Beginning with Abe Lincoln in 1860 and continuing through the late 1890s all U.S. presidents had facial hair, but since William Howard Taft in 1913, no president has had whiskers.
That’s gotta piss the hipsters off. Over 100 years and nary a soul patch. Not a handlebar, a Fu Manchu, a gnarly sideburn, not even a Van Dyke (a Van Dyke is any form of both a goatee and a mustache with the cheeks bare). That’s because a president can’t just roll out of bed and look the way he wants. He has to be coiffed and get bossed around by handlers who are seemingly in possession of some poll that says the old gals in Oshkosh find a 72-hour growth unpresidential. Facial hair, probably not important. But presidents are – important and fascinating and odd and unlikely and flawed and funny. Presidents are a hot topic in my insignificant little life.
- Truman was the last president to have only a high school education.
- Ike was the last president to be born in the nineteenth century.
- James Garfield was born in extreme poverty in a log cabin.
- Andrew Johnson never attended a single day of school (but he did learn to booze a bit, as he was said to be drunk at President Lincoln’s second inauguration).
There’s a bunch of presidents that most Americans couldn’t name, and that’s no ding on my countrymen. After the Revolutionary War/Founding Father guys, there was just a litany of obscure dudes that you wouldn’t know unless a school, county or street around you was named after one. Chester Arthur? Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison? Come on!
- As president, George Washington governed from Manhattan (the one in New York).
- The mob gave (allegedly) Nixon $500,000 for his campaigns in the 1960s.
- Days after Madison’s inauguration, outgoing president Thomas Jefferson simply got on a horse and rode back to Monticello (no escort, no hoopla, see ya).
- Herbert Hoover was in the first graduating class at Stanford University. Founded in 1891, tuition was free. (Hoover was also a racist who believed in eugenics.)
The way they lived, where they came from, how they governed, even how they died intrigues beyond fiction. By the 1920 election, Woodrow Wilson was dying, unable to walk or speak, but essentially, nobody knew it. John Quincy Adams spent 17 years in Congress after he was president. By that time they called him “old man eloquent,” and talk about dying with your boots on, J.Q. collapsed on the floor of Congress and there he died two days later in the Speaker’s chamber. William Henry Harrison got sick directly after his rainy-day inauguration and died less than two months later, the shortest stint of any U.S. president. It is said Harrison cheated the Shawnee of land that was rightfully theirs, so they put a curse on him, alternately called the Curse of Tippecanoe or the Curse of Tecumseh (the Shawnee chief). Harrison’s death in 1840 would begin a string of presidents dying in office at 20-year intervals (presidents first elected in 1840, 1860, 1880, etc.) not ending until 1960 (Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy).
With Lincoln’s assassination still top of mind fewer than twenty years later, James Garfield said: “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning, and it is best not to worry about either.” Garfield was shot in the back at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station not far from the White House. Ironically Abe’s son Robert Todd Lincoln (he was Secretary of War) was one of the first to reach Garfield after he was shot. By all accounts, the wound should not have been fatal. There was no knowledge of the concept of germs, nor sterilization, and the first doctors on the scene literally dug into Garfield’s back seeking the bullet. In 1881, it was commonplace for a surgeon to pick up a knife dropped on the floor and then continue using it, or to put the blade in his mouth should the procedure require him using both hands. Had Garfield’s injury simply been left alone, it’s likely he would have survived.
The time between when a president is elected and when he takes office was originally intended to give the president ample time to travel from his home state to the capital (muddy, rocky Revolutionary War roads and all that.) Presidents nowadays, I think, spend that time repaying favors to those who conspired to get them elected, or maybe rearranging the furniture to satisfy the First Lady. Frances Cleveland was the youngest First Lady in history at age 21. She was also the first to be pregnant in the White House and the only one to deliver a child in the White House. Well played, Frances. Maria Hester Monroe was the first daughter of a sitting president to be married in the White House. I wonder if it was a buffet? I heard President Monroe vetoed the dollar dance; a man of decorum, that Monroe.
Anyway, here’s a few more presidential fun facts to tide you over until next time.
- Garfield was born in extreme poverty in a log cabin in Ohio in 1832.
- 12 U.S. presidents owned slaves, eight while in office.
- Lincoln’s grandfather was killed by Shoshone on the Western frontier in 1786.
- Augustine Washington was George’s pa and when he died in 1743, he owned 10,000 acres and forty-nine slaves in Virginia. The father of our country inherited 400 of those acres at Ferry farms, he was eleven.
- Truman was only the vice president for eighty-two days and he only met FDR twice.
- Washington founded the first working mules in America, receiving the first jack donkeys from Lafayette to breed to his draft horses. By the time of his death in 1799, there were sixty working draft mules at Mount Vernon.
- The congressman who nominated Hiram Ulysses Grant for West Point submitted his name as Ulysses S. Grant, giving him a new first name, eliminating his real first name and giving him a new middle initial and nickname (Uncle Sam Grant or Sam). Grant simply accepted this new name without objection.
- Lincoln could laugh at his appearance, as proof, when once he was accused of being two-faced he replied, “If I had two faces do you think I’d be wearing this one?”