November 6, 1888: Cleveland vs. Harrison I

November 6, 1888: Benjamin Harrison is elected the 23rd President of the United States. The former U.S. Senator from Indiana, and grandson of 9th President William Henry Harrison, wins 233 Electoral Votes, defeating incumbent President Grover Cleveland, who had 168.

But Cleveland won the popular vote, 48.6 percent to 47.8. Matthew Quay, Republican boss of Pennsylvania, practically came out and admitted that he had the State's 30 Electoral Votes stolen for Harrison. If true (and it probably is), then the vote should have been 203-198 in Harrison's favor. Meaning that, if 1 more State was "stolen," then Cleveland should have been re-elected.

Indeed, 4 years later, after a hard Presidency with recession and labor strife, Harrison lost his bid for re-election, and Cleveland became the only former President ever to regain the office. (UPDATE: Donald Trump became the 2nd, in 2024.)

Harrison statue, Indianapolis

Roy Gordon played Harrison in the 1952 film Stars and Stripes Forever.

Harrison and he and his grandfather are the only Presidents to have represented Indiana, although neither was born there: William Henry was born in Virginia, and Benjamin was born in Ohio. The closest Indiana has come to having a President born there is 3 Vice Presidents: Thomas R. Marshall, under Woodrow Wilson; Dan Quayle, under George H.W. Bush; and Mike Pence, under Donald Trump.

(Even the other Vice Presidents representing Indiana were born elsewhere: Schuyler Colfax, under Ulysses S. Grant, was from New York; and Ohio was the birth State for both Thomas Hendricks, under Grover Cleveland, and Charles Fairbanks, under Theodore Roosevelt.

The only Benjamin Harrison High School is in Cayey, Puerto Rico. A fictional school with that name was depicted in the MTV series Finding Carter.

Only one American ship has ever been named Benjamin Harrison, and it wasn't for the 23rd President. Rather, SS Benjamin Harrison was a Liberty ship named for his great-grandfather, William Henry's father, a Signer of the Declaration of Independence. It only lasted 1 year, from March 1942 to March 1943, when it was attacked and scuttled.

The last surviving member of Harrison's Cabinet was John Wanamaker, who served as Postmaster General, and lived until 1922.

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November 6, 1888 was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. Hockey was still all-amateur. And basketball hadn't been invented yet.

But there was one college football game played that day: Yale University beat the Brooklyn-based Crescent Athletic Club, at Washington Park, home of the team that would become the Brooklyn Dodgers.