Speeches of Benjamin Harrison, Twenty-Third President of the United States

These are the actual words of a president Americans have mostly forgotten, and that's precisely why they matter. Benjamin Harrison served in the gap between the Gilded Age's glittering wealth and the progressive era's reforms, and his speeches capture that pivotal moment when America was deciding what kind of nation it would become. Collected here are his campaign addresses, inaugural speech, and messages to Congress, all revealing a thinker far more sophisticated than his forgettable reputation suggests. Harrison tackles the hard stuff: vote suppression in the post-Reconstruction South, the tariffs that built American industry, the tension between labor and capital, and what it meant to be a democratic republic in an age of industrial giants. The compiler Charles Hedges deliberately chose unscripted, real speeches over polished orations, giving us Harrison in his own voice. For anyone curious about how Americans argued about their future in the 1890s, this is raw material.