.S. out of this Clerk and Clod Hopper” (referring to himself).
One of William Henry Harrison’s campaign promises was to forgo seeking a second term once he was president. It was the only part of his platform he carried out: One month after taking office, he was dead.
Harrison was the last American president born an English subject. Though his father (a signer of the Declaration of Independence) had hoped he would become a physician, the army life beckoned, and Harrison became an officer, making a name for himself on the northwestern frontier as an Indian fighter and territorial governor. In 1811, he fought an Indian alliance at the junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers, beginning his rise as a war hero. His reputation would be galvanized during the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames, where troops led by Harrison defeated a British and Indian force that included Tecumseh, who was killed. Aside from bloodstained credentials like these, he had little to recommend him to the presidency besides a stint in the Senate (which took him several tries to win) and a posting as ambassador to Colombia (where he was almost thrown in jail for supporting an uprising against the government).
Harrison’s 105-minute inaugural speech—made on a cold and blustery day in March—would ultimately cost the new president his life.
But if Harrison was no dream candidate, his campaign for president was one of the most important in American history. Before 1840, active campaigning for office was considered about as crass as writing a blurb for your own book. Candidates were supposed to maintain an air of ambivalence while others did their stumping for them. Harrison changed all that by personally jumping into the fray with earnest, smiling enthusiasm, and his Whig party cohorts turned the campaign into a circus. They dismissed opponent Martin Van Buren as a snob and a dandy, claiming their boy Harrison was the real man of the people. There were parties, bands, garish banners. It worked.
Unfortunately, prominent Whigs like Henry Clay expected Harrison to be the sort of president they could dominate. They’d pulled out all the stops to get him into the White House, and he was supposed to return the favor by letting them run his administration. Alas, Harrison—in his sixties and unaccustomed to being treated like a child—chafed under the party’s collar and began telling Clay and company where they could stick their “suggestions.”
The conflict was resolved not by compromise or negotiation but by what was probably pneumonia. Harrison got it, and the Whigs ended up getting President John Tyler—who would prove even tougher to dominate than Harrison. But that’s another story.
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LET THIS BE A LESSON TO US ALL: KEEP IT SHORT!
If William Henry Harrison is remembered for having the shortest term of office, he’s also famous for having the longest inaugural speech on record—an insufferable one hour and forty-five minutes. To make matters worse, he delivered it on a day that was remarkably cold and blustery. His audience had dressed for the occasion, but Harrison insisted on delivering his epic without a coat or gloves. He fell sick the next day, and, though he recovered after only a few days, the illness may have weakened his system—just weeks later, on March 27, he started having chills that forced him to skip a cabinet meeting and go straight for his bed.
Doctors soon descended upon him and besieged him for the next week with “remedies” that were old-fashioned even for 1841. After a regimen of castor oil, calomel, i
pecac, opium, camphor, and brandy, it is perhaps little wonder that his condition grew worse; from chills, his affliction soon diversified into colitis, vomiting, and hepatitis. Mercifully, he died on April 4, 1841.
10 JOHN TYLER
March 29, 1790–January 18, 1862
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1841–1845
PARTY: None
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 51
VICE PRESIDENT: None
RAN AGAINST: N/A
HEIGHT: 6′
NICKNAME: “His Accidency”
SOUND BITE: “Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.”
William Henry Harrison was the first president to kick the bucket while in office, and this posed a particularly thorny problem for Vice President John Tyler: Was he now the president of the United States or merely the sitting president of the United States?
John Tyler had more children than any other president in U.S. history—fifteen in all!
The Constitution was a bit vague on the issue, but Tyler didn’t hesitate to give his opinion: He was the chief executive, fully vested with the office’s powers, and he accepted no arguments to the contrary. Indeed, for the first few months of his administration, when he received official mail addressed to the “Acting President of the United States,” he promptly returned all of it marked “addressee unknown.”
Tyler was a Virginian who had served as governor of his home state as well as in both houses of the U.S. Congress. He had received the vice presidential nod because of his support for big Whig Henry Clay, and now he found himself in the same pickle that Old Man Harrison had been in: Clay and the rest of the Whig party were going to govern the country, and Tyler—already dubbed “His Accidency”—would have to play along nicely, or there’d be trouble.
There was trouble. The Whig-run Congress wanted to reestablish the powerful Bank of the United States that had been destroyed by Jackson and Van Buren. Tyler, a devout states’ rights man, feared what such a bank could be capable of; he broke party lines and vetoed the idea. The Whigs went berserk, banishing him from the party. Five of his six cabinet members resigned. It was a disaster.
Because Tyler had once betrayed the Democrats as well, he now found himself openly loathed by both parties. It was a gloomy four years as he and Congress battled each other (Tyler cast an unprecedented nine vetoes in his one term), and threats against his life seemed to arrive daily at the White House. As if that weren’t enough, his first wife, Letitia, who’d been wasting away in her bedroom for months, died from a stroke in 1842.
For all that, Tyler’s administration managed two triumphs: the settlement with England of firm boundaries between Maine and Canada and—in the eleventh hour of his term—beginning the annexation of Texas (which the president considered his greatest accomplishment). Perhaps more important, Tyler also took another bride: Julia Gardiner, a vivacious, intelligent beauty who was thirty years his junior. She would be the brightest part of his failed presidency.
