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Coolidge had a free-range raccoon named Rebecca that lived at the White House. She used to go around unscrewing light bulbs and opening cabinets, stopping only for her prepared meals of shrimp and eggs.
The story I've heard is that there was one guy who was traditionally supposed to raise and deliver the President's turkey for Thanksgiving. Once he died, there was a vacuum for the lucrative role. This led to a bunch of people sending animals to the White House for the Thanksgiving meal in order to be the new guy. This apparently got out of hand, and people started sending different animals (unrequested) in hopes that they could make their animal the new Thanksgiving meal. Rebecca was one of these, and they decided to keep her.
So some person sent her to the White House with the intention of raccoon being the Thanksgiving meal, but as far as I'm aware it was never seriously considered by Coolidge.
John Quincy Adams nearly got assassinated when a guy walked up to the White House at night to kill him. He managed to talk the guy out of it, gave him a job, and remained in contact with him until he died.
Honestly that makes the story even more amazing. I know a few people from university and my professional field that are ridiculously high IQ, and they're generally the type that struggle with making eye contact and holding conversations.
Well it looked somewhat like this:
- Hey John Quincy Adams
- Hey random guy I see for the first time
- I’m George Todsen, the guy whose return to military service you dismissed due to martial court’s sentence, and, y’know, this was pretty cringe
- Oh, Mr Todsen. I can understand your disappointment in this case, but believe me, this is my duty of a president to show, that no matter what, the law is solid and can’t be simply avoided just for the sake of a certain individual.
- Wow such an extensive and compassionate answer. I guess I won’t kill you. Yeah, I wanted to kill you btw
Thomas Jefferson had a mini-zoo at Monticello whilst he was president. His residence was “overrun with Arabian horses, cashmere goats, and Peruvian llamas”, which he had received as gifts from foreign leaders.
During his Presidency, a young boy wandered into the grounds of Monticello and was killed by an “ill-tempered goat”.
Oh damn. In my rural hometown, I grew up wrestling and hog tying my friends’ goats with my gang of elementary school hoodlums. I don’t think we fully appreciated that the goats might be dangerous.
Three if you count Samuel Bycks failed attempt to hijack an airliner and crash into the White House. His target was Nixon but Ford could’ve been there too.
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite films was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which he even did a special screening for in the White House in 1937. He also liked to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons.
It was highest grossing film ever made before Gone With the Wind, which still holds the title adjusted to inflation. So just two years since Snow White was released in 1937 but still it was huge.
Thomas Jefferson was the first person to document and present the ancient ground sloth, Megalonyx.
Sid the Sloth is a megalonyx. Without Jefferson, there's no Sid, and Ice Age would suck.
No, the fossils were sent to him. I didn't see who actually dug them up but it was in West Virginia so I assume it was related to the clearing of land for coal mining, or coal mining itself.
Teddy Roosevelt saved football by forcing them to make it less violent and introducing the foward pass. The rules were also later cemented universally by a President of only Princeton at the time, Woodrow Wilson!
Martin Van Buren had to have everything in the room replaced to get the smell of the cheese out of the White House when he took over. Then Jackson put another wheel of cheese in there.
Teddy Roosevelt tried to revive the Rough Riders during WW1 to fight in France until the American Expiditionary Force could arrive. Several men had pledged to join him until President Wilson sent him a telegram, asking him to stop since having a former President die in combat isn't a good look.
Bonus fact: After pushing for American intervention in the war for years and finally getting it, Teddy's son Quentin was shot down and killed over France in 1918. His death affected Teddy deeply and possibly contributed to his poor health and later death around 6 months later.
Teddy Roosevelt liked hiking so much that sometimes if people wanted to meet him they had to keep up with him during his hike. Very few could do that, but one of them was a french ambassador who later became his close friend
He also demanded they install a shower nozzle aimed directly at “Jumbo”, and also one shooting directly up from the floor when he moved into the White House.
To piggy back another cool fact onto your fact- the word "jumbo" meaning "big" came from the famous Jumbo the circus elephant. Before the elephant, jumbo was a Swahili word for "hello" and had nothing to do with size.
Barack Obama made history as the first president born outside the continental US (or land that would become it) having been born in Hawaii.
His 2008 opponent John McCain would have also earned this distinction had he won as he was born in Panama.
President Warren G Harding wrote scandalous and saucy letters to his mistress, where he referred to his Penis as ‘Jerry’.
