#american presidents
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liskantope · 1 day ago
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As per every-four-years tradition on this blog, I'm reblogging my massive American presidential election history trivial post that I originally wrote 8 years ago and then heavily edited in 2020. I'm a little too weary to add anything to it this time around. The main development to update on here is that now there's actually a whole (very lengthy) Wikipedia page on Andrew Johnson's drunkenness at his vice-presidential inaugural address in 1865.
A smattering of American history trivia
On a lighter note, I want to share a few fun facts I learned during my recent stroll through the history of American presidential politics during the weeks leading up to this election.  I meant to write and post this on election day actually but then got sidetracked [EDIT: meaning, four years ago in 2016 when I originally posted this]; still, I don’t want to wait until everyone decides it’s time for a break from chattering about presidential politics altogether.  Anyway, without further ado, here is a rather long list of the factoids from American history (mainly related to presidential elections) most of which I hadn’t known before but found the most interesting.  Massive infodump below the cut:
Keep reading
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i-am-trans-gwender · 20 days ago
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If Tumblr existed in the 1880's Abraham Lincoln would have been a Tumblr Sexy Man.
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blueberry-bubbles130 · 4 months ago
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Showing historical figures fanfiction of them:
American politician edition!
Please select one of these figures and explain why you have chosen them in the reblogs.
I’ve read a bit of fanfiction of a few of these politicians. Most of these are presidents, because despite studying a decent amount of American history. I can only add a certain amount of answers to the poll.
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xoxo-bunnydumpling · 2 years ago
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Other Americans: I'd be so mad if we had a King that spent all our taxes on a party for himself
Me, knowing we pay former presidents amd First Ladies a salary for the rest of their natural lives: Yeah that's crazy GUESS WHAT STUPID SHIT WE PAY FOR THAT BENEFITS US NOT AT ALL *insert political and socioeconomic info dump here*
If you didn't know...
The Former President's Act ensures a lifetime pension/salary for, uhhh former presidents (the name is super on the nose) roughly equal to that of a Cabinet secretary which (thanks Google!) is $226,000 as of 2022. They used to also be given 10 years of Secret Service protection but that's lifetime now as well.
Pensions are not unheard of in private sector jobs at all, but...when was the last time YOU made $226,000 a year? Just saying.
EAT THEM.
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that relatable feeling when you don’t want to do more work in class so you attempt to create former president woodrow wilson x also former president john tyler brokeback mountain yaoi fanart on ms paint instead
if these computers are monitored i’ll cry btw
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onesleepyboii · 7 months ago
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i’m really sad rn because no one understands why i find jfk hot and every time i tell someone they stare at me like i’ve said the same words that caused the devil to be cast aside like another mosquito getting its wings cut off and left to suffer
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mckinleygirl98 · 2 months ago
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PARTS two and three of americatube comment fight
plus a highlight of later parts
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under the cut is the little sneak peak nobody asked for
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school tomorrow (i'm probs gonna be making americatube during class ngl, it's really entertaining)
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citizenscreen · 9 months ago
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100 years ago today, President Calvin Coolidge became the first President to deliver a radio address from the White House. #OnThisDay
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digitalyarbs · 1 year ago
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The Real Face of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s reconstructed life mask. The mask was cast of his head and upper torso by John Henri Issac Browere in 1825. yarbs.net
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wafflelovingbatgirl · 2 years ago
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Harry Truman, Ulysses Grant, what’s up with the S?
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macaron-n-cheese · 1 year ago
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I made this stupid tierlist. 5 hours of my life well spent /s.
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here-a-lee-there-a-lee · 2 years ago
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James Madison at his Inaugural Ball in 1809
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black-deaths-babygirl · 2 years ago
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i feel like we don’t talk about how people used to ship founding fathers enough
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blueberry-bubbles130 · 3 months ago
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Okay people you know the drill by now. Showing historical figures fanfiction of them:
American Politician edition. Round two!
I never once in my years of existence that I would ever read a fanfiction that had Jimmy Carter and Abby Lee Miller in it. But here we are.
