President Study Resources?

[TheAttachedMama]

We are doing American History this year with my 4th grader.   I would like to add a short, quick president study to the year.  I found a free president notebook online that has a photo of each president and some blanks to fill in (ex. years served, vice president, political party, remembered for, interesting facts, etc.). I just need a good resource for the information.  Any suggestions?

 

 

 

[knitgrl]

Mike Venezia did a whole series. They are great! Dd loved them at that age. It stops at George W. Bush. (I think.)

Edited July 13, 2023 by knitgrl

[Miss Tick]

Ages ago when we did US history we read all the Mike Venezia books about each president. Our library no longer carries them, though. Replaced with a drier, less interesting series.

If you have any interest in memorizing the presidents, my dd nailed them with the book Yo, Millard Fillmore.

[ScoutTN]

We used a song off YT; there are quite a few to choose from. My kids also enjoyed having a placemat with all the presidents. 
(We rotated these with ones with geography info, ones with flags. Some I made and some we bought.)

[SilverMoon]

I'd get something like the DK presidents book or turn it into a lesson on how to do internet searches. 

[TheAttachedMama]

1 hour ago, knitgrl said:

Mike Venezia did a whole series. They are great! Dd loved them at that age. It stops at George W. Bush. (I think.)

I know! That is what I was originally going to use, but our library doesn't have them either.   

Is there a similar fun biography that includes all of the presidents?  Or maybe a YouTube playlist even?  This is just kind of a side thing we plan to add to our morning time, so I don't want it to take too long.  Something short and sweet.   

[HomeAgain]

I am out of town right now, but when I get home I'll look to see what ds has in his room.  I know it's a book about the presidents and has everything you're asking about (I think).  It was a favorite of his for a while.

We also have Disney's The Presidents. Clips from the dvds are on Youtube.  They're quick, informative and go up through Obama. 

I think memorizing the Animaniacs presidents song is a great tool, too. It only goes through Clinton, but people have added on if you can find it.

[knitgrl]

44 minutes ago, TheAttachedMama said:

I know! That is what I was originally going to use, but our library doesn't have them either.   

Is there a similar fun biography that includes all of the presidents?  Or maybe a YouTube playlist even?  This is just kind of a side thing we plan to add to our morning time, so I don't want it to take too long.  Something short and sweet.   

I love to be helpful, but our presidents books are packed away, and I am not up for digging them out. This topic makes me feel old. I got the resource I used as a spine from Currclick, which no longer exists. What a bummer that libraries don't carry the Venezia books anymore; they are the most engaging series on the presidents that I've come across.

[HomeAgain]

Coming back to this, if it's not too late, @TheAttachedMama.  DS loves this book: U.S. Presidents Feats & Foul Ups.  Each president gets a one page spread of the bullet points: biographical info, things they did in office, and what they did first.  It's pretty cute, but not too deep.

May I also suggest stalking Terabith's work on here?  She's written several posts that are titled Happy Birthday, ______! to celebrate each president.  I absolutely adore them and need to print them out for my own kid:

 

[Terabith]

Oh yeah, if people are interested, I can bump them.  Friday was Gerald Ford’s birthday!

[LauraClark]

19 hours ago, Terabith said:

Oh yeah, if people are interested, I can bump them.  Friday was Gerald Ford’s birthday!

Any chance you would be willing to post all of them or attach a pdf? I also would love to print them out. My kids love those and I even started sending links of your posts to my history-loving dad.

Edited July 18, 2023 by LauraClark

[Lori D.]

Maybe use one of these books to pull out the facts needed to fill in your notebook?
- A Kid's Guide to US Presidents (goes up through the 2020 election)
- The Presidents Visual Encyclopedia (goes up through Biden)
- The Big Book of US Presidents (goes up through Biden)

And as a fun goofy supplement: Weird But True Know It All: US Presidents (2017) -- fun weird facts about the presidency and different presidents

Edited July 18, 2023 by Lori D.

[Terabith]

2 hours ago, LauraClark said:

Any chance you would be willing to post all of them or attach a pdf? I also would love to print them out. My kids love those and I even started sending links of your posts to my history-loving dad.

I can try to figure out how to do that.  

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to George Washington!  (This is a repeat from last year.)

 

You have been learning about George Washington since you were in kindergarten, and you probably think you know all about him. Founding Father, first president, chopped down a cherry tree and told the truth, general, dog lover, wearer of wooden teeth. Blah blah blah. (Actually, his teeth weren’t made of wood, but from the teeth of animals and slaves.) But what you probably don’t know about him is that George Washington was secretly a wizard.

 

“A WIZARD?” you’re probably thinking.

 

Well, yes. That’s really the only explanation for the story of his life.

 

First of all, he was invincible. Like, he really couldn’t be killed in battle. How do we know this? Because if he could have been killed in battle, he totally should have been.

 

Way back in 1755, during the French and Indian War, George Washington served as an aide-de-camp under General Edward Braddock. “Aide-de-camp” is a fancy way of saying that he was basically an intern. The future Founding Father’s job was to help out the highest-ranking officer and do things for him, like his laundry or carrying things. Maybe a little secretarial work. George Washington volunteered for the job because he knew the area. It was a pretty minor position, so it was a little surprising when instead of getting tea for the general and writing letters, George Washington decided to take over the British Army and announce his invincibility to the world.

 

During one battle, a botched surprise attack, the British were losing. Badly. After hours of intense fighting, General Braddock was shot off his horse. The British were surrounded and couldn’t get organized. So Washington, the glorified intern, started issuing orders and riding back and forth between the troops and the officers. Remember, he had no rank or position, but he was issuing orders anyway. If that wasn’t bad enough, then his horse got shot out from underneath him.

 

Twice.

 

Again, remember, George Washington was just a guy who knew the area. He was a volunteer. He wasn’t even a member of the Army. After his general was incapacitated, he said, “Wow! Looks like a position just opened up! Shotgun!” Then in battle, after his horse was shot out from underneath him, he just grabbed another, like it was no big thing. Then when it happened again, he just grabbed another horse. Instead of realizing that God wanted him to walk, he thought, “Wow. Bad day for horses,” and grabbed another victim.

 

Because of his efforts, the British troops were able to form a rear guard and allowed a safe retreat. At the end of the battle, Washington had four bullets in his coat and none in his body. He also happened to be the only officer who wasn't shot down. Years later, an Indian chief traveled to meet Washington. He recounted the battle, "Our rifles were leveled, rifles which, but for you, knew not how to miss ... I am come to pay homage to the man ... who can never die in battle." Let's be clear: I firmly believe that if a Native American says that someone is magic, that person is magic. Not up for discussion.

 

He admitted in a letter to his brother to liking the sound of bullets. “I heard the bullets whistling, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound of bullets,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. When King George heard about that, he suggested that perhaps Washington needed to hear a few more. Not that it would have mattered. The bullets were too scared of Washington to come anywhere’s near him.

 

Washington's bulletproof status didn't disappear when it was time for the Revolutionary War, either. During the battle of Princeton in 1777, Washington charged into a fight where an American regiment had already b een defeated. Washington arrived to a battle the British were completely destroying and to American men fleeing from all angles, which must have been confusing to Washington, who never understood why people were afraid of bullets. Things were falling apart on an impossible scale, which is of course when Washington shines his brightest. Washington rode over to the fleeing men and yelled, "Parade with us, my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly." The men couldn't look George Washington in his radiating, God-imbued face and keep running; they were only mortal.

 

Getting his troops into formation, Washington rode in front of them and ordered them not to fire until he gave the word. Washington rode until he was just thirty yards away from the British, and then standing in the middle of two armies, he gave the order to fire.

 

Let's pause the story. George Washington, the commander in chief of a fledgling nation, a symbol for the would-be country, stood, not only in front of his own men with guns telling them to shoot, but also between his men and the British troops who were only 30 yards away. His courage was only outweighed by his stupidity. Yes, his men needed to see a strong leader in order to keep united, but you know what they also needed? Their leader to not be killed by taking 500 bullets to the face. If you don't remember, the British troops had a tendency to stand in a line; it's a big part of why a lot of historians think the Americans were able to win the war. In this instance, however, it means that George Washington was a single man on a horse standing in front of a Wall of Death. A Wall of Death that was mostly aiming for him.

 

So many shots were fired that it was written, "The smoke was so thick that it was virtually impossible to see. The entire scene was chaos." The smoke cleared and George was not lying dead on the ground as he should have been, but instead "sat upright on his horse, calm and resolute."

Colonel Fitzgerald, Washington's aide, burst into tears upon seeing the commander alive. Riding over to his friend, Washington said, "The day is our own." So to be clear, not only did Washington not seem to understand the almost certain death he had just beaten, but he had the temerity to assert that they would win the ensuing battle, a claim that he had no grounds to believe were true. Except they totally won.

 

Actually, George Washington’s bulletproof status started even before he was born. Mary Ball Washington, mother of the future father of the USA, was enjoying a dinner party and sitting next to the fireplace. Suddenly, a ball of lightning exploded down the chimney, zapping a girl sitting right next to her with enough gigawatts to fuse her fork and knife together and kill her to death.

 

Mary got badly jolted, but not enough to scramble the infant Founding Father currently floating around in her uterus. The party was understandably ruined.

 

If she'd been sitting a little closer, if her chair had been a little better at conducting electricity, if any one of a million variables played out the other way... no USA.

 

Since we're all from the future, we know that Washington is an obvious choice for president and commander in chief and whatever else he wants to be. The American people needed to elect Washington, because God built him out of magic and testosterone, and that sort of thing should be rewarded.

 

Of course it wasn't so obvious back then, and in fact, Washington should not have been elected to be the leader of anything, let alone an entire army. Braddock's defeat was just one of Washington's many, many defeats. Fort Necessity, for example, which Washington set up and then almost immediately had to surrender after a brief battle. That does not make for a shining military history.

 

There were much older, more experienced men to choose from, but why did Washington get called up to the big leagues? Did he give a passionate speech? Did he have the best guns? Did he captivate a nation?

 

No. It came down to geography. Just like today, an important position was filled based on demographics. Namely, Washington was from the correct state. Virginian support was key to winning the war, and hey, Washington's from Virginia, so, sure, let's make him commander in chief. Without that appointment, Washington would never have become president. That just goes to show you, kids -- if you work hard and try your best and are literally born in the right place at the right time through no agency of your own whatsoever, you too can grow up to be president.

 

Well, and there was also the fact that he could see the future. On his way to the Continental Congress, when most of the other delegates were still trying to figure out how to prevent war with England, George Washington stopped off on the way there to buy some tomahawks, some books about military strategies, and some new holsters for his guns, before arriving in his military uniform. While most people were still trying to figure out how to prevent war, he knew that it was inevitable and that he was going to be running it. But he was right. And furthermore, as commander in chief, his plans worked, even when they were terrible. Because he could control the weather. Because he was a wizard.

 

It's the early winter of 1775, and George Washington is now General George Washington and fighting against the mother country. The Continental Army has the British-occupied Boston surrounded, but the two armies are in a stalemate, because Washington's men simply don't have enough firepower to force the British out. A man named Henry Knox shows up saying, "Hey, I've got an idea," and Washington says, "Sounds good." Knox replies, "Wait, I should clarify: It's completely crazy." "In that case," Washington says, "sounds even better!”

 

The mission was simple, in that a simpleton came up with it. Henry Knox wanted to go to Fort Ticonderoga, which was not a company that made pencils in those days, but was actually a fort that had been recently captured from the British. Once they got there, Knox proposed that the Continental Army acquire all the weaponry that was in it, and then bring it to Dorchester Heights to dislodge those stubborn British. The fort was 300 miles away, the plan required a ton of men and money, cannons had to be dismantled, flotillas had to be bought or made to ship everything down a river, stuff had to be moved onto sleds and hauled by enough oxen to handle the combined weight of the cannons and the sleds, and everything depended on the weather being crazy fickle in their favor -- they needed warmth to keep the river unfrozen on their way there and then snow at the precisely right time for covering ground with the sleds, and George Washington was strongly advised not to authorize the mission. Because it was impossible.

 

Well, Washington doesn't know the meaning of "impossible" or "too risky" or "stupid" or "You've been given direct orders not to do this.” So he gave Knox the go-ahead.

 

Knox ventured out and was able to get to the fort in Ticonderoga within four days, and he immediately began the work of disassembling the artillery. By the ninth day, everything was packed up on the flotillas and heading downriver. The men were rowing against freezing winds, and they only just managed to get the cannons across the lake when it started to freeze over. Within a week, Knox was able to obtain around 40 sleds able to carry the 5,400-pound loads, along with the oxen to pull them. Like clockwork, it started snowing, right when the men needed it to. It seemed like another stroke of that George Washington luck was in play.

 

It didn't make any sense. When Washington needed the river not to be frozen, it wouldn't be, and when he needed it to snow so the men could transport the weaponry via sled, it snowed. If this doesn't convince you that God's in some kind of weird heavenly gambling tournament and put a whole lot of money on George Washington's success, then we don't know what will.

 

Washington's weather-related luck actually came up a lot. In August of 1776, America had declared itself a nation, and the first major battle of the Revolutionary War was underway. George Washington didn't have nearly as many men as the British, and that's before you take into account how many were ill or unprepared. Washington set up shop at a Manhattan harbor and waited for the British there, knowing that the harbor would be important. When the British did arrive, Washington got his butt handed to him, as he was wont to do, because really, he was a terrible general.

And then British Army Commander in Chief William Howe decided to stop attacking Washington's troops, even though they were basically stranded and Howe had a giant ship with lots of firepower. For no reason. Just because George Washington was 70 percent leprechaun and willed Howe to stop.

 

Washington, meanwhile, fed spies bad information to make the British believe that he was asking for reinforcements, when really he sent for every ship and boat in the area to enable the entire army to retreat. Obviously all of the boats coming would most likely clue Howe in to some general happenings, but this is George Washington we're talking about, so he saw no flaw in the plan.

 

Because Washington was destined to win the war and be president, the weather took an unseasonable turn for the worse in New York on Aug. 29, and for the Continental Army, this seemed like another element to add to a long list of grievances, being that they were trapped, outnumbered, ill-equipped, poorly trained, freezing and starving, and it was raining. It seemed as if God was punishing the Americans with the same weather that usually makes everyone hate England in the first place.

 

But this rain turned out to be one of the best-disguised blessings in history, as it was so foggy the next morning that one could "scarcely discern a man from six yards' distance," which meant the Brits had to sit on their thumbs until the fog passed. What was more, for some reason, the fog "concealed from the British the operations of the Americans, while at New York the atmosphere was perfectly clear." In other words, the only parts of the city that were foggy were the parts the Brits needed to see through to figure out what the heck Washington was up to.

 

Washington did not need to shoot the British the next morning; he just needed to get out of Brooklyn with enough of his army to continue and win the war with. This fog provided him with precisely the time and the cover he needed to successfully sneak all 9,000 of his men into Manhattan while the British sat back and reminisced about this jolly good London weather. It was like Washington shouted, "Cover me!" at God, and God had complied like world's greatest buddy cop. There was not a single loss of life, and Washington was the last one to leave Long Island ... immediately after he snatched his whole army and the Revolution straight out of the British Empire's back pocket. By the time the fog lifted and Howe saw the Continental Army sailing away, waving at him, it was too late for the British Army to catch them.

 

Washington's crossing of the Delaware and subsequent Christmas conquering of the Hessian enemies is famous by now, but what a lot of people might not know is just how backwardsly Washington stumbled into victory.

 

Washington's plan, of course, was to sail across the Delaware on December 24 and attack on Christmas. When Washington's men sailed out, a British sympathizer saw the men and sent a servant to deliver a warning message. The note actually got to Colonel Johann Rall, the leader of the Hessian men, who promptly put the note in his pocket instead of reading it and continued playing cards and drinking. We haven't been in a lot of wars, but we're pretty sure that "reading urgent notes regarding the whereabouts of your enemies" is probably one of the first things they teach you to know (assuming you needed to even be taught that). Maybe Rall skipped that day of army training, or maybe the part of his brain that deals with reason is made of poop, or maybe George Washington is just cosmically, unfairly, inexplicably lucky. Whatever the reason, Rall never read the note. Well, not never.

 

He eventually read it the next day. After he’d been forced to surrender.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to John Adams (10/30)!

 

There was absolutely nothing more important to John Adams, who was almost certainly the smartest man who has ever been president, than his moral principles and doing what was right. He was cranky and contrary and almost enjoyed his principles more if he was fighting against the crowd and supporting the underdog.

 

You couldn’t have picked a better spokesman than John Adams for colonial independence, in other words.

 

John Adams’s intelligence and verbal skills were prodigious. He regularly used his mind to accomplish the impossible. He dedicated his mind and his writing to fighting and winning the most uphill battles he could find.

 

In 1770, members of the British army shot and killed five civilians in what was called the “Boston Massacre.” The soldiers had to be put on trial, but there was a problem. Nobody would take their case. Every lawyer in the colonies knew that whoever defended the evil, horrible British would certainly: 1) lose, and 2) be crucified by the Bostonians who really, really, really hated the British.

 

John Adams did not care about being vilified. Honestly, any stance that was likely to make him be vilified only increased its appeal in his eyes. John loved humanity, but he wasn’t crazy about people. He did not care about being popular, although he did care a great deal about his legacy. He had ideals and convictions and beliefs up the wazoo, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more important to him than sticking up for his convictions. His motto was, “Being righteous is more important than having friends.”

