by Cracked. com
FIGURE 6.10 A rare first draft of one of Lincoln’s early campaign speeches.
Ulysses S. Grant: More Like Boo-lysses S. Can’t, in That He Can’t Be a Man (Grant’s a Pussy)
THE MYTH: Your history textbook’s version of Ulysses S. Grant is that of a lifetime war hero, and a professional soldier who reluctantly accepted his party’s nomination to be president based on the strength of his popularity on the battlefield.
He was a hard-partying, hard-fighting, hard-bearded military man you could sit down and have eleven or twelve beers with. A man’s man, not like the soft politicians of today. Rumor has it, his big bushy beard actually hid a second beard beneath it, and this sneaky beard was actually made entirely of shrapnel. Every woman he kissed died of tetanus. True story.
(True-ish.)
FIGURE 6.11 An artist’s depiction of Ulysses S. Grant titled, Look at Me, I’m Ulysses S. Grant and I’m a Fancy Lady. Weeee!
THE TRUTH: For such a war-hardened man’s man, he sure pussied out when it came to blood. And not just blood on the battlefield, mind you; President Grant would get sick to his stomach if someone delivered him a steak that was too rare and bloody.
FIGURE 6.12 The fifty-dollar bill, revised for historical accuracy.
He would freak out or weep or find some other unique way to embarrass himself. He was also notoriously shy, so much so that he refused to shower or even change in front of his men (see Figure 6.11). This was a guy who expected his men to fight and die at his request; so his inability to let them see his butt was less than inspiring, to say the least. Grant was the only one who bathed privately while camping, alone, in his tent, like whatever the Civil War version of a never-nude was (wang-totaler?).
He also cried at his daughter’s wedding, and not in an “I’m so proud of my baby girl” sort of way, but more in an “I’m going to lock myself in a room and weep hysterically” sort of way. He just got nervous on the day of the wedding and lost his presidential shit.
Grant must have been put on this earth to go into battle and be shot at, because literally everything else made him absolutely poop himself out of terror.
John Q. Adams: Put the “Crazy” in “Hey, You Guys, I Think John Quincy Adams Is Crazy”
THE MYTH: We’re not going to sit around and bullshit anyone here: Absolutely everything you know about John Quincy Adams you learned from watching Amistad.
So if you remember Adams at all, you remember him as a brilliant diplomat and attorney, a bright thinker, and a great public speaker, and you also remember him looking like ugly Hannibal Lecter, because that’s what the movie told you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Amistad was a good, fairly accurate movie, and John Q. wasn’t as impressive and noteworthy as, say, Washington or Lincoln or Kennedy. We can forgive you for not boning up on our slightly more obscure presidents.
We sure as hell won’t forgive Amistad, though.
THE TRUTH: If we can say that John Quincy Adams had a black belt in diplomacy, you can bet your ass that we can also say that he was a goddamned master sensei at being crazy.
Like shit-hurlingly crazy. Like “Let’s dig into the center of the earth because it’s hollow” crazy, and that one isn’t an exaggeration. As president, John Q. Adams—using taxpayer money—approved an expedition, headed by John Cleves Symmes Jr., that involved digging straight into the earth, which was believed to be hollow by Symmes, Adams, and almost no one else in the world, because it was the 1800s and people weren’t that stupid, for Christ’s sake.
Most people weren’t that stupid, anyway. But Adams sure was. He was prepared to send Symmes to the North Pole, which, for absolutely no reason, they had concluded featured the entrance to a massive underground world filled with—we are far from shitting you right now—mole people. Symmes drew a crazy map of a hollowed-out Earth and asked Adams if he could use the map to find and conduct trade with mole people, and the president of the United States was, like, “Oh, yeah, here’s money for that.”
The deal fell through when Adams left office and was replaced by Andrew Jackson. Jackson would never stand for such a ridiculous mission. We’d commend Jackson for his rationality, but it should be noted that the only reason he ended the expedition was because he genuinely believed the world was flat. At least Jackson’s form of crazy was cheaper for the American taxpayer.
FIGURE 6.13 “Even I know that’s bullshit, and I still drown women for being witches.” —Any Random Guy from the 1800s
Thomas Jefferson: Basically Rain Man
THE MYTH: Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and, as a result, invented democracy, America, and freedom.
We know him as one of the most influential founding fathers, a scholar, an inventor, and, in the interest of full disclosure, a pimp. Jefferson was the kind of heroic badass we simply do not make anymore.
THE TRUTH: Picture the most nervous and awkward kid in your middle school—the kid who was so afraid of public speaking that, whenever he had to give a presentation in front of the class, he started shaking and stress-farting so bad that the walls quaked.
The kid who developed a nervous stutter whenever a small crowd gathered to listen to him. The kid who would rather cry and wet himself than stand in front of his friends and deliver a speech. That was Thomas Jefferson for his entire life.
