The presidency is one of the most documented jobs in the world, which makes its odd corners easy to overlook. These thirty-six stories go past the marble: a clerical error that renamed a general, a portrait carried out ahead of a British army by five people whose names are mostly forgotten, and a mechanical horse in an upstairs room. Politics appears here only as settled history.
Every tile in a U.S. Presidents game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Presidents
nine stories
1The only president who ever held a patent
On the tile: Lincoln's boat1849
Lincoln knew what it meant to be stuck in shallow water. As a young man he helped free a flatboat hung up on the milldam at New Salem, Illinois. In 1848, riding home between sessions of Congress, he saw his stranded steamboat buoyed off a sandbar with empty casks forced under its sides. The next year he patented a better way: inflatable bellows along each side of a hull, expanded to lift a grounded boat clear. Patent 6,469 was granted on May 22, 1849. It was apparently never used, and Lincoln remains the only president to hold a patent.
He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant, and he might have stayed that way if the congressman nominating him to West Point had filled the form out correctly. Instead the paperwork arrived reading Ulysses S. Grant, the middle name borrowed from his mother's family. Grant tried to correct it when he got there in 1839 and found it was too late. The initials stuck, and so did the nickname his fellow cadets drew from them: Sam, short for Uncle Sam.
Theodore Roosevelt was leaving a Milwaukee hotel for a campaign speech when a man shot him in the chest. The bullet went through his overcoat, a folded fifty-page speech manuscript and a metal eyeglass case before it stopped, and surgeons later said those layers had much diminished its force. Roosevelt went on to the hall and spoke with the bullet still in him. He told the crowd he had just been shot, and that it took more than that to kill a bull moose.
William Howard Taft is the only person to have led both the executive and the judicial branch, and the job he actually wanted was the second one. The presidency came first, in 1909, and it did not suit him: the habit of weighing every side of a question that served him well as a judge left him indecisive as president. In 1921 Warren Harding named him Chief Justice of the United States. He served on the Court until 1930.
Calvin Coolidge was staying at his father's homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, on the night of August 2, 1923, when his father came up the stairs calling his name: President Harding had died. John Coolidge was a notary public and a justice of the peace, and he gave the oath himself. In the sitting room, by the light of a kerosene lamp, he swore in his son as president. His mother's Bible lay on the table beside him, but Coolidge later wrote that it was not officially used, since Vermont did not use a Bible for oaths.
Losing the White House in 1828 did not retire John Quincy Adams. Two years later his Massachusetts neighbors sent him to the House of Representatives, where he served nine terms, became a fierce opponent of slavery and earned the nickname Old Man Eloquent. He fought for eight years against the gag rule, which tabled antislavery petitions without debate, until the House repealed it in 1844. In February 1848, minutes after voting against a motion to honor officers of the Mexican War, he collapsed at his desk with a stroke. He died two days later.
Gerald Ford reached the presidency without ever appearing on a national ballot. He had spent his career winning a single Michigan district when Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973. Nixon named Ford to the vacancy under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and Congress confirmed him, the Senate by 92 to 3 and the House by 387 to 35. Eight months later Nixon resigned too. Ford is the only president Americans never elected to either office.
8He reached the White House without a day of school
On the tile: The tailor1808-1875
Andrew Johnson was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy and never spent a day in a classroom. He was self-taught, and after he married Eliza McCardle she tutored him through the early years of their marriage, filling in what school had not. The National Park Service, which tells his story in Greeneville, Tennessee, puts the record plainly: he reached the presidency without attending a single day of school.
Before politics, Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer who went where the ore was: Western Australia in 1897, northern China in 1899. In June 1900 the Boxer uprising trapped him and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, with hundreds of other foreign families in the settlement at Tianjin. For four weeks it was shelled and attacked. Herbert helped build barricades, organized the food supplies and kept the water purification plant running, while Lou helped at the hospital. A multinational force relieved the city in mid-July, and in August the couple left for England.
For most of the nineteenth century the building's formal names were the President's House and the Executive Mansion. White House turned up now and then in newspapers, but only as a nickname. In 1901 Theodore Roosevelt decided the nickname should simply be the name. On October 17 his secretary, George Cortelyou, asked Secretary of State John Hay to change the heading on official papers needing the president's signature from Executive Mansion to White House. Similar letters went to the other cabinet secretaries, and the stationery was changed to match.
The story everyone knows is that the mansion was painted white to cover the scorch marks the British left in 1814, and that the name White House came with the new paint. The dates do not cooperate. The walls were given a lime-based whitewash in 1798, sixteen years before the fire, and the name was in use by around 1811. The reason for the paint was maintenance rather than shame: the whitewash protected the sandstone from moisture, and from cracking when that moisture froze in winter.