 

No wonder he was a one term president.

 

But this is exactly why he was just the man to defend the British soldiers who committed the Boston Massacre. Boston was the seat of anti-British sentiment in the colonies. Honestly, the folks in New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia weren’t all that upset with the British, but anger with Great Britain had reached a fever pitch in Boston, which is why the “massacre” happened to begin with. The civilians provoked the attack. They confronted the British soldiers as a mob armed with clubs, hurling garbage and insults, and suggesting that the British fire upon them. That’s how much the Bostonians hated the British. They begged to be shot, just so they would have an excuse to demand independence. The townsfolk of Boston went to the trial to intimidate the witnesses into testifying against the British. These soldiers were facing a trial by a jury full of Bostonians who hated their guts, and the witnesses were being tampered with.

 

John Adams defended the British soldiers, and he won. That’s how good he is. That’s how smart he is. When Adams believes he is right, there is no force on the planet that can stop him. He convinced the entire courtroom that the soldiers who shot and killed five civilians were in the right.

 

John Adams took that energy into the Continental Congress, where he faced the uphill battle of convincing all the other representatives that a revolution was necessary. Almost everyone else there disagreed with him and wanted to negotiate with the British peacefully and avoid a war with the world’s first superpower. Only John Adams and George Washington knew that a violent revolution was necessary and had to happen immediately. Adams convinced everyone there. Richard Stockton, New Jersey’s representative to the Continental Congress, called Adams the “Atlas of American Independence” because of his dedication to carrying the cause for independence on his back. Adams’s speeches advocating independence were so heartfelt and convincing that he moved people to tears, and he convinced Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, who was an ardent pacifist and wanted peace with Britain more than anything, into quitting the Continental Congress and joining the Pennsylvania militia.

 

John Adams and Ben Franklin were once traveling together for a conference, when they were forced by weather to stop at a roadside inn. The inn only had one bed available, so they snuggled down to share it, and promptly got into a big argument about whether the window should be open or closed. The argument ended when Franklin went into such a long winded and boring lecture on the health benefits of sleeping in cold air that John Adams fell asleep.

 

While touring Shakespeare’s home with Thomas Jefferson, the two of them broke away from the tour and chipped off a piece of Shakespeare’s chair to keep as a souvenir. Of course, maybe this act and not Jefferson wrestling the presidency away from Adams was what cursed their friendship. The two former best friends spent years as sworn enemies, messing with each other’s ambitions, before finally reconciling in their old age.

Shakespeare’s ghost couldn’t cause that, could it? Well, Adams wrote in his diary about a curse he found on Shakespeare’s grave. A curse that references people who “remove things from their rightful place.”

 

Alexander Hamilton might have been famous for writing like he was running out of time, but John Adams might have had him beat. He wrote about everything in his diary and in his long letters to his wife Abigail, a brilliant woman who was a mental match for John. He would write everything about everyone he met. How tall they were, what they were interested in, what their strengths and flaws were. He knew people well enough to know what they needed to hear to get them to see his own point of view, and if they still wouldn’t join his side, he would take their biggest insecurity and hold it up for everyone to see.

 

Unfortunately, being president is pretty much a political position, and part of being a good president is getting other people to like you or at least work with you. And, really, getting people to like him was not really Adams’s forte.

 

One of the things John Adams, a highly educated and brilliant man, was proudest of was his declaration that the American Academy for the Arts and Sciences should be established. It still exists as a forum of scholarship. Adams said its establishment was one of his proudest accomplishments.

During the famed election of 1800, when Jefferson was running against Adams, John Adams said this about his own vice president and former best friend: "Prostitutes ... will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the Most High."  Later, he expanded his claims to say that Jefferson would enforce the "teaching of murder robbery, rape, adultery, and incest."

 

Thomas Jefferson had been John Adams’s best friend, up until the time of the Constitutional Convention. They had worked together for independence, but their views on the specifics of how the country should be run broke down their friendship. John Adams believed the presidency should be a very strong position, almost monarchial, while Jefferson distrusted strong central authority. This soured their friendship so much that when Jefferson defeated Adams (and Aaron Burr) in the election of 1800, Adams did not stick around for the inauguration. He sneaked out of the White House and back to Massachusetts in the middle of the night.

 

As he got older, he began to think with fondness about his former friendship with Jefferson, and they reconciled through letters.

Both John Adams and his lifelong friendenemy Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Thomas Jefferson (4/13).

 

Thomas Jefferson was possibly one of the weirdest men who has served as President of the United States. He was a towering intellect and quite possibly the most intelligent of our presidents, but he was deeply odd and a complicated character. He somehow managed to combine the very best of the United States along with the very worst. He was, in many ways, the quintessential American, but he was also deeply odd.

 

He was an eloquent and powerful writer, which led to him being tasked with writing the Declaration of Independence, but he was such a terrible speaker that he had to add accent marks to get through reading it aloud. The man was definitely no Daveed Diggs. For someone known for his speeches, Jefferson absolutely HATED talking. Frankly, he was probably neurodivergent. He didn’t look people in the eye, and he was absolutely terrified of speaking publicly. He only gave two speeches while president, at each of his inaugurations, and he started the tradition of submitting the State of the Union in writing each year. He hummed constantly to himself. He was deeply obsessive, taking notes on everything from the weather to gardening to how many steps it was from one room to another. When he died, he left 40,000 pieces of correspondence to his grandson, which means that he a) wrote 40,000 pieces of correspondence, which seems pretty excessive even for someone as brilliant as he, and b) that he saved it all. He was a walking episode of “Hoarders.”

 

In order to distract people from actually speaking to him, he deliberately dressed in as crazy a way as possible. He wore bright red pants and the rest of his clothing was a deliberate mishmash of as many styles as possible, to create an outfit that he found the most comfortable. Reverend S.A. Bumstead, who dined with Jefferson commented that, “His costume was very singular.” Ellen Coolidge wrote in a letter, “He did nothing to be in conformity with the fashion of the day.”

 

His intellect was genuinely towering. He probably made a greater impact on early American politics than anyone, including but not limited to his writing of the Declaration of Independence. He designed and invented tons of cool things, like swivel chairs, automatic doors, the portable printing press, and the pedometer. Yes, Thomas Jefferson is responsible for your Fit Bit. He didn’t believe in patents, though, so in a reverse Thomas Edison, he invented loads of things but didn’t take public intellectual credit or profit for.

 

While president, Jefferson got into a weird, ahem, “scientific” argument with the Count Buffon of France, who was legitimately famous and had written a treatise on “The Theory of American Degeneracy,” where he said all the great species were from the Old World, and any American versions were smaller and weaker. Also, American birds didn’t sing and our dogs were too dumb to bark. Buffon was going around convincing everyone that America was a cold, swampy wasteland where anyone who went there would get smaller and stupider. This was a huge problem, because America needed immigrants. The Carl Sagan of the powdered wig era going around saying these things was putting a major crimp in America’s economic development. Thomas Jefferson wrote a rebuttal, saying that America actually had more species and that Buffon was a liar with his pants on fire and that America’s species were not smaller. Jefferson decided to fix this by sending a stuffed giant moose over to France, so he asked his friends to kill and send one over, which took awhile, and when the seven foot tall moose DID arrive, since apparently Jefferson’s friend was not a cracker jack taxidermist, the moose was, er, ripe and rotten after the year long voyage. But its antlers were there, so Jefferson was like, “Just, ya know, imagine the rest of it.” Buffon said he was convinced and that he’d say that in his next edition that his idea of American degeneracy was wrong. Which would have been great, except Buffon died a couple months later, so there wasn’t a next edition. America’s writers and artists came to her defense, though, and the problem seems to have resolved itself.

 

Jefferson was also kind of a badass, despite his massive speaking anxiety and poor fashion choices. Saying, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” is a pretty badass thing to say when you, yourself are the one in authority.

 

One of the first things Jefferson did as president was go to war with the Barbary pirates, who had been conducting a multi-national Mafia shakedown of most of the world for a long time. Nobody was really clear on what presidential powers were with regards to war, so Jefferson just straight up told Congress that he was sending the Navy, starting a great tradition of American executive power for war, but which was probably justified in this instance. And it led to the American flag being hoisted for the first time on foreign soil, which was pretty cool.

But, for all the cool stuff Jefferson did, he also embodied all the worst faults of America. He knew slavery was wrong. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, there was a 168 word passage condemning slavery and claiming it was one of many evils foisted upon America by the British. And yet, despite his deep awareness that slavery was wrong, Jefferson owned over 600 slaves, and he only freed two within his lifetime and only seven more upon his death.

 

In 1785, Jefferson sent one of his slaves, James Hemmings, to France to learn French cooking. Jefferson promised James his freedom if he learned French cuisine and passed it to another slave, which Jefferson did eventually do. James Hemmings learned to speak better French than Jefferson, and he is responsible for bringing French fries, ice cream, mac and cheese, Parmesan cheese, and champagne into popularity in the United States. Hemmings was the cook for “the room where it happened,” when Hamilton and Madison decided on the American economic system and the location of the US capital. So, we have much to thank James Hemmings for!

 

Two years later, Thomas Jefferson brought James’s sister, Sally, who was only fourteen years old, to Paris, and he began having a sexual relationship with her. She was also the half sister of Martha Jefferson. In France, both Sally and James were legally free. When Jefferson decided to return to Monticello only two years later, Sally, who was only 16 years old and pregnant, refused to leave, so he negotiated with her, agreeing that if she returned, he would grant her “extraordinary privileges” and free her children. She returned to Virginia and slavery, already pregnant. The extraordinary privileges granted to her mostly consisted of being allowed to keep her children with her.

 

Sally Hemmings bore Jefferson six children, four of whom lived to adulthood. One son, Beverly Jefferson, and one daughter, Harriet, were allowed to leave Monticello without being legally freed. They passed in white society. Beverly worked as a carpenter and played the fiddle.

Two younger children, Madison and Eston, were freed upon Jefferson’s death by his will. At that time, too, Sally was allowed to leave without being granted official freedom. Madison worked as a carpenter and joiner and owned a farm in Ohio. Eston worked as a carpenter and as a professional musician. Both of these younger sons advertised themselves as being Jefferson’s children and told their descendants, a fact which was born out in DNA results.

 

Because Beverly and Harriet were passing in white society, they denied their lineage, and historians have been unable to located their descendants.

[Terabith]

James Madison, our fourth president, was called “The Father of the Constitution,” I guess because people in the 1700s really sucked at giving nicknames.

 

Really, his importance in shaping the laws that govern our country to this day cannot be overstated. He had one of the sharpest political minds ever, and in a time when political geniuses like Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin were just all walking around, hanging out together, competition for genius was pretty darn stiff.

 

He didn’t exactly look presidential. He was a fun sized president, barely five foot four, and soaking wet he barely hit one hundred pounds. His voice was high, squeaky, and so quiet that reporters often couldn’t hear him and would just leave blanks where they missed what he was saying. He was sickly his entire life. He hated crowds and was something like a miniature Thomas Jefferson.

 

He grew up in Virginia, and went to Princeton, where his “accelerated course of study” led to his graduation in only two years, but may have compromised his health. He founded the American Whig Society as a competitor to Aaron Burr’s Cliosophic Society. He returned as Princeton’s first graduate student.

 

After the Revolutionary War and a whole lot of convoluted and really rather boring various proposals and counter proposals for new forms of government, Madison worked out a lot of the details for the new Constitution, spoke over two hundred times during the Convention, working to persuade fellow members to ratify it, kept the minutes which told us what happened during the Convention, and he convinced most attenders to shift focus from states being mostly sovereign to a shared relationship between states and the federal government. James Madison, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, wrote The Federalist Papers, a series of essays to convince people to ratify the new United States Constitution.

 

James Madison won a seat in the US House of Representatives for Virginia. He served as an advisor on the Constitution to President Washington, and helped Washington write his first inaugural address. Madison set the agenda for the First Congress and helped Washington establish and staff the first three Cabinet departments. While Madison initially opposed any amendments to the Constitution, he eventually decided that they could help mitigate problems that might arise, and he introduced the bill that would propose amendments that eventually became the Bill of Rights.

 

Madison, along with Thomas Jefferson, founded the Democratic-Republican Party, largely in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s strong Federalist and northern state dominated party and out of fear of Hamilton’s strong economic initiatives.

 

Madison served as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of State, and then in 1808 became president in his own right, where his wife Dolly became the template for the role of the First Lady, and the two of them served ice cream at many White House parties, including the apparently delicious oyster flavored ice cream. This was a tumultuous time, because Britain and France were at war, a war which eventually spilled over to the United States, called the War of 1812. And while Mr. Madison might have been the shrimpiest man ever to be our commander in chief, he is also the only president who took up arms and personally led men into battle while president.

 

When the British invaded Washington and set fire to the White House, Dolly Madison rescued the portrait of George Washington and James Madison grabbed a set of pistols, ran outside and off to the front lines to try to rally the troops to fight the British. He was almost captured before moving towards the rear, and the British settled down to a nice, leisurely burning of the new nation’s capital, which was fortunately interrupted by….a tornado. Apparently God was on our side that day, I guess?

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to James Monroe (4/28).

 

When James Monroe set off to college at William and Mary, his parents probably hoped that their son would spend his time studying. Unfortunately, what he mostly spent his time doing was harassing the British soldiers who practiced formations on the field of Williamsburg. The British governor, Lord Dunmore, was terrified of the colonists, so he decorated his mansion primarily in weapons. Like seriously, you can go see it today, and there is one room that was covered floor to ceiling, on all the walls, with guns and swords. Dunmore kept taking actions that made him unpopular with Virginians, such as ordering a cask of gunpowder that belonged to the town of Williamsburg to be seized, and eventually, the governor got so antsy that he fled Williamsburg and his mansion and ran away to Norfolk.

Sixteen year old James Monroe and some fellow students noticed this fact, and decided to liberate the weapons from the walls of the governor’s mansion, which they did, and then turned over 200 muskets and 300 swords to the Virginia militia. Monroe then dropped out of college to join the war efforts. This would probably have been more of a disappointment to his parents if his backup plan hadn’t been “becoming president of the new country.”

 

While an officer in the Battle of Trenton serving under Captain William Washington (no relation to George), both men got shot. The captain stayed down after being shot, which is a sensible thing to do, but Monroe just said, “Hey, I’ll be captain now,” and commanded the troops with a bullet in his shoulder. He captured two cannons, rallying the troops with the cry, “Victory or Death,” I guess because he’d gotten a real taste for stealing weapons back in college and he decided he liked it.

 

In that famous painting of General George Washington crossing the Delaware, James Monroe is the one waving the flag behind the general and clearly thinking if he can cram that flagpole up the butt of some British officer.

 

I guess you could say Monroe really liked fighting. He got promotion after promotion, and eventually wound up with what was basically a desk job. Which seems like a pretty sweet deal. Most people prefer the parts of war that don’t involve getting shot at, but not Monroe. He got restless, quit, and went back to Virginia to start his own militia. He only got distracted when Thomas Jefferson took him on as a legal apprentice, so he finally left military service, where he was beloved by his men and respected by General, Wizard, and Future First President George Washington.

 

Not having finished his college degree didn’t really hamper Monroe’s prospects. He served as ambassador to France, as governor to Virginia, and then when James Madison was president, Monroe served as secretary of state until the War of 1812 broke out and Madison appointed Monroe secretary of war too. I guess Madison had a hard time finding a replacement for Monroe as secretary of state, so Monroe shrugged and said, “Hey, I guess I’ll just do both jobs at the same time!” Which he did, until a peace treaty was signed, at which point Monroe resigned as secretary of war and went back to his part time job being secretary of state.

 

Then Monroe got elected president, where he is mostly famous for giving a speech that came to be known as The Monroe Doctrine, that told Europe to shove it and not to even think about going anywhere near the Western Hemisphere or he would beat them up. U.S.A! U.S.A! This was the perfect speech and philosophy for James Monroe, who loved war, so Europe said, “Okay, okay, we won’t do it,” and it got named for Monroe, even though it was really written by John Quincy Adams. So it really should be named the Adams Doctrine, but they’ve got a family and awesome tv show named after them, so I guess that’s okay.

 

Even as a president, in his late 60’s, Monroe was a pretty hands on kind of guy. At a dinner for visiting diplomats, one of the diplomats offended the other, so they rushed out of the room to grab their swords and duel each other, as I guess was the cool thing to do before Twitter. Monroe, as president, grabbed his own sword and joined them, yelling at the diplomats until they worked out their differences and went home, because can’t we just have ONE DINNER without people trying to kill each other?

 

A few months after this, Monroe’s secretary of the treasury, William Crawford, barged into Monroe’s office and demanded that Monroe give his friends cushy jobs. Monroe said, “Hey, let me think about it.” Crawford got mad and attacked Monroe with his cane, so Monroe pulled the fireplace tongs out of the fire and chased Crawford out of the White House with the flaming red tongs.

 

Monroe also bought Florida from Spain while president.

 

Aaron Burr described Monroe as “incompetent, naturally dull and stupid…extremely illiterate…indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him…and far below mediocrity.” To be fair, Aaron Burr hung out with some real intellectual powerhouses. Being brilliant didn’t really matter, however, since Monroe was so good at war. He’s remembered as a good president, despite his comparatively dull mind.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to John Quincy Adams (7/11)!

 

John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was the first of two father-son presidential duos we’ve experienced. (The other was George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.)

