From the 1840 death of President William Henry Harrison to the 1960 assassination of President John Kennedy, every American President who was elected in a year that ended in zero died in office. Is this, as some claim, the work of a curse placed upon the “Great White Father” by the Native American leader Tecumseh? Many people believe that it is. Others say it is mere coincidence and point to the fact that the curse failed to kill Ronald Reagan and (so far) George W. Bush as proof. This article examines the origins of the curse and offers some plausible explanations for it.
According to folk-tale, Tecumseh cursed William Henry Harrison after Harrison defeated the Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Tecumseh died in another battle against Harrison in 1813, but his curse apparently survived him. Just one month after Harrison was inaugurated as President in 1841, he died of pneumonia. While his death has historically been attributed to his refusal to wear a coat during his inauguration (to prove that he was not too old and frail to be President), some claim it is the work of the curse of Tecumseh.
Since Harrison, every other president who was elected in a year ending in zero has also died in office. In fact, President Taylor was the only President to die in office who was not elected in a year ending in zero. President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, President Garfield was assassinated in July of 1881, President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, President Harding died of a stroke in 1923, President Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1945, and President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. President Reagan “should” have died in office after being elected in 1980, and he was almost killed by an assassin’s bullet that came within an inch of his heart. He apparently broke the streak, but he came very close to being its victim. So far, the curse has not harmed President Bush either.
So is there any validity to the curse? It is impossible to say. It is probably just coincidence, but it is difficult to prove one way or the other. Despite Reagan’s survival, the odd fact that the curse only seems to effect presidents who were elected in zero years, it is a pretty remarkable phenomena. As interesting as the curse story may be, however, there are no surviving records indicating that Tecumseh ever cursed the Presidency or Harrison. It seems to have been invented around the turn of the 20th century to explain the deaths of Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. It did not predict anything. Rather, it is a way of explaining what seemed to coincidental to be the work of mere chance.
Although most people say that the deaths of all of those Presidents was either a coincidence or the work of a curse, some have suggested alternative theories. One of the most popular is that it is the work of astrology. Although this theory does not explain why only Presidents who were elected in certain years are effected or how some of them died after many years in office, it does (supposedly) explain why Reagan survived it. According to astrologers, the astrological patterns responsible for the deaths shifted between the Kennedy and Reagan Presidencies. That guilty patterns are not supposed to appear for several thousand years, so the astrologers say that future Presidents have nothing to worry about. Whether this is a case of finding “evidence” to fit one’s preexisting assumptions, however, is difficult to determine.
