From Grant to Trump, a history of presidential visits to Houston.
The most interesting one came courtesy of one you'd never guess.
Happy President’s Day! It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and the perfect day to reminisce on Houston’s hold, such as it is, on our chief executives.
Every president since Kennedy has visited Houston. Three have lived here full time: LBJ, as a young teacher of rhetoric at Sam Houston HS, and both Bushes, the elder in his dotage and the younger in his salad days.
Grant came here kinda sorta unofficially campaigning for a third term on March 30, 1880, four years after his presidency ended, and received a hero’s welcome, despite the fact he was, perhaps Lincoln and Sherman aside, the ultimate damnYankee. Grant entered a city festively festooned with garlands and streamers, patriotic bunting and slogans hanging from many a window, Union flags snapping in the breeze, and the pageantry of the city’s Honor Guards marching in formation.
“From far and wide the natives came, both black and white,” reported the Galveston Daily News’s Houston correspondent. “From street to street the people threw their streamers forth.” Under hastily constructed archways built over the streets bearing messages of welcome and the coats of arms of Texas and the USA, Grant’s eight-carriage retinue made its way from Union Station to his lodgings at the Hutchins House.
“Along the whole route the streets were crowded, while the houses were profusely decorated with flags, state and federal. In the square before the Hutchins House, the crowd was simply immense….”
And evidently not all so adoring. As Grant came out on the porch to speak, a rifle crack was heard “from the timberland”, causing a tactical retreat and redeployment to the Pillot Opera House. Indeed, there had been some signs of dissent from the moment of Grant’s arrival —on the general’s arrival, when it was discovered that some of the cannon brought out to salute had been spiked, rendered useless, by nameless scoundrels.
But once on the Pillot House patio, the president was ready, and gave the following speech to the masses below:
“Fellow citizens, I believe I am to receive from six to eight such as you as may see fit to call upon me. Until then I have nothing to say.”
And then he turned and walked back inside the opera house.
“This short say was a decided disappointment, but it was all the ‘Silent Man’ had to say,” noted the correspondent. “And Grant returned immediately to the hotel and retired to his rooms.”
You can’t really blame him in retrospect. Early evening found him in a receiving room where he shook the hands of thousands of well-wishers, many of them Union veterans who proudly told him which of his units they’d served in. The receiving room was decorated with messages of national unity with perhaps the one discordant note a local brass band that insisted on playing “Dixie.” It was also noted that “a large number of colored citizens greeted him.”
At 7 pm there followed a concert of light opera, classical, comedy, poetry and oratory which lasted until, wait a minute, 10:30 PM?
Noticed anything missing here? Like dinner? As the wee hours approached the no-doubt frazzled and hangry general was at last taken to a banquet in his honor. It seems it might have been worth the wait. We have a menu:
“Canard suavage” is wild duck. You can still buy Roederer Carte Blanche champagne; the same for Pontet Canet red wine. Roman punch was a popular semi-frozen cocktail of lemonade, champagne, and rum topped with meringue. There was booze everywhere you turned on this menu — Charlotte Russe is a whiskey-sodden no-bake cake of fruits and cream. One wonders if the infamously bibulous Grant came through it reasonably sober.
It’s seems so, because after a long toast by Judge Crosby, who cited the Wars of the Roses, Scottish border wars, and the English Civil War as nasty periods successfully put behind what was then the world’s dominant power. Grant responded approvingly and noted that in 1880, the standing army consisted only of 20,000 troops, while in belligerent Europe, that number stood collectively at 10 million. Material prosperity was the key to lasting peace, he said, to great huzzahs. Rounds of toasts followed to railroads and ship channels, to agriculture and “woman.” And so the evening wound down.
As a postscript, the correspondent noted that a pistol-packing drunk attempted to gain entry to the feast but was apprehended at the door. Again, the nation was not quite as healed as it liked to think.
It’s been reported that Roman punch was an invention of sneaky tipplers during the administration of Rutherford Hayes, whose wife “Lemonade Lucy” was the first First Lady to enforce a ban on alcohol at White House functions.
