Hail to the Chiefs, Part 3
In the previous two installments of this series, I’ve tried to shine a light on our lesser-known presidents. When I visit middle and high school students, it saddens me to learn that many of them can only name a handful of our nation’s leaders. This week we pick up at the beginning of the 20th century.
President #25, William McKinley was first elected in 1896. He annexed Hawaii, engineered a win in the Spanish-American War, and presided during a time of economic prosperity. Sadly, the pattern of a presidential assassination every twenty years continued when he was shot in New York in 1901. The nearest doctor was a gynecologist, and much like President Garfield twenty years earlier, he was probably a victim of poor medical treatment. He died eight days later.
The man who succeeded him is still a familiar face. It helps to be depicted on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt walked softly, carried a big stick, and called the presidency a “bully pulpit,” meaning it provided a powerful platform for his ideas. (Some of our more recent leaders had a different interpretation of the word “bully,” using that pulpit to run roughshod over those with differing opinions.)
TR wasn’t perfect, but he doubled the number of America’s parks, made our food and water safer, created the Panama Canal, and was generally about the toughest guy who ever lived. Oh yeah, and that Teddy Bear you grew up with was named after him.
President #27 was William Howard Taft, largely remembered for being large. As in, stuck in the bathtub large. That’s a legend that’s been talked about for years, but I wouldn’t bet against it. I’ll give him this: he kept the nation out of war, which was pretty rare in those days. Still, he was trounced in his re-election campaign, capturing only eight electoral votes. He was said to be relieved, calling the White House “the loneliest place in the world.” His post-presidency career was most unusual, and very impressive. He became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, which no other president has ever done, before or since. It should also be noted he lost 75 pounds after he left office, avoiding any additional bathtub issues.
In the 1912 election, Teddy Roosevelt returned to run as an independent candidate, and ended up splitting the Republican vote with Taft. That enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University and Governor of New Jersey to win handily. He’s another guy you don’t hear much about these days, but his two terms were quite eventful.
For starters there was Prohibition, which made alcohol illegal, and failed miserably. That little experiment ended up creating organized crime, which has been awfully hard to eliminate. On the plus side, women finally got the right to vote during the Wilson era.
He’s probably best known for getting us into what was then known as the World War. Back then, nobody knew there would be another one, so it had not yet been assigned a numeral. Our involvement was a surprise to some, because Wilson had campaigned as an anti-war candidate, and did indeed keep us out of foreign conflict during his first term. But by 1917, we were all in, with woefully unprepared soldiers. Wilson, who had never been the picture of health, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, and his condition was hidden from the press. (Yes, things were very different then.) For the final eighteen months of his presidency, the brain-damaged president was out of the public eye, and his wife Edith signed all the papers. So to be honest, we once had a female president. It was just a well-kept secret at the time.
The next three presidents are frequently ranked by historians as some of the worst ever. The 1920s-era White House occupants are best-remembered as crooked (Warren G. Harding), silent (Calvin Coolidge), and doing too little to stem the economic disaster that became the Great Depression (Herbert Hoover).
After twelve years with those guys, we needed a president who could lead. In two weeks, I’ll look at Franklin D. Roosevelt and those who have followed him as we conclude this series.
(David Carroll is a Chattanooga news anchor, and his new book “I Won’t Be Your Escape Goat” is available on his website, ChattanoogaRadioTV.com. You may contact him at 900 Whitehall Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405, or at [email protected])
