The Longest Inaugural, but the Shortest Presidency

Larry Reed
Lawrence W (“Larry”) Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty.

On this Inauguration Day, it’s worth noting that the man who delivered the longest inaugural address in American history also presided over the shortest presidency. If there’s any lesson there, it might be this: keep it short and sweet.

Wearing neither coat nor hat on a wintry March 4, 1841, America’s ninth president – William Henry Harrison of Indiana – took the oath of office and began a nearly two-hour speech. At 8,460 words, it was more than three times longer than the average of all American presidential inaugural addresses. It would have been even longer if Daniel Webster, the incoming Secretary of State, hadn’t already edited it for length. By contrast, George Washington’s second inaugural address in 1793, the briefest ever, contained a mere 135 words.

Harrison died just a month into his presidency, on April 4, at age 68. The one thing millions of Americans think they know about him is that he caught pneumonia on Inauguration Day, and that’s what killed him 31 days later. That is probably not true.

The President’s health seemed fine for the first three weeks of his presidency. He ran Cabinet meetings, complained openly about the multitude of office-seekers expecting appointments, and enjoyed morning walks around town. On March 24, while on one of those walks, he returned to the White House drenched by a cold rain. He didn’t bother to change clothes for hours. Two days later he called the doctor in, not for a sore throat or a cough, but for “anxiety and fatigue.”

In a March 31, 2014, New York Times article titled “What Really Killed William Henry Harrison?” Jane McHugh and Philip A Mackowiak explained the verdict of modern epidemiologists: The president died from enteric fever, likely brought on by a nearby open sewer that contaminated the White House water supply. They wrote:

In those days the nation’s capital had no sewer system. Until 1850, some sewage simply flowed onto public grounds a short distance from the White House, where it stagnated and formed a marsh; the White House water supply was just seven blocks downstream of a depository for “night soil,” hauled there each day at government expense.

That field of human excrement would have been a breeding ground for two deadly bacteria, Salmonella typhi and S. paratyphi, the causes of typhoid and paratyphoid fever – also known as enteric fever, for their devastating effect on the gastrointestinal system.

Sewage term-limited the president, not a common cold or pneumonia. Supporting this theory is the fact that other presidents of that period, James Knox Polk and Zachary Taylor, also developed severe gastroenteritis while living at the White House. Taylor, like Harrison, would die from it.

As for Harrison, it probably didn’t help that the president was 68 (elderly in those days), or that his doctor administered numerous enemas and prescribed such unhelpful treatments as skin blistering and mustard packs (his doctor’s report is here).

But what about that two-hour speech? Was it any good?

As a member of the Whig Party, Harrison endorsed many facets of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay’s dubious “American System”, including the re-establishment of a national bank, high tariffs, and federal infrastructure subsidies. The bank issue, by the way, was wisely rejected by his running mate and presidential successor, John Tyler, and produced a violent demonstration at the White House in the summer of 1841. Because Harrison’s speech reiterated Clay’s flawed economics, I don’t give it high marks on substance.

As to delivery, the sheer length of the address is a mark against it. Even if Harrison didn’t die from delivering it in bad weather, I can’t help but wonder if any of the listeners who endured it might have. Moreover, Harrison was a military man, not a literary virtuoso, and his penchant for windy sentences makes for tedious listening or reading. For example, this passage is quite typical:

It may be observed, however, as a general remark, that republics can commit no greater error than to adopt or continue any feature in their systems of government which may be calculated to create or increase the lover of power in the bosoms of those to whom necessity obliges them to commit the management of their affairs; and surely nothing is more likely to produce such a state of mind than the long continuance of an office of high trust.

That’s word salad – I think – for ‘Don’t hang around too long.’ But he promised not to serve more than one term: and we can at least credit him with keeping his word.

When William Henry Harrison’s grandson Benjamin was sworn in as America’s 23rd president in 1889, he may have learned from his grandfather’s example. He kept his inaugural address to half the length of the old man’s.