FT270


George W Bush is a fortunate man. Not only did he dodge the slings, grenades and occasional footwear of outrage and scorn during his presidential twin-term in office, but, some say, a pre-destined arrow exacting an ancient Indian thirst for revenge…

In the newly formed land of the free, democracy was in its first throes of infancy. One of its many defining tantrums, the quaintly named ‘Battle of Tippecanoe’, saw charismatic Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh take on the first gov­ernor of the Indiana Territories, William H Harrison – and not for the first time.

The previous year, they had failed to see eye to eye over the sale of land agreed by the Miami Indians under the Fort Wayne treaty. Tecumseh didn’t buy this latest concession. He believed that the Indian nation was as one and that no single tribe had the right to sell land without approval from its peers. Harrison, on the other hand – like a seasoned real-estate developer running for office – saw it as his inalienable democratic duty to shake hands with all prospective allies among the native indigenous peoples. His refusal to relent on the treaty forced Tecumseh to seek support among various tribal factions. The military esteem in which Tecumseh was held proved the catalyst for his eventual undoing and what, some claim, was his subsequent and long-lasting revenge. His reput­ation went before him as he gathered followers, supported by a widely held belief in the word of his half-brother, the ‘prophet’, Tenskwatawa.

By 1808, Tecumseh, his brother and their followers had taken up residence in Prophetstown, near the Tippecanoe River in the Indiana Territory. In the three years leading up to the battle of 1811, their numbers had swollen, provoking white settlers in the region, fearing for their safety, to demand that the government take action.

On any other day, Harrison’s response might have played into Tecumseh’s hands. Tecumseh, after all, was a master warrior and a brilliant tactic­ian. Unfortunately for the hopes of native resistance, Harrison’s decision to move within probing distance of Prophetstown was taken at a time when Tecumseh himself was away canvassing support for his growing alliance.

In his absence, Tenskwatawa, lacking his brother’s military nous and composure under the prospect of fire, blinked first. His authority to act, he claimed, came from the divine creator, the ‘Master of Life’, who would ensure that his people would prevail and that the white bullets would not dent their ambition. In fact, they suffered an ignominious defeat and a large number of casualties, and were driven from their settlement, which Harrison had burnt to the ground.

Tenskwatawa’s awakening had cost untold lives. Tecumseh returned to find his prospects, like Prophetstown, all but in ruins. Having allied himself so closely with his discredited brother, his aura and mandate to lead was broken. Legend tells that the wrathful chieftain now uttered a dire prophetic forewarning:

“Harrison will not win this year to be the Great Chief. But he may win next year. If he does… He will not finish his term. He will die in his office. You think that I have lost my powers. I who caused the Sun to darken and Red Men to give up firewater… I tell you Harrison will die. And after him every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, accounts of the curse’s origin conflict. Some say it was born out of the defeat at Tippe­canoe; others claim that it was some time later, and that under the shadow of Tecumseh’s death the following year at the Battle of the Thames, it was Tenskwatawa who uttered the fateful words. The confusion doesn’t end there. Some say the curse is simply nonsense and that no records exist that support the existence of such a native Indian jinx. What is not in doubt is that the sinister malediction came to pass.

Sure enough, William H Harrison was elected ninth President of the United States in 1840; his inaugural address as president on 4 March 1841 first saw Death cast his shadow over the White House lawn. Harrison, the hardy military man, would later lay claim to the longest inauguration speech in American history, delivering his address on a shivering, wet, late winter’s day without a coat, hat or care for the cold. Soon after, he fell ill. His might have been the longest speech, but it turned out to be the shortest presidency: 31 days into his term, Harrison was dead.

Talk of revenge as a dish best served cold was superstitious nonsense. Harri­son was a proud, stubborn man of good age, taken off by a chill wind and the cold hand of time. Pneumonia was the cause of death. There was nothing supernatural about it, surely?

Next to fall while in office was Zachary Taylor. If the curse were to be taken at its word, one would rightly expect Taylor, who became President in 1849, just eight years after Harrison, to be safe from its effect. But he was an except­ion to the rule – perhaps because he and Tecumseh had history. It was Taylor who, in the War of 1812, defended Fort Harrison from Tecumseh and the Shawnee; his involvement in defeating the
Native Americans apparently led to death from gastroenteritis.