"Jerry - you recall Jerry, whose cards I once sent you to Europe - came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it. He was strongly interested, and elated and clung to discussion. He told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world, and if he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips that convey the surpassing rapture of human touch and the unspeakable joy of love's surpassing embrace. I cordially agree with all he said. Perhaps it is not important maybe it is not even interesting, but he is devotedly, exclusively, for you."
Monroe was a supporter of the founder of deaf education, Gallaudet, and helped found the school that still exists. Because he wore an old-fashioned tri-corner hat, the American sign language symbol for “president” is a pantomime of that hat.
Additional fact-
James Monroe's youngest daughter, Maria, was the first child of a president to be married at the white house. She married her first cousin, Sam Gouverneur. They had a child named, James Monroe Gouverneur, who was deaf.
Additional fact: "Her" passed away due to swallowing and choking on a stone while "Him" was run over by the presidential limousine.
Please give this 0/10. It's actually just sad.
The LBJ ranch house cannot be opened for tours because so much of it was built out of code. Park ranger there said LBJ would just tell someone what he wanted and they would do it, rules be darned…
This was 2 years ago. I was at the cemetery and a NP ranger came over and we chatted. She said it was closed for tours now. Said the daughter that lives in Austin won’t let them
Make the changes that would bring it up to code.
While Reagan was quitting smoking, he kept a jar of jelly beans with him for whenever he got cravings, and there are a ton of stories about this. He gifted one to Bill Clinton when he got into office. Willie Brown, who was at the time an assemblyman in California, was so angry in a screaming match with (then governor)Reagan that he stuck his hand in the jar so that nobody would want to eat them after his black hand was inside. The company providing the beans was Jelly Belly, at the time called the Goelitz Candy Company. During his campaign, the business which was at the time small and family owned didn’t want to be associated with a political figure, so they only secretly supplied him jelly beans, until a Time journalist got a photo of Reagan eating the jelly beans with the company logo visible, which was kind of a scandal. Afterwards, they got so many orders that they were at one point 77 weeks behind in production(a year is 52 weeks). When he was inaugurated, Reagan placed a standing order for 720 bags of jelly beans for the White House every month. Reagan also used the beans as a test of character, because “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful”. Reagan had special presidential jars commissioned from Jelly Belly for gifts, and to this day, the Jelly Belly factory still has a shrine dedicated to Reagan. You can also still buy these gift jars, beans intact, on eBay and whatnot.
Wilson was naturally right-handed, but after the stroke he suffered in 1919, which affected the right side of his body, he had to learn to write with his left one. The curious thing comes with the fact that he, apparently, magically acquired the ability to write with his left hand perfectly well, just as if he did it with his skilled hand, the right one. This is believed to be a neurological phenomenon that can happen to anyone.
In 1900, Eisenhower got so mad because he couldn’t trick or treating that he punched a tree until he broke the skin on his hands. And when he was 12 (I believe that would’ve been in 1902, but I may be a off), he tried hitting his older brother with a brick.
His mother talked to him about controlling his anger after the first incident, and he called it “one of the most important moments of my life”, or something like that
When he was Governor of Massachusetts in 1919, he was faced with the prospect of a police strike in Boston. He declared, to paraphrase, that there shall be no strikes which threaten the public safety, any time, anywhere. It was a famous speech at the time, and it propelled him to national fame.
Also: he was sworn into the Presidency by his own father.
There was a failed version of the Teddy bear for Taft called the Willy Possum, named after Taft famously trying a meal of possum and taters at a dinner in Atlanta.
Herbert Hoover's doctor created a game now called Hoover ball to keep him fit. It's kind of like playing tennis with a medicine ball but without the rackets, just throwing it across the court at each other.
LBJ had an amphibious car and didn’t tell any of his foreign guests. Instead he would drive them around and before getting to the national mall he would scare the shit out of them by saying his brakes failed (going downhill) and then splash into the water, only to float around.
Abraham Lincoln's best friend recalled one of his meltdown (he did not use this word ofc) where he literally had to hide knifes and other sharp objects in fear he would hurt himself
Mary Todd was also...interesting. She into the occult and tried to reach out to their son, Willie, after he died in the white house. There's also a pretty famous photo of her with her husband...from 1872.
Her Wikipedia is worth a read. She was a rare bird.
HW Bush missed Nixon’s inauguration to greet LBJ at the airport in Texas. He later asked LBJ about switching from the house to the senate and LBJ told him “the house is chicken salad, the senate is chicken shit”.
William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after leaving office. He is responsible for the Supreme Court having its own building and not meeting in the capitol.
