There is an interesting presidential site in Indianapolis that the Trumans didn’t visit when they passed through the city: Benjamin Harrison’s house. They were running late but probably wouldn’t have stopped even if they’d had the time, because Harry Truman didn’t think much of Benjamin Harrison. He considered him a “do-nothing” president. “I tend to pair up Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower,” Truman once wrote, “because they’re the two presidents I can think of who most preferred laziness to labor.” Ouch! As if comparing him to poor old Ben was the cruelest thing Truman could say about Ike. Now, Harrison and Eisenhower had a few things in common – both were Republicans, both were successful war generals – but it’s not fair to call Harrison, at least, lazy. Nor did he do nothing as president. Harry was wrong. Allow me to set the record straight.

Benjamin Harrison is best remembered (if he’s remembered at all) as the president who rearranged the White House furniture between Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms. But, in his single term, Harrison rebuilt the U.S. Navy, set aside more than 13 million acres of public land as forest preserves, established Ellis Island to process immigrants, and signed the Sherman Antitrust Act. Six states were admitted to the Union on his watch: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. (Before he signed the bills admitting the Dakotas, Harrison shuffled them so nobody would know which state was admitted first.)

He was the president who converted the White House from gas to electricity (probably so none of Cleveland’s appliances would work when he moved back in). He was the last president with a full beard and the last to have been a Civil War general (he preferred to be called “General,” not “Mr. President”). Oh, and he loved oysters.

Harrison is also the only grandchild of a president to become a president, and he certainly outperformed his grandfather in the White House. William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia after delivering, in the pouring rain, a two-hour inaugural address – the longest in the annals of the presidency. (He wasn’t wearing a hat, incidentally.) He died 31 days later. (The intervening Harrison, John, was “only” a congressman. After he died, his body was snatched from the family plot. Benjamin discovered it hanging upside down at a nearby medical school, making him, as far as I can tell, the only president to have discovered his father’s dead body hanging upside down at a medical school.)

Benjamin Harrison was also the first president to sign a billion-dollar budget, and that led to his downfall. The Democrats made government spending a campaign issue. On November 8, 1892, Harrison was defeated in his bid for reelection by his old nemesis, Cleveland. (Cleveland’s running mate, incidentally, was Adlai Stevenson, grandfather of the 1952 presidential candidate.) Eight-year-old Harry Truman would remember that night for the rest of his life. “My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory,” Truman wrote a lifetime after the event. “He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the northeast corner of the house with a flag and bunting.” 

Harrison returned to Indianapolis with an especially heavy heart, for not only had he lost the presidency that fall – he had also lost his wife. Caroline Scott Harrison had died of tuberculosis exactly two weeks before Election Day.

In his grief, Harrison threw himself into renovating his home in the Northside, an exclusive neighborhood a mile north of downtown Indianapolis. The three-story redbrick mansion is located at 1230 North Delaware Street. Coincidentally, Harry Truman’s address in Independence was 219 North Delaware Street, but there the similarities end. Harrison’s house was built in 1875 at a cost of $29,000 – $4,000 more than Harry and Bess paid for their house more than 75 years later.

Harrison had the house refitted with modern plumbing, replaced the gas with electricity (as he’d done at the White House), and added an imposing, two-story wraparound porch to the facade.

Harrison also threw himself back into his work. Unlike Truman, he wasn’t shy about capitalizing on his name after he left the White House. He resumed his law practice, charging a minimum retainer of $500. He billed Stanford University $25,000 for delivering a series of lectures. In 1895, his income was $50,000.

In 1896, Harrison, who was 62, married Mary Lord Dimmick, a lovely 38-year-old widow who also happened to be the daughter of his late wife’s sister. In other words, his new wife was his niece.

Harrison’s two grown children, 41 and 38 at the time, did not approve and boycotted the wedding. Harrison and his second wife had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1897. Four years later, Harrison died, like his grandfather, of pneumonia. There was, inevitably perhaps, a bitter dispute over the inheritance.

In 1913, Mary and Elizabeth moved to New York and rented out the mansion on Delaware Street. Eventually it became a rooming house. In 1937 Mary sold the house and its furnishings to the Arthur Jordan Foundation, with the understanding that it be turned into a memorial to her late husband. Initially, though, the foundation turned it into a dormitory for female students at a nearby music school. When the school moved in 1951, the house was finally opened to the public. Harrison’s descendents still hold family reunions there, at which, reportedly, they still squabble over the inheritance.

I showed up at the Benjamin Harrison home a few minutes early for the 10:30 tour, and while I was waiting on the porch, a mail carrier arrived with a handful of letters. With mock incredulity I asked her, “Benjamin Harrison still gets mail?” She just smiled.

The Northside neighborhood isn’t as exclusive as it used to be. After the First World War, Indianapolis’s leading lights began migrating farther north, up Meridian Street. The grand mansions they left behind fell into disrepair. Many were demolished. In the 1960s, Interstate 65 was routed through the neighborhood, and it still looms ominously overhead today. Preservation efforts began in 1978, when the neighborhood was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, the Old Northside (as it is now known) has been somewhat revitalized, partly by young couples swooping in to gobble up the giant Victorian homes on the cheap and renovate them.

As tourist attractions go, the Benjamin Harrison home will never rival, say, Disneyland, yet it still draws nearly 30,000 visitors a year – almost as many as the Truman home in Independence. My tour group, however, consisted solely of me. My guide was a retired 55-year-old sporting goods executive named Joel.

Joel had only recently begun giving tours at the home. Maybe that’s why he was so thorough. Oh so very thorough. Joel described every detail of every room in great, well, detail. And just when I thought he was finished with a room, his eyes would scan it just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Somehow he usually had.

But, to be fair, there was much to describe. Each of the mansion’s sixteen rooms is crammed with stuff: period furniture, silverware, dishes, clothing, draperies, carpets – and handheld fans. Lots and lots of fans. Apparently the Harrison women collected them. Fans were a big deal back in the day, and not just because they helped keep you cool. Women used them to communicate. A fan carried in front of the face meant, “Follow me.” Drawing a fan across the cheek meant, “I love you.” Closing a fan meant, “I wish to speak with you.” You could tell a lot about a lady by the way she held her fan. In her official White House portrait, Caroline Scott Harrison is holding a fan in a way that says, “I am the first lady.”

In the parlor there was a Reginaphone, a music box that played large metal discs that looked a bit like records. I asked Joel if it still worked. He shrugged and turned the crank. It played a quite lovely version of a Sousa march called “The Liberty Bell.” Of course, until I looked it up later, I only knew it as the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In the master bedroom there was a contraption with pulleys and weights called a Whitney Home Gymnasium, the 19th-century equivalent of a Universal gym machine. Old Ben used it to keep in shape, though judging by his portraits, he wasn’t fanatical about it.

It was all very interesting, but I had an appointment and I needed to get going. I’d thought the tour would last 45 minutes, maybe an hour. It was ninety minutes before I escaped the clutches of Joel and the Benjamin Harrison home.

(Photo by author)