Benjamin Harrison, the President Afraid of His Own Light Switches

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Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and great grandson of Declaration signer Benjamin Harrison V, yet started his Indianapolis law career as a court crier earning $2.50 a day. A Miami University graduate married to Caroline Scott, he raised the 70th Indiana Infantry in the Civil War, led a hand to hand assault on a Confederate battery at Resaca, brewed coffee for freezing pickets near Nashville and was made a brevet brigadier general by Abraham Lincoln. He represented the federal government in the civil suit that followed Ex parte Milligan, entered the Senate in 1881, backed veterans' pensions, opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and lost his seat after Democrats gerrymandered the Indiana legislature.

In 1888 he ran a front porch campaign, lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland by about 90,000 votes and won the Electoral College, amid the blocks of five bribery scandal tied to supporter William Wade Dudley, whom he cut off after the election. His administration and the Billion Dollar Congress produced the Dependent and Disability Pension Act, the McKinley Tariff, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act. He pushed the Lodge federal elections bill to protect Black voting rights, which failed, and built a modern steel navy from a fleet of two commissioned warships. Cleveland beat him in 1892, and in 1898 he argued Venezuela's boundary case against Britain in Paris for over 25 hours before dying in Indianapolis in 1901.

• He and his wife were so afraid of the new White House electric lights that they left them on all night rather than touch the switches.
• In 1889 he became the earliest president whose voice survives, on a Bettini wax cylinder.
• Under the Land Revision Act of 1891 he created the first federal forest reserves, covering 22 million acres.
• He signed the law creating Sequoia National Park and protected the Casa Grande ruin in Arizona.
• After leaving office he opposed tariffs on Puerto Rico, calling government by absolute executive power un-American.