Balls in the ballroom — what a concept! I know one time Princess Diana and John Travolta danced together at the White House. Was it a full scale ball? Where are the balls of today? It seems that we only have red carpet arrivals and then people sitting around at tables. So this passage jumped out at me as I was reading James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned)("Her" = Adams's wife, Louisa):
Her fortnightly teas became so popular that she tried to restrict the crowd by decreeing that henceforward no dancing would be permitted, but Washington society came and insisted on dancing. Washington now had a little bit of the dazzle the Adamses had known in foreign capitals. When Congress was in session, balls and fine dinners were held almost every night. The most magnificent house in Washington had been empty since its owner, Commodore Stephen Decatur, the great naval hero of the War of 1812, had been killed in a foolish duel in March 1820. But now Baron Hyde de Neuville had purchased the three-story mansion on Lafayette Square and threw splendid parties there. For a time, the Adams house was filled with music and dancing and even giggling and flirting.... A dancing master came for as much as three hours a day to teach all the young folk.
Key words: almost every night. Nowadays, it seems you only hear of balls — the dancing kind of balls (not the "Big Balls" kind of balls) — during inaugurations. I'd like to see Trump's new ballroom used for dancing, and perhaps he's the person to get people dancing. It took a person to incite all that dancing that was going on in Washington circa 1820. Of course, the person was not John Quincy Adams, and it wasn't his wife Louisa. It was Dolley Madison.
"... that he’d told aides that he wanted to pay his first visit 'to a place where they speak Spanish, because I’m bilingual,' proceeding to show off his fluency in the language. Mr. Rubio acknowledged America’s complicated history with Panama, a former Colombian territory that was founded after President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, eyeing the potential for a shortcut between America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, backed breakaway separatists who declared independence in 1903. Mr. Rubio noted that the country 'was born in many ways here as a result of the interests of the United States,' and said the relationship had had its 'ups and downs.' The downs include a 1989 U.S. invasion of the country to arrest the country’s de facto ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering.... [Panama's President José Raúl] Mulino also said on Sunday that Panama, which in 2017 became the first country in the region to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure program, would not renew the agreement...."
The NYT says Rubio "showed off" his fluency in Spanish and "joked" about it, as if it were an amusing side line. But it is important and tremendously useful to his role as Secretary of State. Perhaps to recognize its high value would be to impugn all the many Secretaries of State who were not fluent in Spanish.
If my research — hastily done on Grok — is correct, there was only one other Secretary of State who was fluent in Spanish. That was Henry Clay, back in the time of John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829. What about Thomas Jefferson? — you may be wondering. Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, was fluent in French, Latin, and Italian, but had only a minimal knowledge of Spanish.
"... to take control. And then the GOP makes Trump speaker. Then Trump has control over the legislative agenda and impeachment. Fun ensues."
So said Tom, commenting on the first post of the day today.
I don't know if Tom is the first person to say that, but what an interesting scenario. It has happened before that a former President has gone on to serve in the House of Representatives:
[John Quincy] Adams considered permanently retiring from public life after his 1828 defeat, and he was deeply hurt by the suicide of his son, George Washington Adams, in 1829. He was appalled by many of the Jackson administration's actions... Adams grew bored of his retirement and still felt that his career was unfinished, so he ran for and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives in the 1830 elections. His election went against the generally held opinion, shared by his own wife and youngest son, that former presidents should not run for public office. Nonetheless, he would win election to nine terms, serving from 1831 until his death in 1848. Adams and Andrew Johnson are the only former presidents to serve in Congress....
In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?
I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...
... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.
IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:
I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.
In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.
Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.
Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."
I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:
After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...
As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.
"... a sham democracy driven by personal ambition, partisan corruption, and shameless pandering that disguised the powerful interests truly in charge [according to Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, in 'The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality']. The Adamses had the nerve to point out the chicanery of this racket, and for that, the authors argue, historians have dismissed them as out-of-touch, misanthropic stuffed shirts. Isenberg and Burstein want to recover and vindicate what they describe as a lost 'Adamsian' vision of a more elevated, virtuous, balanced, nonpartisan polity, so unlike the system that defeated them, the all-too-familiar forerunner of our own. By the Adamses’ standards, Trump is not an aberration. He is an exemplar of everything in our politics that they resisted in vain, especially the fraudulent party democracy that substitutes tribal loyalties and celebrity worship for informed debate. But this view of the past and the present is flawed, historically as well as politically. The Adamses were chiefly the victims not of undeserving charlatans but of their own political ineptitude. And the crisis that has given us Donald Trump has arisen not from the excesses of a party politics the Adamses despised, but from the deterioration of the parties over recent decades.... Trump is not a creature of the party politics pioneered by Jefferson and Jackson. He is its antithesis, a would-be strongman who captured the presidency by demonizing party politics as a sham. He will be stopped only if the Democrats can mount a reinvigorated, disciplined party opposition. In that struggle, the Adamsian tradition is at best useless and at worst a harmful distraction."