 

His childhood was somewhat traumatic. He became the man of the house when he was eight years old, while his father was working behind the scenes of the Revolutionary War. Young John watched battles from his front porch and wrote in his journal that he worried about being “butchered in cold blood or taken and carried…as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of British soldiers.” (At least he had an impressive vocabulary for an eight-year-old.)

 

Quincy had an intense desire to live up to his father, and since his father was president of the United States, those are tough expectations to live up to. Even after being lauded as a superb diplomat (He was responsible for acquiring Florida under President Monroe), pretty much wrote the Monroe Doctrine, which told Europe to stay out of the Western Hemisphere, vocally opposed slavery, was private secretary to the American minister to Russia, was a secretary at the Treaty of Paris, a Congressman, and, you know, president of the United States, he still felt like a failure. He wrote in his diary, “My whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success to anything that I ever undertook.” To punish himself for his perceived transgressions, Quincy would punish his body. He exercised for five hours a day, soak himself in ice-cold baths, and scrape his body with a horsehair mitten.

 

His exercise routine involved swimming the Potomac River every day. Even in winter. Even at 58, he could reportedly swim the width of it in an hour. And, of course, they didn’t have bathing suits in those days, so he did this all in the nude. There is a tall tale that one day, an enterprising female journalist wanted an interview with Quincy, so she stole his clothes until he agreed. However, there is no evidence that this story is true, and if it was, it would have come to light since the journalist, Anne Royal, was put on trial for being a “common scold.” Since it did not, and the earliest account of the story is from well after the lifetime of either participant, we can be pretty sure it never occurred. Still, it’s funny.

 

While president, John Quincy Adams pushed for improving America’s infrastructure through such improvements as the Erie Canal and the Cumberland Road, to connect different parts of the United States. He drafted most of what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. He tried to set aside lands for conservation, and he called for a universal system of weights and measures to standardize such things across the new United States. He sent troops to protect the Cherokee Indians.

 

However, his aloof manner and “elitism” did not endear him to the public, and he lost his bid for re-election.

 

John Quincy Adams kept two pet alligators in the bathroom of the East Wing of the White House, which must have made going to the lavatory exciting.

 

He also thought the Earth was hollow and approved an expedition to prove it and open up trade relationships with the mole people that he believed lived inside the Earth. Granted, at the time, our understanding of geography wasn’t as complete as it is today, but it wasn’t THAT messed up. Even then, people knew the Earth wasn’t hollow, but Quincy was a little bit insane. Fortunately for the taxpayers, when Andrew Jackson (who believed the earth was flat) succeeded Quincy, he put an end to the expedition.

 

John Quincy Adams was such a workaholic that even after his presidency, he served as a Congressman. While a Congressman, he argued passionately for over nine hours for the freedom of the Amistad slaves who had killed their Spanish captors, and he was successful in obtaining their freedom and transport back to their home in Sierra Leone. In fact, John Quincy Adams was so devoted to his work that he collapsed and died on the Congressional floor, while in the midst of explaining his objections to the Mexican-American War.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Andrew Jackson!

 

Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, was a lot of things, but all of them were crazy. He was born without a father, and his mother died when he was 14. At the ripe old age of 13, Andrew Jackson decided to fight the British in the Revolutionary War. In 1780, he and his brother were captured by the British and taken as prisoners of war. Young Andrew was ordered to shine the shoes of his captor. He refused, which earned him a long scar down his face from the point of a sword. He was then forced to march forty miles to another prison camp: shoeless, with no food or water, with an undressed wound and smallpox.

 

He went on to fight in the War of 1812 and the Seminole War, and then when he ran out of wars, he just started fighting duels. Lots of duels. In one duel, against a Charles Dickinson, Jackson did the gentlemanly thing and offered to allow Dickinson to go first, even though he was widely known as a crackerjack shot. Dickinson shot first, as Jackson stood there, taking it just to the left of his heart. While Dickinson was reloading, Jackson shot him dead.

 

Jackson wasn’t only adept with firearms. His nickname was “Old Hickory,” because he carried a hickory cane. Not to help him walk or anything, but so he could beat people with it. In 1835, the first assassination attempt in American history occurred when a man named Richard Lawrence had the ill considered idea to pull out a gun and fire on Jackson. The gun misfired, so Lawrence, who like a good Boy Scout had come prepared, pulled out a second gun and shot at Jackson. This gun also misfired. (Upon later inspection, both guns worked perfectly.) Jackson took his hickory cane and began beating Lawrence nearly to death with it until presidential aids had to restrain Jackson.

 

The man stands up to fictional hero standards. He makes Batman and Bruce Willis look passé.

 

He oversaw the Trail of Tears, the forceful removal of the Cherokee from their native lands to an area west of the Mississippi. The journey resulted in the death of a quarter of the Native Americans.

 

His first official act as president was to throw a giant party, which was less of a black- tie affair and more of an 18th century Burning Man. So many thousands of people (about 20,000) showed up that Jackson was forced to sneak out a window, and it wasn’t until someone had the idea of putting tubs of whiskey on the White House lawn that Jackson was able to sneak back in and get down to being president. However, undeterred by the consequences of radical hospitality, when Andrew Jackson was gifted a giant, 1400 pound wheel of cheese, he put out a series of advertisements inviting the entire country to come help him eat it. Unfortunately, the stink and fragments of the cheese so perfumed the White House that it could be scented for a mile in any direction. And thus did Jackson vacate the White House. Poor Martin Van Buren.

 

Upon the election of Martin Van Buren, Jackson was asked if he had any regrets about the previous eight years. “That I didn’t shoot Henry Clay, and that I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.” That’s right, after a presidency (and a life) chock full of duels and deaths, Andrew Jackson’s only regrets were that he didn’t kill more people.

[Terabith]

Happy early birthday to Martin van Buren (12/5)!

 

Martin Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, and was the first president to be born an American citizen (i.e. after the Declaration of Independence was signed). His family was of Dutch descent. He learned English in school, making him the only president for whom English was a second language. He was also a right bastard and just a general, all-around horrible person.

 

He wasn’t just a bad president, although he was. He was just a generally crappy human being. He’s the kind of person people would cross the street to avoid or who would make you dread Thanksgiving if he was one of your extended relatives.

 

One theory for why Martin van Buren was such a terrible person is that it was all his teachers’ faults. His handwriting indicates that he was probably, by nature, left-handed. But left-handed people were literally of the devil, and so from an early age, he was taught that to do what was right (to him, confusedly, literally write with his left hand) was wrong. But from childhood on, van Buren was pretty much determined to do what was wrong in any time of moral decision making.

 

He became a lawyer and was active from an early age in first local and then state politics. Martin figured out early in his career how to exploit politics. It was a time in which populism reigned. People were really beginning to elect the people that THEY wanted, even if they were horrible human beings like Andrew Jackson. Van Buren looked at the idea of power arising from the people and went, “Hey, I can totally cheat that!” He was called the “Little Magician” and the “Red Fox” for his ability to manipulate elections. He formed the Albany Regency in 1822, the first political machine: a group of similarly horrible human beings who control the government, not by winning elections but by RIGGING elections and placing their friends and relatives in positions of power. Van Buren was their leader.

 

He became a senator in 1821, and then campaigned for Andrew Jackson, who was his mentor. Van Buren became governor of New York in 1828, but he only served for two months before resigning to become Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State. Van Buren was a key advisor to Jackson, but then politics got weird and Van Buren resigned so that Jackson could fire his entire cabinet and start over.

 

So, why did Jackson want to fire his entire Cabinet? Well, it’s complicated. In 1831, Jackson’s Secretary of War, John Eaton, got married to a widow and former tavern maid named Peggy O’Neil. Apparently, O’Neil had not been a widow for quite long enough, and it was considered scandalous that Eaton married her so quickly. It was considered so scandalous that the couple became social pariahs. Leading ladies of Washington DC refused to talk to them or invite them to parties. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren sided with the Eatons, but nobody else did, and Jackson, who was a man who was easily angered at the best of times, asked for the resignations of all of his cabinet members and basically promised Van Buren the presidency after Jackson was finished.

 

With Jackson’s backing, Van Buren became president easily in 1836. Being president after someone as charismatic (and insane) as Andrew Jackson is tough, even without the lingering smell of old cheese permeating the White House from the Giant Cheese Party at the end of the Jackson administration.

 

(Have I told you about the Giant Cheese Party? Andrew Jackson was gifted a 4,000 lb block of cheese. He was having a hard time getting rid of the cheese, even leaving it in the parlor and inviting anyone who wanted to to come in and have some cheese, so before he left the White House, Jackson threw a huge cheese shin dig to try to get rid of the by now super smelly and greasy cheese. He invited the whole town. West Wing famously memorialized it as a time when constituents could consult with the president on topics that they felt were personally important. Sounds noble. Not so noble was the condition of the White House. “The air was redolent with cheese. The carpet was slippery with cheese.” Van Buren promptly banned food from all White House receptions, which honestly, seems kind of understandable in context.)

 

When Van Buren was vice president, he always brought an extremely visible pair of loaded pistols to Senate assemblies. He said it was a precaution.

 

Maybe because of his general personality and character, he tended to get tummy aches, so he drank a mixture of water, soot, and charcoal.

He also loved slavery. In his inaugural address, he said, “I must go into the Presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.

 

When he was not being a racist jerk, he spent lots of time throwing fancy parties for fancy friends and spending lots of money on furniture. He spent a fortune redecorating the White House (though after the cheese debacle, maybe it was warranted). He spent $27,000 of American taxpayer money redecorating the White House, which would be $540,000 in today’s money. He wanted the White House to be a palace. Andrew Jackson, Martin van Buren’s mentor, threw a giant drinking party when he got elected. Van Buren stationed police officers outside the White House to make sure no “improper” people ever entered. Davy Crockett, who once wrestled a bear, described Van Buren as a dandy who would “walk around laced up in corsets such as women…wear. It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or a woman.”

 

Van Buren didn’t care that people trashed his name or that the country was falling apart on his watch, because he didn’t have strong opinions. He would use so many fancy words and so much doubletalk that nobody ever knew where he stood on any particular issue. (A quality he shared with Aaron Burr.) While Van Buren was vice president, Henry Clay tried to get a rise out of van Buren by trash talking his mentor, running mate, friend, and president Andrew Jackson. He gave this long, passionate speech condemning (rightly, as it turned out, because Jackson was a huge turd) Andrew Jackson’s entire administration. When the speech was over, Van Buren didn’t agree with Clay, but he also didn’t defend his friend. He walked up to Henry Clay, asked if he could borrow his snuff (tobacco), took two hits of it, and left. Just walked out the door, even though there had been no explosion in the background and Van Buren wasn’t even wearing sunglasses.

Van Buren was blamed for the economic depression of 1837, the biggest financial crisis the US had experienced and which remained the worst until the Great Depression a hundred years later, even though it was primarily caused by Jackson’s policies, and Van Buren’s critics called him “Martin Van Ruin.” You can still feel the burn from that one, almost two centuries later. And while the economic collapse wasn’t really his fault, the optics of spending tons of money on fancy clothes and furniture and wine while the country suffered unemployment and people were struggling had a certain reminiscence of Nero and his fiddle. Housing prices were dropping throughout the country. Van Buren decided to cut spending on infrastructure, including spending on National Road, US 40.

 

This pissed off the people of Indiana. They couldn’t afford to fix the road themselves, because of the economic depression. And the poorly maintained road meant that anyone driving on said road would eventually find their carriage disintegrating.

 

While gearing up to run for president in 1844, after losing in 1840, he made a trip through Plainfield, Indiana. His stagecoach driver decided to show him the fruits of his infrastructure cuts. The road was so bad that in one spot, it had become a pig wallow around an elm tree growing in the middle of the road. Most riders took a detour, but the cabbie decided to stay on the road, right towards the tree. The roots upturned the carriage and tossed the dandy Martin van Buren into a bunch of pig poop. The cabbie leapt clean away.

 

He lost that nomination to James K. Polk.

 

During the 1840 campaign, he ran against Whig candidate William Henry Harrison (also known as “that guy who gave the longest inauguration address ever, got pneumonia, and died after thirty days”). As part of the campaign, his supporters called him “Old Kinderhook,” which they shortened to “OK” during campaign chants, and that expression has proved to be Van Buren’s lasting legacy to the United States.

 

After giving up on winning the presidency again, Van Buren fell back on the lessons he learned in his Albany Regency days. He would gamble on elections that he would personally rig. Rigging elections wasn’t crappy enough for Van Buren; he needed to personally profit from them, as well.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to William Henry Harrison! (2/9)

 

William Henry Harrison was a person who only wanted to do two jobs in life. He wanted to be a soldier, and he wanted to be president. And he was really, um, committed to both of these things.

 

When Harrison was eight years old, instead of watching unboxing videos on YouTube, he was watching Hessian soldiers invade not just his town but his house. In order to get even, he joined the army in 1791, when he was 18, after briefly studying medicine but deciding that his life should be far more about taking life than saving it.

 

He fought in the Indian Wars for a while, earning the admiration of presidents Adams, Madison, and Monroe, and precisely zero Native Americans. He was appointed governor of the Indiana Territory, but even while governor, he was still fighting battles and leading attacks against the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his forces. In 1811, Tecumseh and his troops snuck up on Governor Harrison and his men near Tippecanoe, and even though it was early in the morning and Tecumseh’s men had the element of surprise on their side (Harrison’s men were asleep and apparently didn’t post a sentry?), Harrison woke up and in two hours drove the Native Americans away and burned their camp to the ground, effectively stopping any future Native American incursion into “their” territory. This earned Harrison the nickname Tippecanoe because the guys who handed out nicknames were not very good at their jobs. Tippecanoe led this charge and personally fought in hand-to-hand combat as governor, which is usually not one of the most fightingest jobs, but then, if you’re the one who wakes up and someone is trying to kill you, I guess the job description isn’t the first thing on your mind.

 

Harrison then quit being governor and rejoined the army for the War of 1812, because even though he was fighting in more battles than any other governor, he still wasn’t satisfied with the amount of fighting in his life.

 

He was a man for whom fighting and battle was everything. He met his future wife, Anna Symmes, while on military business, and when her father, a judge, disapproved of Anna’s interest in Harrison and asked Harrison how he would support his daughter, Harrison replied, “By my sword, Sir, and my good right arm.” Some guys ask a father’s permission to marry their daughters. William Henry Harrison waves a sword around at judges. But it worked, and Harrison won both Anna’s hand and her father’s approval.

 

After stabbing his way into marriage, Harrison went right back to fighting the War of 1812, which involved taking back Indiana, Ohio, and Detroit from British and Indian forces and winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Thames, in which Harrison’s lifelong enemy Tecumseh was finally killed.

 

Harrison was a national war hero, but he left the army over a disagreement with the Secretary of War. Harrison wanted control over all the armies, and the secretary thought it would be best to divide the army up and give Harrison some of it. Harrison’s plans apparently required the entire American army to be under his command, so he resigned. Congress later investigated his resignation, concluded that he had been treated unfairly, and award him a gold medal. The man won a gold medal from Congress for quitting.

 

Maybe it was because he still wanted to be in charge of the army without having to answer to any secretary of war, but as soon as Harrison retired from the army, he turned his attention towards the presidency. William Henry Harrison wasn’t like most of our other war heroes turned president. Honestly, most of them kinda stumbled into the presidency without really seeking it out on their own, just because they were so popular. Harrison was different. He wanted the presidency. Badly. He wanted power. And he was sneaky enough that he didn’t really care how he got it. In 1840, after trying and failing twice in his pursuit of the presidency, Harrison was prepared to lie.

The Whig party wanted some way to distance their candidate, William Henry Harrison, from the incumbent Martin van Buren. (Who, in all honesty, was kind of awful.). So they deliberately, with malice and forethought, turned Harrison into a folksy, blue collar hero fighting for the working man. They gave him the label “the log cabin and hard cider candidate.” Harrison campaigned all over the country for years, reassuring everyone the whole time that he was a fun-loving guy you could sit down and have a beer with. But that wasn’t enough. He also had to make crappy Van Buren look like an elitist aristocrat.

 

Honestly, it’s kinda sad that politics really hasn’t changed since the early 1800s.

 

Harrison and his team started releasing flyers – illustrations of Harrison next to a log cabin, to demonstrate Harrison’s authenticity and that he could be physically near a log cabin in a drawing, anyway. The Whigs threw parades full of log cabin floats; folks drank whiskey out of log cabin shaped flasks to somehow show support for Harrison, and America ate it up. In a time when political machines were running things and it seemed like only an elite few made it to Washington, it was nice to see Harrison, a down-home, decent guy, seeking office.

But, Harrison had never lived in a log cabin. He didn’t drink hard cider. He had acres and acres of land surrounding his Ohio mansion, where he fought as a prohibitionist to close alcohol distilleries. Van Buren might have been crappy and elitist, especially in comparison to Jackson, whose presidency he followed, but as a guy who was born and raised in a literal tavern, he certainly had a better claim to the “log cabin and hard cider” label than Harrison. Honestly, Van Buren just didn’t want the entire house he lived in to smell like rotten cheese. (See Andrew Jackson for details.)

