Close encounters of the presidential kind…
Tag: us presidents
The Strange Death Of Warren G. Harding
It was 100 years ago today – August 2, 1923 – when President Warren G. Harding suddenly died. He was in San Francisco, on the tail end of a cross-country promotional tour that had taken him as far as Alaska. It would have been an exhausting trip even for a younger man without a bum ticker. Then Harding contracted pneumonia along the way and, if that wasn’t enough, was laid low by some tainted seafood.
Any or all of these may have contributed to Harding’s demise. But no one knows exactly why or how Harding died when he did. The New York Times attributed the president’s sudden expiration to a “stroke of apoplexy.” Some have suggested heart failure. Others have joked that – battered by a landslide of scandal and humiliated by the corrupt schemes launched by the old friends he had raised to positions of power – Harding simply died of shame.
An autopsy might have helped quell rumors of foul play, but first lady Florence Harding refused to allow one.
There was one character in the mix who claimed he knew how Harding died. His name was Gaston B. Means and he claimed not only to know that the president was murdered, but also who did it. His assertions, to put it mildly, were suspect. But Means could spin a compelling yarn. And he was at one time credentialed. He not only had the badge of a special agent of the Justice Department, he had an office in the department.
Means persuaded no small number of Americans that Florence Harding was the killer. He claimed that she confided in him, confessing that she had poisoned her husband.
According to Means’ account (and it should be noted he was an inveterate liar), while he was a special agent for the federal government, Florence Harding tasked him with investigating her husband’s dalliances. Means claimed to have compiled a dossier detailing Warren’s affair with Nan Britton, a young Ohio woman. The Hardings had a knock-down, drag-out row over the child the president had fathered with Britton, Means claimed, adding that not long after that, the first lady took charge of giving her husband his meds.
Means would peddle the story for years, claiming the first lady was enraged that Harding fathered a child by a young woman, Nan Britton, smitten with the president. A notorious con-man, hustler and trickster, Means was also a special agent in the investigative agency that would morph into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For those shocked that today’s FBI plays politics and seems to struggle to shoot straight, it’s worth remembering that the agency is in some part a legacy of Gaston B. Means. Which is to say, misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. A fabulist of the first order, Means’ fabrications were interlaced with enough detail drawn from actual events that he managed to convince many that his tales were true. Books such as Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” and H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” were among the best-selling nonfiction books of 1930, but they didn’t come close to selling as many copies as Means’ memoir, “The Strange Death of President Harding.”
Every Living Former U.S. President, Except Donald Trump, Direct Descendants of Slaveholders Including Biden and Obama
A Reuters investigation into the genealogies of America’s leading political figures reveals a legacy of slavery in the nation’s corridors of power.
A staggering fifth of the country’s lawmakers, living presidents, Supreme Court justices, and governors can directly trace their lineage back to ancestors who enslaved Black people.
This finding includes Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president, with the single exception of President Donald Trump, are direct descendants of individuals who once enslaved Black people.
According to Reuters, the list includes former presidents Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and – Barack Obama through his white mother’s lineage. Trump’s family immigrated to the U.S. after the abolition of slavery.
Bad Quotes of Some Bad Presidents
Presidents’ Day is just around the corner. Should we celebrate?
People who love liberty and live in a free society don’t bow down and worship politicians. We understand that politicians wield power, to be sure, but we also know they still put their pants on one leg at a time. As President Reagan once put it, “America is a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”
The best of America’s presidents worked to keep the peace and our liberties. They didn’t view the Constitution as public window-dressing while they undermined it inside the store. The worst ones expanded power in Washington, burdening future generations with dubious programs, bureaucracy, taxes, debt, and foreign adventurism. The truly good ones are few and far between.
So whoever it was who decided we should have a Presidents’ Day in February, I can assure you it wasn’t me. I’d prefer to celebrate an Entrepreneurs’ Day. Or an Inventors’ Day. Or, of course, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. If I had my way, we’d have a Capital Day too.
America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, regarded government employment with a healthy wariness. In a 1799 letter, he warned, “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” Twelve years later in another letter, he said, “I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.”
Presidents’ Day, fortunately, is still welcomed by most Americans more as a day off work than a day to glorify presidents—even Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays were “consolidated” into the holiday in the first place. But there’s still too much presidential glorifying that goes on for my tastes. In the spirit of Jeffersonian skepticism, my way of noting the holiday this year is to offer five of the many bad things some bad presidents said.
20 US presidents who belonged to shadowy secret societies
Secret societies always get the ominous treatment in fiction.
Are there any movies with remotely benevolent secret orders? Most fictional secret societies are usually more bogged down with dressing in outdated robes, chanting ominously, doing sacrifices, or hatching nefarious global plots.
So, to the paranoid mind, it probably sounds somewhat startling that 20 out of 45 US presidents have been affiliated with some kind of secret group. Just keep in mind that many of these societies function a bit like social clubs, charitable organizations, and business networks. In many cases, beneath the secret handshakes and mysterious rituals, they’re kind of like adult frats (or actual frats, in the case of the college groups on this list).
On This Presidents Day, Stop Worshiping the Imperial Presidency
Ah, Presidents Day: a much-needed moment to slow down and commemorate presidents past and present, because we definitely don’t have enough of that in this country.
I jest!
Walking around Los Angeles, you’d be hard-pressed not to pass someone sporting BIDEN-HARRIS merchandise—a shirt, a bumper sticker, a sweatshirt, a mask. Back where I grew up in Virginia, the same is true, though they have a different hero: For years, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” adorned the lawns, cars, and hats of those who wanted you to know they stood, and perhaps still stand, with former President Donald Trump.
