Alrighty, time to retire James Harrison and let his son start making them waves.
John Fitzgerald "Fitz" Harrison
"Fitz Contemplates His Father's Footsteps"
The photograph was published in
The New Yorker next to an article with the same name in 1906, two days after Fitz announced his candidacy for Mayor of New York.
Date of Birth: April 12th 1880
Date of Death: January 29th 1937
Positions Held:
Secretary of the NYC Economic Commission (1903-1906)
Mayor of New York City (1906-1910)
Representative for New York's 8th Congressional District (1910-1913)
Secretary of the Treasury (1913-1917)
President of J.P.Morgan & Co. (1917-1923)
Governor of New York (1924-1933)
Vice-President of the Republic (1933-1937)
Secretary of the Treasury (1937)
Spouse(s):
Josephine Harrison-Young (m. 1901)
Josephine Harrison-Young (b. 1882)
The hand-tinted photograph of Josephine was taken in 1901, three days before Fitz proposed.
Biography:
Fitz was born while his father was off leading the Rough Riders in Cuba. His father dodged in and out of his life until he was three, and James Harrison returned to New York to become Police Commissioner. Fitz thus grew up very close to his mother, and somewhat distant from his father. He attended the prestigious Jeremiah Williams School, developing a love for Baseball while there. By the end of high school, it seemed that Fitz would become a professional baseball player instead of a politician. It was the move to Washington DC in the wake of his father's inauguration that put Fitz on the road to politics. Before he went to Harvard in 1901 though, Fitz took full advantage of the active social life he could lead while staying at the White House.
During the first two years of his father's presidency, Fitz gained a reputation as "America's Number One Socialite". However, his hard-partying lifestyle concealed a concerted effort to understand Washington, and especially the younger members of the Harrison Administration and Congress. On December 31st 1899, Fitz met his future wife, Josephine Young during the end-of-century festivities in DC. Though relations between the two were initially formally awkward, a situation undoubtedly compounded by Fitz having slept the first morning of the 20th Century in Josephine's bathtub, the two grew close, becoming engaged in the summer of 1901. Later that year, Fitz moved from Washington and tried out for the New York Yankees. When asked why he declined to join despite being accepted, Fitz answered that he had "just wanted to see if [he] could do it".
Fitz spent 1902 at Harvard, eventually dropping out in January 1903. He believed he had learned enough about economics during his two years at the Washington Institute for Higher Learning and in conversation with people visiting his father; people such as Jonathan Smith, Floyd Weaver and Joseph P. Jarvis, who had shown him the full spectrum of economic views. He had received business advice in tidbits at parties from John D. Rockefeller, and learned more about banking in a conversation with J. P. Morgan in 1899, when Federal Bank Insurance faced a challenge from ACP legislation, than he had learned in all his time at school. Thus when the Mayor of New York, Colin Henry, assembled his New York City Economic Commission in 1903, Fitz was high on the list of candidates for Secretary due to his time in Washington.
He was announced as Secretary in June 1903, and was immediately disappointed by the Mayor's summary ignoring of most of the plans and advise the Commission came up with. Fitz's economic views, influenced as they were by many different conflicting sources, were ever-changing during his time as Secretary, a state of things that would never truly change. Fitz was described by Assistant Secretary Raymond Oaks as being a "mercurial personality in almost every sense of the word". When Henry gave him the ability to handle assignments to the NYCE himself in August 1904, Fitz "drew up the most mixed bag of economists I [Oaks] have seen in my entire life. There were socialists, some I might even call communists, paired with the most ardent free marketers, some of whom were almost anarchist in their disdain of intervention". All of these personalities were allowed to whisper into his ear, and all of them left Fitz's office feeling as though they had had their way with him.
Oaks suspected that Fitz was in fact "playing a great game with all these economic professors. He allowed them to think they were pushing their views upon him, when in fact he was absorbing it of his own free will". This willingness to listen to any and all views would last throughout his life, but his actual stance was probably never as liquid as it was during his time at the NYCE. In 1905, the general apathy that struck the Federal Party left Fitz's faith in them shattered. When the apathy spread visibly into Henry's policies, or rather lack of policies, and the ACP council members began making city policy and completely disregarding any proposals of Fitz's that supposed the government intervene in any way, Fitz decided to leave the Federal Party be and stay an Independent, which he had only done so far to avoid being overshadowed by his father should he join the Federals.
In 1906, Fitz ran for Mayor of New York City as an Independent against the man who had appointed him Secretary. Fitz ran on a platform of "doing my job, like I'm supposed to", which was a direct attack toward Henry and his lack of action. "Eloquent, charismatic and comfortingly optimistic", as the pro-Harrison
New Yorker described him, Fitz won by a large margin. Over the next four years, he intensified immigrant aid programs and pushed forward numerous, sometimes conflicting, fiscal measures that raised spending in one place and cut it in another. He radically distanced himself from his father, speaking of him in public only when he insisted on being judged on his own merits and not James Harrison's. His relationship with his father grew colder during his time as mayor due to Harrison's trips to Africa and Europe, which reminded Fitz of the years his father had been off in the West while his mother cared for him. It was not until Harrison's stroke in 1911 that Fitz began to reconcile with his father.