The other day, talking to Meade, I made the stray observation: "Nobody says 'the man in the street' anymore."
It was a common colloquialism in news reports years ago. It's hard to take note of when something stops getting said. Decades could pass before you notice that something has disappeared from the language. Maybe the death of "the man in the street" began in the 1970s, with the success of the women's movement, as it became less and less possible for mainstream folks to convince themselves that "man" includes woman. Perhaps there was a transitional period in which reporters — perhaps literally in the street with their microphones seeking random comments from passersby — said "the man — or woman — in the street," before that got old and sounded corny and then nobody ever said it again.
Yesterday, Meade and I were watching "Jeopardy!" It's "College Championship" time and all the players are college students. The board full of answers in need of questions is stocked with things that younger people know — pop singers, movie superheroes, school-level math, history, and science and so forth. The kids buzz in and get many questions right. But yesterday, they had an answer that drew absolutely vacant stares and even puzzlement when Alex Trebek revealed the question. The answer was: The middle initial of John Public. The question: What is Q? I laughed a lot, because I could see that from the kids' perspective, that was just some weird nonsense.
Nobody says "John Q. Public" anymore. Like "man in the street," the term embodies the general public in a single person. This time, that person has a name, John Q. Public. I'm going to assume, it's gone away because we won't accept the idea that the public can be personified as a male, and that also means the whole idea of the general public as one person just doesn't work anymore. If there was ever a period when people adapted to changing times by saying, cutesily, "John Q. — and Jane Q. — Public," I missed it.
Now, it just seems goofy, I suppose, to people who don't remember the common usage, to hear that John Public has a middle initial and it's Q. What's the Q for? From the OED:
1937 N. & Q. 6 Mar. 177/2 ‘John Citizen’..is not so frequent in American usage as ‘John Q. Public’... It is probably a play on the name of an early president, John Q(uincy) Adams.
I think it's more like Jesus H. Christ. An initial just seems funny. And if you want funny, there's no funnier letter than Q.
As for Jesus H. Christ, well, what's that about? Hilariously, there's a Wikipedia entry for Jesus H. Christ — which, you may realize, is "a vulgarism" that "is not used in the context of Christian worship." Mark Twain referred to it in his autobiography as typical of "the common swearers of the region," so the usage goes way back. Some people attribute it to "the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus (Ἰησοῦς)... transliterated iota-eta-sigma, which can look like IHS." There's also an idea that the H is for Harold — from mishearing "hallowed be thy name" the Lord's Prayer as Harold be thy name.
IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O said "Monty Python had man in the street segments":
BEST: cool illustrations (of John Quincy Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.); appropriate selection criteria (do good work, don't undermine your successors, etc.); actually saying something nice about Nixon (a "purposeful post-presidency," becoming a "respected elder statesman").
WORST: Acting like they're offering help to Obama (who's "deeply engaged in his presidency," but must be thinking about his post-presidency), when the subject obviously came up because of Hillary Clinton and her ex-president spouse coming in for criticism for their grandiose and lucrative posturings in the direction of great good work.
I received email from the President just now. The subject line: My last campaign.
Ann --
In a few days, I'll be hitting the trail for my last campaign.
[Blah.. blah... request for donation omitted.]
Thanks,
Barack
His last campaign?
The man is 50 years old. His career is young. He's packing it in so early? This troubles me. Why no more stamina in the political arena?
I mean, what if he loses in November? He could run again. He could let 3 presidential terms pass and come back and only be as old as Romney is right now!
(Also at that link: the names of the 7 Presidents who sought the presidency after they were out of office. You probably know the name of the individual who won, but do you know the 6 who tried and failed?)
Why doesn't Obama have more gumption? It makes him seem too weak even now as he seeks reelection. Last campaign. That's annoying.
You know, the first time I ever voted for a Republican, it was 1976 and I decided I couldn't vote for Carter. It was one thing that he said that turned me against him. He was asked — very shortly before election day — what he would do if he lost. He said he'd go back to his peanut farm and be a farmer. I didn't like that. I thought: Not much of a statesman.
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