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xtruss · 2 months ago
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The Top-Secret World War II Mission That Killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., The Heir Apparent To The Political Dynasty
In August 1944, the Older Brother of Robert and John F. Kennedy Died While Piloting a Drone Aircraft over England, Leaving His Younger Siblings to Fulfill Their Father’s Dreams
— Meilan Solly, Senior Associate Digital Editor, History
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L to R: John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in London in 1937 Keystone / Getty Images
By all accounts, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s war should have been over.
As Allied forces advanced on the Western Front in the summer of 1944, the Navy lieutenant completed his 50th mission—twice the number required to fulfill a tour of duty abroad. Instead of returning home to the United States, however, he volunteered for a top-secret operation named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.
“I am going to do something different for the next three weeks,” Joe Jr. wrote in a letter to his parents. “It is secret and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous, so don’t worry.” Somewhat wary in his response to his eldest son, the lieutenant’s father, former Ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., advised, “I can quite understand how you feel about staying there … but don’t force your luck too much.”
Three days after Joe Sr. wrote his reply, the hollowed-out aircraft carrying Joe Jr. and his co-pilot exploded over England, killing both men. The mission represented a fatal failure for Operation Aphrodite, which sought to transform battle-worn bombers into uncrewed, radio-controlled missiles—in essence, early drones.
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The last known photograph of Joe Jr., taken on the day of his death, August 12, 1944. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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Joe Jr. in uniform. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
On a more personal level, Joe Jr.’s death at age 29 dealt a staggering blow to his father’s grand dreams for the future. Groomed for the presidency since his birth, Joe Jr. had served as a delegate at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, with plans to run for Congress after the war. Upon hearing the news of his brother’s demise, John F. Kennedy, the family’s second-oldest son, reportedly remarked, “Now the burden falls on me.”
Previously “considered too ‘sloppy,’ fun-loving and physically unhealthy” for a career in politics, in the words of the London Times, John secured seats in the House of Representative and the Senate before narrowly winning the 1960 presidential election, becoming the first Irish Catholic commander in chief and the youngest person elected to the nation’s highest office to date.
“Just as I went into politics because Joe died,” John later said in an eerily prescient remark, “if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run. … And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.”
Born on July 25, 1915, Joe Jr. was the first child of Joe Sr., a wealthy businessman and prominent Massachusetts politician, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the daughter of a Boston mayor. The oldest of nine, Joe Jr. bore “a certain forcefulness of character that marked him as a natural leader” even in his youth, wrote Rose in her memoir. His younger siblings looked up to him, and he, in turn, set a strong example for them by excelling in school and sports. Still, Rose recalled, Joe Jr. “got into his share of mischief,” particularly when partnered with John, who was two years his junior. In 1923, the brothers wrote a song about bedbugs and cooties and started a club with a steep entry fee: To be initiated into the organization, new members had to consent to getting stuck with pins.
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L to R: Joe Jr., Kathleen Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy and John in Cohasset, Massachusetts, circa 1926 or 1927 © John F. Kennedy Library Foundation / Kennedy Family Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Both Joe Jr. and John attended Choate, a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. There, Joe Jr. played football and edited the student yearbook. Before enrolling at Harvard University, his father’s alma mater, he spent the 1933 to 1934 school year studying under Jewish political scientist Harold Laski at the London School of Economics.
Joe Jr.’s time in Europe coincided with the rise of Adolf Hitler; when he visited Germany, he learned about the Nazis’ forced sterilization program—a policy he praised for doing “away with many of the disgusting specimens of men which inhabit this earth.” According to historian Kate Clifford Larson, Joe Jr. “held quite conservative views about the disabled,” a stance that was surprising given his close relationship with his younger sister Rosemary Kennedy, who had intellectual disabilities. Despite Joe Jr.’s similarly respectful attitude toward Laski, he also espoused antisemitic sentiment, claiming that Hitler had offered the “scattered, despondent and … divorced from hope” Germans a common enemy. “It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews,” Joe Jr. wrote to his father. “This dislike of Jews, however, was well founded.”
Joe Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1938, then joined his family in London, where his father was serving as the U.S. ambassador. In February 1939, the 23-year-old traveled to Madrid, arriving soon after a shelling by insurgents fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Not dispatched on official business, he was “just looking around,” Joe Sr. told the Associated Press, adding, “His mother will die when she hears he is in Madrid.”