With a British army closing on Washington in August 1814, Dolley Madison insisted on waiting until the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington was secured. She ordered the frame broken and the canvas taken out. The steward Jean Pierre Sioussat and the gardener Thomas McGrath did the work, with help from Paul Jennings, an enslaved fifteen-year-old footman, and two New Yorkers, Jacob Barker and Robert De Peyster, carried it to safety. In his memoir, published in 1865, Jennings called the tale that Dolley cut it out herself totally false.
HMS Resolute sailed in 1852 to look for the lost Franklin expedition, was locked in the Arctic ice, and was abandoned. An American whaler found her adrift in 1855, and Congress paid to refit the ship and send her back to Queen Victoria as a gesture of friendship. When the Resolute was finally broken up, the queen had her oak and mahogany timbers made into a desk and sent it to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. Most presidents since have used it.
For more than a century there was no Oval Office. Thomas Jefferson worked in the southwest corner of the State Floor, in what is now the State Dining Room. From John Quincy Adams to William McKinley, presidents and their staffs used the east side of the second floor. The first Oval Office was built in 1909, when William Howard Taft expanded the new West Wing, and Franklin Roosevelt moved it to its present corner overlooking the Rose Garden in 1934. Every president since has worked there.
By the 1940s the floors sagged and the chandeliers swayed, and interior brick walls turned out to be standing on nothing in particular. Rather than patch it again, Truman moved out and let engineers take away everything inside the outer stone walls, dig foundations twenty-two feet down, and raise a steel skeleton inside the empty shell. The original wooden beams that James Hoban had installed in 1817 were milled into paneling for the ground-floor rooms.
The second-floor room that carries his name was not Lincoln's bedroom. It was his office and the Cabinet Room, the place where he actually worked. The famous rosewood bed standing in it was bought by Mary Todd Lincoln for a guest room, and no documented evidence shows that the president ever slept in it. The room became a bedroom only in the Roosevelt renovation of 1902, decades after Lincoln died.
The White House began with an outdoor wooden privy. Thomas Jefferson had it torn down and put two water closets upstairs, one at each end of the house, fed through wooden pipes from a cistern in the attic. John Quincy Adams added an iron garden pump with nine spouts, drawing on a well at the nearby Treasury Building. In 1833 Andrew Jackson had iron pipes run into the ground-floor corridor and a bathing room installed in the East Wing. By 1853 the second floor had central plumbing, with taps for hot and cold water.
The capital's location was a bargain struck between northern and southern representatives and written into the Residence Act of 1790, which put the city on the Potomac and left the exact placement to George Washington. He personally marked where the north walls and the entrance of the President's House would go. The position he chose was meant to link the house symbolically to the Capitol, with Pennsylvania Avenue running between the two.
George Washington is the only president the Electoral College ever chose unanimously, and it did so twice. In the first election, sixty-nine electors cast sixty-nine votes for him. In 1792 he took all one hundred thirty-two. He did none of the work. The political culture of the day held that a candidate should not be seen to want the office, so Washington played no part in either campaign. The real contests both years were for vice president.
The Constitution originally let each elector cast two votes without saying which one was for president. In 1800 the Republican electors all voted for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and the two men finished exactly level at seventy-three votes apiece. The decision went to the House, which balloted thirty-five times without settling anything. Alexander Hamilton, who preferred his old enemy Jefferson to Burr, urged Federalists to give way, and on the thirty-sixth ballot a few of them handed in blank ballots, electing Jefferson. The Twelfth Amendment closed the loophole in 1804.
Four candidates split the 1824 election and nobody reached a majority. Andrew Jackson led the popular vote with about 153,000 to John Quincy Adams's 114,000, and led the electoral count ninety-nine to eighty-four, but ninety-nine was thirty-two short. Under the Twelfth Amendment the House chose among the top three, each state casting a single vote. Speaker Henry Clay, eliminated in fourth place, backed Adams, who won and then made Clay secretary of state. Jackson called it a corrupt bargain.
A Democratic newspaper sneered that William Henry Harrison would sit out his days in a log cabin if someone gave him a barrel of hard cider and a pension of two thousand a year. The Whigs took the insult and made it the whole campaign. Harrison, who came from an established Virginia family and liked his comforts, was repackaged as Old Tip, the people's candidate, with whiskey in log cabin bottles, parades three miles long and a ten-foot ball rolled from town to town. He carried nineteen states to Van Buren's seven.
5A woman ran for president before most women could vote
On the tile: Woodhull1872
Victoria Woodhull ran for president in 1872, decades before the Nineteenth Amendment. The Equal Rights Party nominated her and named Frederick Douglass as her running mate, though he never accepted the nomination. She had not even reached thirty-five, the minimum age the Constitution sets for a president, and ran anyway. She and her sister Tennessee Claflin had already become the first women to run a brokerage firm on Wall Street, which they opened in 1870. She tried again in 1884 and 1892.
Samuel Tilden finished with about a quarter million more popular votes than Rutherford Hayes, and four states sent in competing sets of electoral returns. Congress invented a fifteen-member commission to sort it out: five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices. David Davis, the independent justice expected to hold the balance, accepted a Senate seat instead, and his replacement, Joseph Bradley, was a Republican. Every disputed vote went to Hayes by eight to seven. Congress declared him the winner, 185 to 184, at about four in the morning on March 2, 1877, two days before his term began.
