Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (6 page)

 

Andrew Jackson was our first national hero since
Washington
and the object of much public adulation. When a little boy in rural
Maryland
learned that the General was passing through a nearby town he asked his parents to take him there. When they refused, he ran away from home. The little boy returned a few days later, beaming with joy and grinning from
ear to ear. He parents were furious, but the infectiousness of his enthusiasm soon won them over
and his father asked, "Did you see General Jackson?"

Practically bursting with pride, the little boy said, "General Jackson spoke to me!"

His parents were in awe. "What did he say to you?"

The boy took a deep breath and then replied, "He told me to get the hell out of the way!"

 

Jackson
was the type of man who was either a fast friend or an implacable enemy. If his honor or the honor of his wife were impugned, he responded with a challenge to a duel. In 1806 a man named Charles Dickinson not only insulted Rachel Jackson; he also owed
Jackson
a debt from a horse race, which he refused to pay.
Jackson
, of course, challenged
Dickinson
to a duel.

The two men and their seconds met and the duel proceeded. The combatants stood back to back, walked apart forty paces, and turned. Jackson allowed Dickinson to take his shot first.
Jackson was seen to flinch, but did not fall. He then took careful aim and shot Dickinson to
death. Jackson then collapsed.

His second rushed over to him and tore open his coat to find that Jackson had been shot in the chest. "Sir!" his friend exclaimed, "How could you stand and aim and fire with a bullet so
near your heart?"

Jackson replied, "I would have lived long enough to kill him if he had put a bullet in my
brain."

 

The practice of kissing babies during campaigns is something of a cliché, but it has an
historical point of origin. During the 1828 campaign General Jackson and his good friend John
Eaton were greeted by a crowd of well-wishers, one of whom was a young woman with a baby
in her arms.
Jackson
took the child, lifted it up, and cried out, "This is a sterling example of American youth." He passed the baby to his friend, said, "Kiss it, Eaton," and walked on.

 

Abraham Lincoln's face and form have become so iconic that we often lose sight of the
fact that he was, well, rather ugly. Once, when riding on horseback along a town road, he chanced to pass a young woman in a buggy. She stopped to look at him and he tipped his hat politely. "Sir," she said, "I do believe that you are the ugliest man I have ever seen."

Startled, Lincoln stammered, "Well, I... I don't know what I can do about that."

"You could have stayed home," she observed.

But he had a sense of humor about himself. When during a debate his opponent accused him of being two-faced, Lincoln asked, "Oh, come now. If I had two faces, would I be using this
one?"

 

Lincoln
was the kind of man who would occasionally answer a serious question with an
anecdote or a quip. When the Civil War began a newspaper editor dispatched a reporter to
Washington
with instructions to interview as many members of the new administration as possible to
pose the following question: was this Civil War inevitable? He received many thoughtful and
complex answers; from
Lincoln
he received the following joke.

"Well," Lincoln said, "that question reminds me of a story I heard tell about a country boy name of Jim Bob. Jim Bob had a powerful hankering to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. So he went down to the depot to talk to the depot master, who told him, 'Okay, Jim Bob, I'm
agonna
ask you some questions, and your
answers'll
tell me if you got the makings of a
railroad man.' So he asked Jim Bob some questions and he liked Jim Bob's answers, and then he said, 'Well now, Jim Bob, you're doing good so far. I just got one more question, and I want
you to think long and hard before you answer it. Let's suppose that you, Jim Bob,
you
are the depot
master. The word comes down the line"( i.e. on the telegraph ) "that a train is heading due north at
30 miles an hour, and another train is heading due south at 30 miles an hour on the same track. You run out to pull the rail switch so they won't collide, but the switch is broke. What are you
agonna
do, Jim Bob?' Jim Bob sat back and studied on it a spell. Then he said, 'I reckon I'd run
home and fetch my brother Billy.' This confused the depot master. '
Tarnation
, Jim Bob, why
would you fetch your brother Billy?' 'Well sir,' said Jim Bob, ‘my brother Billy ain't never seen
a train wreck.'"

In other words, the Civil War was inevitable.

 

One of Abraham Lincoln's better known quips was in a cabinet meeting, when he
announced his support of Ulysses Simpson Grant. When one cabinet member objected to Grant
because he was a heavy drinker,
Lincoln
mused that perhaps he should find out what kind of whiskey Grant drank and send a cask to every other
Union
general.

 

James Abram Garfield was elected president in 1880 and was assassinated in 1881, making his presidency the second shortest in our history. There is very little of interest to be said
about the poor fellow, but his assassin is another matter all together. The assassin, Charles
Guiteau
, was an emotionally disturbed misanthrope, a failure at everything he had ever tried, and suffering from delusions of grandeur. He gave a speech on
Garfield
's behalf in 1880 at a public meeting in
New York City
, and expected for this reason to be appointed
U.S.
ambassador to
France
. When Garfield (who didn't even know who he was) failed to appoint him,
Guiteau
murdered him.

