How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (9 page)

Maybe it was because he still wanted to be in charge of the army without having to answer to any pesky secretary of war, but whatever the reason, as soon as Harrison retired from military service, he sought the presidency. William Henry Harrison wasn’t like a lot of other war-heroes-turned-president. Most of those men (like Grant, or Taylor), just sort of stumbled into the presidency on the strength of their national popularity. Harrison
wanted
the presidency, and he was just sneaky enough that he didn’t really care how he got it. In 1840, after trying and failing twice in his pursuit of the office, Harrison was prepared to lie.

The Whig Party wanted some way to distance their candidate, Harrison, from the incumbent Van Buren, so they turned Harrison
into a folksy, blue-collar hero, earning him the label of the “log cabin and hard cider candidate.” Harrison campaigned all over the country for years, reassuring everyone the whole time that he was a fun-loving guy that you could sit down and have a beer with. But it wasn’t enough for Harrison to be
just
the cool, good ole boy; he also needed to make shitty Van Buren look like an elitist aristocrat.

Harrison and his team started releasing flyers—illustrations of Harrison next to a log cabin—to demonstrate his down-to-earth authenticity and prove conclusively that he could be physically near a log cabin (in a drawing, anyway). The Whigs threw parades full of log cabin floats, folks drank whiskey out of log-cabin-shaped flasks to show support (somehow), and America ate it up. In a time when political machines were running things and it seemed like only an elite few made it to Washington, it was nice to see Harrison, a down-home, decent guy, seeking office.

Here’s the thing: Harrison was about as down-home and folksy as the cold and terrifying cyborg the Republicans ran in 2012. Harrison
didn’t
live in a log cabin
or
drink hard cider. He had acres and acres of land surrounding his mansion in Ohio, where he fought as a prohibitionist to close alcohol distilleries. Van Buren might have been shitty and elitist, but as a guy who was born and raised in a tavern, he certainly had a better claim to the “log cabin and hard cider” label than Harrison.

In the light of modern campaigning, where
every
candidate has an image that’s carefully constructed and maintained by a dedicated PR team, this might not seem like a huge deal, but it was fairly revolutionary at the time. Harrison’s entire campaign was based around selling an image, not a person. Harrison didn’t actually run on any issues. His campaign manager said, “Let no committee, no convention, no town meeting extract from him a single word about what he thinks now or what he will do hereafter.” Harrison went along with it, because he wanted the presidency. He wanted it bad enough that he didn’t care about his reputation, and he certainly wasn’t above rubbing dirt all over Van Buren’s stupid name. Harrison’s team even started an ugly rumor that Van Buren installed a
bathtub
in the
White
House
(apparently in the 1840s only assholes bathed), and the public went apeshit. Can you believe that? A bathtub. Like a common whore!

The campaign worked (a lesson adopted by literally every campaign that followed). Seventy-eight percent of the voters chose Harrison, because they fell for the lie about how real he was. Harrison, the uncompromising war hero, let his ambition blind him to anything else and lied his way into the White House. Watch out for him.

Still, if you’re looking for a good strategy for battling Harrison, you should maybe just wait it out. Be patient. This is a man who died thirty days into his presidency because he gave his inauguration speech outside during a freezing rainstorm without an overcoat or hat or gloves or anything else that might keep him warm. Maybe he was trying to show off how tough he was, or maybe he was still trying to play up his realness, because overcoats are for fancy people, and Harrison was a
man’s
man. Or maybe he just thought, “Hey, I wonder what’s the dumbest way I could die?” The point is, he delivered a two-hour speech in the cold, got sick, and died after being president for only a month. You should watch out for the good right arm that Harrison boasted about to his father-in-law but, if at all possible, just dance around, ride this one out, and before you know it, Harrison will completely exhaust himself to death.

John Tyler was born to be a rebel. No one knows what started it, but rejecting authority and taking matters into his own hands was simply in Tyler’s blood. Some of us are Fonzies, and some of us are Ritchies, and Tyler was a Fonzie. In elementary school, Tyler disagreed with the headmaster of his school, which is standard, so he organized his fellow classmates and staged a
revolt
, which is
crazy
. Sure, we all
thought
about it, but Tyler did it, because he is a loose
cannon
, and while most kids grow out of their youthful rebellion phase, Tyler let it define him.