In 1910 Fitz ran for the spot as Representative of New York's 8th Congressional District, leaving New York City to fellow Independent John Forrester. He won the election with 91% of the vote, and moved back to Washington with his wife for the first time in nine years. In the House of Representatives, Fitz voted almost universally against the budget cuts that were made. He called the cuts "a dangerous sign of government losing its interest in the people's well-being". He did vote for the FBI's budget cut, saying "while I support [Anderson] Savage, I do not believe he needs all the money he's currently getting to run an organization that, in the wrong hands, could become an American Secret Police".
Fitz supported Hensdale's mediation proposal in 1911. He had previously shown pro-Entente sentiment, but became fervently opposed to the Tripartite Pact after the Russo-German refusal to negotiate. Fitz continued to advocate peace, but announced that "should American sovereignty be violated or the most basic values of humanity be forgotten by the Tripartite, we should not hesitate to bring swift and merciless justice upon them". During the China War, Fitz played a major role in his wife's Red Cross Charity Drives.
In the presidential election of 1913, enlivened by the fact that "victory [over Hensdale] seemed possible", Fitz decided to throw his weight behind T. H. Terrance, marking the first time he would actively support a candidate for President. Fitz decided to support Terrance on the basis of his promise for social reforms. When asked by a reporter for his stance on the great issue of the election, the United States' involvement in Europe, Fitz replied that "in light of the ever-diminishing prospects for peace in Europe, I believe that Mr. Terrance's advocating of an alliance with the Entente is the correct course of action. If it does not act as deterrent to Germany, then at the very least American participation will expedite the end of the war, and ensure that liberty and democracy triumph over oppression and dictatorship".
After Terrance's close win, the new president-elect offered Fitz the office of Secretary of the Treasury. Part of this offer was ultimate control of the implementation of the social reforms that Fitz had supported Terrance for in the first place, and naturally he accepted the position. He refrained from registering himself in the Federal Party, both to keep a continued distance from his father's legacy, and to "keep [him]self unhampered by the petty squabbles of party politics for the time being."
During the war, Harrison became well-acquainted with the handling of a government treasury forced to overstretch its resources. He even created the foundation of a more centralized banking system with the passing of his 1915 Federal Reserve Act. In a statement to the press three years later, Fitz said that "if [the Federal Reserve] succeeds in preventing economic disaster even once, then I can safely consider the [Federal Reserve] Act my greatest achievement". In the election of 1917, Fitz declined from openly supporting any of the candidates.
His reasons for staying out of the cycle were largely based around the League of Nations, which he said he was "extremely unsure about". While he agreed with the basic idea of Jarvis' European League of States, he also believed the United States should have some sort of say, and thus would not extend full support to the Republican Party. When the election went to Jarvis, and he was not re-offered the position of Secretary of the Treasury, Fitz returned to New York. Upon arrival, he was approached by the partners at J.P.Morgan & Co., who were looking for a the twelfth Company President since the death of J. P. Morgan in 1913.
Fitz accepted the offer, and would oversee some of the company's most explosive growth over the next four years. Although Henry Morgan, son of John Pierpont, attributed the company's success to Fitz at a dinner in December 1920, it is generally accepted that Fitz was just given the presidency at an opportune time, as markets were beginning to stabilize in the US after the end of the Great War and in Western Europe after the Treaty of Versailles. he worked at J.P.Morgan & Co. for another three years before resigning and placing himself in the running for a job that had once been his father's; the Governorship of New York. As a Federal-leaning Independent candidate, he won in a landslide, although many suspected he won on pity votes given due to the death of his father in 1922.
During the early years of the Great Depression, Fitz focused his efforts on re-expanding the State Volunteer Service and implementing the countermeasures of the Ryan Administration while formulating his New Deal agenda. It was with this in mind that he proposed running as Ryan's running mate in 1933, and became Vice-President of the Republic; a mere one step removed from the position his father had held 28 years earlier. Over the next four years, Fitz was effectively in charge of running this New Deal; the most expensive government operation in history, just outdoing the Great War when adjusted for inflation. At the close of Ryan's term, he believed he was finally ready for the Oval Office, and ran a short campaign before conceding defeat as polls proved to be overwhelmingly in favor of McCahill to Fitz. He thus accepted the future Preisdent's offer of running mate status.
The rise of Richard Milton-Spencer however, pushed him off the chance to be Vice-President again, instead being relegated to Secretary of the Treasury for the second time in his career should McCahill/Blancharde prove victorious. He had just begun to settle into the position again on January 29th, when The Grand Coup stormed into Washington D.C. Fitz was trapped in his office by the sudden advance of the MDNG, but upon realizing what was happening, he left his desk, never to return. The Secretary of the Treasury was shot four times in the chest by Maryland National Guardsmen as he and his aide came to a roadblock set up by the Fascists on the road to the White House, where Fitz had been headed in order to find out if the President was still in the city. At the time of his death, Fitz Harrison was 56. He was buried on the side of Pennsylvania Avenue, along with Constant Blancharde and Patrick Ryan.