 

This doesn’t seem like a big deal in light of modern campaigning, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. Harrison’s entire campaign was based on image, not truth. He had a catchy slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” Harrison didn’t actually run on any particular issues. (Okay, that part might not be all that new. Aaron Burr tried the same tactic against Thomas Jefferson, but with far less success.) Harrison’s campaign manager said “Let no committee, no convention, no town meeting extract from him a single word about what he thinks now or what he will do hereafter.” Harrison went along with it, because he wanted to be president. He wanted it badly enough that he didn’t care about his reputation, and he certainly didn’t care about Van Buren’s reputation. The campaign even started an ugly rumor that Van Buren had installed a bathtub in the White House! (Apparently in the 1840s, only jerks took baths.). The public went crazy. Can you believe that? A bathtub!

 

The campaign worked and was a lesson adopted by literally every campaign afterwards. Seventy eight percent of the voters chose Harrison, because they fell for the lie about how real he was.

 

Then, Harrison gave his two-hour long inauguration speech outside during a freezing rainstorm without a coat or hat or gloves, got pneumonia, and died thirty days into office.

 

Kinda anticlimactic.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to President John Tyler.

 

John Tyler, our tenth president, has one living grandson, and another who died in 2020. Still. One of them lives in his old house. The Tyler men have a habit of having kids well into their 60’s and 70’s. Go, them. I, uh, guess.

 

Tyler was born in 1790 to a rich family in Virginia. He was raised on a plantation in Charles City County, with his two brothers and five sisters, while their forty slaves grew crops. He attended the College of William and Mary and then read law with his father, who was a judge, and then Tyler was admitted to the bar at the age of 19. He started a law practice in Richmond, where his father was then serving as governor, and bought a plantation of his own, relatively near where he grew up. He was elected to represent Charles City County in the House of Burgesses, and then he organized a militia company during the War of 1812. He was then elected to the US House of Representatives, but he found it unsatisfying and went back to practicing law full time.

 

However, apparently law was boring, because in 1823, he managed to get re-elected to the House of Burgesses and then appointed governor in 1825, where he mostly promoted states’ rights, and also delivered the funeral address for Thomas Jefferson when he died. In 1827, he was elected to the Senate, but he was continually arguing with then President Andrew Jackson (a dangerous affair).

 

And then came the bizarre election of 1840.

 

The Whig nominee, ancient William Henry Harrison, chose our friend John Tyler to be his vice president and then gave himself the label, “The Log Cabin and Hard Cider” candidate in order to fight the “elitist” incumbent Martin Van Buren. This would not be quite so ironic had Harrison never been anywhere near a log cabin. Also, he didn’t drink hard cider. But, even by 1840, political branding was a thing, so they had fliers printed with Harrison standing next to log cabins; parade floats were made to look like log cabins; cider flasks in the shape of log cabins became this holiday’s must-have gift. People loved it. They were so excited about getting to drink hard cider while celebrating their favorite candidate that they didn’t give a flying fig that he never expressed an opinion on any particular issue. Harrison’s campaign manager even outright said, “Let no committee, no convention, no town meeting extract from him a single word about what he thinks now or what he will do hereafter.”

 

For their part, Harrison’s folks badmouthed Van Buren because he had (gasp) installed a bath tub in the White House. I guess because only the elitists took baths? Dirt was healthful? I don’t even know. Whatever it was, it worked, and Harrison got 80% of the popular vote. But then, the silly man gave the longest inauguration speech ever, while not wearing his coat, caught pneumonia, and died thirty days later.

This actually caused something of a crisis, because no president had ever died in office before, and people weren’t really sure what the protocol was. Since this was before the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, people were stuck with the Constitution, which said only, “In Case of the Removal of the President from his Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.”

 

People didn’t know if this meant that the VP became President, or just that the Vice-President did the president’s job while retaining the role of VP. The Cabinet met and decided it was the latter. Tyler said, “Nope. That ain’t it,” and had himself sworn in as president. This did not exactly endear him to everyone, and he became saddled with the nickname “His Accidency.” While president, he upheld his strong belief in the primacy of states’ rights (which laid a lot of the groundwork for the Civil War), vetoed a new National Bank, signed a treaty with Britain establishing the northern boundary between the US and Canada, applied the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii, and signed a treaty annexing Texas.

 

He dropped out of the election of 1844 and became Chancellor of the College of William and Mary. When the Civil War started, he was the only former president to side with the Confederacy, and he was elected to the Confederate Congress as a representative from Virginia, but he died before attending the first session. Tyler was seen as a traitor, and the United States government did not recognize his death until sixty-three years later.

[Terabith]

I can't write anything about James K. Polk that isn't better expressed by They Might Be Giants.  

 

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Zachary Taylor!

 

Zachary Taylor was born, like many other presidents, in Virginia. (Hence Virginia being known as the “Birthplace of Presidents.”) However, he left as soon as he could. While still a child, his family moved to Kentucky, first in a small cabin and then in a brick house. His father gradually obtained 10,000 acres of land and twenty-six slaves to cultivate it.

 

In 1808, Taylor joined the Army as a first lieutenant. In 1811, he was called to Fort Knox in Indiana, after the commandant in charge fled. Taylor was put in charge of the small fort, and it was used as a staging ground for General William Henry Harrison, as he prepared for battle with Tecumseh prior to the march to Provincetown and the Battle of Tippecanoe. Taylor restored order there, but he was recalled to Washington to testify, and so he did not take part in the historic battle.

 

During the War of 1812, Zachary Taylor successfully defended Fort Harrison, which was the first American victory in the war and also should not have been in any way possible. On September 3, 1812, a band of Native Americans from the Miami tribe arrived at the fort and told Taylor that he was shortly to be attacked. Now, advance warning of such things is always nice, but Taylor should have still been completely screwed. He had only 50 men in the garrison, but the vast majority of them were seriously ill, and only 15 were at all functional. He also had five relatively healthy civilian settlers. A group of over 600 Native Americans from various tribes were coming to attack. “Oh, those are great odds,” Taylor thought. “No sweat.” That night a party of forty men under the flag of truce approached and asked if they could have a parlay in the morning, to which Taylor agreed, but during the night, a brave sneaked into the fort and set the blockhouse attached to the barracks on fire. Due to a large amount of alcohol being stored there, the fire was, shall we say, impressive and really completely out of control. Instead of deciding that the situation was hopeless, however, Taylor shouted, “Taylor never surrenders!” (I guess the presidential habit of speaking in the third person did not, in fact, originate with Trump), and Taylor said, “Hey, at least with everything being on fire we can see all the Indians sneaking up to attack us. Advantage: us!”

 

Taylor organized a bucket brigade, to keep the fire from spreading to the walls around the fort. Taylor organized the 20 men he had at his disposal to quickly erect a five foot high temporary wall to replace the part which had burned down, and he gave each sick man sixteen rounds of ammunition, told them to provide covering fire, while the walls were repaired. By sheer ferocity of fighting, twenty men held off six hundred. However, the Indians retreated, butchering the animals nearby, and the men inside the fort faced starvation. However, within a couple weeks, supply wagons arrived to relieve them, and Taylor received a promotion.

 

This was only the first of many times Taylor would defy all reasonable odds to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. During the Mexican American War, Taylor used the US Army’s 4,500 men to slaughter the Mexican Army’s 15,000. Taylor was such an impressive general that by the end of the Mexican-American War, the American people were begging for him to be their president. The only problem was, Taylor had no interest in politics. At all. He was a general. He liked war and artillery. He had never even voted. Making him president would be like making Stan Lee president because Marvel movies rock.

 

But, you know, as some of our more recent presidential campaigns have shown, political inexperience doesn’t have to be a hinderance. The Whigs got together and ran Taylor as their man, running him as a man without opinions. This was….well, actually, it was a surprisingly good idea. With the guy not expressing or even having any opinions on any issues besides how best to kill people, everyone assumed he agreed with them. The South assumed Taylor was pro-slavery. Northerners assumed he was an abolitionist. This strategy of “don’t do or say anything” worked, and Taylor became president in something of a landslide.

 

As president, he was, well, honestly, he wasn’t really either a rousing success or failure, because on July 4, 1850, he went to a fundraising event for the Washington Monument, and being July in Washington, DC, it was, like, really, really hot. So, as you do, he tried to cool down by, um, eating a lot of cherries. Like, a lot, a lot. Lots of cherries. And drinking a ton of milk. I guess, because cherries and milk seemed cool? Who can argue with the ineffable thoughts of presidents? But, this turned out to have not been such a good idea, because the combination of cherries and milk (really, rather a lot of cherries and milk) gave him quite the upset stomach, and he died five days later. In 1980, people were so dumbfounded that this incredibly tough general was killed by cherries and milk that they dug him up and ran tests on him to find out what REALLY killed him, thinking that surely there had been poison or something. But, nope. It really was the cherries and milk.

 

And what really sucks is that he left us with Millard Fillmore.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Millard Fillmore! (1/7)

 

Millard Fillmore had an entire society, dedicated in 1963, all about how boring he was. Honestly, I’m kinda curious about what they did at their meetings. There’s….not really a lot to talk about.

 

Seriously, the man was pretty much entirely forgettable. Much of his early life mirrors Abraham Lincoln’s, but I guess not being a mutant sends one’s life in an entirely different direction. (Just wait…Honest Abe’s biography is a hoot.). Fillmore was born in a log cabin. He was self-educated. He studied law.

 

On the “not like Honest Abe” side of the coin, Millard Fillmore opposed Lincoln’s anti-slavery stance politically if not personally. And also, nobody wanted him to be president. He was only named vice president in the first place because he lived in New York, and the Whig party needed someone from the northeast to balance out Old Rough and Ready Zachary Taylor’s southwestern cowboyness.

 

When Zachary Taylor died (of eating too many cherries and drinking too much milk) and Fillmore took the Oath of Office, the entire cabinet resigned. Nothing says vote of confidence like an administration saying, “Nope, I’m outta here.” Fillmore’s own party didn’t support him running for re-election. I really wasn’t exaggerating when I said NOBODY wanted the man to be president.

 

So, what did Fillmore do in office? Well, um, he supported the Compromise of 1850, which I guess kept the peace between the North and the South for a few more years, but it hasn’t exactly stood the test of time as a virtuous policy. The Compromise of 1850 was so divisive to the Whig Party that it, in a precursor to what would happen to the nation a few years later, split, with some like Lincoln joining the newly formed Republican party and some trying to form their own party, and a the few remaining only united on not running Fillmore in the next election. The Whig party ran a candidate in one more election, and then gave up the ghost.

 

Umm, what else did Fillmore do, besides supporting the Compromise of 1850 and largely destroying the Whig party? During the Civil War, he formed a militia out of men over the age of 45, which sounds great, except all they did was march in parades, so maybe not.

He did help open up trade with the Japanese, ending Japanese isolationism, whether they wanted it ended or not. He did this by sending a bunch of trading ships and a bunch of warships and basically said, “Trade with us or else!”

 

He signed the Fugitive Slave Act, the most oppressive law in American history, even though he himself was personally opposed to slavery, so he was a jerk, but also not enough of a jerk to be particularly interesting.

 

After his presidency was over, he was offered an honorary Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Oxford. He declined it on the basis that he did not have a classical education and didn’t deserve the honor. The diploma was in Latin, and Fillmore said that “no man should accept a degree he cannot read.” Which is kind of a cool story.

 

Of course, before you get to liking Fillmore too much, you should know that after his presidency, he started the “Know Nothing Party,” which has sort of been adopted as a stance by a more current political party, and also it was mostly founded to be racist and against immigration, which, well, still also tracks with current political party. Again, he didn’t personally agree with those stances, but he was willing to go along with them to further his political career.

 

People never forgot Fillmore’s support of the Fugitive Slave Act, and after Lincoln was assassinated, a mob descended on Fillmore’s house and threw black paint at it.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Franklin Pierce!

 

Franklin Pierce was a very handsome man. You know those movies from the 80’s, where the bully is incredibly handsome and charismatic and stupid? They all cribbed from Franklin Pierce’s life story.

 

He had a reputation throughout his entire life of being handsome and likable. Behind closed doors, though, he was like one of those bouncers who take delight in breaking people’s fingers. His wife’s one request of him was that he never go into politics. It was clear to pretty much everyone that the presidency was a killing job that took a toll on people’s lives and families, and Jane wanted none of that kind of stress. She did not want to live in Washington DC. Out of respect for his wife (wink wink, nudge nudge), he "left" the Democratic Party and politics and opened up a law office to please his wife.

 

Honestly, Jane was pretty long suffering. She didn’t get mad when he went off to fight in the Mexican American War without telling her. Pierce really wanted to go to war. His big frustration was that by the time he got to his post, the war was almost over. Not being the kind of man to let that stop him, Pierce managed to find some enemy fire, , get thrown from his horse, and severely injured his knee. His commanding officer honorably discharged him and told him to go home, but Pierce said, “No.”

 

During the battle the next day, Pierce fought in the Battle of Churubusco like that French solider in Monty Python sketch who had his arms and legs cut off and continued to fight. Pierce once again injured the same knee, because of course he did, but he used his charisma score of 20 to stay on the battlefield, barking out orders, and firing wildly, and gained wild acclaim among all the soldiers for these exploits.

Despite all this, his wife Jane was totally fine with him joining the war without telling her, and getting himself severely injured, because at least he was keeping his one promise to her of staying out of politics. And for awhile, he did, living a quiet, private life. Until he became president, which is, as one might point out, not keeping his promise.

 

Behind the scenes, while ostensibly leading his private, quiet life with his wife, Pierce kept in touch with all his political buddies and let it be known that if someone nominated him for president, he certainly wouldn’t turn it down. It turns out, the only person in the country who didn’t know that Pierce was quietly running for president was his gullible but maybe not terribly bright wife.

 

Jane found out that Franklin was running for president the day he was nominated, at which point he sort of shrugged and said, “Hey, they nominated me. What was I supposed to do?” They were on vacation together and Jane was completely blind-sided by the news. Pierce grinned manically.

 

And then, to add more tragedy to their lives, shortly before Franklin, Jane, and their son were about to move into the White House, the train carrying them ran off the rails and crashed. Franklin and Jane had only a few scratches, but their young son died. Jane believed this was punishment for Franklin seeking the presidency when he shouldn’t have and never forgave him for this.

 

From then on, Jane wore all black every day and stayed away from the White House as much as she possibly could. Pierce just kept on with the presidenting, because he wanted power and glory and all that stuff.

 

Which was kinda weird, because in a way similar to a more recent president we had, he loved the glory of being president, but he really rather hated the JOB of being president. He was pretty terrible at it. He never looked around to notice that the issue of slavery was tearing the nation apart. The United States was on the verge of Civil War, and Pierce just went on and on about what a “great period of peace and prosperity the United States was in.”

 

He was good at politics, but he was really bad at actually governing.

 

Also, he got arrested while president because he ran over a woman with a horse. The case was discharged due to “insufficient evidence,” but it was one of those wink wink nudge nudge, we know who you are and we don’t’ want to make you mad kind of things.

 

Pierce was also a raging alcoholic. Not like someone’s dear old grandfather who gets a bit too tipsy at night. Nor was he a functional alcoholic like Ulysses S. Grant, who made better decisions the more sloshed he got. Pierce was a raging alcoholic, downing many bottles of whiskey a day, and slurring his words and you know, running over women with his horse because of it. Pierce’s political opponents called him a “victor of many a hard fought bottle.” Pierce’s own party declined to nominate him for a second term, and when Pierce learned that he had lost the presidency and was asked what he was going to do next, he said, “The only thing left to do is get drunk.”

 

Which he did, until his liver gave out, and it killed him.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to James Buchanan!

 

James Buchanan, our fifteenth president, is the only president who never married and almost certainly our first gay president. He had a very close relationship with his friend, William Rufus King, with whom he lived for more than twenty years. Andrew Jackson and other contemporaries called King “Miss Nancy” and referred to Buchanan as “Aunt Fancy.” There was a great deal of speculation when Buchanan was elected about how King would be the First Lady. Sadly, King died before Buchanan took office.

 

He also thought the issue of slavery was of little interest or consequence, which was, um, wrong. At one point, he said, “Happily, (slavery) is a matter of little importance,” a statement that did not play out well historically. His politics set the stage for the Civil War. While he personally was opposed to slavery, he felt that it was protected by the Constitution. He was nominated for the presidency mostly because he refused to express an opinion on the issue of slavery. He was even out of the country and had expressed no opinion on Pierce’s Kansas-Nebraska Act that determined whether territories would enter the Union as slave or free states.

 

Buchanan is often considered the worst president, which was kind of weird, since he really showed a lot of promise early in his life. He was very intelligent, considered very perceptive, and had extremely successful pre-presidency careers, serving in the US House of Representatives, the Senate, as Polk’s Secretary of State, and Pierce’s minister to Russia. And while the Civil War was probably inevitable from the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, secession really started under Buchanan. He declared that while secession was illegal, it was also unconstitutional for the president to stop states from doing so. This led to seven states seceding, since his philosophy was to ignore secession and hoped it went away. (Andrew Jackson’s approach was the less diplomatic but more effective threat of, “I will hang every last one of you if you secede.) South Carolina asked Buchanan to remove Northern troops from Fort Sumter, and Buchanan was completely willing to do so until one of his cabinet members pointed out that doing so would be treasonous. The man had all this great potential, but he totally choked when it came to holding the country together.

 

He was also known for his supernatural hearing ability, reportedly being able to hear people whispering in neighboring rooms.

 

Buchanan’s other superpower was his ability to drink people under the table. He would drink two or three bottles of wine at a sitting and top it off with a bunch of whiskey, and apparently still could keep his wits about him. Lots of people tried to keep up with the hard drinking but terrible president and failed, including a bunch of Russians. He was also a pretty fun drunk, like the affable and beloved frat guy who made sure everyone was having a good time, especially since if he was completely plastered, he could pretend everything was hunky dory and the country wasn’t completely falling apart around him.