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The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 1931. Joe Jr. is in the back row at right. Richard Sears/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
The following year, Joe Jr. made headlines as a DNC delegate who pledged to vote for Postmaster General James Farley over incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt. Under pressure to switch his allegiance to the president, particularly as the son of an ambassador appointed by Roosevelt, he remained steadfast in his choice, believing that no commander in chief should be allowed to serve three terms. The burgeoning politician’s conduct at the convention won him the admiration of prominent attendees, one of whom told Joe Sr. that his son “seemed to gain the respect of everybody there,” adding, “I am sure he can have a political future if he wants one.”
Though Joe Jr. returned to Harvard for law school, he ultimately decided to enlist in the Navy as a pilot in June 1941 instead of finishing his degree. Prompted in part by his father’s staunch opposition to the U.S.’s entry into World War II—a scenario that seemed increasingly likely in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor—he defended his decision in a letter to Joe Sr.: “With your stand on the war, … people will wonder what the devil I am doing back at school with everyone else working for national defense.” John soon followed in his older brother’s footsteps, relying on his family connections to secure a position in the Naval Reserve, despite back issues that would normally have barred him from serving. When the U.S. finally joined the war in December 1941, both brothers were partway through naval training.
“Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. to Get Naval ‘Wings’ Today as Dad Looks On,” read a May 5, 1942, headline in the Boston Globe. The title telegraphed the family dynamics at play, underscoring the pressure placed on Joe Jr. by his father, whose presence and influence loomed large. Adding to the weight of Joe Sr.’s expectations was the surprising military success of John, who received a promotion to lieutenant and command of his own boat by the end of 1942. As his younger brother led a squadron patrolling for Japanese ships in the Solomon Islands, Joe Jr. was relegated to a naval air base in Virginia, where he launched lower-risk patrols in search of German U-boats.
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Joe Jr. on the campus of Harvard University in 1938 Bettmann via Getty Images
On the night of August 1, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed into John’s boat, PT-109, knocking its crew into the water and ripping the starboard side clean off. Then 26 years old, Kennedy exhibited great bravery during the incident, leading the 11 surviving sailors to a nearby island before swimming, sometimes solo, to neighboring islands in search of food and aid.
The press, the Navy, and friends and family alike praised John as a hero. But while Joe Jr. was certainly glad that his younger brother had escaped death, he felt overshadowed and was eager to prove himself. “Colleagues commented later on his intense preoccupation with putting himself in harm’s way, and thus on the path to publicly recognized heroism,” wrote Edward J. Renehan Jr. in The Kennedys at War: 1937-1945. As fellow pilot Louis Papas later recalled, “There was never an occasion for a mission that meant extra hazard that Joe did not volunteer. He had everybody’s unlimited admiration and respect for his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous missions.”
Sent to Great Britain in September 1943, Joe Jr. spent the next several months flying patrols over the Atlantic, the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, piloting PB4Y Liberator bombers on anti-submarine details. By May 1944, he’d flown the 25 missions required for reassignment to the U.S., losing his co-pilot and numerous colleagues to enemy anti-aircraft fire in the process. Though he had permission to return home, he opted to stay in the fight. As he told his parents in mid-June, “I now have 39 missions and will probably have 50 by the time I leave. It is far more than anyone else on the base, but it doesn’t prove a hell of a lot.”
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John (left) and Joe Jr. in their naval uniforms Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In the summer of 1944, Joe Jr. volunteered first for Operation Cork, an air patrol connected to the Allied invasion of France, and then for Operation Aphrodite and its Navy counterpart, Operation Anvil. The top-secret project was aimed at taking down the Nazis’ steel-reinforced concrete bunkers in occupied France, from which the Germans were launching their devastating V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles. Uncrewed, gyro-controlled jets packed with explosives, the projectiles offered a low-risk way of terrorizing the British from afar.
Commander James Doolittle, of the Army’s Eighth Air Force, suggested converting war-weary bombers into pilotless missiles. “Control and autopilot technology [were] sufficiently immature to make the … program incredibly risky, but the perceived benefits justified the potential costs,” wrote Roger Connor, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, in a 2014 blog post. Though the bombers were remote-controlled, they required a two-person crew to get the aircraft off the ground and ensure it stayed on course.
