Quiz Time

It was the tumultuous 60s, the country was at war, and the Democratic convention descended upon Chicago to select a Presidential candidate. Do you know was nominated? Or have I fooled you again?

Wonderfulness

Dear nerd,

I hope you're not busy, because I'm about to steal 30 minutes of your time with this website. It's a timeline of Teddy Roosevelt's life composed of entries from his diary. The hilarity cannot be unintentional; it's just too good for it to be the work of some stodgy Teddy Roosevelt Collection librarian who accidently put together a work of unintended comedy greatness. Here are some choice quotes:

April  1873: In Vienna "I bought a black cock and used up all my arsenic on him"

November  1878: 

2nd - At Porcelain initiation, "...was higher with wine than ever have been before-or will again. Still, I could wind my watch. Wine makes me awful fighty."

26th - Begins teaching Sunday school at Christ Church on Garden street opposite Cambridge Common

March 1879: Romping through Maine

September 1883: Kills first buffalo

August 1884: Kills two deer with one bullet. "This was much the best shot I ever made."

May 1885: Picks up new herd in Medora. Survives late night stampede

May 1896: Comptroller Fitch's testy exchange results in the offering of a duel. "Pistols or anything else!" Yells Roosevelt. Cools off and tells reporters there will be no duel.

February 1904: Lunch with Buffalo Bill

April 1904: Letter to Ted: "I am very glad I have been doing this Japanese wrestling... My right ankle and my left wrist and one thumb and both great toes are swollen sufficiently to more or less impair their usefulness... since you left they have taught me three new throws that are perfect corkers."

December 1909: Dines on elephant trunk soup from the beast he and Kermit disposed of the preceding evening. 

December 1913:

13th - "Caymans were becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes lay on the sand-flats and mud banks like logs, always with the head raised, sometimes with the jaws open... it is good to shoot them. I killed half a dozen..."

25th - Arrives in Corumba

27th - Bags ant-eater

January 1914: Bags tapir

February 1917: Writes letter to Secretary of War requesting permission to "raise a Division of Infantry with a divisional brigade of cavalry in the event of war (possibly with the permission to make one or two of the brigades of infantry, mounted infantry.)" Request denied.

March 1817: "In view of the fact that Germany is now actually engaged in war with us, I again earnestly ask permission to be allowed to raise a division for immediate service at the front." Request rejected the following day. 

Drumroll...

Ladies and gentlemen... the Democratic Vice-Presidential Nominee!

A bit of Teddy

Browsing through my 1968 Life Magazine Special Issue on the Presidency, as I'm wont to do on weekends, and I found two interesting Roosevelt quotes:

"I wish I had 16 or 20 lions to turn loose on the Senate floor"

A first natural reaction to this was that he was angry at the Senate and wanted lions to attack them. More likely though he was sitting in the Senate floor, bored and daydreaming, and felt the sudden urge to hunt 16 or 20 lions. So urgent was the need that he didn't want to wait to go home, book a week long boat trip to Africa, hike for days across the Serengeti, and stalk and kill one maybe two lions. No, he wanted to kill 16 to 20 lions right then and there. Such is bloodlust.

Apparently he also called golf a "sissy game" and advised Taft that if he played it in public he would lose the 1908 election. I couldn't agree more. I mean, would you vote for this?

Mary Odd

I find the title of Brian Thornton's book, "101 Things You Didn't Know about Lincoln", a little bit condescending. Oh yeah, Mr.Thornton? Are you so sure I'm a Lincoln illiterate simpleton who doesn't know any of these 101 things about Abe Lincoln? Well I like to think I know a little bit about Abraham Gregory Lincoln, our nations first President, inventor of the lightbulb, and legendary general who defeated Napoleon in World War I. Despite my haughtiness I gave the book a chance, and while I was entertained, the title was a damned lie: I didn't learn a whole lot new about Lincoln. I did, however, learn a few things about Lincoln's wife Mary Todd.

After Lincoln's assassination, Mary didn't leave the White House for five weeks. I wonder if Andrew Johnson and his family moved in before she moved out and they shared awkward, silent dinners with Mary dressed in widow's garb? When she did finally leave the White House she was wearing so many black veils that people could not see her face at all. Creepy!

I also learned she supposedly once chased Abe down the road with either a butcher knife or a broom. I'd say the difference there is important. And later, after Lincoln's death but before her son Robert had her committed to a sanitarium, she would pay hotel maids to sleep in her hotel room with her because she was afraid to sleep alone. I knew she was a little off, but that's not Drew Barrymore or Cameron Diaz slightly nuts, that's Howard Hughes or Charlie Sheen batshit crazy.

101 things I didn't know about Lincoln? No. A couple stories about crazy old Mary Todd Lincoln I've never heard before? Definitely.

T.R.: Warmonger?

The insightful and witty James Poulos thinks that William Jennings Bryan needs to shut his silver loving, evolution hating mouth about Teddy Roosevelt.... not in so many words of course.

He argues that T.R. gets the short shrift from critics who call him a warmonger. Sure, as President he kept his cool, but as undersecretary of the navy? He was a bit overzealous about the Spanish-American war... what with trying to start it and all. And that wasn't even his first choice of wars, what he really wanted was a war with Germany. After overseeing the arming of the U.S.S. Maine, Roosevelt thought it would be swell if there was war to be had, any old war would do, really:

"I wish there was a chance that the Maine was going to be used against some foreign power; by preference Germany-but I am not particular, and I'd take even Spain if nothing better offered"

Luckily for Roosevelt, unluckily for the Maine, he got his wish when the Maine exploded in a Cuban harbor and provided him with an excuse to begin pushing for a war. How hard did he push for war? I'll let his boss, Secretary of the Navy John Long, tell you:

"I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine... The very devil seemed to possess him."

I've gotta say, with all due respect to the James Poulos and the 1906 Nobel Prize Committee, that sounds a bit like a warmonger.

Some Hayes Never Learn

In what must have been a debauched orgy of bacchanal delights, the living descendants of Rutherford B. Hayes gathered at his home in Fremont Ohio Saturday to pay tribute and share memories. Stephen Hayes, great-great-grandson of Ruddy, let's us know what fun it was growing up in such a historical site: "Many rooms were off limits. My parents wouldn't let us go into any room on the second floor." Which must have been tough for the young boy, as the second floor was where the President Hayes kept his climbnasium, ball pit, and trampoline collection.

Showing us how much the Hayes family descendants have learned since the 1870s, Hayes' great-granddaughter Margaret Clark tells us

...she admired the Hayes heritage because they took a stand for such principles as truth and honesty. "'Lemonade Lucy' -- I'm very proud of that," she said, referring to the name given Lucy Hayes because of the stance she and the President took on abstinence in the White House. "She had the fortitude to stand up for what is right."

You don't see many people taking a stand for prohibition these days. It would have been refreshing, if a little anachronistic, had she not followed that up immediately by calling for a reinstatement of the fugitive slave act and denouncing "carnal modernisms" like the telephone and the daguerreotype.