 

Sadly for Buchanan, he was the victim of one of the weirdest diseases: National Hotel Disease, characterized by a swollen tongue and uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea. The disease killed 40 politicians who stayed in DC’s National Hotel during the 1850’s. Buchanan actually contracted the disease twice, because despite getting deathly ill the first time he stayed there, he decided to stay there again upon his return? I guess it was good yelp didn’t exist, because it would have caused a major ding in the National Hotel’s reputation. There was a rumor that the disease was considered an assassination attempt but it was probably actually a form of dysentery related to sewage pipes.

 

While America disintegrated under Buchanan’s watch, he pretty much ignored it, interfering with the personal lives of members of his staff and their wives, and throwing huge parties with lots of drinking. He hated being president, and told Abraham Lincoln he could not wait to get out of the White House.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln (2/12).

 

Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president, was quite possibly our greatest president ever. He led the Union through the horrors of the Civil War, ensuring that the United States remained united. He ended slavery. And honestly, I don’t know where to start with him.

 

He loved long, ridiculous anecdotes. He loved poop jokes. His favorite story to tell combined the two. He had this whole spiel about Ethan Allen, Revolutionary War hero. According to Lincoln, Allen visited England after the war, and his hosts kept trying to get a reaction out of Ethan Allen by constantly insulting George Washington. He wouldn’t crack, so finally they showed him their portrait of Washington in the outhouse. So the Brits were standing outside the outhouse, waiting for Allen to come out after he pooped, and when he came out all unperturbed, they asked him what he thought of their portrait of Washington in the outhouse. Ethan Allen supposedly said, “I think it’s a very appropriate place for nothing will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

 

Lincoln kept a book of poop jokes in the desk in the Oval Office and claimed they were the only thing that kept him going during the Civil War, which I guess is fair.

 

Actually, Lincoln’s comedy came up a lot. He kicked off the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet by reading aloud a really long and really bad comedic speech by a humorist Artemis Ward. I found a copy, and I think it involves poop, but it also completely fails to be funny, which I thought at first was maybe humor not translating well 150 years later, but also maybe not, because after reading it, Lincoln asked his Cabinet, “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh?” Then he read the Emancipation Proclamation, which must have been a shock for anyone who kinda tuned out during the bad comedy speech but was still giving a wry chuckle while doing the nineteenth century equivalent of playing on their phone.

 

He was also a genuine mutant.

 

He was one of our tallest presidents, at 6’4,” but even for a man as tall as that, his arms were disproportionately long. And then he strengthened them by a lifetime of axe swinging. He was not just strong. He was super strong. Numerous witnesses described him routinely, regularly carrying boxes of stones that weighed over a thousand pounds through the town of New Salem, Illinois. Some witnesses said it weighed more than 1,200. He used that strength to wrestle men. A lot of men. In fact, during his very first campaign speech, when he was running for the office of the New Salem Assembly, a small fight broke out while Lincoln was speaking. Rather than calling for security, Lincoln waded off the stage and into the audience, picked up one of the combatants by the throat, and threw him twelve feet in the air.

 

That’s not even getting into the time he won a debate with Colonel Edmund Dick Taylor by ripping open his opponent’s shirt.

 

The context is that Colonel Dick Edmund Dick Taylor liked to lambast the “rich big Whigs.” Instead of taking down his opponent’s arguments piece by piece, which as one of the greatest orators of all time, Lincoln absolutely could do, he just sidled up to the man and when he started making fun of the Whigs, Lincoln ripped the man’s vest open and revealed a fancy ruffled shirt with a massive gold chain. This caused the audience to laugh uproariously, and Lincoln chose that moment to make his exit.

 

Politics were different in the 1800’s.

 

Another great moment from the campaign trail was when Lincoln almost convinced a group of children to burn down a hotel. He had gotten bored with always winning the ax throwing contests he engaged in with another lawyer, so he convinced three kids to throw an inflated pig’s bladder into the fireplace. It predictably exploded, sending showers of sparks everywhere. Lincoln tried to put the fire out with a broom, but the broom caught fire. He only barely managed to keep the hotel from burning down. The whole thing was basically a Three Stooges skit, except starring the man on the penny.

In addition to being superhumanly strong, with freakishly long arms, there’s another reason Lincoln was a mutant. There was something deeply weird about his face. Most people, including Lincoln himself, described him as ugly. There’s a story Lincoln used to tell, about a man who gave him a knife. The man said, “I was given this for being the ugliest man in the world; it is now your trophy, until you find someone uglier than you,” and Lincoln claimed he held onto it his entire life. He had warts, scars, enormous ears and eyes that looked like they were constantly threatening to sink into his face, maybe in protest of his nine-inch-long nose. There’s never been a good picture of Lincoln.

 

But it seems like that might actually be the problem. Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay, said photographs could never do Lincoln justice. He said Lincoln’s features were “too complex to be recorded accurately by photographers, painters, or sculptors.” Nicolay said that all art was “powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that far away look…”. You’d think that this was just one man’s obsession, but it turns out that a lot of people agreed with him, including a New York Herald reporter who said, “I have never seen a picture of him that does anything like justice to the original…he is a much better-looking man than any of the pictures represent.” And the editor of the Chicago Tribune said that Lincoln was at one moment hideous and at another had eyes that sparkled with “a countenance that was wreathed in animation.”

 

And it seems like all the accounts were like that. Walt Whitman said of Lincoln, “Though hundreds of portraits have been made, by painters and photographers, I have never seen one yet that in my opinion deserved to be called a perfectly good likeness, nor do I believe there is really such a one in existence.” Lincoln’s appearance “baffles interpretation.”

 

Honest Abe Lincoln: president and mutant superhero.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Andrew Johnson (12/29)!

 

If Charlie Brown were a president, he would be Andrew Johnson. The man was an underdog from the day he was born till the day he died.

 

Andrew Johnson was born dirt poor and without a father. He never went to school and was sold as an indentured servant to a tailor. He taught himself to read and write, worked hard, and was kind to everyone, but he was still called “poor white trash” wherever he went. He had plans for himself that were bigger than being a tailor, so he ran away from his “owner” when he was fifteen. A ten-dollar reward was offered to anyone who returned him.

 

He went into politics, which honestly feels like a weird career move for someone whom everyone hated his entire life. He became mayor, senator, and eventually governor of Tennessee, but he was a governor of Tennessee who supported the Union during the Civil War. Tennessee in the 1800s had some weird rules and governor was essentially a powerless position. He couldn’t veto anything, because while Johnson was a Democrat, the Tennessee legislature was controlled by the Whig party. He didn’t really have the political power to make appointments or influence legislation, so he pretty much just walked around while people used air quotes when referring to him as “Governor” and hoped to attain a higher office.

 

He managed to become a US Senator, but then Tennessee seceded. While most Union sympathizers in the South fled when their states seceded, Johnson stayed to serve as military governor, which is another Charlie Brown position to be in. Johnson had the job of holding Tennessee together and punishing anyone who was anti-Union by doing things like shutting down Confederate newspapers and arresting pro-secession members of the clergy, while operating under the authority of President Lincoln, which the seceded state did not recognize. It was pretty much impossible, and did not exactly make Johnson more popular. The people of Nashville hung banners all over town that read “Andrew Johnson: Traitor.” But Johnson just kept his head down and kept working hard and doing what he thought was right.

 

Lincoln chose Johnson as his vice president for his second term, in a show of unity to the divided nation.

 

Of course, if you ask people what they remember about Andrew Johnson, pretty much everyone will say that he was a drunkard and that he got impeached. Johnson wasn’t normally a huge drinker, but when he arrived in DC for the inauguration, he was suffering from typhoid fever, and someone told him that whiskey was a good way of treating it. So, Johnson drank three tumblers of whiskey and then went to give his inauguration speech, which was, the New York Herald commented “remarkable for its incoherence.” He rambled on about all the great things he learned growing up poor and how great the country is and how much he loved America’s people, and then he concluded his speech by saying, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States,” and then drunkenly made out with the Bible on which he took his oath before people dragged him away.

 

A month later, Lincoln was shot. The assassination plan actually had Johnson being assassinated, as well (and also Secretary of State Seward), but the man John Wilkes Booth got to assassinate Johnson lost his nerve and didn’t attempt to kill Johnson.

 

Lincoln was an act nobody could follow. Johnson wasn’t horrible, but as was the story of his life, nobody really liked or respected him, even in his own administration. Johnson’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, opposed Johnson’s reconstruction efforts and undermined his efforts in the South. So Johnson asked for Stanton’s resignation, and Stanton refused, and Congress, who also didn’t respect Johnson, passed the Reconstruction Act which took away Johnson’s control over the US army in the South and removed Johnson’s ability to fire cabinet members without Senate approval. When Johnson tried to fire Stanton anyway, he was impeached. He kept his job by a single vote, but everyone hated Johnson and his presidency was shockingly unspectacular, although he did purchase Alaska for America. Which is cool and all, but doesn’t hold much of a candle next to freeing the slaves and holding the Union together of Lincoln.

 

[Terabith]

Ulysses S. Grant is the quintessential American hero. He was a steely eyed, hard-drinking man who was responsible for over half the Union victories of the Civil War. Before he got the gig of head general, he was an action hero of the Mexican-American War, a man who demonstrated his courage and bravery by riding down a sniper filled street and then lighting a cigar. He embodied coolness.

Also, he was a little weird.

He was squeamish at the sight of blood, an odd characteristic in a military man. Even meat that was not well-done would unnerve him. He was phobic about being seen naked. Which, okay, a lot of people don’t like parading around in the nude. But he was fighting a war, and it was customary for officers to bathe by stripping and having enlisted men pour water over them. Not Grant. He was not having any of that. He bathed in his tent. Late in his life he bragged that nobody had seen him naked since he was a small child, which is particularly odd when you think about the fact that he was married and fathered five children.

At his daughter’s wedding, Grant got so anxious (despite it being perfectly acceptable, and indeed, preferred, to be clothed at a wedding) that he holed up and cried hysterically.

Did I mention that he was a hard-drinking man? He was drunk pretty much throughout the entire Civil War. Alcohol was like his super power. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that “If he could find out what brand of whiskey Grant drank, he would send a barrel of it to all the other commanders.” Grant was that weird kind of alcoholic who got better at his job when he was drunk. (Usually people just think they’re better when they’re drunk. Spoiler: you’re not Grant.) It worked for the Civil War. Lincoln needed a general with the special, “I don’t give a fig” chutzpah that only a man who is completely hammered on a battlefield has. Grant had been not a loser, but mediocre, for most of his life, and he knew it. He had, like most of us, had hard times. He’d been reduced to working for his father’s tannery (which he hated, tanneries being super stinky all the way around). He’d sold firewood to feed his family. He knew he had nowhere to go but up. Grant was the best Union general of the Civil War, because when other (saner, sober) generals would succumb to fear or be overwhelmed by overwhelming odds, Grant would just get himself so drunk that he could “brush aside caution.” When a situation required him to do the unthinkable, no problem, alcohol can help with that as well! Alcohol allowed Grant to relentlessly grind down the Confederacy, rather than allowing months to pass between battles, which favored the South.

So, spoilers, the Union wins the Civil War. Lincoln is shot; Andrew Johnson becomes president, and Grant hangs around. Under President Johnson, Grant helps out with Reconstruction, overseeing the military aspects of Reconstruction, but it was genuinely awkward for Grant, since Johnson was in disgrace, what with getting impeached. Johnson had not been a particularly popular or successful president, so the country turned to Grant, who had led them so ably through the Civil War, and said, “Hey, let’s make HIM president.” Grant really didn’t have any political experience, and he was, at 46, the youngest president elected. Being president requires a different skill set than being a battle commander, and Grant struggled. To be fair, the task was daunting and probably only Lincoln would have been up for the job of healing a nation that had literally fought itself to death, as well as integrating the now freed slaves into the life of our country as free people, politically, socially, and economically. Grant tried to promote the Civil Rights of the newly freed former slaves, while trying to reconcile the North and the South and rebuild the largely materially destroyed South. Grant also established the Department of Justice, the Weather Service, and he created Yellowstone National Park, our first national park. He attempted, with limited success, to improve the status of Native Americans, and he improved relationships with Great Britain.

He did have the occasional insane idea, however. He wasn’t too confident that this black and white people living together thing in peace and harmony was necessarily going to work out, so Grant hatched a plan to buy the Dominican Republic for $1.6 million and send all four million newly freed black people there. This plan fell apart at the last minute.

Grant was also a bit of an anti-Semite, who once banned all Jews from the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. Oddly, Grant’s letters banning Jews from several entire states are the only explicitly anti-Semitic governmental policies enacted by the United States, but the man still managed to win the Jewish vote in both elections. He must have been persuasive.

Grant was also known for his kindness to animals. During the Civil War, Grant came across a group of men who were stuck in the mud. They were trying to get their horse to pull the wagon out by beating it. Grant basically turned from Bruce Banner to the Hulk when he was confronted by animal cruelty. Grant ordered the man to stop. The man said, “Who’s driving this team, you or me?” which in retrospect was a poor choice of words, a fact which the man had much time to ponder as he was tied to a tree for the next six hours.

After Lee’s surrender, it was Grant who was responsible for the fact that Robert E. Lee was not charged with treason. He felt that the key to lasting peace was treating the Confederate soldiers gently, even allowing them to keep their animals for farm work, and he told President Andrew Johnson that he would resign rather than obey any order to arrest Lee.

While president, Grant was responsible for (temporarily) dismantling the Ku Klux Klan. They didn’t resurface until 1910. He facilitated the fifteenth amendment, which gave voting rights to African Americans. He established the gold standard and created the Justice Department. While Grant was an honest man, his second presidential term was marred by scandals from some of his subordinates, and he was criticized for not detecting and dealing with them well.

After completing the presidency, he and his wife went on a two-year long world tour. He wrote his memoirs and died of throat cancer in 1885.





 

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Rutherford B. Hayes!

 

President Hayes's election was a complicated, confusing morass that illustrates the electoral college system has had its issues from the beginning. He went to bed on election night when it looked like Samuel L. Tilden had a lock on things. Hayes thought he'd be giving a concession speech. The election boards in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, necessary for Hayes to get to the required 185 electoral votes, cited intimidation of black voters (almost certainly true), voided Democratic votes (maybe more ethically tricky), offered vote counters in South Carolina between $30,000 and $200,000 for a Republican victory (definitely problematic), and declared Hayes the winner. A whole box of votes in Florida that favored Tilden was thrown out. Then Hayes lost Oregon, because it came out that one of the Republican electors held a government job, and the Democratic governor certified a Democratic elector.

 

The states in question cast competing votes, and nobody could figure out what the heck was going on, so in something that would so no longer happen today, the Republicans and the Democrats of Congress worked together to forge a compromise and pass the Electoral Commission Act of 1877. This Act said that a group of five senators, five members of Congress, and five Supreme Court justices would decide what votes counted. (This could never go wrong!) This was supposed to consist of seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one Independent, Justice David Davis, but before the commission could make their decision, Illinois appointed Justice Davis a Senator. Davis resigned from the Commission because he felt like this was cheating, and a new Republican justice was appointed instead. This gave the election to Hayes, despite Hayes losing the popular vote.

 

Honestly, it makes perfect sense that fewer people had voted for Hayes. He succeeded Grant, who was an all around decent and good guy (if a little weird) but his administration was devious and corrupt. The Democrats had nominated Samuel Tilden, who was a famous reformer who had fought corruption as the governor of New York. And Republicans picked Hayes, who was also a decent guy, but literally just "some random guy who nobody outside of folks in his chain of command or the state of Ohio had ever heard of." He was, however, good at keeping his opinions to himself. The Republicans chose him because he hadn't really pissed anyone off and was considered "generally inoffensive." The being a strong super soldier was really just a bonus, really.

 

Hayes himself fought in over fifty engagements in his day job as a Union officer in the Civil War and was shot repeatedly. One of those bullets caused a serious injury to his left arm, tearing a blood vessel, but instead of just bleeding to death, old Rutherford gave direction to his subordinates and succeeded in scattering the rebels. Apparently he yelled at individual men for cowardly behavior, and this was pretty convincing coming from a man in the process of bleeding to death. In another battle, he had his horse shot out from under him and was thrown several feet while a bullet grazed his skull. His men assumed he was dead, but he was not. When he regained consciousness, he just found a new horse and started fighting again.

 

He was apparently a weak and sickly child, and his mother stayed distant from him because she didn't want to get too attached in case she lost him. In response, Rutherford developed an intense drive for excellence. He started a fitness regime that involved hunting and running that he engaged in up until a week before he died. He developed "unusual strength and coordination" that helped him survive in battle, including being shot five times.

 

As president, Hayes kept up his stance as being "generally inoffensive." He was a decent president who worked for strides for civil rights. But he didn't do anything that either made him friends or made him a villain. He himself was not a teetotaler, but he made his White House free of alcohol in order to please the prohibitionists. His wife was the first First Lady to be a college graduate. He signed legislation that allowed a woman to serve as lawyers and argue in front of the Supreme Court. He was the first president to travel west of the Rocky Mountains, and he was the first president to have both a telephone and a typewriter in the White House.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Chester Arthur!