Which brings us to our next Houston-connected president — her husband, who came here as an adventurous young attorney fresh out of Harvard Law more or less on a lark. He wished to see his old college buddy Guy Bryan, who by 1848 had become a sugar plantation and slaver on a massive scale down on the Brazoria County coast near what is now Freeport. Such a trip required passage through Galveston and Houston and luckily for us Hayes was an inveterate letter writer who later became president; otherwise we might not have these amusing recollections.
Here is Hayes on Houston: "a fine town on a muddy flat at junction of two bayous forming Buffalo Bayou. Academical style of architecture prevailing. Capitol House is a capital house..."
On Galveston: “a neat fine town on a sand beach and apparently healthy.”
He’d just passed through New Orleans which was then stricken with a cholera outbreak, and Galveston was “a glorious contrast to the filth of New Orleans.” He went on: “It is built on an island, is high and sandy, resembling Cleveland, though not so large or so rich, and is every way a good pleasuring winter retreat.”
On Austin: "an inconsiderable town" with "grand expectations."
He reported the town was full of discharged ‘Rangers,’ officers and soldiers of the United States army, gamblers, and others. Costumes of every variety--Indian, Mexican, Christian, civil, military, and mixed. All armed to the teeth. Fierce whiskers, gaming, and drinking very abounding in all quarters.” Furthermore, he added, there were “not more than one or two passable buildings in the entire city.”
It’s a great narrative. The meat of it is centered on my new home in Brazoria County, where both the abundant wildlife and the peculiarities of plantation society astounded him. (Hayes was anti-slavery but not a hot-headed partisan on the issue. He wrote that while he never saw any of the horrors of slavery reported in the northern press, neither did he see anything about it to win him over to the pro-slavery side.)
Which I guess made him the perfect compromise candidate to re-unite north and south in 1876. If that required throwing the freed slaves under the bus, then that was simply sad and unavoidable to Hayes, a meh man when a firebrand was needed.
After that, things become more ho hum. As Houston grew in importance, we attracted more and more national politicos and now presidential visits are greeted with extreme hostility. Why not — we get nothing from them but traffic snarls.
In 1891, Benjamin Harrison became the first sitting president to visit Houston. It was kind of a big deal: As the Houston Daily Post pointed out, “Very few people living in Texas ever saw a president.”
In 1901, William McKinley "rode through flower-strewn streets to the Winnie Davis Auditorium where he addressed a standing-room-only crowd. The next day’s paper reported McKinley as diplomatically saying, “I consider our stop in Houston the most enjoyable so far on our trip.” He was assassinated a few weeks later in Buffalo, NY.
Big bad William Howard Taft gave a speech from the balcony of the Rice Hotel in 1909 and was "was widely criticized by some forces for cracking jokes instead of dealing with substantive issues."
Teddy Roosevelt blew through as ex-president in 1911, and his cousin Franklin was the next Chief Exec to come to Houston, in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence. My grandmother remembers this day well.
Here is an account from the Houston Business Journal :
"The city suspended its anti-noise ordinance for three minutes so that a blast of automobile horns and whistles could greet the arrival of the president’s train.
Roosevelt paraded through town to the Ship Channel, where he took a yacht to the San Jacinto Battleground. He spoke to a crowd estimated at 28,000 at the battleground, while his speech was broadcast over the three local radio stations."
That was pretty much the last of the old-school grand presidential visits. Since then, aside arguably from Kennedy's NASA speech at Rice Stadium, they have been more photo ops and campaign finance junkets.
If any presidents after the war came through here before their presidencies, they didn’t have much to say about it, and neither has Donald Trump, but this one picture, taken in Houston at a 1989 function at the Westin Galleria, speaks volumes.
Right Davis and remember Nixon's "secret plan to end the war"? In the end we declared victory and hauled ass hoping people didn't see our tail between our legs
I remember hearing a speech by Spiro Agnew, October 28, 1968. It must have been at U of H.