Tyler was always fighting with whoever the authority was, even if the authority was the president, and even if the president was Andrew Jackson. Tyler made a name for himself as a senator by repeatedly criticizing President Jackson, voting against almost everything Jackson proposed. Tyler did this despite the fact that Tyler and Jackson were members of the same party and, in fact, his vocal condemnations
of Jackson were considered an “act of insurgency” by his party. Tyler was originally a Democrat like Jackson and stayed that way until, like a good little rebel, he got fed up with their establishment, quit, and joined a new party, the Whigs. He rose up the ranks of the Whigs quickly and was grateful when they made him William Henry Harrison’s running mate. It’s possible that Tyler would have fought Harrison, as he fought every authority figure in his life, but we’ll never know for sure, as Harrison died before anyone had a chance to decide if he was a good president.

John Tyler was the first man to serve as president without being elected. He stepped in when Harrison died, setting a president precedent and earning himself the unfortunate but appropriate nickname “His Accidency.” This was actually a fairly badass move; most people assumed a new election would be held, and some thought Tyler should just be an “acting president” until Congress decided what to do, but Tyler didn’t give them the chance. Shortly after Harrison died, Tyler took the oath of office and flat-out
told
everyone, “Hey, I’m the president now.
Deal with it
.” He promptly proceeded to tell Harrison’s cabinet that regardless of how they did things under Harrison,
Tyler
was in charge now. They were going to listen to him, and if anyone didn’t like it they could leave, because
nobody
tells Tyler what to do. A pretty ballsy move for someone who had no clear or legal right to be so ballsy.

Tyler’s first order of business as president was to piss off absolutely everyone. Whig leader Henry Clay expected Tyler to work closely with the Whigs (as Harrison would have done), but even
that
felt too much like manipulation to Tyler. Tyler vetoed most of Clay’s proposed legislation, hurting the Whig agenda and also running counter to how the Whigs believed a president should behave (their idea of the presidency involved vetoing as a rarity, and Tyler was immediately pretty veto-crazy). One by one, everyone in Tyler’s cabinet resigned out of protest, because he refused to listen to anyone who he thought was trying to influence or control him (which, according to Tyler, was everyone). When he didn’t change his policy even after his entire cabinet resigned, the Whigs officially kicked him out
of the party. This makes Tyler the only standing president who was dropped by his own party, and it’s all because he was worried that the Whigs were going to try to push him around. John Quincy Adams tried to get him impeached, and his critics in the media dubbed him “The President Without a Party,” setting a precedent for James Dean and any other future rebels who would go without things. Tyler’s decision to alienate his own party (the first entry on a long list of colossal fuck-uppery) had a devastating impact on his presidential legacy. The Whigs voted against him at every turn, and, as a result, he accomplished very few of his goals and is considered “hapless and inept” by most historians. He managed to officially add both Florida and Texas as states to the Union, but because of his steadfast refusal to play nice and make friends, he never had a chance of getting a second term and the American people saw him largely as a do-nothing president. With no party backing him for reelection, Tyler briefly considered forming his own party, but backed down at the last second because he was worried his running would split the vote between him and Democrat James Polk, ensuring an easy victory for Henry Clay, the Whig candidate. Tyler was always eager to stick it to The Man, and, as the guy with the most influence over the Whigs, Clay was The Man, so Tyler backed out of the race specifically to screw over Henry Clay, and it worked. It was an “If I’m going down, I’m taking you with me” sort of move, and it paid off.

In one final act of rebellion, Tyler spent his last few days in office throwing one amazing and legendary party. Tyler sent out two thousand invitations (though three thousand people eventually showed up, proving that even if the host is generally disliked, no one can turn down a free party), “eight dozen bottles of champagne were drunk with wine by the barrels,” and property was destroyed.

Tyler threw this party for no reason other than to deliver a silly little pun. When Tyler left the White House shortly thereafter, he remarked, “They cannot say now that I am a
president without a party
.” Then he put on sunglasses and a wicked fucking guitar solo just
happened
.

After his presidency, Tyler retired to his plantation, which he
named “Sherwood Forest,” as he saw himself as a Robin Hood figure, which is weird, because Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and John Tyler stole the presidency and owned like forty slaves, but whatever. Oh, right, the slavery thing, that’s important. Lest you think that Tyler’s rebellious streak was all fun, you should know that being a rebel
also
meant rebelling against the Union. Yes, when Tyler left office, he joined the Confederacy and turned on the nation over which he used to preside. He was considered a traitor,
and was the only former president whose death wasn’t officially announced or memorialized by the White House.