When Joe Jr. heard about the operation, he readily volunteered for it. According to an account by a fellow officer, the lieutenant, “regarded as an experienced Patrol Plane Commander and … an expert in radio control projects,” was tasked with piloting “a ‘drone’ Liberator bomber loaded with 21,170 pounds of high explosives into the air and [staying] with it until two ‘mother��� planes had achieved complete radio control over the ‘drone.’” After completing this transfer of control, Joe Jr. and co-pilot Wilford J. Willy were supposed to bail out over England, parachuting to safety as the plane continued on to the V-1 bunkers.
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The motley group of Allied aircraft needed for the mission—among them a Mosquito carrying the president’s second-oldest son, Elliott Roosevelt, who was tasked with capturing the flight on film—took off from a Royal Air Force base shortly after 6 p.m. on August 12, 1944. Eighteen minutes into the mission, Joe Jr. shared a message over the radio: “Spade Flush,” the code phrase for the bomber to be handed off to the mother ship. At approximately 6:20 p.m., as Joe Jr. and Willy awaited the signal to bail out, two explosions rocked the plane, killing the pilots and nearly destroying the other aircraft in the formation. The pair’s bodies were never found.
The accident was “the biggest explosion I ever saw until the pictures of the atom bomb,” a pilot on board the mother ship said. No one on the ground was hurt, but debris from the wreck rained down on the English countryside, with one local witnessing an “enormous black pall of smoke resembling a huge octopus, the tentacles below indicating the earthward paths of burning fragments.” The cause of the disaster was never identified, but mechanical failure was a leading theory.
Operation Aphrodite continued through January 1945, with little success. In recognition of the pilots’ sacrifice, the government awarded Joe Jr. and Willy the Navy Cross, the second-highest military decoration. John, meanwhile, won the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the highest non-combat award for heroism, for his actions aboard PT-109.
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Joe Jr. sitting in an aircraft during training in 1941 Bettmann via Getty Images
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John and his wife, Jackie Kennedy, watch a boat race while on board the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a destroyer named in Joe Jr.'s honor Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Kennedys deeply mourned Joe Jr.’s death. With no body to bury and scant details of his final moments (the mission remained classified until after the war), the family commemorated their eldest son with a privately published book titled As We Remember Joe. In the text, John—now the heir apparent—wrote:
It may be felt, perhaps, that Joe should not have pushed his luck so far and should have accepted his leave and come home. But two facts must be borne in mind. First, at the time of his death, he had completed probably more combat missions in heavy bombers than any other pilot of his rank in the Navy and therefore was preeminently qualified, and secondly, as he told a friend early in August, he considered the odds at least 50-50, and Joe never asked for any better odds than that.
Despite the grief he felt over Joe Jr.’s death, Joe Sr. remained resolute in his ambitions for his family. “We’ve got to carry on,” he told his wife. “We must take care of the living. There is a lot of work to be done.” According to legend, Joe Sr. called John into a meeting, where he announced that the younger son would take his brother’s place as the family’s representative on the national stage. “It was like being drafted,” the future president later said. “My father wanted his oldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.”
Joe Jr., for his part, had seemingly predicted how events would play out in the event of his death. In a letter written just before his enlistment in the Navy, he wryly commented, “It seems that Jack is perfectly capable to do everything, if by chance anything happened to me.”
— 12 August 2022
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sailerboy · 2 months ago
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Of presidential concern!
Did you know that there are two kinds of coup. The formal definition of these are.
A self coup is when we elect someone and he has a determination to stay in power.
A plain coup, is an illegal and overt attempt by a military organization or other government elites to unseat an incumbent leadership.
Let’s assume we elect someone who broadcasts that you will never have to vote again. I assume he wants to become someone like leaders in Venezuela, Africa, Russia, North Korea..for example. He will have control of the justice system, and possibly all constitutional rules plus foreign policy. And if the main government court gives him the power to legally let out the rioters like men in the January 6 insurrection , the self coup turns into a plain coup.
If our justice system gives him the power, then he can legally justify murder, and other types of revenge on constituents, the public, the opposing party and on opposing states by stating that he has the justification.
I hope this is not what America is coming to. I am just thinking of what will my country be like if a leader tries that tactic. We could have no free speech, less military to protect us, less central and personal services and freedom, more individual costs due to tariffs and control of the taxing system.
Does this ring a bell?
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