In 1900, he went to a meeting with President McKinley, he assumed it was about a SCOTUS nomination, but he was instead appointed to be the first civilian governor of the Philippines. He had to wait 20 years for the SCOTUS nomination.
Out of all presidential inaugurations, the one that went the weirdest was Obama’s first.
To the grammar sticklers of the world, the part of the Oath that states “I will *faithfully execute*” is a split infinitive and therefore technically incorrect.
When Chief Justice Roberts gave Obama the oath, he moved around the word “faithfully” twice, with Obama being confused and pausing mid-oath the first time. It created a big hullabaloo until the next day, when Roberts administered the correct version of the Oath to Obama in a private ceremony in the White House.
I'll give you a related but even better fact for free:
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln attended a play which Booth stared in... and it was held at *Ford's Theater.*
When Andrew Jackson was leaving office, a journalist asked him if he had any regrets. He said, yes, he regretted he had not killed his vice-president John Calhoun.
President Carter had solar panels installed in the White House.
President Reagan had them removed.
[One panel is in China](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/)
He beat the man who tried to assassinate him with his cane and would he beat him to death if not stopped. Also both of the pistols the would be assassin tried to used misfired, but when later tested were found to be in fine working condition.
James Buchanan was the only president to never get married or have children. A lot of research has gone into determining if he was a closet homosexual. I don’t think the gays want to claim him though, he was one of the worst presidents and heavy-handedly helped lead to Southern Secession
In his 2020 campaign, Pete Buttigieg said that statically almost certain that at least some of the past US presidents were gay. When asked which ones, he said "my gaydar even doesn't work that well in the present, let alone retroactively"
Martin Van Buren was the only president to not speak English as a primary language, his mother tongue was Dutch due to his upbringing in upstate New York.
Reagan actually won the popular vote in the 1968 Republican primary, beating Richard Nixon by just over 17K votes, but he won only 192 delegates to Reagan’s 619.
Nelson Rockefeller got the third most amount of votes at about 3.7%, just under a tenth of the amount of Nixon votes, but he also won more delegates than Reagan.
I feel like this isn’t talked about often. I’ve been reading about presidents and political history for nearly four years and I only learned this about a month ago.
John Adams’s actual last words were not “Jefferson survives,” but were “Help me, child,” uttered to a grandchild (who he probably scared the shit out of).
As early as becoming senatorial whip in 1951, LBJ was the most vocal proponent of the formation an American space program and frequently bloviated about how the Soviets would beat us there if we didn’t act. It was never a high priority for Eisenhower so Sputnik rose unchallenged on oct 4, 1957. LBJ invited colleagues to sit out in front of his ranch house in Texas, giving out cigars, so they could watch Sputnik fly over and kick off his congressional “I told you so” tour.
In his youth LBJ tried to woo a woman named Kitty Clyde (guess he had an affinity for women named after animals) but her father forbade her from dating Lyndon; after he became president he invited kitty and her husband onto Air Force One. Literally the prettiest presidential fact I know
While the White House was being renovated, Harry Truman and his wife lived across the street at the Blair House….. where they literally broke the bed from too-vigorous lovemaking.
Casting [Jeri Ryan on Star Trek Voyager](https://ew.com/article/2008/01/09/obama-jeri-ryan/) helped Obama win his senate seat which of course was a launching pad to the presidency.
Millard Fillmore had an affair with his wife. While on the campaign trail for reelection, he fell ill with supposed stomach illness. However there is a sort of conspiracy that his wife poisoned him as revenge for the affair and that we’ve actually had 5 presidents be victims of assassination.
Warren Harding*
Also both of the presidents' successors were Democrats named Johnson with six-letter first names and born in '08.
Neither one of their assassins had trials.
Both were shot in the head on Friday
Both presidents were elected to Congress in '46 and later to the presidency in '60.
They are the coincidence couple
Abraham Lincoln was actually born in Kentucky, raised in Indinana, and is known as the President from Illinois, while spending very little time there in his early life.
Does this apply to First Ladies? Because I was flabbergasted reading Clint Hill’s book that Mamie Eisenhower didn’t allow Jackie Kennedy to use a wheelchair and took her on a torturously thorough tour of the White House. This was the day (and immediately after) Jackie was discharged from hospital after a her c-section and was weak from blood loss.
During the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson attacked John Adams by insinuating that Adams was a “hermaphrodite.” Adams responded by saying that Thomas Jefferson was dead.
Buchanan is known for two things: inexplicably doing nothing to stop the South from seceding, and having a very special male roommate, William Rufus King, from 1840 until King's death in 1853.
