It’s Presidents’ Day again (February 16) and Americans honor Samuel Simpson, Tom Wilson, Leslie King Jr., and William Blythe III, among others.
Presidents’ Day was invented by Congress in 1971 to make one holiday out of two, Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday. (They had to make room for Martin Luther King Day in January; even holidays are politics.)
A few good men (and a few not so good)
The problem with Presidents’ Day is that it seems to honor all U.S. presidents, not just Lincoln and Washington. It’s a holiday which, unintentionally, celebrates roughnecks, philanderers, bankrupts, and one bona fide secessionist.
If unwarranted universality is the problem with Presidents’ Day, mediocrity is the flaw when it comes to many of America’s chief executives.
The fact is the American political system often fails to promote the most prominent public figures of the day to the White House.
In past times, American presidents were chosen with little of the press and political vetting which occurs now. Some exceedingly bad habits slipped through (as they still do, even with modern investigative reporting).
Historians and, in some regions of the country even common citizens, still honor the Great Triumvirate of Webster, Calhoun and Clay, senators who dominated public life from the 1830s to the 1850s, far more than the men who won the presidency during the same period, men such as Harrison, Polk and Taylor. Twentieth Century reformers Robert LaFollet and George Norris incarnated the spirit of reform. Their White House contemporaries, such as William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolige, seem pallid by comparison.
One president, Ulysses S. Grant, was a downright ner-do-well. A binge drinker and chronic bankrupt, in the 1850s Grant moved his family from county to county and even state to state avoiding creditors. He sometimes used an alias, including Samuel Simpson, in business dealings. His career was saved by the Civil War.
What’s in a Name? Nothing Much
A few of our presidents changed their names legally. As a Princeton undergraduate in the 1870s, Tom Wilson thought his first name too common. So he dropped it, adopting his middle name of Woodrow.
Leslie King Jr. was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1913 but King Sr. abandoned his family soon after. Four years later, the former Mrs. King, after moving in with her parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, remarried, wedding one Gerald Ford, a paint store salesman. The toddler from her first marriage was re-named Gerald Ford Jr. Jerry was shielded from the truth until high school. One sunny day a man walked into the store where the youngster was working and said, “I’m your father!” Jerry Ford was flabbergasted but his parents confirmed the story.
Born in 1913 as Leslie King Jr., his name was officially changed to Gerald Ford Jr. as a child. He became U.S. President in 1974.
Another recent president was born William Blythe III in 1946 three months after his father’s death in an automobile accident. When young Blythe’s mother remarried years later, Bill, than 15, changed his last name to that of his stepfather, Clinton.
Some presidents might have wished they could change their names.
Born in 1946 as William Blythe III, he officially changed his last name to Clinton at age 15. He was elected U.S. President in 1992.
A number of our chief executives were philanderers, some famously so. At least three, Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy and Clinton, were flagrant womanizers even during their White House years. It may have also been true of Lyndon Johnson.
Rumors of infidelity dogged James A. Garfield early in his married life and he freely admitted to a certain “moral weakness,” but his marriage to Lucrecia Rudolf, a fellow educator, strengthened into an enduring bond during his later political career.
Wilson was rumored to have maintained a long-running relationship with a divorcée named Mary Ellen Peck, whom he accompanied on ostensibly solo vacations in Bermuda.
Jefferson was famous for keeping a black slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, with whom he may have had a number of illegitimate children.
During the 1884 campaign, Democrat Grover Cleveland was accused of having fathered an illegitimate child. He admitted it and went on to win the election anyway.
Our current chief executive has been accused of various modes of sexual misconduct by 27 women; the president has vehemently denied all of the allegations.
One president, James Buchanan, may have been gay. A life-long bachelor, Buchanan lived with bachelor roommate William King for a decade in Washington. Friends of the pair referred to King as Buchanan’s “wife.” Other nicknames, from less friendly sources, included Aunt Fancy for Buchanan and Miss Nancy for King. Historians are divided on the question of Buchanan’s sexual orientation, with some suggesting he may, in fact, have been asexual. Buchanan himself, in a letter written late in life, admitted to what he called “a lack of ardent or romantic affection.”
At least one president may have been manic-depressive. And he was the greatest—Abraham Lincoln. A fellow Illinois circuit lawyer, Ward Hill Lamon, described how his friend would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night at a crowded boarding house “and sit before the fire, wrapped in gloom, unable to answer when addressed by name.”
Even as president, Lincoln would roam the White House on sleepless nights or sit before a window in speechless contemplation. He would experience bizarre, unsettling dreams he insisted on recounting during Cabinet meetings.
A watchman at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington once described the president emerging “ghost-like” from the tomb of his son William. Lincoln had spent an entire night in lonely, speechless mourning beside the youth’s coffin.
The most studied and written about president, modern scholars have concluded that Lincoln suffered, at times, from clinical depression and may, as a young man, have experienced cycles of what would be described today as manic depression or bipolar disorder. Later in life, Lincoln learned to master his moods. However, even during his presidential years, Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, noticed what they called two distinct “humors;” in an expansion mood, Lincoln was “The Tycoon,” when more reflective “The Ancient.”
One president became a Confederate rebel. John Tyler, chief executive from 1841 to 1845, attempted to mediate a solution to the secession crisis in 1861. His efforts failing, he repudiated the Constitution, was elected to the Confederate Congress representing his native state of Virginia but died before taking his seat in Richmond.
Oddities and outrages
Other presidents have had checkered or unusual lives. Andrew Johnson had no formal education of any kind and was illiterate as a youth. James Madison was celibate until his early 40s. James K. Polk may have been impotent because of a rare urinary condition and botched surgery to correct it.
Andrew Jackson killed one man in a duel and injured several others before reaching the presidency in 1829. He was injured himself in a brawl with Thomas Hart Benton in 1813 but they still became steadfast political allies years later when Jackson was president and Benton a senator from Missouri. Jackson carried two bullets in his body from dueling and may have taken part in an many as 100 such face-offs during his long life.
Although 65 when he ran successfully for president in 1848, Zachary Taylor had never voted in his life.
Both Roosevelts suffered disabilities; FDR struggled with polio from age 39 until his death at 63; Teddy Roosevelt, in his last years, was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.
Martin Van Buren was the only president not to speak English as a first language; during the first years of his life in the upstate New York village of Kinderhook, his family and neighbors spoke primarily Dutch.
Still, the Great Republic, as Winston Churchill called it, survived and prospered. Probably, by and large, its presidents have represented, if not the best in American society, then something like an average of the elite, all of which serves to remind us of the importance of John Adams’ dictum that we should aspire to become “a government of laws, not of men.”
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo Credits: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/images/avproj/pop-ups/A8509.html; National Archives and Records Administration Identifier: 594648
Coming in March: Amazon Dreams II: Is the Amazon the World’s Longest River?