 

Chester Arthur was a right bastard who was in love with the idea of power for power's sake. It's kind of as if we made Lex Luthor president. One of his childhood friends had a story about Arthur: "When Chester was a boy, you might see him watching the boys building a mud dam across the rivulet in the roadway. Pretty soon, he would be ordering this one to bring stones, another sticks, and others sod or mud to finish the dam; and they would all go do his bidding without question. But he took good care not to get any of the dirt on his hands."

 

In the 1860's, president of the United States was an obvious and showy position of power, but it was arguably not the most powerful political position. There was another job that had a ton of power but that received none of the scrutiny or checks and balances that presidents had. The two political parties were run by political machines. The machines picked the candidates. They backed candidates financially. They either bought or stole elections. They were the power behind the power, and no state had a political machine like New York.

 

The New York Custom House was where the government collected tariff revenues on everything imported into the US. It was run by just three people. Each of them were very powerful, but one of them, the Collector, was more powerful than the others. The Collector was paid more money than almost any other elected official, including the US president. The Collector could hire, or fire, whomever he wanted. All of the Collector's employees were completely dependent on him. So when the Collector told employees to do him favors, such as make political contributions to a candidate, they did it. Presidential candidates were pretty dependent on the goodwill of the Collector. The Collector was one of the very few people who could make someone president. The Collector had loads of money and prestige but very little accountability, and it attracted the sort of cartoonishly evil people that you would expect.

 

Chester A. Arthur wanted to be the Collector. He made sure to make the right friends and do the right errands for the right party bosses, many of which involved breaking the law. Arthur did it all with a smile. Arthur spent so much time cozying up to corrupt tinkerers that his wife decided to leave him, but before she could do so, she spontaneously "got sick with pneumonia and died." Sure. Pneumonia. That's what we're calling it these days.

 

After enough deal making and wheel greasing, Arthur got the job of his dreams. He did a great job, greasing the wheels of the political machine and fattening his own pockets with kickbacks. One investigation revealed that Arthur had made a company pay a $270,000 fine, even though they only actually owed a $7,000 fine. But even as this came out, President Grant re-appointed Arthur, because a lowly president was pretty powerless against the machines that really ran the country.

 

Until Rutherford B. Hayes, with his birthday just a day before Arthur's, took the Oath of Office. He personally fired Arthur, who was like, "Oh, well, that sucks, I guess I'll have to settle for becoming president."

 

Actually, that's not entirely true. Arthur looked at the situation and decided, not to become president, but to become VICE PRESIDENT. Nobody wants to be vice president. It's a thankless job, that commands respect but entails very little work and where you have very little power. John Adams hated the job because it was a waste of time. But Arthur was like, "Ooohhhh....less work sounds good," and he went to work campaigning his heart out for the job of vice president.

 

He took the nomination away from Garfield's first choice, his personal friend. In a single day. Nobody really knows what happened behind closed doors, but in less than 24 hours, the man had the job.

 

Then Garfield got assassinated, and everyone looked at Arthur and was like, "Oh my God, he TOTALLY killed the president." He probably didn't, but honestly, it's the kind of thing he very well might have done. So people gossiped and spread the first birther conspiracy about him, saying that he shouldn't be able to be president, because he was born in Canada, even though he was totally born in Vermont. But nobody gossiped too loudly, because people in Arthur's way had a habit of having bad things happen to them.

 

And then.....Arthur was actually a pretty okay president. He looked at the situation and was like, "Huh. Maybe I should defang all the people who could take me out." I mean, sorry, REFORM THE POLITICAL SYSTEM. That's it. He fought corruption and did a ton of civil service reform. He was like if Lex Luthor became president but a smart Lex Luthor, who knew when to cash in his chips.

 

Arthur also refused to appoint a vice president. He served his entire term without one, because he didn't want anyone else getting ideas about delusions of power to rival his own.

 

Actually, it's entirely possible that God decided to take him out, because shortly after he became prez, he got very sick with Bright's Disease. He was so sick, he decided not to run for re-election, and he died less than a year after leaving office.

 

And so ends the story of our second supervillain president.  (In case you were wondering, Andrew Jackson was our first.  He was drunk on crazy.  Arthur was drunk on ambition.)

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Grover Cleveland!

 

Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, got his political career off to an exciting start by being voted sheriff of Erie County, New York. He ran on the traditional political platform of being tough on crime. And boy, was Cleveland tough on crime. He felt that it would be wrong to ask other people to take on the unpleasant duty of executing criminals, so Cleveland took on the task of hanging criminals himself, which was decent and honorable and also had the nice side effect of saving the county money.

 

He also devised a cunning plan to steal cancer. See, while Cleveland was president, he discovered he had a tumor on the roof of his mouth. It was growing quickly, and if Cleveland was going to survive, the tumor had to be removed surgically at once.

 

And this wasn’t a casual operation. Surgery had a 15% death rate at the best of times back then, and this was a complicated operation. However, Cleveland was afraid that news of his operation would cause Wall Street to collapse and kick off an economic depression. So he did what any (insane) person would do and decided to have it done under complete secrecy.

 

He didn’t even tell the Vice President.

 

So, over the July Fourth weekend, Cleveland and six of the nation’s medical professionals boarded a boat for the secret operation. The cover story was that Cleveland was going sailing for the holiday. And in the middle of the swaying ocean, these doctors and dentists boiled their instruments, tied the president to a deck chair, and removed the tumor, five teeth, and large sections of the upper palate and jawbone. The procedure took place entirely within his mouth, so that no scarring would be visible.

 

By the middle of July, Cleveland was fitted with a rubber prosthesis to fill the hole in his palate and restore his normal speaking voice. The public was told only that he had suffered a toothache.

 

Cleveland was a decent man to the end. His last words were, “I tried so hard to do right.”

 

[Terabith]

Apparently I haven't written anything about Benjamin Harrison.  Will have to work on that.

[Terabith]

It is really hard to write anything snarky about William McKinley, because he’s up there with Jimmy Carter as possibly the nicest president we’ve ever had. He was also smart, competent, and thoroughly decent.

 

As a teenager, he briefly attended Allegheny College, where he became famous for his ability to learn the names, faces, and life stories of people from even the briefest interaction, a talent which served him well in his later political life. He was a model student, a gifted debater who was passionate about abolition, always went to chapel, and played “town-ball,” a team sport at the time. There is a rumor that he was kicked out of the college for putting a cow in the belfry of Bentley Hall, but there is no evidence that this occurred, and there is no evidence that he was expelled. There is better evidence that he and his roommate placed a goat in the belfry, but again, this was not actually breaking any rules. He went home for the summer to improve his health and work for the post office, but then shortly thereafter the Civil War broke out, and he never returned to college. Years later he wrote to the college president that it was one of his greatest regrets that he did not complete his studies there. He received an honorary degree from Allegheny in 1895 when he returned as governor to speak at commencement.

 

When he was 18, McKinley volunteered to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He was weak and sickly and had absolutely no experience, so he was put to work in the kitchen. McKinley won distinction and respect because he constantly ran right up to the front lines, under enemy fire, to make sure everyone got fed. His commander, Rutherford Hayes, said McKinley showed “unusual and unsurpassed capacity,” and he was so brave and efficient at feeding people that he won promotion after promotion, eventually earning the rank and nickname “The Major.” He regularly wrote in his diary that he knew he would probably die soon, but he wasn’t afraid because he was literally serving his countrymen and would die doing what he believed in. By the time the war was over, he was strong, healthy, and confident.

 

He was completely devoted to his wife, Ida. When he was governor of Ohio, he made sure his office was directly across the street from his home, because after eating breakfast with her, he would walk across the street and wave to her before he entered his office. He also stopped working every day at three o’clock long enough to go to the window and wave to her, before returning to his work.

 

When McKinley was president, journalists like Hearst and Pulitzer worked really hard to get America involved in Cuba’s war for independence from Spain, but McKinley initially resisted. He had been in a war and seen bodies piled up, and he was thoughtful about approaching military aggression. He wanted to wait until he had exhausted every other avenue. But when he did decide to get involved, he got very involved. He was an incredibly competent and decisive wartime commander. He converted a room in the White House into a war room and was directly connected to every commander in the field, checking in with soldiers by phone several times a day. His mastery of detail and wartime experience made him an amazing commander, and the Spanish-American War ended after only four months, with more American casualties from disease than battle. It was an important war that established America as a global superpower and it let Americans see Northerners, Southerners, blacks, and whites all fighting together for a noble cause, which was crucial in the aftermath of the Civil War. America got control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and we didn’t even want it.

 

After the war, McKinley began negotiation for a canal through the isthmus of Panama.

 

So, umm, McKinley loved cigars. He never smoked in public, and he refused to allow himself to be photographed smoking them, but in private he was rarely without one. Honestly, that’s the worst thing anyone really says about the man.

 

McKinley wore a red carnation every day as a good luck charm, because it was his wife’s favorite flower. One day, minutes after he removed the carnation and gave it to a little girl as a present, he was shot by a deranged anarchist. McKinley’s first words after being shot were, “Don’t let them hurt him,”(upon seeing his assassin tackled to the ground) and “My wife, be careful how you tell her – oh, be careful.” His immediate concern was for his killer and for his wife and how she would take the news of his attack.

When McKinley got to the hospital, the only surgeon there was a gynecologist who couldn’t find the bullet, and McKinley died eight days later.

[Terabith]

Teddy Roosevelt’s biography reads less like a political tome and more like an unrealistic action movie or a how to guide to being the manliest man to ever walk the planet.

He was a sickly child, with asthma. His father said to him, “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it can go. I am giving you the tools, but it is up to you to make your body.” From that day on, Teddy’s goal was to live a life of vigor, conviction, and fearlessness. He took up boxing, hiking, and weight lifting. At Harvard, he competed in boxing and rowing. After graduating from college, a doctor advised him to have a desk job and a relatively sedentary life, due to his asthma and heart condition, but instead, Teddy goes on to climb the Matterhorn (and incorporate a number of extra challenges into his mountain climbing, basically making it a Tough Mudder excursion).

Upon returning to the United States, he is elected to the New York State Assembly and writes The Naval War of 1812, which is published to critical acclaim and becomes mandatory reading at the Naval Academy. From there his resume diverges from the political norm, as he became a cattle rancher, a deputy sheriff, an explorer, a police commissioner, Secretary of the Navy, and a war hero in the Rough Riders, a calvary regiment he founded. The historic charge up San Juan Hill (charging up is not something you want to be doing in a battle; fortune favors those with the high ground) was so arduous that the horses had to be left behind, and he led his men running up the hill on foot.

Upon his return from the war, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, where he set up wrestling mats and proceeded to wrestle and box with anyone he could coerce into getting in the ring or on the mat with him. He took up judo and jiu-jitsu. He routinely invited some of the best boxers and martial arts experts to the governor’s mansion and later the White House to go toe to toe with him. It was one of these boxing matches while he was president that caused him to lose the vision in one eye and led to the end of his boxing career.

Teddy even turned tennis into a contact sport. It started out innocently, with a group of men who played tennis with him in the afternoons, but it didn’t take long for Teddy to decide that tennis was really a rather boring sport. To liven things up, he created obstacle course hikes that sometimes involved swimming across half frozen rivers.

While preparing to give a campaign speech when running for president a second time, Roosevelt was shot at point blank range. Fortunately, the bullet was slowed by going through his hundred page speech and glasses case, but he still had a bullet in his chest. He went on to give a stirring, hour long speech while utilizing the blood stained manuscript before he agreed to go to the hospital.

Roosevelt was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a renowned conservationist who created the Wildlife Refuge System and set aside 42 million acres of land for national parks.
The teddy bear was named after him because he refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree, deeming that unsportsmanlike. He and his children had a wide assortment of pets, including a badger, a bear, snakes, a barn owl, horses, dogs, cats, and guinea pigs.

He was the first president to appoint a Jewish person as a cabinet member, host a black man at a White House dinner, and fly in an airplane. He’s also the only president we know who had a tattoo.

As police commissioner he would go on undercover walks in disguise to make sure all his officers were doing their jobs. “These midnight rambles were great fun,” he said.

He almost died on an exploration trip down the Amazon River with his son, and on a year long safari to Africa, he said he and his son killed 512 animals, including lions, elephants, and rhinos. (While this sounds horrible and shocking to us today, the animals were considerably less endangered back then, and the majority of the animals were donated to scientists or the Smithsonian, which owes a massive debt to Roosevelt for outfitting a large portion of their collection.) When he finally died in his sleep, a politician said, “Death had to take him sleeping, for if it had tried to take him waking, there would have been a fight.”


 

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to President Taft!

 

William Howard Taft, our 27th president, is the only man who has served both as president and as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (And he enjoyed being Chief Justice much more than president.) He is also, at over 330 pounds, the huskiest president we have had.

 

He did not, contrary to popular opinion, get stuck in the White House bath tub. Taft was well- aware of his prodigious girth, and he was fond of taking baths, but he was also a smart man. Being aware of his size, prior to his presidential inauguration, he had a custom built, super-sized bath tub installed in the White House. He had identical tubs installed other places that he spent a great deal of time, including a ship when he went to tour the Panama Canal. He did once have an embarrassing incident in a hotel, when he got into the tub and displaced water, spilling it onto the floor and down to the floor below. But that’s a far cry from getting stuck. When he was spending time in places that did not have an extra-large bath tub, he avoided the problem by shockingly, of all things, taking showers.

 

He was pretty famous for his flatulence, and would often embarrass his staff by burping and farting in front of visiting dignitaries.

Taft was born in Cincinnati in 1857. He attended Yale and became a lawyer and then a judge while still in his 20’s. From the time he was young, it was his ambition to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but then he got into politics, serving as governor of the Philippines under President McKinley and then as Secretary of War under President Teddy Roosevelt.

 

Teddy picked Taft to be his successor (despite the fact that Taft was pretty much the physical opposite of Teddy) as president, and in 1908, Taft easily won the presidency. While serving as president, Taft helped prop up numerous Latin American governments. He used “dollar diplomacy,” which basically meant that he tried to further American interests in East Asia and Latin America by exercising economic power and guaranteeing loans made to these countries. Domestically, Taft busted many big businesses (antitrust cases). He disagreed with former President Teddy Roosevelt’s stances on environmental conservation and tariffs, which gradually led to a falling out between the two men. Teddy Roosevelt decided to run against Taft in 1912, which resulted in….shall we say, shenanigans?

 

Roosevelt earned more delegates than Taft did, but when they got to the Republican Convention, Taft’s men simply refused to allow Roosevelt’s delegates to be seated. Roosevelt was furious and instead decided to found the Bull Moose Party and run as a third party candidate. This would be the election in which Roosevelt was shot and proceeded to give a 90 minute speech with the bullet lodged in his chest. This split the Republican vote, and so Democratic candidate and general all around terrible person Woodrow Wilson won.

Taft left Washington and took a job teaching law at Yale.

 

In 1921, President Warren Harding appointed Taft chief justice of the Supreme Court, which pleased Taft immensely, and he remained there until shortly before he died in 1930.

 

 

 

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Woodrow Wilson (12/28)!

 

Woodrow Wilson was blind in one eye, dyslexic, and didn’t learn to read until he was ten years old. He’s also the only president who both had a Ph.D and a Nobel Peace Prize. This should tell you everything you need to know about his character: if he wanted something, he was going to do it, and nothing was going to stop him. In his first term of office, he made more reforms and had more laws passed, including enduring things like the Federal Reserve Act, child labor laws, and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, than almost any president before or since. It was under his eye that women got the right to vote, and that worker’s rights were passed that gave workers the right to not work so many hours in a day that they dropped dead.

 

On the other side of the coin, he was one of our most racist presidents, and that’s including the ones who actually owned slaves. Wilson’s administration sought to increase the amount of segregation and decrease the number of black people in office. He segregated federal offices, which hadn’t been done since the mid 1800s.

 

He was also…maybe cursed? His health was, let’s say, really, really bad. In addition to the being dyslexic and blind in one eye thing, he suffered constant migraines that never went away and stomach pain that was so bad that he traveled with his own stomach pump, which he used on himself every day at the suggestion of possibly the world’s worst doctor until a White House doctor said, “WTF? Who told you to do that? Holy crap, stop that this instant!” He had writer’s cramp in his right hand and stabbing pains in his left shoulder and leg, and he survived approximately a zillion strokes.

 

Wilson was very proud of keeping the United States out of World War 1 during his first term, but during his second term, Germany refused to stop attacking American ships, so Wilson reluctantly entered into the war to end all wars. Holding out on entering World War I was not due to deeply held beliefs in pacifism, but because of his aforementioned racist views and his strong “America First” stance. He didn’t want to enter World War I because he feared it would “further deplete the white race.” But once we finally joined WWI, Wilson was pretty much all in. He made sure our soldiers always had food and ammunition. He set an example of wartime austerity by putting a flock of sheep on the White House lawn to keep it short, and donated their wool to the Red Cross. This actually didn’t work very well, because 1) the White House front lawn was not fenced, so the sheep kept wandering off, and 2) the traffic and business stressed the sheep to the point that they were constantly really sick. After the peace treaty was signed, Wilson thought World War I was an opportunity to build the League of Nations, an organization to promote peace through diplomacy. It was a nice idea, but nobody else really agreed with it. The lack of support kind of drove him crazy.