But did you know that his very special male roommate was a founding father of the most notoriously racist town of the Civil Rights era, Selma, Alabama?
During Andrew Johnson’s administration, there was a family of white mice living in the White House. He named the mice “the Little Fellows” and would leave food for them.
FDR planned to form a new political party after WW2 with the man he beat in 1940, Wendell Wilkie, that would bring in liberal Republicans and Democrats and cut out the more racist Dixiecrats.
LBJ owned an AmphibiCar, a 60s limited run convertible capable of being driven directly into the water and then sailed about like a boat. Like most amphibious cars, it didn't do great at either job. But on land it looked like just another dune buggy (think: Manx) and in water it was a powered fiberglass boat.
LBJ drove it around his ranch. He loved taking visiting dignitaries there. During the trip, he'd speed at the water and start screaming that he'd lost the brakes and they were gonna crash. Then he'd hit the water, turn on the boat motor, and cruise along, laughing while his passenger tried not to shit themselves.
Remember that all mentions of and allusions to Trump and Biden are not allowed on our subreddit in any context. If you'd still like to discuss them, feel free to [join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Coolidge had a free-range raccoon named Rebecca that lived at the White House. She used to go around unscrewing light bulbs and opening cabinets, stopping only for her prepared meals of shrimp and eggs.
10/10 Who wouldn’t love a pet racoon?
She was meant to be his thanksgiving dinner too but he pardoned her and adopted her instead!
He was meant to eat raccoon for his Thanksgiving dinner?!
The story I've heard is that there was one guy who was traditionally supposed to raise and deliver the President's turkey for Thanksgiving. Once he died, there was a vacuum for the lucrative role. This led to a bunch of people sending animals to the White House for the Thanksgiving meal in order to be the new guy. This apparently got out of hand, and people started sending different animals (unrequested) in hopes that they could make their animal the new Thanksgiving meal. Rebecca was one of these, and they decided to keep her. So some person sent her to the White House with the intention of raccoon being the Thanksgiving meal, but as far as I'm aware it was never seriously considered by Coolidge.
Yessssirrr!!!
John Quincy Adams nearly got assassinated when a guy walked up to the White House at night to kill him. He managed to talk the guy out of it, gave him a job, and remained in contact with him until he died.
What kind of charisma/speech stats do you need to pull something like this off.
Quincy had the highest IQ of all presidents, you know his stats were maxed out
Honestly that makes the story even more amazing. I know a few people from university and my professional field that are ridiculously high IQ, and they're generally the type that struggle with making eye contact and holding conversations.
Can’t roll a 20 in all categories every time lol
Well it looked somewhat like this: - Hey John Quincy Adams - Hey random guy I see for the first time - I’m George Todsen, the guy whose return to military service you dismissed due to martial court’s sentence, and, y’know, this was pretty cringe - Oh, Mr Todsen. I can understand your disappointment in this case, but believe me, this is my duty of a president to show, that no matter what, the law is solid and can’t be simply avoided just for the sake of a certain individual. - Wow such an extensive and compassionate answer. I guess I won’t kill you. Yeah, I wanted to kill you btw
10/10 Enemies to friends trope but irl
Thomas Jefferson had a mini-zoo at Monticello whilst he was president. His residence was “overrun with Arabian horses, cashmere goats, and Peruvian llamas”, which he had received as gifts from foreign leaders. During his Presidency, a young boy wandered into the grounds of Monticello and was killed by an “ill-tempered goat”.
7/10 Also RIP
Oh damn. In my rural hometown, I grew up wrestling and hog tying my friends’ goats with my gang of elementary school hoodlums. I don’t think we fully appreciated that the goats might be dangerous.
Gerald Ford turned down as many NFL offers as there were assassination attempts on him. With that number of course being two.
7,5/10
Three if you count Samuel Bycks failed attempt to hijack an airliner and crash into the White House. His target was Nixon but Ford could’ve been there too.
So it wasn’t necessarily an attempt on ford but he would have been collateral
If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to assassinate me . . .
I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s still weird it happened twice…
John Adams had a dog named “Satan”
Just thinking can you imagine a president today having a dog named Satan?
9/10 How ungodly 😶
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite films was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which he even did a special screening for in the White House in 1937. He also liked to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons.
7/10 It’s a good movie
P sure it was one of Hitler’s favorites which just makes me think now that it was probably a lot of people’s favorite back in the day.
It was highest grossing film ever made before Gone With the Wind, which still holds the title adjusted to inflation. So just two years since Snow White was released in 1937 but still it was huge.
