The Curse of Tippecanoe (also known as Tecumseh's Curse, the 20-year Curse [1] or the Zero Curse [2] ) is an urban legend [3] about the deaths in office of presidents of the United States who were elected in years divisible by 20. According to the legend, Tenskwatawa, leader of Native American tribes defeated in 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe by a military expedition led by William Henry Harrison, had cursed the "Great White Fathers".
Since 1840, eight presidents have died in office. Seven of them were elected in years divisible by 20: William Henry Harrison (1840), Abraham Lincoln (1860), James A. Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940) and John F. Kennedy (1960). Two former presidents elected in applicable years, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, did not die in office.
Thomas Jefferson, elected in 1800, and James Monroe, elected in 1820, preceded the supposed curse and outlived their presidencies by 17 and 6 years, respectively. Neither of them was ever targeted by an assassin. However, there is a curious coincidence that both men died on the Fourth of July.
William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840 and died in 1841, just a month after being sworn in. In Tecumseh's War, Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa organized a confederation of Indian tribes to resist the westward expansion of the United States. In the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison defeated Tenskwatawa and his troops, acting as the governor of the Indiana Territory. Harrison thus earned the moniker "Old Tippecanoe".
In 1931 and 1948, the trivia book series Ripley's Believe It or Not! noted the pattern and termed it the "Curse of Tippecanoe". [4] Strange as It Seems by John Hix ran a cartoon prior to the election of 1940 titled "Curse over the White House!" and claimed that "In the last 100 years, Every U.S. President Elected at 20-Year Intervals Has Died In Office!" [5] In February 1960, journalist Ed Koterba noted that "The next President of the United States will face an eerie curse that for more than a century has hung over every chief executive elected in a year ending with zero." [6] Both of their hints at the elected president's death came true, with Roosevelt's death in 1945 and Kennedy's assassination in 1963.
The first written account to refer to the source of the curse was an article by Lloyd Shearer in 1980 in Parade magazine. [3] It is claimed[ by whom? ] that when Tecumseh was killed in a later battle, Tenskwatawa set a curse against Harrison. [2]
Running for re-election in 1980, President Jimmy Carter was asked about the curse at a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio, on October 2 of that year while taking questions from the crowd. A high school student asked Carter if he was concerned about "predictions that every 20 years or election years ending in zero, the President dies in office." Carter replied, "I've seen those predictions. [...] I'm not afraid. If I knew it was going to happen, I would go ahead and be President and do the best I could till the last day I could." [7] He would later become, and as of October 2024, still is the oldest living former president at 100 years old.
Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, no president has died in office. Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded severely two months after his 1981 inauguration. Days after Reagan survived the shooting, columnist Jack Anderson wrote "Reagan and the Eerie Zero Factor" in The Daily Intelligencer and asserted that the 40th president either had disproved the superstition or had nine lives. [8] As the oldest man to be elected president at that time, Reagan also survived surgery in 1985. First Lady Nancy Reagan was reported to have hired psychics and astrologers to try to protect her husband from the effects of the curse. [9] [10] Reagan left office in 1989 and ultimately died from natural causes in 2004. He was 93 years old and had survived his presidency by 15 years.
The president elected in 2000, George W. Bush, also survived two terms in office. In 2005, a live grenade was thrown at him but failed to explode. [11] Bush left office in 2009 and is currently living.
The only one of the eight presidents who died in office who was not elected in a year covered by the curse was Zachary Taylor, elected in 1848, but died in 1850, a year ending in zero. [12] Like Reagan and Bush, many presidents outside the curse have faced assassination attempts or medical problems.
Elected | Term of election | President | Death | Term of death | Cause of death | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1840 | First | William Henry Harrison | April 4, 1841 | First | Pneumonia | |
1860 | First | Abraham Lincoln | April 15, 1865 | Second | Assassinated | |
1880 | First | James A. Garfield | September 19, 1881 | First | Assassinated | |
1900 | Second | William McKinley | September 14, 1901 | Second | Assassinated | |
1920 | First | Warren G. Harding | August 2, 1923 | First | Heart attack | |
1940 | Third | Franklin D. Roosevelt | April 12, 1945 | Fourth | Cerebral hemorrhage | |
1960 | First | John F. Kennedy | November 22, 1963 | First | Assassinated | |
1980 | First | Ronald Reagan | June 5, 2004 (did not die in office) | — | Pneumonia, complicated by Alzheimer's disease | |
2000 | First | George W. Bush | Living (did not die in office) | — | — | |
2020 | First | Joe Biden | Living | — | — |
Snopes rates the claim that a "death curse threatens U.S. presidents elected in years evenly divisible by twenty" a legend and undocumented folktale not supported by actual records of Tecumseh cursing the "Great White Fathers" after his defeat at Tippecanoe. [13] Multiple sources have called the failure of the curse after 1960 a disproof of a curse as an explanation for the deaths in office.[ citation needed ]
According to Timothy Redmond of the Skeptical Inquirer , the supposed curse demonstrates a number of logical fallacies, including confusing correlation with causation, cherrypicking, and moving the goalposts. In layman's terms, out of many unlikely eerie patterns, at least one of those hypothetical patterns is likely to come true. [14] Snopes rates the curse on its fact-checking scale as a "legend", a rating given to over-general or unprovable claims, and denies a supernatural explanation for the curse.