That’s not news. Public displays of affection for the U.S. president have become standard in everyday American life, extending well past election cycles and rock-concert-esque inaugurations, as if who you voted for is a personality trait. That’s the conventional wisdom, it seems. So, on this fair Presidents Day, a reminder: Presidents aren’t saints. They aren’t monarchs. They aren’t celebrities. And they aren’t your friends! The executive leader is an employee of the country—someone whose job was, and still should be, limited in size and scope.
It has become something decidedly different over the years, with each president becoming more powerful than the last. That maybe explains, to some degree, why the political fangirling has grown in tandem. Though I can’t step back in time to the 18th and 19th centuries, I would venture to say Americans weren’t donning shirts with presidents’ faces or branding horse-drawn carriages with the names of current and erstwhile U.S. leaders. Nor do I think former President George Washington, whose birthday serves as the inspiration for this holiday, would have wanted that sort of hero worship, when considering that the bedrock of America’s founding specifically sought to create a new order—one without a king or king-like figure.
“The founders of our republic did not want to put that much [power] in the hands of a single leader,” Mark Rozell, the founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told The Christian Science Monitor. “America’s addiction to executive power has become dangerous for this country.”
Stop Protecting Presidents from History
The media continues to treat former President Barack Obama as a champion of transparency, but his presidential library is looking like a huge bait-and-switch. Obama raised hundreds of millions for a grandiose library in south Chicago – except that it was revealed two years ago that it wouldn’t actually be a library. At the end of the Obama administration, 30 million pages of documents from his presidency were shipped to a former retail store near Chicago. Come to find out, the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, will control the official records of his time in office, rather than the National Archives and Records Administration, which administers all other presidential libraries. Rather than opening the files to the public and researchers, the Obama Foundation will eventually digitize the records. This could result in even worse delays than George W. Bush sought to finagle. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow warned, “The absence of a true Obama presidential library will have the effect of discouraging serious and potentially critical research into the Obama presidency.”
There are plenty of reasons to expect excessive secrecy from both Trump and from Biden, who kept his Senate records locked up during his presidential run. In 2011, Biden was treated like a civic saint when he donated 1,875 boxes of documents from his U.S. Senate career to the University of Delaware. The National Endowment for Humanities gave a grant to help curate the collection, and the deal between Biden and the library was that the documents would remain sealed until “two years after Biden retires from public office.” Biden retired as Vice President in January 2017. Instead of releasing the information to the public, the library announced just before Biden launched his presidential campaign that secrecy would continue until two years after Biden “retires from public life.” Biden in 2019 justified keeping all his Senate records locked up during the campaign because “the idea that they would all be made public in the fact while I was running for public office, they could be really taken out of context.” It is unknown whether Biden’s Senate records contained any bombshells as explosive as his son Hunter’s laptop (which the media raced to defuse before Election Day).
Prerogatives for perpetual presidential secrecy are more akin to royalty than to a republic. Presidential libraries, which cost taxpayers $100 million a year, become lavish taxpayer-funded mausoleums where public records are mostly buried in perpetuity. As New York University history professor Jonathan Zimmerman wrote in 2015, “Why should each president get his own library? Multiple libraries are wasteful… And they’re undemocratic, because they allow our presidents – not the people who elected them – to define their legacies.” Zimmerman recommended putting all presidential records in a single library.
Drugs In The White House
May 12-13: sowed hemp at muddy hole by swamp.
August 7: began to separate the male from the female hemp—rather too late.
While it is unlikely that George Washington, who penned these diary notes 200 years ago. smoked any of the scraggly rope-dope he was growing on his Mount Vernon plantation, he certainly dreamed of hemp as a cash crop. After all, it had a solid foreign market and was perfect for cottage industry, basket-making and such. He won over Thomas Jefferson, who began importing hemp seeds to Monticello, but failed to win the support of early American farmers, who favored tobacco cultivation. If, by some historical quirk, they had instead followed Washington’s advice, early U.S. history might have been considerably headier.
As it turned out not until the 19th century did Americans—including presidents—really turn on. The patent-medicine boom in the mid 1800s was largely responsible: Virtually everyone sampled various opium-, cannabis- and cocaine-based remedies and elixirs. If the president had the flu, a stomach ache, piles or a hangover, the prescribed remedy was tincture of opium: laudanum. Also prescribed for all manner of “female complaints,” laudanum found its way into first ladies’ medicine chests too. A century before Betty Ford got strung out on Valium and vodka, Mary Todd Lincoln was portrayed by presidential biographer William H. Herdon as a virtual patent-medicine junkie.
On the whole, however, records of bummers on these 19th-century elixirs are far outweighed by the good trips. Ulysses S. Grant, burned out by years of boozing, was miraculously revitalized near the end of his life by daily doses of Mariani tea, one of chemist Angelo Mariani’s delightful cocaine-based products. It so bolstered the aging ex-president that he was able to put in hours of work a day on his memoirs, valued as one of the finest accounts of the Civil War.
During the 1880s, coca wine, another Mariani tonic, enjoyed unsurpassed popularity on the patent-medicine market. The enterprising Mariani eventually rounded up glowing endorsements from the prince of Wales, the czar and czarina of Russia, the kings of Norway and Sweden, and Pope Leo XIII. In the United States, Pres. William McKinley’s secretary noted that a case of Vin Mariani had received an enthusiastic reception from the president.
FDR lays it out…
Too funny.
Hellbound and Down 
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