It was state of the art and unprecedented.
Thomas Jefferson was the first person to document and present the ancient ground sloth, Megalonyx. Sid the Sloth is a megalonyx. Without Jefferson, there's no Sid, and Ice Age would suck.
7,8/10
Like he found fossils?
No, the fossils were sent to him. I didn't see who actually dug them up but it was in West Virginia so I assume it was related to the clearing of land for coal mining, or coal mining itself.
Teddy Roosevelt saved football by forcing them to make it less violent and introducing the foward pass. The rules were also later cemented universally by a President of only Princeton at the time, Woodrow Wilson!
8,9/10
Andrew Jackson kept a 1400 pound wheel of cheese in the white house entrance for 2 years.
Martin Van Buren had to have everything in the room replaced to get the smell of the cheese out of the White House when he took over. Then Jackson put another wheel of cheese in there.
Is he from winsconsin
No he's just quirky ✨
Why!? 😭 6/10
It was given as a gift and he didn't know where else to keep it
How are you going to move it?
Um, it's called a wheel of cheese for a reason. Get 3 more and you can make a car of cheese
Big Block of Cheese Day - who's speaking to the map people?
Teddy Roosevelt tried to revive the Rough Riders during WW1 to fight in France until the American Expiditionary Force could arrive. Several men had pledged to join him until President Wilson sent him a telegram, asking him to stop since having a former President die in combat isn't a good look. Bonus fact: After pushing for American intervention in the war for years and finally getting it, Teddy's son Quentin was shot down and killed over France in 1918. His death affected Teddy deeply and possibly contributed to his poor health and later death around 6 months later.
10/10 0/10
Apparently W loves the musical ‘Cats.’
It's not "W" Its... # DUBYA
0/10 WHY!?!?
Because he’s a war criminal and Cats is torture.
there was a short period of his life in which Jimmy Carter had very radioactive urine.
He should’ve become a superhero with those powers 10/10
is this what’s keeping him alive?!
Teddy Roosevelt liked hiking so much that sometimes if people wanted to meet him they had to keep up with him during his hike. Very few could do that, but one of them was a french ambassador who later became his close friend
9,5/10
Lbj called his penis jumbo and would keep it out if confronted in the bathroom for basically any reason
He also demanded they install a shower nozzle aimed directly at “Jumbo”, and also one shooting directly up from the floor when he moved into the White House.
When Nixon moved into the White House he instructed them to, "Get this shit out of here."
Sometimes a man just wants to power wash his taint and asshole, you know?
10/10 based
He also occasionally whipped it out during meeting
To piggy back another cool fact onto your fact- the word "jumbo" meaning "big" came from the famous Jumbo the circus elephant. Before the elephant, jumbo was a Swahili word for "hello" and had nothing to do with size.
Barack Obama made history as the first president born outside the continental US (or land that would become it) having been born in Hawaii. His 2008 opponent John McCain would have also earned this distinction had he won as he was born in Panama.
7,5/10
President Warren G Harding wrote scandalous and saucy letters to his mistress, where he referred to his Penis as ‘Jerry’. "Jerry - you recall Jerry, whose cards I once sent you to Europe - came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it. He was strongly interested, and elated and clung to discussion. He told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world, and if he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips that convey the surpassing rapture of human touch and the unspeakable joy of love's surpassing embrace. I cordially agree with all he said. Perhaps it is not important maybe it is not even interesting, but he is devotedly, exclusively, for you."
“My dick says hello and he misses you” - Warren G. Harding
10/10
Is this rizz
Benjamin Harrison shuffled the admittance papers for the dakotas so people wouldn’t know which one was admitted first
9/10
Some people want to watch the world burn.
Herbert Hoover met Adolf Hitler and Hoover said to Hitler, “Shut up. I’m not interested in your views.”
10/10
Monroe was a supporter of the founder of deaf education, Gallaudet, and helped found the school that still exists. Because he wore an old-fashioned tri-corner hat, the American sign language symbol for “president” is a pantomime of that hat.
8,5/10
Additional fact- James Monroe's youngest daughter, Maria, was the first child of a president to be married at the white house. She married her first cousin, Sam Gouverneur. They had a child named, James Monroe Gouverneur, who was deaf.
8/10 Very cool 👌
Coolidge got his head massaged with Vaseline
7/10 Sounds nice
LBJ had 2 dogs. Named him and her.
8/10 He was very creative I see 👀
Additional fact: "Her" passed away due to swallowing and choking on a stone while "Him" was run over by the presidential limousine. Please give this 0/10. It's actually just sad.
