Made in South Bend: Benjamin Harrison's Inauguration Underwear

The A.C. Staley Manufacturing Company was once underwear provider to the President

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED DECEMBER 13, 2024

It's Inauguration Day, and it doesn't really matter what year it is, because the pageantry all feels the same. Flags - so many flags - snap in the wind overhead while a brass band plays its salute. The music is loud, brassy, and hard. The day is thick with formality and heavy with tradition. It all feels very American, very patriotic, very solemn.

But most of all, it just feels cold.

Men in stuffy suits make their faces still, lest their manhood be questioned by an observer who caught them visibly shivering. The crowd indulges the music and endures the speeches. Luminaries watch their own steamy breath swirl in the breeze as solemn words echo off of the marble steps beneath their seats. It is almost time to swear in the President.

Then, at last, they can go inside.

Finally, the moment arrives. The President stands and takes a moment to brush his hands over the creases that formed in his suit during the long wait for the Oath. There are going to be ten-thousand photographs of this moment. He might as well smooth everything out first.

Through the rigor of the election cycle and during the weeks ahead of the Inauguration, the American President has been picked apart, studied, dissected, investigated. Everyone is so sure that they know all about him. His most ardent supporters know everything. His most vicious detractors know even more.

But no one knows what kind of underwear he's wearing.

Except in 1899.

President Benjamin Harrison had a lot on his mind ahead of his own inauguration on March 4, 1889. His administration had promised to bring civil service reform, antitrust legislation, civil rights, and international tariff wars. Six new states were poised for admission into a rapidly growing Union. Native Americans had been pushed as far west as they could go without being pushed into the ocean. There was a lot that this new President was going to have to do.

But most of all, he had to get through the inauguration without dying of pneumonia.

Nearly 60 years before Benjamin Harrison prepared to take the oath, his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had been a part of the same pageantry. After being sworn in, the elder President Harrison stepped to a podium to deliver the longest inaugural address in American history. The speech lasted more than two hours, each word coming through a biting cold that kept getting colder.

William Henry Harrison hardened himself and stood firm, unflinching in the brutal chill. The wintry weather cared not for the man's office nor his bravado. By the time the speech ended, the frost had settled deep into his body. A month later, he was dead. Doctors at the time said it was pneumonia, brought on by his frigid inaugural ceremony.

Benjamin Harrison was determined not to let the same thing happen to him, and he took every precaution. He wrote a very short inaugural address (that you can purchase right now or just $225,000!) and dressed in warm and strategic layers.

Onlookers might have noticed the shirt, the vest, the jacket, the hat, and the overcoat. But there was something they didn't notice. Harrison was equipped with a secret weapon: full-body woolen underwear produced proudly in South Bend, Indiana.

The A.C. Staley Manufacturing Company cut their teeth producing long underwear for laborers and farmers who needed to stay warm in the brutal Midwestern winters. Think thick wool, with a dash of silk to keep it from feeling like sandpaper. Cozy, right?

It turns out that the new President liked cozy. So much so that he wore a pair of A.C. Staley's woolen undies on his Inauguration Day. They did the trick. Benjamin Harrison did not die of pneumonia.

The President's underwear might have remained a secret, but Benjamin Harrison was a polite man. He wrote a letter to the A.C. Staley Company back in South Bend and let them know how much he appreciated their product, and that he did wear the full body set during his inauguration. The company's marketing minds recognized when an opportunity was too good to pass up, and they ran straightaway to the newspapermen, who were eager to share this little bit of salacious Presidential news.

In a time before social media influencers, getting your brand onto a President was about as good as it got. By the end of 1889, Staley's factory was operating at maximum capacity, turning out 240 pairs of full-length woolen underwear suits every single day.

The A.C. Staley Manufacturing Company became the Stephenson Underwear Mills in 1907 and closed down its operations in 1935.

Benjamin Harrison served one term as President. He died in Indianapolis in 1901. It was pneumonia that killed him.

President Benjamin Harrison remains the only United States President whose inaugural underwear became public knowledge.

Learn more about Benjamin Harrison's undies in Season 1, Episode 8 of A Bend In Time.