In 2009, Steve Friess of Slate sought to interview notable presidential historians and security experts such as Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Richard A. Clarke on the alleged curse, but none of them returned his calls. Michael S. Sherry, American history professor at Northwestern University, replied, "I doubt I have anything profound to say about this particular factoid, odd though it is." [15]
William Henry Harrison was an American military officer and politician who served as the ninth president of the United States from March 4 to April 4, 1841, the shortest presidency in U.S. history. He was also the first U.S. president to die in office, causing a brief constitutional crisis since presidential succession was not then fully defined in the U.S. Constitution. Harrison was the last president born as a British subject in the Thirteen Colonies and was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd U.S. president.
The Battle of Tippecanoe was fought on November 7, 1811, in Battle Ground, Indiana, between American forces led by then Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory and tribal forces associated with Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, leaders of a confederacy of various tribes who opposed European-American settlement of the American frontier. As tensions and violence increased, Governor Harrison marched with an army of about 1,000 men to attack the confederacy's headquarters at Prophetstown, near the confluence of the Tippecanoe River and the Wabash River.
Battle Ground is a town in Tippecanoe Township, Tippecanoe County in the U.S. state of Indiana. The population was 1,334 at the 2010 census. It is near the site of the Battle of Tippecanoe.
Tecumseh was a Shawnee chief and warrior who promoted resistance to the expansion of the United States onto Native American lands. A persuasive orator, Tecumseh traveled widely, forming a Native American confederacy and promoting intertribal unity. Even though his efforts to unite Native Americans ended with his death in the War of 1812, he became an iconic folk hero in American, Indigenous, and Canadian popular history.
Thomas Phillip "Tip" O'Neill Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician from Massachusetts who served as the 47th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987, the third-longest tenure in history and the longest uninterrupted tenure. He represented northern Boston in the House from 1953 to 1987.
Tecumseh's War or Tecumseh's Rebellion was a conflict between the United States and Tecumseh's confederacy, led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the Indiana Territory. Although the war is often considered to have climaxed with William Henry Harrison's victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Tecumseh's War essentially continued into the War of 1812 and is frequently considered a part of that larger struggle. The war lasted for two more years, until 1813, when Tecumseh and his second-in-command, Roundhead, died fighting Harrison's Army of the Northwest at the Battle of Moraviantown in Upper Canada, near present-day Chatham, Ontario, and his confederacy disintegrated. Tecumseh's War is viewed by some academic historians as the final conflict of a longer-term military struggle for control of the Great Lakes region of North America, encompassing a number of wars over several generations, referred to as the Sixty Years' War.
Tenskwatawa was a Native American religious and political leader of the Shawnee tribe, known as the Prophet or the Shawnee Prophet. He was a younger brother of Tecumseh, a leader of the Shawnee. In his early years Tenskwatawa was given the name Lalawethika, but he changed it around 1805 and transformed himself from a hapless, alcoholic youth into an influential spiritual leader. Tenskwatawa denounced the Americans, calling them the offspring of the Evil Spirit, and led a purification movement that promoted unity among the Indigenous peoples of North America, rejected acculturation to the American way of life, and encouraged his followers to pursue traditional ways.
In political studies, surveys have been conducted in order to construct historical rankings of the success of the presidents of the United States. Ranking systems are usually based on surveys of academic historians and political scientists or popular opinion. The scholarly rankings focus on presidential achievements, leadership qualities, failures, and faults. Popular-opinion polls typically focus on recent or well-known presidents.
There are many coincidences with the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and these have become a piece of American folklore. The list of coincidences appeared in the mainstream American press in 1964, a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, having appeared prior to that in the GOP Congressional Committee Newsletter. In the 1970s, Martin Gardner examined the list in an article in Scientific American, pointing out that several of the claimed coincidences were based on misinformation. Gardner's version of the list contained 16 items; many subsequent versions have circulated much longer lists.
The inauguration of William Henry Harrison as the ninth president of the United States was held on Thursday, March 4, 1841, at the East Portico of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. This was the 14th inauguration and marked the commencement of the only four-year term of both William Henry Harrison as president and John Tyler as vice president. The presidential oath of office was administered to Harrison by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Harrison died 31 days into his term, the first U.S. president to die in office and has the shortest presidential term in American history. Tyler then succeeded to the presidency, creating a precedent which would be followed seven more times before it was officially regulated through the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967.
Tecumseh's confederacy was a confederation of Native Americans in the Great Lakes region of North America which formed during the early 19th century around the teaching of Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa. The confederation grew over several years and came to include several thousand Native American warriors. Shawnee leader Tecumseh, the brother of Tenskwatawa, became the leader of the confederation as early as 1808. Together, they worked to unite the various tribes against colonizers from the United States who had been crossing the Appalachian Mountains and occupying their traditional homelands.
A death in office is the death of a person who was incumbent of an office-position until the time of death. Such deaths have been usually due to natural causes, but they are also caused by accidents, suicides, disease and assassinations.