Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote, governed for four years through the most productive Congress of the century, and lost again to the man he had beaten. He was the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration, an Indianapolis lawyer and a Civil War brigadier general, and he was so cold in person that his own supporters called him the human iceberg; he could hold a crowd of ten thousand and lose a man he had just shaken hands with. In 1888 he trailed the incumbent by around ninety thousand votes and won the electoral college by carrying New York and Indiana narrowly, an outcome that would not recur for a hundred and twelve years. The Congress that came in with him spent the first peacetime budget of a billion dollars and legislated accordingly. It passed the first federal law against monopoly, a short and vaguely worded statute that would be the basis of American competition law for the next century and was almost unused for its first decade. It raised the tariff to the highest level in American history, which raised prices, was blamed for doing so, and cost the party the following midterms catastrophically. It committed the Treasury to buying silver monthly, which satisfied nobody and drained the gold reserve. It admitted six new states, more than any administration since the founding. It also came within a filibuster of protecting the vote. A federal elections bill would have put congressional elections under federal supervision and enforced the fifteenth amendment in the South; the House passed it, the Senate talked it to death, and no comparable measure was attempted for seventy-five years, during which Black southerners were disenfranchised almost completely. In the same period soldiers killed some two hundred and fifty Lakota at Wounded Knee, which the army treated as a battle and awarded medals for. Harrison built the modern navy, convened the first Pan-American conference, and negotiated a treaty to annex Hawaii which his successor withdrew from the Senate as soon as he arrived.
- Lived: 1833 CE – 1901 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