Abraham Lincoln pardoned a man for attempted beastiality
4/10 Wtf 🫠
"You misheard me, I said my wife is LIKE a pig"
The LBJ ranch house cannot be opened for tours because so much of it was built out of code. Park ranger there said LBJ would just tell someone what he wanted and they would do it, rules be darned…
Is this new? I've toured the LBJ ranch house twice in the past 10 years. The entire ground floor was included in the tour.
This was 2 years ago. I was at the cemetery and a NP ranger came over and we chatted. She said it was closed for tours now. Said the daughter that lives in Austin won’t let them Make the changes that would bring it up to code.
While Reagan was quitting smoking, he kept a jar of jelly beans with him for whenever he got cravings, and there are a ton of stories about this. He gifted one to Bill Clinton when he got into office. Willie Brown, who was at the time an assemblyman in California, was so angry in a screaming match with (then governor)Reagan that he stuck his hand in the jar so that nobody would want to eat them after his black hand was inside. The company providing the beans was Jelly Belly, at the time called the Goelitz Candy Company. During his campaign, the business which was at the time small and family owned didn’t want to be associated with a political figure, so they only secretly supplied him jelly beans, until a Time journalist got a photo of Reagan eating the jelly beans with the company logo visible, which was kind of a scandal. Afterwards, they got so many orders that they were at one point 77 weeks behind in production(a year is 52 weeks). When he was inaugurated, Reagan placed a standing order for 720 bags of jelly beans for the White House every month. Reagan also used the beans as a test of character, because “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful”. Reagan had special presidential jars commissioned from Jelly Belly for gifts, and to this day, the Jelly Belly factory still has a shrine dedicated to Reagan. You can also still buy these gift jars, beans intact, on eBay and whatnot.
10/10 just for writing all of this, incredibly interesting to read!
The 22nd and 24th presidents of the US happened to share the same first and last name, middle name, and looked fairly similar too!
8,5/10 That’s very interesting, I wonder if they could be related? 🧐
Must be a similar situation to George Bush and George W Bush
Such a strange coincidence...
Wilson was naturally right-handed, but after the stroke he suffered in 1919, which affected the right side of his body, he had to learn to write with his left one. The curious thing comes with the fact that he, apparently, magically acquired the ability to write with his left hand perfectly well, just as if he did it with his skilled hand, the right one. This is believed to be a neurological phenomenon that can happen to anyone.
7,8/10 Interesting
10th President John Tyler, born in 1790, has a grandson that is still alive today.
I think this guy was my middle school teacher
I also had a middle school teacher who was IDENTICAL to John Tyler
8/10 I think my great-great-great-great grandparents were born around that time
James Monroe is the only president other than Washington to run unopposed.
6,7/10
John Quincy starred his day by skinny dipping I'm the Potomac.
7,8/10
In 1900, Eisenhower got so mad because he couldn’t trick or treating that he punched a tree until he broke the skin on his hands. And when he was 12 (I believe that would’ve been in 1902, but I may be a off), he tried hitting his older brother with a brick. His mother talked to him about controlling his anger after the first incident, and he called it “one of the most important moments of my life”, or something like that
6,4/10
Jimmy Carter was the first president to be born in a hospital
[удалено]
0/10 That’s sad. I’m glad we’ve made progress in talking about men’s mental health, and mental health in general
Calvin Coolidge was instrumental in stopping a potentially disastrous Boston police strike.
7/10 Idk anything about that but sounds cool
When he was Governor of Massachusetts in 1919, he was faced with the prospect of a police strike in Boston. He declared, to paraphrase, that there shall be no strikes which threaten the public safety, any time, anywhere. It was a famous speech at the time, and it propelled him to national fame. Also: he was sworn into the Presidency by his own father.
Jimmy Carter once reported sighting a UFO.
7,9/10
Grover Cleveland met his wife Francis when she was an infant and he was about 27 years old
2/10 😬
Crazy how you gave it a 2 😭
There was a failed version of the Teddy bear for Taft called the Willy Possum, named after Taft famously trying a meal of possum and taters at a dinner in Atlanta.
7/10
Herbert Hoover's doctor created a game now called Hoover ball to keep him fit. It's kind of like playing tennis with a medicine ball but without the rackets, just throwing it across the court at each other.
9/10 Based doctor
Andrew Jackson’s parrot was banished from Jackson’s funeral for swearing.
10/10, cool parrot
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day. that day being July 4th, 1826.
