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August 1964 | Volume 15, Issue 5
The Speech That Toppled A President
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Below appears in shortened form the text of a rough-and-tumble, wickedly clever speech delivered in the House of Representatives against the candidacy of Martin Van Buren to succeed himself as President of the United States. It fixed the image of the urbane President as a social swell, a British toady with monarchical longings, a man who had lost touch with the American people, who ate foods with Frenchified names out of gold spoons, and was so effeminate that he used the same toiletries as Queen Victoria. This classic hatchet job was the work of Charles Ogle of Somerset, Pennsylvania, the second of three generations of Ogles to represent their district in Congress. Delivered on April 14, 1840, and widely circulated in pamphlet form during the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign, the harangue became in fact the keynote of the Whig campaign. Van Buren, a Democrat, was snowed under by the conservative candidate, General William Henry Harrison (“Old Tippecanoe”), a soi-disant hero of Indian fighting in the old Northwest. The immediate occasion for the speech was Ogle’s proposal to strike out of the general appropriations bill a small item—$3,665—for landscaping the grounds and repairing the furniture of the President’s House.
Little was heard in the circusy atmosphere of 1840 about serious public issues. The Whigs aimed shrewdly and successfully at the emotions and prejudices of the rising class of frontiersmen and small farmers, and beguiled them with slogans, frontier folklore, songs, floats, coonskin caps, kegs of hard cider, and replicas of the western log cabin, which in this year began its long run as the political symbol of the incorruptible man of the people who providentially appeared when needed to turn the rascals out. In vain the Democratic side dissected the “Gold Spoon” speech as an “omnibus of lies” and accused the Pennsylvania representative of snooping below stairs in the home of the President. The voters believed Ogle.
The text is taken from the pamphlet. The worst errors have been corrected, but the spirit of the old typography has been retained. One or two references should perhaps be explained. “Locofoco” was a tag applied to the radical wing of Jacksonian Democracy and later to Democrats in general. The “plateau” which Ogle lingered over in his imaginary stroll through the White House was a handsome thirteen-and-ahalf-foot centerpiece purchased in Paris for the State Dining Room by President Monroe, a fellow Whig, some thirty-three years before, at a cost of about 6,000 francs ($1,125). What Ogle objected to was the $75 President Van Buren spent in regilding the bronze band which surrounded the mirrored sections of the centerpiece. Millions of Americans saw it two years ago during Mrs. John F. Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House. Here, then, is the oratorical extravaganza which retired a President to private life.
I doubt much the policy of this Government in granting the Chief Magistrate emoluments or revenues of any