Progressive Revelations 2/22/11: Past and Presidents

Past and Presidents

February 22, 2011

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President’s Day is over, and I forgot to finish my list of my favorite U.S. Presidents, mainly because I never started it. If I did make my own list of presidents, I am sure all historians across the world would want to read it because I know so little about history that they would want to find out what I had to say. With that in mind, I decided to do some research...

I found out that our tenth president was John Tyler, which is contrary to popular belief that the tenth president was "Um, I have no idea." Apparently, he was part of the Whig party, which makes sense if you look at his hair. Zachary Taylor, our twelfth president, wore the same wig. So did Millard Fillmore, our thirteenth. They are on a special version of Mt. Rushmore dedicated to people with bad hair. The fourth is Rutherford B. Hayes, whose beard was so long that people could not see the rest of his body when he spoke on television. Luckily there were no TVs when he was president in the late 1880s, but RBH -- as I like to call him -- was the first president to have a phone in the White House...

What has shocked most novice scholars over the years is that James Garfield was our twentieth president. He lasted only 200 days, and upon his assassination, was reincarnated as the funny orange cat we all know and love today. The only term shorter than Garfield's was William Henry Harrison’s term. He was president for something like five minutes, which was not nearly enough time to have a university named after him in the South...

William Henry Harrison’s grandson, Benjamin, was our twenty-third president. Clearly his grandfather had done such a good job in his five minutes in office that the voters had no other choice than to vote for Benjamin. Literally, the only other choices on the ballot were yaks, and the yaks could not vote because they did not know how to register. Actually, "Big Ben," as nobody called him, defeated Grover Cleveland, who later went on to star in "Sesame Street." Later, though, Cleveland got revenge on Benjamin by defeating him in his next term, and Ohio got revenge on Cleveland by naming a city after him...

Finally, as we look for ways to celebrate next year’s President’s Day – and it’s clear that most people have already begun the planning – look no further than William Taft, our twenty-seventh president. Here is a guy with a mustache that spoke volumes. He clearly opened the door for future presidents with mustaches, except that no other presidents had one after him. This means that if we want to celebrate President's Day, we need to do whatever it takes to not have mustaches. It would make our presidents, past and present, proud...

But I digress.