Quote of the Day (William Henry Harrison, on States With “Financial Concerns”)

“In consequence of the embarrassed state of business and the currency, some of the States may meet with difficulty in their financial concerns. However deeply we may regret anything imprudent or excessive in the engagements into which States have entered for purposes of their own, it does not become us to disparage the States governments, nor to discourage them from making proper efforts for their own relief. On the contrary, it is our duty to encourage them to the extent of our constitutional authority to apply their best means and cheerfully to make all necessary sacrifices and submit to all necessary burdens to fulfill their engagements and maintain their credit, for the character and credit of the several States form a part of the character and credit of the whole country. The resources of the country are abundant, the enterprise and activity of our people proverbial, and we may well hope that wise legislation and prudent administration by the respective governments, each acting within its own sphere, will restore former prosperity.”—William Henry Harrison, Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1841

Here I was, ready to hold up to scorn the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, for insisting on delivering his entire inaugural address—the longest ever, more than 8,000 words, taking one hour and 45 minutes to read—in the midst of a snowstorm. (For his sins, Harrison died one month later of pneumonia he’d contracted as a result.)

I was about to contrast, in the nastiest possible way, Harrison’s long-winded lack of eloquence with other, far more memorable addresses given by our country’s chief executives on the same late-winter day: Thomas Jefferson’s first (“We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans”), delivered after the first peaceful transfer of power in the nation's history, and Abraham Lincoln’s first, given as America stood on the brink of civil war (“The mystic chords of memory,

stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”)

But search hard enough and you’re bound to find something of surprising import, and that’s the case even with Harrison, who’s fascinating to aficionados of American history (the shortest-serving President in the republic) but the bane of high-school students of the subject (how do you recall someone who never did anything remotely interesting—at least as presented in textbooks?).

Here, the new President discusses something we all recognize far too readily today: the hard-pressed condition of state governors as they figure out what to do with their budgets after a massive financial upheaval. Today’s governors are dealing with the aftermath of the 2007-09 recession (and the current anemic recovery), while those of Harrison’s era grappled with the consequences of the Panic of 1837 (a financial setback so severe that it won the Presidency for Harrison in his second contest against Martin Van Buren).

How else did the two situations resemble each other? How did they differ? It’s not a bad way for high-school teachers to show how a subject filled with mounds of dates that kids dread also has continuing relevance to their current circumstances.

Quote of the Day (Daniel Webster, on Editing an Inaugural Address)

“I have killed seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts.”—Daniel Webster, discussing how he edited an allusion-heavy draft of William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address, quoted in Jill Lapore, “Annals of the Presidency: The Speech—Have Inaugural Addresses Been Getting Worse?”, The New Yorker, January 12, 2009

(The link above is only an abstract—you’ll have to register to read the whole thing, with the alternatives being buying the issue or hunting it down in a library. Whatever you decide, reading Lapore’s almost unendlessly intriguing article on the fine—or, as it happens more often than not, not-so-fine—art of writing inaugural addresses will be worth your trouble.

After he finished deleting all the classical allusions in Harrison’s address, Webster—no economist of words himself—might have taken an ax to much of the rest of the content, since the President-elect in that 1841 speech went on, despite insanely cold winter weather, to deliver the longest inaugural address in American history. Harrison’s madness precipitated a cold that worsened into pneumonia, leading to his death one month later—the shortest term in office of any President.

If a highlight film of great inaugurals could be compiled, it wouldn’t last long, once you get past Kennedy’s, FDR’s, Lincoln’s, and Jefferson’s first. But Lapore brings to the forefront another address that, while not reaching that level of greatness, achieved a flickering power of its own: James A. Garfield’s, in 1881.

Garfield—my God, who knew?

Much of Lapore’s article uses Garfield’s prolonged, weeks-long agony in writing his own speech as a hilarious running thread through the piece.

But America might have been spared three-quarters of a century of lost opportunities and turmoil if it had listened to this Civil War veteran warning about the retreat from Reconstruction already taking place: “To violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the government itself.”

The Garfield link above is worth reading in its entirety. Finally, his dream of a race, long handcuffed by human-rights abuses, finally coming into its own, will be fulfilled less than two weeks from now, on the same spot where he spoke, by Barack Obama.)