Birthplace of Presidents, Ohio's Political Improbability

Between eighteen sixty-nine and nineteen twenty-three, seven of the eleven presidents of the United States were from Ohio. No state has produced that share of the national leadership in so compressed a time span. Political historians have been trying to explain it ever since.

Some of the explanation is geography. Ohio was the largest competitive state in the country during the Gilded Age, too big to ignore and genuinely divided between industrial cities and agricultural counties, between immigrant communities and old-stock Protestant voters. Winning Ohio was not sufficient for a Republican presidential candidate, but losing it was usually fatal.

The parties nominated Ohioans because Ohioans could carry Ohio. Some of it is individual. Ulysses Grant was from Point Pleasant, a river village in Clermont County, and his Ohio background was the least interesting thing about him.

Rutherford Hayes came from Delaware, Ohio. James Garfield was from a log cabin near Orange Township in Cuyahoga County, often described as the last president born in one. Benjamin Harrison was from North Bend.

William McKinley from Niles. Warren Harding from Blooming Grove. William Howard Taft from Cincinnati, and his father had been Grant's attorney general.

The run ended with Harding and then the disaster of his administration, which gave Ohio one more political legacy: the Teapot Dome scandal, the Veterans' Bureau corruption, and a president who died in office in nineteen twenty-three under circumstances still imperfectly understood. Ohio gave the country seven presidents and then, for a century, one cautionary tale.