The scion of a political dynasty ushers in the era of big government Politics was in Benjamin Harrison's blood. His great-grandfather signed the Declaration and his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, was the ninth president of the United States. Harrison, a leading Indiana lawyer, became a Republican Party champion, even taking a leave from the Civil War to campaign for Lincoln. After a scandal-free term in the Senate-no small feat in the Gilded Age-the Republicans chose Harrison as their presidential candidate in 1888. Despite losing the popular vote, he trounced the incumbent, Grover Cleveland, in the electoral college. In contrast to standard histories, which dismiss Harrison's presidency as corrupt and inactive, Charles W. Calhoun sweeps away the stereotypes of the age to reveal the accomplishments of our twenty-third president. With Congress under Republican control, he exemplified the activist president, working feverishly to put the Party's planks into law and approving the first billion-dollar peacetime budget. But the Democrats won Congress in 1890, stalling his legislative agenda, and with the First Lady ill, his race for reelection proceeded quietly. (She died just before the election.) In the end, Harrison could not beat Cleveland in their unprecedented rematch. With dazzling attention to this president's life and the social tapestry of his times, Calhoun compellingly reconsiders Harrison's legacy. Calhoun dusts off an almost thoroughly forgotten chief executive, known primarily for serving between Cleveland's two terms, to disclose a harbinger of the modern, activist president. Although born in his grandfather's house--and Grandfather was William Henry Harrison, the president famed for dying one month after inauguration--Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) wasn't to the manor born. He had to establish himself as an attorney before marrying, and become a hardworking high earner before his political ambitions bore fruit. He lost more elections than he won before his 1888 presidential victory; even then, he lost the popular vote because of huge Democrat majorities in the South. He passed more legislation, spent more money, and did more hands-on diplomacy than had any previous president. His single great failure was his legislation ensuring the voting rights of southern blacks. Democrats successfully stalled the bill in the Fifty-first Congress, and after they regained Congress in 1890 and the White House in 1892, the issue was dead until the 1960s. One of the most revelatory entries in the American Presidents series. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Charles W. Calhoun is a professor of history at East Carolina University. A former National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, Calhoun is the author or editor of four books, including The Gilded Age , and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era . He lives in Greenville, North Carolina. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. , (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century , in 2000.