Normal service resumed in 1865 when a shot rang out and the icy hand returned to grip President Lincoln, one year into his second term in office. Lincoln had been elected in 1860. Thereafter, the fallen made for unnerving reading: 1880, Garfield (dies 1881: assassin’s bullet); 1900, McKinley (for second term) (dies 1901: assassin’s bullet); 1920, Harding (dies 1923: heart failure); 1940, Roosevelt (for third term) (dies 1945,  during fourth term: stroke); 1960, John F Kennedy (dies 1963: assassin’s bullet).

From the onset of Harrison’s reign in 1840, no president elected in a year ending in ‘0’ would leave the White House alive. The curse proved as good as its word. Moreover, Taylor aside, no sitting president from the George Washington on who was elected outside of a year ending in ‘0’ has met an untimely end while in office.

And the weird coincidences are not restricted to death. Take the submerged patterns linking the assass­inations of Lincoln and Kennedy. One of the cutest sees Lincoln shot in Ford’s theatre, while Kennedy is killed in a Lincoln convertible manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. Does chance work in mysterious ways? Is a shadowy hand drawing order from chaos? Possibly. Or as sceptics claim, is this nothing more than a convenient selection of facts – are we simply seeing faces in the clouds?

Perhaps. But perhaps not. David McMinn cites the Fisher Exact Probability test, which was used to yield a significance level of 0.00004; the result concluded that the pattern is a very unlikely result of mere chance. Even a more conservative approach, McMinn claims, by mathematician Michael Capobianco returned a significance level of less than 0.1.

If chance as an explanation can be questioned, the curse is back in the game. Questions, however, remain: why would it strike only once every 20 years? Putting that aside, and with the benefit of hindsight, why did Reagan (elected in 1980) and Bush (2000) survive?

In his earlier career in the Wild West, Reagan was used to dodging screen bullets. In 1981, his guile was tested as never before when a real assassin’s bullet came within inches of his heart. Reagan’s survival suggested to some that the curse had been lifted. Further evidence came in the years succeeding 2000, when the baby Bush era saw a grenade that failed to go off and a pair of wayward shoes hot off the heels of a well-oiled if somewhat disgruntled Iraqi. The irony was that one of the most unpopular presidents in American history had proven remarkably resistant to such attacks.

Sceptics claimed that this was the death-knell for a curse-cycle peddled by mystics and mired in hogwash. For believers, Reagan had been very, very lucky; and as for Bush? Well, Dubya had never been ‘chosen’ as the terms of the curse were said to demand – the ‘stolen’ election of 2000 had seen to that. So, the curse was still there, bubbling under.

Some astrologers have considered the possible influence of a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on a presidential death cycle. In ancient cultures, these planets were often considered the great chronocrators, or governors of time. Their resulting alignment (known as a conjunction), which occurs on an average 20-year cycle, was considered by many to signify periods of great socio-political-economic change. Among their many attributes, Jupiter is said to represent the ruler, while Saturn symbolises death. It’s not hard to see where joining the dots might take us…

As a result, the past two centuries of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions on a 20-year rotation have been touted as a possible factor in presidential deaths. During this period (1800–2000) only three presidents survived while in office. Of these, the conjunctions accompanying Monroe’s election (1820) fell on the fire sign Aries and Reagan’s appointment (1980) on the air sign of Libra. Aside from Monroe and Reagan, all conjunctions have fallen on Earth signs Taurus, Virgo or Capricorn; an association – with the exception of Jefferson (1800) – that has without fail led to the death of the presidential incumbent.

The year 2000 was the final act in this particular astrological marriage of convenience. Its arrival led many to posit (FT145:14) that George W Bush would be the next – and last – with conjunctions thereafter falling to the air signs Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. Bush, however, as history would tell, did not answer to universal laws, only unto himself. His survival in office, sceptics say, put paid to any talk that US demo­cracy was written not in the constitution, but rather the stars.

It is, of course, possible that Tecumseh, or his brother Tenskwatawa, set his fateful curse in conjunction with these two ruling gas giants and their astro­logical alignments. This would explain the motive behind a 20-year cycle.

The question remains: why, then, did Bush survive? Was it down to the ‘stolen’ election? Did the ‘rightful’ candidate go one better even than Reagan and dodge a pre-destined bullet? Is the inconvenient truth for Al Gore that he owes his life to his Republican rival?



Further reading
David E. McMinn: “The twenty-year death cycle of American presidents” (www.davidmcminn.com).
Richard Nolle: “The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction” (www.astropro.com).
Ohio History Central: “An online encyclopaedia of Ohio history” (www.ohiohistorycentral.org).