In 1888 Grover Cleveland won more popular votes than Benjamin Harrison, 48.6 percent to 47.9, and lost the Electoral College badly, 233 to 168. Failing to carry his own state of New York did it. Most defeated presidents go home for good. Cleveland went home, waited four years, ran against Harrison again in 1892 and won with 277 electoral votes, becoming the first president to serve two terms that did not touch.
Taft's backers ran the 1912 Republican convention, and before it opened the party's national committee had awarded Taft 235 of the 254 contested delegate seats. Roosevelt's supporters walked out, met across town, and that August founded the Progressive Party, nicknamed for Roosevelt's boast that he felt as strong as a bull moose. Their platform called for women's suffrage, an eight-hour day and a minimum wage for women. The split handed the election to Woodrow Wilson, who won 435 electoral votes. Roosevelt finished ahead of the sitting president.
The polls had Thomas Dewey winning, and a typesetters' strike had pushed the Chicago Daily Tribune's deadline early, so the paper set its front page before the votes were counted. Truman had campaigned by train, one trip running fifteen days and 8,300 miles from Pennsylvania to California, speaking from the back platform in town after town. He won 303 electoral votes to 189. The photograph of him holding up the paper that read Dewey Defeats Truman is the most famous picture of his career.
1The Secret Service was founded to chase counterfeiters
On the tile: Counterfeits1865
The agency that guards the president was created to protect money. By the end of the Civil War nearly a third of all the currency circulating in the United States was counterfeit, which is the sort of number that unsettles a treasury. In 1865 the Secret Service was set up as a bureau of the Treasury Department to suppress that counterfeiting. Guarding presidents came later: part time for Grover Cleveland in 1894, and full time only in 1902, after the assassination of William McKinley.
Crews worked on Mount Rushmore from October 1927 to October 1941, under Gutzon Borglum and, after his death in March 1941, under his son Lincoln. About ninety percent of the mountain came off with dynamite, which powdermen used until only three to six inches of rock was left above the finished surface. Then drillers honeycombed the remaining granite with closely spaced holes, so it could often be broken away by hand and smoothed with bumper tools. Nearly four hundred people worked on it. In fourteen years, not one of them was killed.
3There is no federal holiday called Presidents' Day
On the tile: Presidents DayMyth busted
Retailers advertise it, calendars print it, and schools close for it, but the federal government has never adopted a holiday called Presidents' Day. The Office of Personnel Management is blunt about it: the February holiday is designated Washington's Birthday in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code, the law that specifies holidays for federal employees. Whatever the sales circulars say, only one president has his name on the list of federal holidays.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were old rivals who had become friends again by letter. Both were determined to live to the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and both did, barely. Jefferson died at ten minutes to one on July 4, 1826. Adams died about five hours later, at ninety-one, reportedly saying that Thomas Jefferson survives. He was wrong by a matter of hours, and never knew it.
William Henry Harrison delivered his inaugural address outdoors in the cold March weather without a hat or a coat. About three weeks later he fell ill, and on April 4, 1841, a month into the job, he died in the White House, the first president to die in office. The chilly inauguration long took the blame, and pneumonia is the traditional diagnosis, though recent scholarship has suggested enteric or typhoid fever, possibly spread by Washington's water supply.
No law limited a president to eight years. It was a tradition, set by George Washington and kept for well over a century. In 1940, with Germany overrunning western Europe, Franklin Roosevelt decided the emergency outweighed the custom and ran for a third term. Some of his own people objected, among them his longtime political adviser James Farley and his vice president, John Garner. He won, and in 1944, at war and in failing health, he ran again.
Calvin Coolidge had a reputation for saying as little as possible, which makes this detail more entertaining than it ought to be. He liked horseback riding for exercise, and to save time he had an electric horse installed in the White House, a stationary machine with two gaits, trot and gallop. Then he rode it. Grace Coolidge and others who watched the president at work on the machine were, by the record, amused.
For years Washington children rolled their Easter eggs down the grassy slopes of the Capitol grounds, until Congress passed a law in 1876 to keep the grounds from being used as a playground. That left the eggs without a hill. In 1878 Rutherford Hayes agreed to open the White House grounds on Easter Monday instead, and the South Lawn has hosted the event in most years since. Grover Cleveland began greeting the children in 1885, Benjamin Harrison added music in 1889, and radio arrived in 1929.
Theodore Roosevelt's children treated the White House as a house with an unusually large yard. When Archie Roosevelt was sick in bed with measles, the Roosevelt children, with help from a footman named Charlie Reeder, sneaked the family pony, Algonquin, into the White House elevator and up to his bedroom. Archie let out a whoop and dove for him. The startled pony slipped and fell with a thud loud enough to bring the whole family running, and Archie got a lighthearted scolding from the president.