Jefferson was a terrible public speaker, neither charismatic nor eloquent, and would collapse into a sweaty pile of stage fright the instant he saw a microphone (or whatever it was that people stood behind when speaking during the 1700s—bales of hay? an abacus?). Throughout Jefferson’s presidency, he gave only two speeches (his inaugurations), and he adopted the practice of just writing and mailing his State of the Union addresses to Congress.
Many scholars suspect that Jefferson might have suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. There’s no way to prove that now, but the details do add up: He couldn’t make eye contact with people; he would hum and sing to himself constantly; and he repeatedly engaged in specific, nonfunctional routines and rituals, all symptoms of Asperger’s. He obsessed over, and wrote down, every detail he ever observed, whether it was the weather, animal sightings, recipes, or gardening. He left forty thousand pieces of correspondence to his grandson, which is crazy because it means that (a) he was so obsessed with keeping records that he actually made forty thousand pieces of correspondence and (b) he actually kept them all throughout his entire life. Obsessive behavior, public shyness, and an inability to connect with other people—it certainly sounds like he was on the spectrum (it is a miracle that he still managed to pimp as hard and as often as he did).
In addition to sucking at public speaking, he just kind of sucked in a general way, too. He dressed like a child, but, like, a crappy child. Or a blind one, or, again, one incapable of picking up on social cues. (He was laughed at just about everywhere he went as a result of his clothes.) His pants were bright red, he wore fur collars, he mixed and matched incompatible styles—he dressed like an uncool person before it was cool, and he did it on purpose. It was his way of saying, “I might be a terrible speaker, but at least I look like shit. Make me your president.” And then, hey, we did.
A Series of Thomas Jefferson’s Most Popular Pickup Lines
“Hey, baby, you want to come back to my place and not make direct eye contact, quickly make love, and then leave immediately to avoid any kind of personal contact?”
“Hey, girl, you must be tired because you traveled 283 steps just to get here. I counted. I counted the number of steps you took.”
“Hi, I’m Thomas Jefferson. I wrote the Declaration of Independence and you should have sex with me because you are my slave, Sally Hemings. I have Asperger’s!”
JFK: Huge Fan of Assassination Plots
THE MYTH: We don’t often think of John F. Kennedy as a war-and-violence-loving president; we think of him as an everything-else-loving president.
Other presidents, like that warmonger Lyndon Johnson, got us into Vietnam, but JFK just wanted to love. If y
ou know what we’re sayin’, ladies. Seriously, there’s a better than decent chance he had sex with all of our mothers/grandmothers. We love him the way we love all incorrigible rogues, and the fact that the most famous thing he did as president was become the victim of a violent crime sort of makes him antiviolence by default. If any president embodied the spirit of being a lover, not a fighter, it was JFK.
THE TRUTH: JFK’s appetite for violence was exactly as strong as his appetite for sex (which is to say, as an ox).
In his brief tenure as president, JFK spent the bulk of his time devising and launching covert plots aimed at assassinating other presidents, like South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem (whom Kennedy eventually did assassinate) and Fidel Castro (whom Kennedy tried and failed to assassinate more times than Wile E. Coyote versus the Road Runner). We love how he valiantly kept America safe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in all likelihood, JFK’s assassination-related antics instigated the crisis to begin with. He’s like the guy who shakes up a beehive and then expects the rest of the picnic to praise him when he stops the bees from shooting a bunch of missiles at us (see Figure 6.14).
FIGURE 6.14 A beehive that fires missiles.
And as far as Vietnam goes, JFK was the one who said that if we withdraw from Vietnam, “the communists would control Vietnam, pretty soon . . . all of Southeast Asia would be under control of the communists and . . . then India, Burma would be the next target,” a justification that future politicians and war advocates would use for the next decade.
Kennedy wasn’t all bad, but he was far from the war-hating, peace-loving rogue that we remember him as.
Also: Not a Doughnut . . . in Case That Wasn’t Clear
THE MYTH: People love talking about JFK’s famous speech in West Germany at one of the most volatile points in the Cold War.
It was a hugely important rallying cry for democracy, but mostly people like it because of Kennedy’s gaffe. JFK says, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and all of Germany laughed, because when Kennedy thought he was saying “I am a Berliner,” he was actually saying “I am a jelly-filled doughnut.” He was confused about the translation, and we all laugh and laugh about it to this day.
THE TRUTH: No one actually laughed when JFK said that. A bunch of reputable news sources have repeated the story, but according to Reinhold Aman, a German professor with a slightly better handle on the language and circumstances of the speech, “No intelligent native speaker of German tittered in Berlin when JFK spoke.”
But still, even if people didn’t laugh, Kennedy still called himself a doughnut, right?
Wrong. The confusion comes from the belief that Ich bin Berliner means “I am from Berlin,” while ein Berliner is a specific type of doughnut. If you were a pedantic jag, you’d say, based on those two bits of information, that it sounds like Kennedy is claiming to be a doughnut.
But that’s because you’re a pedantic jag. A German-speaking person would hear the sentence exactly the way that Kennedy intended it to be heard: “I am a Berliner” (or “I am from Berlin”). It’s why, when someone says “I am a New Yorker,” we don’t assume the person’s actually saying “I am a New Yorker magazine.” Because that would be idiotic.