 

Wilson grew irritable and suspicious of even his closest friends, something doctors and historians later attributed to brain damage caused by all the strokes, which the frustration of people laughing at his global peace initiatives exacerbated. He went days without sleeping, and his brain began deteriorating, which made him angrier and more stubborn. Determined to win public support for the League of Nations, Wilson decided to (against the orders of his wife, his doctors, and his political allies) tour the country and give speeches to rally the people to his side. He rode all over America, coughing and sneezing and being fed predigested foods (the only food he could eat) by day and giving rousing speeches at night. He delivered the speeches with closed eyes, shaking hands, and a weakened voice. With his wheezing, the lack of sleep, the strained mumbling, his rapidly failing body, and his single-minded obsession, he finally had a big enough stroke that he noticed, so he cut the tour short and went back to the White House to relax, because being president is such an easy job that it’s what we should all take up when we need a vacation.

 

He was in a real pickle. Wilson’s doctors believed that if he stepped down and left the White House, the disgrace and humiliation would kill him, but they also thought that if he actually tried to continue being president, the stress would kill him. Wilson’s health was so bad that he could barely walk; his mind had deteriorated to the point where he was completely nuts and could barely make decisions, and his temper was so nasty that his aides were resigning en masse.

 

So, Wilson’s wife Edith because the unofficial president in 1919. She decided what matters would be brought to the president and what would be ignored. She secretly presided over the country while her husband the president got sicker and crazier and angrier. This was kept out of the public eye, because just like today, the public would probably frown on a zombie being president. His health issues eventually led (after he left office) to the 25th Amendment being passed, that grants constitutional measures to cope with a president incapacitated physically or mentally who does not voluntarily step down.

[Terabith]

On any list of worst presidents, Warren Harding almost always makes the list. It’s possible there were four or five presidents worse than him, but not many.

He was the president during Prohibition, but he was famous for all the alcohol he served in the White House. Alcohol that was procured from federal agents who seized it from bootleggers. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, then an adult, was a regular at Harding’s poker nights, said, “No rumor could have exceeded the truth. Trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood all about” as the first lady mixed the drinks. Harding was purportedly drunk on whiskey during an Oval Office confrontation with railroad leaders about a strike negotiation.

Harding made his friend Albert Fall the Secretary of the Interior. Fall was later arrested for accepting bribes in exchange for selling American oil fields to business associates. This was only one of the many, many scandals during the Harding administration. The head of the Office of Alien Property and the head of the Justice Department were both convicted of accepting bribes, and the head of the Veterans Bureau skimmed profits and organized an underground drug ring.

He was also really into gambling and once lost the entire White House china set in a poker game.

He also was really, really into his affairs. In 1905, while he was still running a newspaper, he started an affair with Carrie Phillips, whose husband owned a department store in town. Harding’s wife was in the hospital being treated for a life-threatening kidney infection. Carrie Phillips’s husband was in the sanitarium “soothing his nerves.” This affair went on for a long time, and Harding wrote all sorts of love letters to Phillips, in which he named his penis Jerry and in which he wrote some really bad poetry, including such gems as, “I love your poise/Of perfect thighs/When they hold me in paradise…/I love the rose/Your garden grows/Love seashell pink/That over it glows.”

However, such bad poetry and poor decision making as putting the details of your illicit sexual encounters in writing exposes one to blackmail. Before he was nominated by the Republican party to run for president, Harding was asked if he had any skeletons in his closet. He thought for like five minutes and then was like, “Uh, nope. No skeletons.”

Bad move, Republican party. They wound up paying her between $20,000-25,000 (almost $300k in today’s money), along with $5k each month while Harding was president, as well as sending her and her husband to Europe on an extended holiday during the time he was campaigning.
He also had a confirmed child with another woman, Nan Britton, who was more than 30 years younger than Harding and wrote a tell-all book (to earn money to support Harding’s illegitimate child) in which she described losing her virginity to Harding at age 20 while he was a senator, an encounter during which the New York Vice Squad burst down the door, only to realize who Harding was before they backed out with apologies. His affair with Britton lasted six years, and included frequent encounters in a closet in the White House while the Secret Service kept an eye out for Harding’s wife.

Warren Harding died of a heart attack while he was in the middle of his first term of office. An FBI agent accused his wife of poisoning him out of jealousy over his affairs, but no evidence to that effect was ever produced.



 

[Terabith]

Happy early birthday to Calvin Coolidge (7/4)!

 

Calvin Coolidge was a quiet man. He refused to use the telephone that had recently been installed in the White House. Once, at a party, a woman told him that she had bet a friend that she could get him to say three words. Coolidge responded, “You lose.”

 

Calvin's taciturn nature probably arose from the fact that he had a very Norman Batesian childhood. As a small child, he was told by his parents that he was not allowed to make mistakes and also that he was never going to be the smartest or the strongest, so he had darn well better work harder than anyone. If he did make a mistake, say being late to school, he would be banished to a cold attic, where he would have to sit in the dark for hours. His father was terrifying but often away on business, and his mother died when he was 12, so he was mostly raised by his grandmother. Calvin's sister died when he was 14, and he just plugged along trying to be perfect and having long, involved conversations with his dead mother, that he spoke about in his (unanswered) letters to his father.

 

Coolidge was determined to prove to the public that order and integrity had been restored to the White House after the debacle of the Harding administration, and he tried.

 

Coolidge had a pet raccoon that he walked on a leash. And a “pygmy” hippo, who had to eventually go and live at the National Zoo.

 

Coolidge also liked to play practical jokes on the Secret Service. They had installed a bell in his office that he could ring in case of emergency, but Coolidge kept ringing it, only to be found giggling, hiding behind a pillar when agents dropped everything and ran in, so the Secret Service was forced to hide the emergency bell from the president. He also would ring the doorbell and run away before staff answered the door. At other times, he would buzz agents into his office, only to hide under his desk to try to make them think he had been kidnapped.

 

But then a few years into his presidency, Calvin's 16 year old son died in a freak tennis accident. His son stubbed his toe; the toe got infected, and he died of infection. That was kind of the last straw for the president who had tragedy follow him everywhere. Coolidge began to have the Secret Service bring him young boys, so he could feel a connection to his son. After his son died, Coolidge shifted from playing practical jokes, fighting corruption, and supporting lower taxes and smaller government to pretty much doing nothing and just napping all day and occasionally erupting into incandescent rage at White House staff. Coolidge at his craziest made Teddy Roosevelt look like a house cat.

 

Even at his craziest, however, he did not throw plates filled with ketchup at the White House walls.

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Herbert Hoover! (8/10)

 

Herbert Hoover was orphaned at the age of nine. After this, he spent a few years living on an Indian reservation with an uncle who was an Indian agent. Hoover learned to hunt and survive in the wilderness from the Native American children. He grew up a devout Quaker, although the uncle that he spent several years living with liked to rephrase Bible verses to say such things as, “Turn your cheek once, but if he smites thee again, then punch him.” This is, shall we say, not aligned with either the teachings of Jesus or the Quakers.

 

Despite a childhood of hardships, Hoover put himself through Stanford, where he studied geology and engineering, although he got fairly poor grades and devoted most of his time to part time jobs and campus activities. He was a millionaire by the age of 40. Hoover’s personal slogan was, “Work is life.” He didn’t really seek power or even wealth. He just really, really liked to work. He didn’t believe in taking vacations, and when he wasn’t working, he was antsy and uncomfortable. He said hobbies were a waste of time that could be spent working. He built a mining empire and made a ton of money.

 

After making his fortune, Hoover decided to turn his obsessive work like nature to the job of humanitarian aid. When World War I started, he spearheaded a private effort to rescue 120,000 American tourists stranded in Europe. After that, he was asked to coordinate American efforts to relieve food to neutral Belgium to save starving Europeans. Hoover ran the American Relief Administration, which fed millions of people. Between 1921 and 1923, Hoover directed aid to a famine stricken Soviet Union, where he fed fifteen million people daily. When criticized for aiding communism, Hoover said, “Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!”

 

At one point, Hoover was tasked with meeting with German commanders in the middle of the war to negotiate bringing aid to American troops who were being held as prisoners of war. And apparently the traditional way of negotiating involved drinking a ton of booze. Hoover was crafty, however, and decided to turn that booze into a negotiating strategy. He told the bartender to only pour water into the American’s martinis, and to make sure nobody got the drinks mixed up, he had the American drinks all be served with an onion garnish. As the evening went on, the Germans got drunker from all the gin and got sloppier, and the Americans negotiated brilliantly. Interestingly, the Gibson martini, named after the general who was in on the negotiating party, became a real hit in the United States.

 

When Coolidge decided he wouldn’t run for re-election in 1928, Hoover decided the office of president might be just enough work to be up for his taste and efficiently, allow him to do the most good for the most people.

 

It really wasn’t his fault that the stock market crashed seven months into his presidency, kicking off the Great Depression. Hoover had even warned people about the dangers of the stock market during his inaugural address. However, once the stock market collapsed, Hoover made bad decision after bad decision, which exacerbated the crisis. Turns out maybe the presidency isn’t an entry level job after all? (Hoover had served admirably as Secretary of Commerce under both Presidents Coolidge and Harding, but had never run for political office himself. He quickly distinguished himself while running against Democrat Al Smith by creating one of the best slogans in presidential history, even if it became ironic in light of the Depression: “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”)

 

Hoover’s only real diversion from the constant economic crisis caused by the Depression while he was president was the sport he invented called “Hooverball.” In this game, players stand on opposite sides of a tall net throwing and catching a ball, only instead of using a soft, bouncy volleyball, Hoover would hurl a ten pound medicine ball at the other team, how has to either catch or get hit by that same ball when they threw it back. One of Hoover’s friends described it as “more strenuous than either boxing, wrestling, or football.” He played it virtually every day.

 

After World War Two, President Truman asked Hoover to again work to prevent global famine. Hoover, the president who was accused of causing the Great Depression, was such a great humanitarian that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times.

It is said that, “Hoover fed more people and saved more lives than any man in history.”

 

But what he should be remembered for is the fact that he was so uncomfortable with the notion of staff in the White House that he ordered them to be invisible. He didn’t ever want to see any staff, which led them to constantly jump into closets or hide behind bushes if they heard him coming. There were even bells that were rung to warn the staff to hide. The truly ridiculous thing is that when FDR took over after Hoover, he didn’t change this policy. It wasn’t until Harry Truman asked why the devil people were hurling themselves into closets and behind couches that the White House staff were allowed to come out of hiding. (The poor White House staff had to deal first with President Coolidge’s weird pranks of ringing the emergency bell and then hiding and then President Hoover’s bizarre sense of privacy.)

 

Hoover and his wife would speak in Mandarin to prevent other people from understanding what they overheard. Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou Hoover, spoke eight languages. The two of them met at Stanford, where Lou was the only female geology major.

 

After Truman’s presidency, a presidential pension was created. Hoover didn’t need it, being a millionaire many times over, but he accepted the pension even though he had never taken a salary so that Harry Truman, who was poor and needed the pension, would feel better about accepting it.

[Terabith]

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was growing up, he wore dresses and long hair until he was five. This was not considered weird; gender specific clothing for children is a pretty recent invention, and dresses (especially white ones that could be bleached) were considered practical clothing for potty training children. He was also constantly sick. He was constantly catching bad colds and influenza and pneumonia and chronic sinus trouble and all sorts of diseases. But FDR never let illness slow him down. Whenever he was well, he could be found working out, swimming, or boxing, making sure that his windows of health were spent on physical improvement.

When he was 39, he spent a day sailing and fishing, and then helped some locals put out a forest fire on the way home, then went for a swim, and then jogged a mile. Two days later, he couldn’t move his legs, and doctors diagnosed it as polio. It paralyzed him below the waist. Doctors told him that he would never walk again, but the biggest mistake anyone could make is to tell FDR that he couldn’t do something. Through years of rigorous and painful exercise, FDR massaged and worked his leg muscles enough that with the help of iron braces and canes, he was able to stand and walk for brief periods. However, he was forever dependent on a wheelchair for primary movement, and he was unable to bathe or dress himself. He did, however, swim several miles a day, even with paralyzed legs. As far as “taking it easy” went, which was the advice given to him by medical professionals, he decided to become New York’s governor, assistant secretary of the Navy, and eventually settled into a relaxing career as United States president.

When FDR became president, the United States was in the worst shape it had been in since the Civil War. Twenty five percent of American workers were unemployed. Two million people were homeless, and 32 out of 48 states had closed their banks. You’d think you’d have to be crazy to want to take over the country in those conditions, but Roosevelt was used to facing uphill battles, so he took the job and went to work passing massive legislation during his first hundred days in office. FDR’s New Deal claimed to rescue the United States from the Great Depression. In truth, it really didn’t, and in fact, four million more people lost their jobs during the beginning of FDR’s presidency. However, America’s entrance into World War Two is probably what saved the country; the increase in jobs and government spending that a war requires put Americans back to work.

At the time, however, FDR told the nation that his New Deal had saved the day and everyone believed him, because that was how Roosevelt worked. His legs never technically healed, but he used braces and canes to present the illusion of mobility, so hey, he might as well be walking. His New Deal didn’t fix the economy, but because he said it did, it pumped Americans full of faith and hope. Roosevelt’s will was more powerful than reality. He navigated us through World War II and was elected to an unprecedented fourth term.

FDR was president for longer than any president before or since, perhaps as a way to get even with his mother, who made him wear a dress until he was five years old. His twelve years as president inspired the 22nd amendment, which said that no president could be elected more than twice. The media rarely photographed him in the wheelchair, so the public was not aware of the extent of his paralysis. His weekly radio broadcasts, called Fireside Chats, inspired hope throughout the country, and his Scottie dog Fala was one of the most famous dogs of all time.

His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of the most influential First Ladies of all time. She and Amelia Earhart once slipped away from a state dinner, commandeered an aircraft, and went for a joyride to Baltimore.

FDR was a major jokester, and he had a hard time keeping his mouth shut when he found something funny. He once caused a minor diplomatic emergency over the correct way to cook Brussels sprouts. FDR began giving Winston Churchill’s wife all kinds of crap over the fact that the British boil Brussels sprouts. (Honestly, this seems fair.). He began to punk her with all sorts of made-up ways of preparing Brussels sprouts that were better. He pulled the US ambassador to Britain into this, embarrassing him to the point that Winant finally told the president that he was a diplomat, not a foodster, and that he’d resign if FDR ever did that again.

FDR would call the secretary of the navy and get him to guess who FDR was in bed with, only to eventually reveal the answer, “a sore throat.” He would summon reporters for a “massively important” press conference and have them meet a random farmer who would lecture interminably about the importance of stud bulls. He once stranded a Secret Service member on a roof of a farm building by ordering the man to climb up there and then bribing someone to remove the ladder.

He also walked in on Winston Churchill completely naked at least once. (Honestly, Churchill disdained clothes more than the average toddler, so it’s probably a miracle this didn’t happen more frequently with more people.)

What FDR did not like, however, was civil rights. Despite his wife Eleanor constantly trying to fix him up with civil rights leaders, FDR refused to back two different anti-lynching bills, despite the fact that African Americans were being lynched all over the place. FDR was apparently afraid that saving Black lives would cost him support from Southern Democrats. He didn’t seem to care much about the lives of minorities in general: he deported over two million Mexican Americans in cattle cars; he turned away Jews fleeing Nazis, and he put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.

He also cheated on his exceptionally cool wife, Eleanor. A lot.

But after four terms in office, dying in office was the only way Americans would stop voting for him. It’s a miracle he’s not still being written in.
 

[Terabith]

Interestingly, Truman’s middle initial didn’t stand for anything. His parents wanted to honor two different relatives with names that started with S, but couldn’t agree, so they compromised and just gave him the middle initial S. There was originally no period after the S, until Truman became president, but at that point an editor from The New York Times told Truman that that wasn’t grammatically correct and would set a bad example for America’s children, so Truman agreed to the period.

Harry S. Truman was an unlikely guy to become president. He grew up in Independence, Missouri, which is not exactly a sprawling metropolis. His parents were farmers and didn’t have the money for him to go to college, and his poor eyesight kept him from going to West Point, so after high school, he worked a collection of odd jobs until World War I started, and he volunteered to go to France, even though he was two years too old to be drafted and exempt anyway as he was working as a farmer, but farming in Missouri sucks enough to make mustard gas look inviting, so he volunteered to go and successfully led his men in battle.

After the war, he came back to Missouri, married his high school sweetheart, and got involved in politics, eventually making it to the Senate, where he gained a reputation for being fiscally responsible and a champion of citizens’ rights, which helped convince FDR to tap him to become vice president for his fourth presidential term instead of Wallace, who was FDR’s previous vice president but had proved to be unpopular in Washington. FDR started his fourth term as president and didn’t speak to or brief Truman on any relevant materials, although, to be fair, this might be explained by the fact that FDR was in the middle of fighting World War Two and also busy with dropping dead only two weeks later. This thrust Truman into the presidency and the role of ending a World War even though he had no foreign policy experience.

But, as is typical for stoic midwestern farmers, Truman got down to the business of ending the War, making the difficult decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, proposing the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and hopefully prevent a third World War, desegregating the armed forces, proposing the Truman Doctrine and NATO to protect the world from the growing power of the Soviet Union, founding the United Nations, and intervening in the Korean War. He didn’t let a little thing like inexperience or lack of formal education get in the way of saving the world.
He also possibly made a poor decision when he got annoyed at railroad workers striking and threatened that if they didn’t get back to work, he was going to draft them into the military and send them to Asia. But, who among us hasn’t lost our temper and started a massively unbalanced game of chicken?
 