Two interesting things subsequently transpired.

One:
Guiteau
was one of the first murder defendants in American history whose attorney used the
insanity defense in an attempt to have his client escape the noose. A few decades earlier, Rep. Daniel Sickles murdered U.S. District Attorney Philip Key, who was having an affair with
Sickles's
wife. The defense strategy, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, was successful.
Guiteau
was not so lucky. The attempt failed, even though
Guiteau
was quite obviously a mental case. He
was duly convicted and was promptly hanged.

Two: while
Guiteau
was in prison awaiting trial, a prison guard took a shot at him, and
missed. The guard was subsequently tried for attempted murder. He was found not guilty by
reason of insanity.

 

 

I told Bill McKinley not to nominate that lunatic!
 
Now look!
 
That goddamned cowboy is president of the United States!

 

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most unusual and impressive men ever to occupy the
White House. Naturalist, author, rancher, explorer, soldier, hunter, statesman—only
Jefferson
was so varied in his interests, and no president even comes close to TR's adventures and literary output.

On February 14, 1884, young Roosevelt's wife Alice died, two days after giving birth;
his mother died on the same day in the same house. Overcome with grief, Roosevelt left his
infant daughter in the care of his sister and went out to the Dakota Territory to become a cattle
rancher.

Stories about TR out in the Wild West are legion. Knocking a hostile drunk unconscious
with a single blow in a saloon fight ... facing down three hostile Sioux, armed only with a rifle ... being involved in a showdown and staring down his opponent until the man chickened out ... as a
deputy sheriff, tracking down and capturing three thieves who had stolen from him, guarding his
captives single-handedly for the forty-hour overland journey back to town, keeping himself awake at night by reading Tolstoy ... not to mention the cow-punching life of the cowboy on a
cattle drive ... Teddy did it all.

He also lost everything he owned in the Dakotas in the great blizzard of 1886/87, and then returned east to pursue a public life that led him from success to success. State assemblyman ... civil service commissioner ... New York City police commissioner ... assistant secretary of the Navy ... Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War ... crusading, reformist governor of New York ...

He was a popular hero. It was largely for this reason that William McKinley chose him as
his running mate in the election of 1900; and, of course, when McKinley was assassinated in
1901, Roosevelt became at forty-two the youngest president in American history. Republican
Party leader Mark Hannah had strongly opposed Roosevelt's candidacy, exclaiming, "Don't they realize that only one human life separates that madman from the presidency?" And when
McKinley was murdered, Hannah exploded, "I told Bill McKinley not to pick that lunatic! Now
look! That goddamned cowboy is president of the United States!"

One final comment: as of this writing, Theodore Roosevelt is the only American president to have leapt from horseback and, armed only with a hunting knife, wrestled a
mountain lion to the ground and stabbed it to death.

 

Theodore Roosevelt's eldest daughter Alice was something of a wild girl by the standards
of 1904, the year her father was elected to the office he had inherited from McKinley .She smoked cigarettes, drank cocktails, and went riding in cars with boys. She once summarized her
philosophy of life by saying, "If it's full, empty it. If it's empty, fill it. And if it itches, scratch
it." The president was once taken to task for not keeping her under control, and he replied, "I can govern the
United States of America
or I can control
Alice
. I cannot do both."

Alice married a congressman named Nicholas Longworth in a White House ceremony in 1906.
Lest anyone forget whose daughter she was, the bride cut the wedding cake with a samurai sword.

 

Woodrow Wilson had many sterling qualities, but a winning personality was not one of
them. He was in fact, an obnoxious, arrogant, supercilious man, convinced of both his own superior moral probity and superior intellect. He believed that the treaties ending World War One would, if based upon his Fourteen Points, recreate the world as a world without war; and anyone who disagreed with him was obviously misguided. This smug attitude led him into frequent confrontations with his supposed allies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, David
Lloyd George of
Britain
, Georges Clemenceau of
France
, and
Vittorio
Orlando of
Italy
. At one point Clemenceau was heard to mutter, “Fourteen points! Fourteen points!
Sacre
bleu!
God himself had only ten!”

But in the rough and tumble of cut-throat European diplomacy, Wilson was outmatched. He found himself abandoning point after point and accepting destructive compromise after destructive compromise, all in order to secure the creation of the League of Nations (which, once created, the U.S. did not join.) A British diplomat present at the time described Wilson in Paris as being like "a virgin in a whorehouse, crying out piteously for a glass of lemonade."

 

The approaching election of 1920 portended ill for the Democrats, saddled as they were
with an unpopular president and very unpopular wartime regimentation. Their campaign, as a
matter of desperation, attempted to besmirch the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, by
spreading the rumor that Harding had more than a drop of black African blood. In 1920, this rumor, if believed, would have been the kiss of death politically.

A joke current at the time (...
Warning! Racism alert!
...)
had two black men, Jim and Sam, talking about the election. "
D'yall
heah
?" asks Jim. "De
Erpubicans
done
nomernated
Mistah
Harding."