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OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD
Tyler’s estrangement from the Whig party was no joke. Angry mobs made a habit of showing up at the White House—some even burned him in effigy. There were also plenty of bomb threats. Once, when an unmarked package arrived at the White House, a staff member was called to take a look at it. While Tyler hid behind a marble column, the servant proceeded to hack the parcel to pieces with a meat cleaver, only to reveal a dilapidated toy.
In a unique act of pity, Congress passed “Tyler’s Bill,” which provided for the first federally funded White House security. The force consisted of four men—they would be in plain clothes and referred to officially as “doormen.” And, no, they didn’t wear dark glasses.
GARNERING GARDINER
In 1842, John Tyler’s son, John Jr., fell for a bright and flirtatious young woman from East Hampton, New York, named Julia Gardiner. She and her sister had been brought by their father to go fishing for husbands in Washington high society. But it wasn’t John Jr. who would find a marital hook in his mouth, for John Sr. had his eye on the irresistible Julia, too. And, well, he was the president of the United States.
Having gone through a rather hasty mourning for first wife, Letitia, President Tyler set about winning Julia’s heart with impressive tenacity. But while the young lady was captivated by Tyler, she didn’t say yes to the big question.
That is, until her father got blown to pieces by a defective cannon. It happened on February 28, 1844. The new steam frigate Princeton, jewel of the American navy, was making a maiden cruise down the Potomac. Aboard were many of Washington’s elite and powerful, including the president and the Gardiners (now regularly seen in Tyler’s company at social events). Also aboard was a giant monstrosity called, ironically, Peacemaker—a new cannon of prodigious proportions, the largest in the world. As the vessel made its way down the river, Princeton’s crew, delighted with their new toy and eager to show it off, fired Peacemaker twice, to everyone’s delight. When, upon passing Mount Vernon, someone suggested firing it one last time in honor of George Washington, the crew enthusiastically complied.
This was unfortunate, because the big beast was flawed. It exploded, turning the deck of the Princeton into a killing ground. Among the instantly slain were Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and Julia Gardiner’s father.
Upon hearing of her father’s demise, Julia fainted. When the ship later docked at Alexandria, she was carried ashore in the arms of the president. According to Julia herself, the death of her father occasioned a change in her feelings for the president. She agreed to marry him, and the two were wed in a secret ceremony in New York City on June 26, 1844.
Presidential Progeny
“My children are my principal treasure,” John Tyler was once heard to say. If we are to take him at his word, he was a wealthy man indeed. Tyler had more children than any other president in American history: eight by Letitia and seven by Julia. When he married Julia, his eldest daughter was five years older than her stepmother. Someone once asked Tyler if he weren’t a trifle old to be marrying a woman as young as his second wife, who was twenty-three. “Pooh,” he replied. “Why, my dear sir, I am just full in my prime.” And here’s a mind-bender: Tyler had been born when George Washington was president, and his youngest daughter, Mary—born when Tyler was seventy years old—died during Harry Truman’s administration. That’s a span of thiry-two presidents—more than 150 years!
11 JAMES KNOX POLK
November 2, 1795–June 15, 1849
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1845–1849
PARTY: Democratic
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 49
VICE PRESIDENT: George M. Dallas
RAN AGAINST: Henry Clay
HEIGHT: 5′8″
NICKNAMES: “Young Hickory,” “Napoleon of the Stump”
SOUND BITE: “No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.”
James Knox Polk, a stern-faced man whose hair looked like an early nineteenth-century version of the mullet, was the original dark horse candidate. Martin Van Buren was the Democratic favorite for the election of 1844, and the Whigs were pinning their hopes on the incomparable Henry Clay, who ran Congress as if it were his personal fiefdom. But both Van Buren and Clay had spoken out against what had become the issue of the day: annexing Texas. Polk wanted to gobble up all the territory he could, and he let everybody know it. For this reason, Andrew Jackson—philosopher-king of the Democratic party and an ardent fan of annexation—supported Polk, and Polk went on to win the election. Though John Tyler had laid all the groundwork to make Texas part of the United States, Polk rode into the White House for supporting it. And stealing land from Mexico would become his administration’s legacy.
Sweeping the country was a belief in Manifest
Destiny, which saw the United States expanding its borders all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The concept had become so popular that most Americans didn’t give a damn who or what stood in the way of their pancontinental ambitions. In such an environment, Polk was the man of the hour, a leader convinced of his nation’s destiny and its right to exercise force to make it happen.
The new president eyed California the way a glutton eyes a buffet, and he was determined to get it at any cost. That cost, ultimately, would be war—California, after all, was Mexican territory. After bullying, bribing, and berating Mexico to no effect, he settled on naked force. Texas would be the spark: While Mexico believed that its boundary with Texas ran along the Nueces River, Polk insisted the Rio Grande, farther south, was the actual border. It was a dubious claim at best, but that didn’t stop him. (Plenty of congressmen saw through the ruse and protested loudly, but to no avail.) General Zachary Taylor was sent to keep an eye on the Mexicans—and was ordered south of the Nueces, to the Rio Grande. When Mexican forces reacted to foreign troops on their territory with force, Polk had the cojones to accuse them of shedding “American blood on American soil” and got Congress to pass a declaration of war.
In 1848, after two years of bloody fighting, a beaten Mexico was forced to give away a hell of a lot more than the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. To the victor go the spoils, and America secured a stretch of territory that today includes much of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona.
Polk’s distinctive mullet hairstyle would later influence generations of heavy metal bands and country western singers.
That Manifest Destiny thing is something else, ain’t it?
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Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents Page 5