So where did the misconception come from? A 1983 novel called Berlin Game, where one character claims that Kennedy said he was a doughnut. The New York Times picked it up and treated the anecdote as fact (what, was that the first time they’d ever seen a novel? They know James Bond’s also not real, right?), and it has snowballed ever since. Plenty of smug pseudointellectuals laugh about Kennedy today, because the New York Times took historical information from an ’80s spy novel.
Thomas Paine: Adopted Mascot of Modern Libertarians, Huge Fan of Taxes
THE MYTH: Thomas Paine, the founding father best known for his Revolutionary War tract Common Sense, has found a new relevance in modern-day politics with pundits and the Tea Party movement.
Libertarians are so enamored with Paine, in fact, that they’ve taken to dressing up like him, while spouting off about the evils of taxation and socialism, on Internet videos—cosplay and YouTube clips being by far the most dignified way to convey a political message.
THE TRUTH: But Paine is also responsible for these ideas:
[P]ay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age.
—Rights of Man
So he was in favor of Bill Clinton’s child tax credit of 1997, hundreds of years before it even existed? That’s some serious political hipster cred.
It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilized countries, for daily bread.
[P]ay to every such person of the age of fifty years . . . the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty . . .
This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.
—Rights of Man
An entitlement paying old people to support them while not working? That sounds like Social Security, not something libertarians are super keen on, according to the last ALL CAP e-mail your uncle forwarded on to you. In fact, if he wasn’t the very icon of X-Treme Capitalism today, we’d almost swear that Thomas Paine was a socialist:
There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it.
—Agrarian Justice
[C]reate a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.
—Agrarian Justice
If you choose to share this passage with any libertarians you may know, be sure to wear old shoes you don’t mind having ruined, as they will most likely shit right where they stand.
Rosa Parks: Carefully Chosen Spokesperson for a PR-Savvy Civil Rights Movement
THE MYTH: You don’t have to be a history major to recognize Rosa Parks as the snowflake that started an avalanche of progress.
On her way home one day (presumably from church or the library), she and her adorable granny glasses were minding their own business when a racist cop arrested her for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. The spontaneous bus boycott that followed gained national attention for the civil rights movement and launched the career of a then-unknown Martin Luther King Jr. It’s impossible to imagine where we’d be today if serendipity hadn’t placed Parks on that bus in December 1955.
THE TRUTH: Not only was Parks not the first African American woman to refuse to yield her seat to a white man, but she wasn’t even the first in her own town.
There was Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old girl who took the exact same buses as Rosa Parks and was arrested for refusing to give up her seat nine months before Parks, as well as eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith, who’d been arrested six weeks before Parks.
FIGURE 6.15 “OK, great, Rosa, now give me ‘matronly librarian who got arrested for sitting on a bus so we could start to heal this nation.’ PERFECT, you’re a natural.”
Parks was deliberately chosen to be the face of the civil rights movement. It turns out the NAACP wasn’t some half-assed organization that found out that racism existed after an old lady got arrested. It was a sophisticated, media-savvy organization looking to get attention for its incredibly important cause. The group decided that, of the very many shit pies they were being forced to eat in the South, the black women being arrested for sitting at the front of the bus was the right mixture of symbolic and nonthreatening.
So now they had candidates to consider. Colvin was disqualified for being a pregnant teenager, and Smith wasn’t used because her dad was (falsely) rumored to have a drinking problem. It sounds ha
rsh, but the NAACP leaders knew that they couldn’t give the white community a single excuse to ignore them. They were playing a game of chess with a thousand moving pieces, and everything had to go exactly right for them to even make a splash.
Rosa Parks may have been the third woman arrested, but she looked like a nineteenth-century schoolmarm who might be carrying a bowl of warm oatmeal in her purse. She was the obvious choice, and the NAACP rode the momentum of that choice, and an increasingly sophisticated awareness campaign, to national prominence and eventually into history. And they did absolutely none of it by accident.
FIGURE 6.16 “Great, now give me ‘profoundly disappointed by the bigoted American judicial system.’ NAILED IT! We’re gonna be in so many fucking history books.”
Political Quiz Time!
Which U.S. president nicknamed his penis Jumbo and was fond of showing it to people with the slightest provocation? Was it:
A. Bill Clinton
B. Bill Clinton
C. Bill Clinton
The answer? None of the above. And no, it wasn’t JFK, either. Let us introduce you to the depraved world of Vietnam-era president Lyndon B. Johnson.
While other unfaithful presidents were satisfied with little affairs here and there, Johnson’s bevy of babes was referred to by his male aides as a “harem” (he was said to be jealous of Kennedy’s womanizing ways and wanted to top him). Johnson would make passes at secretaries, and it was known that any who accepted would be promoted to private secretary, two words that in this context should probably have air quotes around them. By the time he was done, virtually all of his secretaries, plus his two mistresses, got to meet Jumbo.