[Terabith]

Then General Dwight D. Eisenhower was something of a prophet. Shortly after invading Nazi Germany at the end of World War Two, Eisenhower took his troops on a tour of the concentration camps. And by that, I mean that Eisenhower was the only one who went into the buildings where the bodies were. No less a figure than George Patton refused to enter. General Eisenhower, however, knew that if people did not see the camps for themselves, they would refuse to believe that the Holocaust had occurred. “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations as propaganda.” He then called up Washington, DC and London and begged them to send reporters, photographers, editors, observers, and anyone else who could record the atrocities so that anyone who tempted to deny the Holocaust would be silenced by the barrage of evidence. Sadly, that tendency of human nature has proved all too true.

He was the first commander of NATO in 1950.

Eisenhower did not want to be president. As far back as 1948, he was asked to run for president by BOTH parties, because he didn’t have a political party affiliation. When pressed, he responded, “I do not feel that I have any duty to seek a political nomination.” Republicans coined the phrase, “I like Ike.” In January of 1952, Eisenhower’s name was entered into the New Hampshire primary without his permission. For weeks, Eisenhower refused to engage with either of the parties who continued to court him. He won the primary in March. He was so moved by a film made in tribute to him and by the ground swelling of support he was receiving in various primaries, that he resigned from the military on June 2, 1952, and made his first political speech on June 4. He won the Republican nomination and the general election in November of that year. (Elections apparently didn’t last as long in the 1950s as they do now.)

As president, Eisenhower saw the creation of the interstate highway system. He was also so infuriated by the squirrels digging up the putting green on the White House lawn that he ordered them shot. (The groundskeepers decided instead to trap and relocate the poor squirrels instead.) He integrated the armed forces. He oversaw the creation of the space program. (Eisenhower actually breathed a big sigh of relief after the Soviets put up Sputnik, because the main thing holding back the United States’s space program at that point was the legal debate of whether a nation’s borders extended up infinitely. With the launch of Sputnik, the United States could get on with the space program.)

He was the first president to fly on Air Force One, and he sent the 101st Airborne to enforce the federal order to desegregate the schools in Little Rock.

His biggest presidential scandal involved him accepting a wool jacket, which just goes to show you that presidential suit crises weren’t initiated by Obama
 

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to JFK (5/29)!

 

John F. Kennedy, our 35th president, was the youngest person ever elected president. He had a bad back and was rejected by the military, even during World War Two when they were trying to make pretty much everyone into a soldier. But JFK was pretty much James Bond and wanted to serve, so he got his wealthy father to pull strings to get him into the Navy, instead of out of it like Bill Clinton, or paying someone to go in his place, like Grover Cleveland did. While fighting, his boat went down (injuring his back still further in the process), but he gathered his men together and towed an injured comrade to shore, swimming for four hours with the man’s life jacket clamped between his teeth, after asking his crew if they wanted to fight or surrender and saying, “What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose.” And then, when they got to the island and found there was no food, he repeated the process while swimming to another island. He got a medal for this, and more medals for other heroic actions during the war.

 

After the war, he became a journalist but got bored with that and ran for Congress, won, and got married to the glamorous Jacqueline Bouvier. Of course, he didn’t just run for Congress like an ordinary guy. He was worried that voters might prefer the more experienced Joe Russo, especially Italians. So JFK found a janitor who was ALSO named Joe Russo, and “convinced” him to run for Congress. (Janitor Joe Russo was convinced the men who visited him and ordered him to run for Congress were from the Mob.) This did divide the “Joe Russo” votes, but it turns out it wouldn’t have mattered to begin with, since both Joe Russos together did not get nearly enough votes to have won against the wealthy Kennedy.

 

JFK had several operations to try and fix his by now really messed up back, during which he nearly died several times. While recovering from one of these surgeries, he wrote the book Profiles in Courage, I guess because Netflix hadn’t been invented yet, but it won the Pulitzer Prize, so there’s that.

 

At least that’s the story, and the book Profiles in Courage really set the stage for JFK’s political career really, but near the end of his life, JFK’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, revealed that he was actually the ghostwriter for Profiles in Courage, and JFK’s role in the book’s creation has been hotly contested ever since, ranging from Kennedy sketched out rough outlines to Kennedy did, in fact, write the book, and Sorensen was more of the copy editor. This explained why JFK’s rich dad had arranged for Sorensen to receive royalties from the book, which journalists even at the time questioned, but got busily told to mind their own business.

 

In 1960, JFK ran for president against Richard Nixon, and at least partially due to looking younger and more handsome than Nixon (which really wasn’t all that high a bar) on the first ever televised debates, won.

 

While president, Kennedy announced the plan to put an astronaut from the United States on the moon, founded the Peace Corps, sent marshals to protect the Freedom Riders and helped to promote civil rights, founded the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to help promote (more) equal rights for women, and stared down death in the closest we have ever come to World War III and humanity being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis and prevented this outcome by a combination of steely eyed courage, lots of drugs (because of the aforementioned bad back), and charm.

 

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t have come about in the first place if, under first Eisenhower’s and later JFK’s watch, the United States hadn’t spent loads of time, energy, and money attempting to assassinate or discredit Castro (who, to be fair, was pretty horrible) by, let me check my notes, poisoning Castro’s cigars and ice cream, rigging an underwater shell with explosives for a scuba diving Castro to find, and dosing Castro’s offices with LSD to make him sound insane in his speeches. It’s entirely possible that Castro inviting the Soviets to install nukes wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t, in fact, been so intent on being out to get him.

 

Actually, JFK and Castro had a lot in common, both having, shall we say, unconventional and enthusiastic sexual habits. JFK said he got blinding headaches if he went more than a couple days without sex, and he really wanted completely emotionless sex something like three times a day with a tremendous assortment of women. He slept with Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, and pretty much every female intern in the White House. If your grandma lived around DC while Kennedy was there, there’s a good chance he slept with her, too.

 

He was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, a fact which generated lots of bizarre conspiracy theories and led to some fascinating episodes of "The X-Files" and a lot of money for conspiracy theorists and Oliver Stone. It’s possible that JFK’s back brace ultimately led to his death, since it prevented him from ducking down after the first, survivable shot hit.

[Terabith]

Belated happy birthday to Lyndon Johnson (8/27).

 

Lyndon Johnson, who became president after JFK was assassinated, was a complex figure. He grew up dirt poor in Texas, and his first job was as a schoolteacher before he turned his hand to politics. He was not a humble man, and started telling friends when he was elementary school that he was going to be president.

 

He took the oath of office on an airplane after JFK was killed in Dallas. His presidency was hugely busy and productive. He instituted a war on poverty, established Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and Head Start; and oversaw the passage of sweeping civil rights legislation. However, he also was responsible for the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the unpopularity of that war was largely responsible for the fact that he declined to run again for president in 1968.

 

Johnson could also be a bit eccentric. He liked to take visiting dignitaries skinny dipping before getting down to business. He hated to waste time and had phones installed in the bathroom and would call reporters and advisors into the bathroom to consult with him while he was pooping. His poor national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, was so embarrassed by this that he faced the wall in the furthest corner while he talked to Johnson. Johnson told him to come closer, which resulted in Bundy almost backing into Johnson’s naked lap. Johnson utilized pooping as the ultimate power move.

 

On his ranch in Texas, he liked to throw a bunch of beer in his car and drive off drunkenly, while Secret Service agents tried to follow him and usually caught up with him when he stopped to pee on the side of the road. One time he peed on a Secret Service agent, who tried to delicately point out what the president was doing, only to be told, “I know. It’s my prerogative.”

 

Johnson was all about power. He would use his 6'3" frame and get in people's faces and yell and loom and spit and mock people, a few inches from their face.

 

He was very aware of the fact that being president was COOL. Once, when he was addressing troops in Vietnam, before he exited in a military helicopter, a member of his staff asked Johnson which helicopter was his. Johnson said, "Son, ALL these helicopters are mine."

 

And like JFK before him, Johnson viewed the presidency as a great opportunity to have lots and lots of sex. He said that he "bedded more women accidentally than JFK did on purpose." This is an impressive statement, since JFK often had sex with three different women a day. Johnson would hit on women in front of his wife.

 

He also liked to take his penis out and wave it at people as a demonstration of power. When a staffer would challenge him, Johnson would pull out his johnson (that he literally named Jumbo) and shake it at the poor staffer and say, "Have you seen anything as big as this?" One reporter who asked LBJ about why American troops were in Vietnam got to witness Johnson pull out his penis and shout, "THIS IS WHY!" (The weirdest part of this story is that it worked, and the reporter either felt that this was an adequate answer to his question or possibly just that the president was insane enough that further elaboration would not be forthcoming.).

 

LBJ was stark raving insane, but he was also possibly one of the greatest presidents we've ever had. His Civil Rights legislation was a masterpiece. He had dossiers on every senator, what they wanted, what they liked, what their weaknesses were, and he prevailed upon them to pass the legislation, and he did it knowing it would remove his political party from power. After he signed it into law, he said, "We have lost the South for a generation." But he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

[Terabith]

For most of the participants of World War II, the war was a long slog of misery and danger, but future president Richard Nixon had a much more pleasant experience. He was an officer in charge of supplies, and so he was stationed in the rear of active combat, on an island in the South Pacific more reminiscent of tropical drinks. While stationed there, Nixon opened a casino bar. He was so devoted to his poker games that he turned down the opportunity to meet Charles Lindberg for poker, and he used his winnings (almost $10,000) to finance his first congressional campaign after the war.

Nixon’s presidency is not remembered fondly, because of its ignoble ending, but he accomplished many important and good things. He founded the EPA and Title IX, to help promote gender equality, and he started a program for affirmative action in companies that were receiving federal contracts. He opened diplomatic relations with China, which had been completely closed prior to his administration, and he established the Shanghai Communique, which still governs relations between the United States and China today. He was the first president to visit the Soviet Union and negotiated the first arms control treaty with them, which slowed but did not stop the increase in nuclear arms. He welcomed home the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon. He gave significant aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, which the prime minister later credited with saving the country, and he helped normalize relations with the Middle East.

He brought most of the American forces home from Vietnam, which would have been a more laudatory feat if he hadn’t basically extended the American presence there by five years in an attempt to win election in the first place. Nixon’s 1968 election win was pretty much pulled off thanks to the fact that he committed full on treason. During the election, Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and the Democratic nominee. Humphrey was running on a “peace plank,” an assurance that the Johnson-Humphrey administration was negotiating an end to American presence in the increasingly unpopular and unwinnable war in Vietnam. Humphrey had brought leaders from North and South Vietnam together in Paris for peace talks and claimed progress was being made. Just three days before the election, Humphrey called for a halt to bombing in Vietnam, and both Johnson and North Vietnam agreed. Peace seemed imminent, and Humphrey surged ahead in the polls. And then, for no reason, South Vietnam pulled out of the talks. This was odd behavior and worked out suspiciously well for Nixon, the Republican nominee. In taped phone conversations that were revealed later, Lyndon Johnson revealed that Nixon’s campaign had been talking to the South Vietnam leaders, telling them that they were going to be sold out. Nixon told them that he had a much better plan. This sabotaged the peace talks, and by putting his personal interests ahead of the interests of the United States, Nixon had met the technical definition of treason. Had the peace talks continued, Humphrey almost certainly would have been elected. When Nixon and Kissinger negotiated five years later, the deal was almost the same one that had been on the table five years previously. All it had cost was tens of thousands of American lives lost in Vietnam.

Nixon was an intelligent man and a skilled negotiator, but he was also completely insane, as well as completely lacking in morality. Nixon hated a journalist named Jack Anderson, who kept doing nefarious things like reporting on Nixon’s transgressions. So Nixon did the logical thing and upon assuming the highest office in the land, ordered the CIA to put surveillance on Anderson. And then started talking to two officials about how to kill Anderson. Plans were floated, including a plan to poison his aspirin bottle and coating the steering wheel of Anderson’s car with acid, so he would absorb the drug through the skin and die in a drug fueled car accident. The only reason these plans were not carried out was because Nixon reassigned the agents to breaking into the Watergate hotel, to steal tapes about his treason from way back in 1968.

Even Spiro Agnew was ominously told to “go quietly, or else.”

Nixon’s sanity, which started out fairly tenuous, rapidly deteriorated under the pressures of the presidency, and when he was drinking, it pretty much deserted him. Unfortunately, Nixon was drinking hard when North Korea shot down a US spy plane. This definitely called for a response, but the North Korea situation has always been tricky. Nixon flipped out and ordered a nuclear strike. Henry Kissinger got on the phone and called everyone and asked them to hold off on the nuclear holocaust until Nixon sobered up in the morning.

By the end of the Nixon presidency, the Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had given the orders that if Nixon ordered a nuclear strike, military commanders were to consult with either him or Kissinger before carrying them out. Nixon’s drinking was so out of hand that he was frequently talking about ordering nuclear strikes, and presidential aides were fearful of a depressed Nixon causing a holocaust.

After Nixon ordered his friendly CIA agents to break into the Watergate Hotel and steal the tapes that detailed the treason that had led to his election in 1968, they were caught by hotel security. The crime eventually became public as a result of whistle blowing journalists, and Nixon eventually resigned rather than face impeachment.
 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Terabith

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Gerald Ford (7/14).

 

Gerald Ford is mostly known for being played by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live” and falling down a lot. But that’s really not fair.

 

First of all, he was a male model and even owned a modeling agency. He was on the cover of Cosmopolitan.

 

He was also a super elite athlete. He played football in college, and he had the opportunity to play for the NFL for either the Detroit Lions or the Green Bay Packers. He turned them down because he wanted to go to law school. Yale offered him the job of boxing and football coach even though he had never boxed in his life. At first Yale wouldn’t let him take classes full time because of his coaching duties, but eventually they relented and Ford wound up in the top third of his class.

 

He was a hero in World War Two, serving in the Pacific.

 

He was the only president who was never elected either president or vice president. He was appointed vice president by Nixon after Spiro Agnew pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and he became president when Nixon resigned due to Watergate.

 

His wife, Betty Ford, had been First Lady for only two months when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her openness about the disease was shocking, and it was the first time that the term breast cancer was spoken about openly on the news rather than being whispered about.

 

He survived two assassination attempts in seventeen days, both by women, one of whom was a follower of Charles Manson.

 

Let’s just say Gerald Ford is not someone we would want to fight in an alley at night.

[Terabith]

Happy 98th birthday to President Jimmy Carter! He is now the oldest lived president in history, and the one who has had the longest post presidential career.

 

Jimmy Carter is another president who has lived his life according to the Grover Cleveland's motto, "I have always tried to do what is right." Back before he became president, Carter was a young Naval officer, when he accidentally stumbled into events that sound more like the lead up to a movie starring Tom Cruise than a president. In 1952, while working at a nuclear reactor, someone said the words you never want to hear a surgeon or a nuclear engineer say. “Uh oh.” The nuclear reactor was malfunctioning, and someone would have to lead a team into this death trap to prevent meltdown before time ran out. That man was future president Jimmy Carter, who built a life size replica of the malfunctioning reactor on a nearby tennis court so the 24 man team could practice their roles, since they would don protective clothing and be lowered into the reactor for ninety second shifts, because that was as long as the human body could sustain the level of radiation being emitted. They fixed it, but Carter (and presumably the rest of the team) had radioactive urine for six months following the accident. They absorbed thousands of times more radiation than would be considered safe today.

 

Carter once saw a UFO and was so startled he filed a report with the UFO Bureau. He talked about it extensively and swore that once president he would fight to erase stigma associated with UFO sightings, until finally some advisors told him to shut up about the UFOs already, because it made him sound nuts. Of course, recent releases have proved that he was probably right about that, as well.

 

Jimmy Carter also practiced excruciating honesty even about embarrassing things because he felt like it was the best thing for the country. In December 1978, he experienced an attack of painful hemorrhoids that left him bedridden for a day and forced to cancel engagements while doctors decided if they would require surgery. The White House wanted to issue a vague statement saying that the president was indisposed, but Carter felt that that would be bad for the country and create instability in markets, so he insisted on telling the world that his problem was literally a pain in the butt.

 

Jimmy Carter was very concerned about doing what was right for the environment, too. He had solar panels installed on the White House. Ronald Reagan had them removed, because of course he did.

 

Carter nearly torpedoed his political career before it started by giving a series of very frank interviews that was one of the most honest things ever done by a political candidate. He talked about America's flaws. He aired his self doubts and fears. He talked about how his Christian faith made him NOT be afraid of being assassinated. And in an interview with Playboy Magazine, he said that God had forgiven him even though he had committed "lust in his heart." This frank statement alienated the burgeoning evangelical support he was beginning to garner due to his own deeply held faith. Even then, the evangelicals were wary of Carter's liberalism.

 

Carter gave up his naval career to go back to Georgia to save his family’s peanut farm, and he got his start in politics running for the local school board. He was an early supporter of civil rights, which hurt his political career, but as a devout Christian and Sunday School teacher, he believed that it was more important to do the right thing than the popular thing, a belief that he practiced both during his presidency and after it, when he started the Carter Center, which has played an active role in advancing human rights and fighting disease. He has also been extremely active in Habitat for Humanity. He built houses even now, in his 90’s, including being back at it after both cancer and falling and needing stitches on his face. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his “decades of untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

 

I shook his hand in 1997 in Pikeville, Kentucky, when he was there doing blitz building for Habitat.