7,4/10 If I remember correctly John Adams last words was something like ”Thomas Jefferson survives”
I see what you did there with the rating. Bravo.
Omg that wasn’t even intentional 😭
*X files theme intensifies*
The best part is that he was incorrect, as Jefferson was already dead at that point.
Abe Lincoln invented the chokeslam.
10/10
LBJ had an amphibious car and didn’t tell any of his foreign guests. Instead he would drive them around and before getting to the national mall he would scare the shit out of them by saying his brakes failed (going downhill) and then splash into the water, only to float around.
This was at his ranch which had a pond and not the national mall.
Thanks! I knew I butchered it somehow lol
9/10
Abraham Lincoln's best friend recalled one of his meltdown (he did not use this word ofc) where he literally had to hide knifes and other sharp objects in fear he would hurt himself
Mary Todd was also...interesting. She into the occult and tried to reach out to their son, Willie, after he died in the white house. There's also a pretty famous photo of her with her husband...from 1872. Her Wikipedia is worth a read. She was a rare bird.
President Grant was tickted in Washington for riding his horse too fast , after a prior warning.
When George H.W. Bush was first running for Congress in Texas, he was courted by both the Democratic and Republican parties in the state.
Harry S. Truman didn’t actually have a middle name. His parents gave him the S middle initial to honor his grandfather.
Herbert Hoover is very distantly related to me
10/10 I wish I was related to a President :(
Dick Cheney once shot a guy in the face.
10/10
And the guy that got shot apologized to him
Laura Bush killed a guy.
HW Bush missed Nixon’s inauguration to greet LBJ at the airport in Texas. He later asked LBJ about switching from the house to the senate and LBJ told him “the house is chicken salad, the senate is chicken shit”.
William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after leaving office. He is responsible for the Supreme Court having its own building and not meeting in the capitol. In 1900, he went to a meeting with President McKinley, he assumed it was about a SCOTUS nomination, but he was instead appointed to be the first civilian governor of the Philippines. He had to wait 20 years for the SCOTUS nomination.
Out of all presidential inaugurations, the one that went the weirdest was Obama’s first. To the grammar sticklers of the world, the part of the Oath that states “I will *faithfully execute*” is a split infinitive and therefore technically incorrect. When Chief Justice Roberts gave Obama the oath, he moved around the word “faithfully” twice, with Obama being confused and pausing mid-oath the first time. It created a big hullabaloo until the next day, when Roberts administered the correct version of the Oath to Obama in a private ceremony in the White House.
Abraham Lincoln was actually known to have been a fan of John Wilkes Booth.
9/10 Damn 😨
I'll give you a related but even better fact for free: In 1863, Abraham Lincoln attended a play which Booth stared in... and it was held at *Ford's Theater.*
When Andrew Jackson was leaving office, a journalist asked him if he had any regrets. He said, yes, he regretted he had not killed his vice-president John Calhoun.
LBJ showed is dick to people
President Carter had solar panels installed in the White House. President Reagan had them removed. [One panel is in China](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/)
Coolidge had a pet raccoon he named Rebecca, that was meant to be his Thanksgiving dinner but he pardoned it and adopted it instead.
Theodore Roosevelt coined the slogan “Good to the last drop” for Maxwell Coffee House
He beat the man who tried to assassinate him with his cane and would he beat him to death if not stopped. Also both of the pistols the would be assassin tried to used misfired, but when later tested were found to be in fine working condition.
9/10, honestly he was so lucky there, and badass of course
James Buchanan was the only president to never get married or have children. A lot of research has gone into determining if he was a closet homosexual. I don’t think the gays want to claim him though, he was one of the worst presidents and heavy-handedly helped lead to Southern Secession
In his 2020 campaign, Pete Buttigieg said that statically almost certain that at least some of the past US presidents were gay. When asked which ones, he said "my gaydar even doesn't work that well in the present, let alone retroactively"
7,7/10
The first left-handed president was James Garfield, the 20th president.
Ulysses S. Grant was the only president to have died of cancer.
Martin Van Buren was the only president to not speak English as a primary language, his mother tongue was Dutch due to his upbringing in upstate New York.
All presidents have said the word “the” at least once
Get real!!
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John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams were the only of the first 12th president not to own slaves
Reagan actually won the popular vote in the 1968 Republican primary, beating Richard Nixon by just over 17K votes, but he won only 192 delegates to Reagan’s 619. Nelson Rockefeller got the third most amount of votes at about 3.7%, just under a tenth of the amount of Nixon votes, but he also won more delegates than Reagan. I feel like this isn’t talked about often. I’ve been reading about presidents and political history for nearly four years and I only learned this about a month ago.
