The President's House

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on the Benjamin Harrison house at 1230 North Delaware Street in Indianapolis, and on the question a president's house is the right place to ask: what could a presidency do about voting rights, and what happened when it tried? This is course 5 of the Indianapolis cluster and its civics anchor, and it is the one course in the series whose subject is a person with power rather than a place that lost it. Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, lived and died in this house. During his single term a bill to put federal supervisors on congressional elections passed the House, was filibustered in a Senate that had no way to end a filibuster, and was set aside by one vote. You will read the bill, read Harrison's own messages, watch a bill die by the ordinary machinery rather than by a losing vote, and then test the flattering version of the story against the parts of his record that do not fit it, including the Geary Act and Wounded Knee. You will read the house itself as architecture and as a museum, and learn the difference between what a building is and what a preserved building has been chosen to show. Finally you will connect a failed federal remedy in 1891 to a local boundary decision in this same city in 1970, because national power and local boundaries are two levers on the same question. A 360 tour of the site is planned and will be added to the Now section when its embed URL exists. The prerequisite course, The Green Book: How to Read a Route, teaches the research method this course applies.