As the Presidential election season heats up again, I have heard and read so many commentaries and editorials about President Biden's age. Many people hold the consensus that Biden is too old to run for President again and should step aside for someone younger.
He was the oldest man who had ever run for president, and the demands for him to step aside due to his advanced age grew louder and more forceful. The man was William Henry “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison, the Whig Party candidate in 1840. He was 67.
“Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year on him,” one Baltimore newspaper columnist wrote, “and take my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.” Instead, the Whigs mounted the first modern presidential campaign, with nationwide rallies and speeches, that used the attacks to catapult “Granny” Harrison into the White House.
President Biden is 81; if reelected, he would start his next term at 82. Polls show widespread concern about Biden’s age and his likely rematch with 77-year-old Republican Donald Trump, who was the second-oldest president at the start of his term. In a New York Times poll released recently, 71 percent of respondents said Biden was “too old” to be an effective president.
But the Democratic Party establishment continues to support Biden, just as the Whigs did with Harrison in 1840. The attacks on Old Tippecanoe began soon after the Whigs nominated the former general, a hero in the War of 1812, at its convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to run against 58-year-old President Martin Van Buren. Previously, the oldest president to take office was 61-year-old Andrew Jackson. Democrats quickly labeled the Whigs “Grannycrats.”
In early 1840, Thomas Elder, a Whig Party leader, had an idea. Instead of fighting the old-man image, he decided to portray Harrison as the poor man’s champion, living as a simple farmer in a log cabin and drinking hard cider, the people’s drink. No matter that the old general grew up on the prestigious Berkeley Planation in Virginia, the son of a wealthy signer of the Declaration of Independence, and now lived in a mansion in North Bend, Ohio. Or that he did not drink hard cider.
Until then, political parties did not conduct national rallies, and it was deemed improper for presidential candidates to deliver campaign speeches. Nevertheless, the Whigs mounted “log cabin and hard cider” rallies across the country. On February 22, George Washington’s birthday, thousands of people poured into Columbus, Ohio, for a parade featuring log cabins on wheels, marching bands and free cider. The colorful parade spurred one spectator, Alexander Coffman Ross, to write a song about Harrison and his running mate, former senator John Tyler of Virginia.
“What has caused the great commotion, motion, motion, our country through?” the song went. “It is the ball a-rolling on for Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Tippecanoe and Tyler Too became the campaign’s theme and remains one of the most famous campaign slogans.
Log cabin fever spread across the nation. “The prairies are on fire,” a Cleveland newspaper wrote. More than 60,000 people jammed into Boston for a five-mile parade. A parade in Baltimore by the Whig Young Men featured a rolling log cabin with a live eagle perched on top. In Springfield, Illinois, state lawmaker Abraham Lincoln spoke for Harrison from the back of a horse-drawn wagon. Women became involved in a presidential campaign for the first time, waving white handkerchiefs. There was a Log Cabin newspaper edited by Horace Greeley, the future founder of the New York Tribune.
Meanwhile, Whigs sought to create a national image of Harrison as a young army hero. One poster featured a portrait of Harrison at age 27 - one that had been doctored years later by the artist Rembrandt Peale, who painted a military uniform over Harrison’s original civilian clothes. A lithograph by Nathaniel Currier showed Harrison as a dashing figure in a black suit and cape against a purple sky.
Harrison did not take part in any of these celebrations. He stayed home and answered letters from voters. Then a voter in Oswego, New York, complained he had written Harrison but received a response from a Whig committee. The Democratic press jumped on the case.
“HORRID BARBARITY” screamed a headline in the Washington Globe, the official paper for Van Buren. “We are credibly informed - though we can scarcely believe it, the fact appears so monstrous and is incredible - that the keepers of Gen. Harrison’s conscience have carried their barbarous caution so far as to shut up the old gentleman in an Iron Cage.” (The Globe’s editor, Francis P. Blair, lived across from the White House. Today the Blair House hosts visiting international guests.)
Democratic papers derided Harrison as “General Mum.” It was more than he could stand. So he agreed to speak at a remembrance of the 1813 British siege of his base at Fort Meigs in northern Ohio. On his horse-carriage trip, the old general stayed overnight in Columbus. On the morning of June 6, 1840, on the steps of the National Hotel, Harrison spontaneously gave the first presidential campaign speech in history. “The story goes that I have not only a committee of conscience-keepers but that they put me in a cage,” he joked.
On June 11, Harrison gave the first formal presidential campaign speech to 40,000 people at Fort Meigs. To the nation’s shock, he also spoke in Cleveland and other Ohio cities. “When was there ever before such a spectacle … as a candidate for the Presidency, traversing the country, advocating his own claims for that high and responsible station? Never!” exclaimed the Cleveland Advertiser newspaper.
Democrats pointed out that Harrison did not live in a log cabin and continued to portray him as a feeble old man. To counter the image, Old Tip sometimes rode his white horse right up to the speaker’s stand. Other times he rode up in a horse-drawn open carriage and stood to wave to the crowd.
People flocked to see a presidential candidate campaign. Harrison drew 100,000 people in Dayton. “I rise, fellow citizens,” he began. A transcriber on the scene reported, “The multitude was here agitated as the sea when the wild wind blows upon it, and it was a full five minutes before the tumult of joy at seeing and hearing the next President of the United States could be calmed.”
Van Buren declined to join Harrison on the stump, considering it beneath the dignity of a president. The nation was in an economic decline, and Harrison won the electoral college 234 to 60. Democrats were shocked. “That the American people should have preferred an incapacitated old man … is indeed a phenomenon that occasions no little regret,” the Richmond Enquirer wrote.
In early 1841, Harrison spoke in Cincinnati as he boarded a boat for the first leg of his trip to Washington. “Fellow citizens, perhaps this may be the last time I may have the pleasure of speaking to you on Earth or seeing you,” he said.
On February 9, his 68th birthday, Old Tippecanoe became the first president-elect to arrive in Washington by train. On a cold and windy March 4, a coatless Harrison gave the longest inauguration speech in history, one hour and 45 minutes. Exactly one month later, the oldest president became the first commander in chief to die in office. The official cause was pneumonia - brought on by his underdressed inauguration, the legend goes, or possibly by a subsequent rainstorm - but a 2014 University of Maryland research report concluded he likely drank contaminated water from the White House tap.
Vice President Tyler became America’s 10th president. At 51, he was the youngest U.S. president to date.
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