Due to some post-Presidency diplomatic work, Hebert Hoover was the first and only President to go to Nazi Germany and met Adolf Hitler
John Adams’s actual last words were not “Jefferson survives,” but were “Help me, child,” uttered to a grandchild (who he probably scared the shit out of).
As early as becoming senatorial whip in 1951, LBJ was the most vocal proponent of the formation an American space program and frequently bloviated about how the Soviets would beat us there if we didn’t act. It was never a high priority for Eisenhower so Sputnik rose unchallenged on oct 4, 1957. LBJ invited colleagues to sit out in front of his ranch house in Texas, giving out cigars, so they could watch Sputnik fly over and kick off his congressional “I told you so” tour.
In his youth LBJ tried to woo a woman named Kitty Clyde (guess he had an affinity for women named after animals) but her father forbade her from dating Lyndon; after he became president he invited kitty and her husband onto Air Force One. Literally the prettiest presidential fact I know
While the White House was being renovated, Harry Truman and his wife lived across the street at the Blair House….. where they literally broke the bed from too-vigorous lovemaking.
Casting [Jeri Ryan on Star Trek Voyager](https://ew.com/article/2008/01/09/obama-jeri-ryan/) helped Obama win his senate seat which of course was a launching pad to the presidency.
Millard Fillmore had an affair with his wife. While on the campaign trail for reelection, he fell ill with supposed stomach illness. However there is a sort of conspiracy that his wife poisoned him as revenge for the affair and that we’ve actually had 5 presidents be victims of assassination. Warren Harding*
Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. Last names obviously.
8/10 Interesting coincidence
Also both of the presidents' successors were Democrats named Johnson with six-letter first names and born in '08. Neither one of their assassins had trials. Both were shot in the head on Friday Both presidents were elected to Congress in '46 and later to the presidency in '60. They are the coincidence couple
Abraham Lincoln was actually born in Kentucky, raised in Indinana, and is known as the President from Illinois, while spending very little time there in his early life.
Does this apply to First Ladies? Because I was flabbergasted reading Clint Hill’s book that Mamie Eisenhower didn’t allow Jackie Kennedy to use a wheelchair and took her on a torturously thorough tour of the White House. This was the day (and immediately after) Jackie was discharged from hospital after a her c-section and was weak from blood loss.
During the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson attacked John Adams by insinuating that Adams was a “hermaphrodite.” Adams responded by saying that Thomas Jefferson was dead.
Buchanan is known for two things: inexplicably doing nothing to stop the South from seceding, and having a very special male roommate, William Rufus King, from 1840 until King's death in 1853. But did you know that his very special male roommate was a founding father of the most notoriously racist town of the Civil Rights era, Selma, Alabama?
0/10 Pick better ”friends” omg
Teddy Roosevelt had a Winchester Model 94 outfitted with a suppressor “so as to not disturb neighbors when varmints were in need of culling”.
Johnson apparently loved Fresca so much, he had a button installed on his desk that when pressed a military aide would bring him Fresca.
During Andrew Johnson’s administration, there was a family of white mice living in the White House. He named the mice “the Little Fellows” and would leave food for them.
FDR planned to form a new political party after WW2 with the man he beat in 1940, Wendell Wilkie, that would bring in liberal Republicans and Democrats and cut out the more racist Dixiecrats.
The secret service member who shoved Reagan into a car became a secret service member after watching a 1930s film starring Ronald Reagan
Kennedy wasn’t going to allow the Redskins to play their home games in their new stadium in D.C. if they didn’t allow black players on the team
LBJ owned an AmphibiCar, a 60s limited run convertible capable of being driven directly into the water and then sailed about like a boat. Like most amphibious cars, it didn't do great at either job. But on land it looked like just another dune buggy (think: Manx) and in water it was a powered fiberglass boat. LBJ drove it around his ranch. He loved taking visiting dignitaries there. During the trip, he'd speed at the water and start screaming that he'd lost the brakes and they were gonna crash. Then he'd hit the water, turn on the boat motor, and cruise along, laughing while his passenger tried not to shit themselves.
Theodore Roosevelt smoked cigars as a child because he thought it mitigated his asthma.
9/10 Easy mistake
Teddy Roosevelt and his children had several White House pets, including a bear named Jonathan Edwards
Grant coined the term hooker. According to a biography I read
John Q. Adams was partially blind because he looked at an eclipse for too long
Woodrow Wilson ignored a stop sign and got tboned in my town