Presidential Pie

While poking about on the history of Hoosier pie, I came across a great historical newspaper editorial about President Benjamin Harrison and pie that I had to share. I’ve transcribed it below with some very minimal annotation. The article mentions Hoosier pie, but I suspect here that the author is not specifically referring to a sugar cream pie, now known as a Hoosier pie, but is talking about Indiana pies in general. See what you think. Harrison’s relationship with pie was apparently life long. His obituary in the New York Times of 14 Nov. 1901 tells that while he lay dying, his young daughter from a second marriage brought him an apple pie that she had made. The former president smiled his recognition, but could not speak. He died not long after.

Milwaukee Sunday Sentinel, 27 Oct. 1889
Raising a Pie Issue

We doubt if that Democratic newspaper in New York which is interviewing a discharged Whitehouse cook can make any large amount of political capital out of the charge that the president and Mr. Halford[i] eat pie for breakfast. Most people in this happy land will ask with Emerson, “what else is pie for?”[ii] The notion that pie is something to be avoided, that it provokes dyspepsia, has been urged with assiduity for thirty years, yet pie continues to be the most popular of all the products of the bakery. It is worthy of note that pie is the horror, real or pretended, of those who have foisted on society those modern pastries that have done more to derange the human stomach and starve the human body than even hot mince pie. It was a proper distinction that was drawn by the Western man who, when asked what pastry he would have, replied: “I don’t want any pastry – gi’me some pie!” Pie is important enough and good enough to hold a place of its own without being classed under those modern abominations that are served under French names as food for human beings.

We are glad to observe that a reaction has set in against fancy desserts and in favor of pie, and we owe something to Mrs. Harrison[iii] for a noble example. When Gen. Harrison entered the Whitehouse, some anti-pie person persuaded him that it would not do to eat the plain and wholesome cookery of Indiana, including pie. Pie, he was told, was not only injurious, but was under a social ban. What was the result? “The new cook’s dishes laid him out.” He neglected pie for the croquettes, soufflés and other atrocities of the anti-pie element, and fell into the sharp clutches of dyspepsia. ‘Lige Halford, also, succumbed. Then Mrs. Harrison asserted herself. She fired the two French cooks and sent back to Indiana for her old negro cook,[iv] whose picturesque bandana now brightens the kitchen where the white cap of a gesticulating Frenchman recently bent over pylorus-vexing dishes. No more perfidious soufflés and croquettes for the president. He can have corn-beef boiled with cabbage, turnips and potatoes if he wants it; potatoes with the skins on, salt rising bread, corn-pone, hominy, baked apples, apple-dumplings and pie – good old-fashioned Hoosier pie, about which there is no fraud, and which makes a man feel that, whatever trials beset his path, life is still richly worth living. We look to see an improvement in the administration of national affairs, now that the president’s internal affairs are arranged.

If the Democratic party wants to switch off from the tariff issue and raise a pie issue for the next campaign, all right. If that party chooses to make war on pie and become a party of white-cap French cooks, well and good. This country will vote for pie every time.

[i] Elijah Walker Halford was Harrison’s aide/secretary (The Presidents: A Reference History [2002], 300).
[ii] This anecdote seems to originate in James Bradley Thayer’s A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (1884) which recounts an 1871 journey Thayer made with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[iii] Caroline Lavinia Scott Harrison was Benjamin Harrison’s first wife.
[iv] Dolly Johnson was the cook that the Harrisons brought to the White House from Indiana to replace the French chef.