How well do you know our presidents? Take the New England Historical Society Presidents Day quiz to find out!
[mlw_quizmaster quiz=3]
New England is as unlikely a place as there is to celebrate a Christmas first. After all, Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut officially banned the holiday. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that most New Englanders took the day off, let alone trimmed trees, sang carols or sent cards.
And yet, with a little imagination, we can find a Christmas first in each of the New England states.
First Christmas Tree in Connecticut
Painting of a German father and son collecting a tree, by Franz Krüger
A Hessian soldier named Hendrick Roddemore put up a Christmas tree in Windsor Locks, Conn., in 1777, giving Connecticut the claim to the first Christmas tree.
The Americans captured Roddemore, a mercenary, at the Battle of Bennington.
Many prisoners from that battle were sent to Boston and then elsewhere. Roddemore ended up at the farm of Samuel Denslow in Windsor Locks. Denslow let him live in a small cabin on what is now the Noden-Reed Farm and home of the Windsor Locks Historical Society.
In 1777, Roddemore raised a Christmas tree inside that small cabin. He continued to live there until well after the war, putting up a tree every year. Today, a stone marks the spot where Roddemore put up that first tree.
First North American Christmas in Maine
First buildings on St. Croix
Maine can claim perhaps the best Christmas first: the first Christmas, in 1604. It happened on St. Croix Island, the lost French colony of Maine.
St. Croix Island, now on the border between New Brunswick and Maine, was settled by a small band of Frenchmen headed by Sieur DeMons. Samuel Champlain served as historian and navigator. The expedition included thieves from Paris prisons and noblemen from the court of Henry IV, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, artisans, merchants and sailors.
The Frenchmen arrived in June, almost three years before Jamestown started. They built a fort, houses and a handmill, and they planted gardens and a field of rye.
On Christmas day, the French colonists, all men, attended services in a new chapel. They probably held two, one for the Protestants, one for the Catholics.
Then they gathered inside next to a roaring fire, told stories, joked and reminisced about France. They had a feast — perhaps roast venison or rabbit stew.
The St. Croix settlement did not last. Most of the men were felled by a mysterious disease – probably scurvy. By spring they decided to move, packed up their houses and moved to Port Royal, which is now Annapolis.
First American Christmas Card in Massachusetts
A Christmas first for Massachusetts: The Louis Prang Christmas card.
One man can take credit for the first American Christmas card: Louis Prang. He fled the German wars of 1848 and came to Boston. Prang went to work for an engraver, eventually setting up his own lithography shop.
The first Christmas card had already been sent in 1843 by an Englishman named Sir Henry Cole. He had a thousand cards designed and printed, but he couldn’t send them all. So he sold the leftovers for a shilling. Word spread about the cards, and soon English printers were churning them out.
The fad didn’t spread to America until Louis Prang found out about it. He decided the potential market was huge. In 1875 he printed his first Christmas cards for the London market, and the next year he sold them throughout the Northeast. It took but two more years for him to corner the greeting card market in the United States.
By 1881, Louis Prang was printing more than 5 million Christmas cards a year. His Prang Lithographic Factory in Roxbury became a tourist attraction, and he often conducted tours himself. His house and factory are still standing, the house at 45 Centre St. and the factory at 270-286 Roxbury St.
Eventually Louis Prang moved his business to Springfield, where he continued to make Christmas cards as well as child-safe art materials – which you can still buy under the Prang name.
A White House Christmas Tree from NH
The 1997 Christmas ornament depicting the Pierce White House
New Hampshire native Sarah Josepha Hale deserves credit for promoting the Christmas tree in her popular magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book.
In 1856, another New Hampshire native introduced the first Christmas tree to the White House.
President Franklin Pierce and First Lady Jane Pierce invited the Sunday school class of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church to join them in trimming the tree for Christmas. The Pierces were mourning for their son, Benny, who died in a train wreck shortly before they moved into the White House.
It was no accident that the Pierces chose a Sunday school class to trim the tree. Christmas trees had gained such acceptance in Sunday schools they were even called ‘Sunday school trees.’ Children who memorized Bible verses got rewarded with trinkets and candy hanging from the tree. When cold weather caused churchgoers to stay home, a decorated indoor tree enticed children to brave the winter temperatures.
The Pierces had never taken a Puritanical attitude toward Christmas. In 1824, Pierce’s father, Benjamin, hosted 21 veteran soldiers from the American Revolution to his home in Hillsoborough, N.H., for a Christmas feast.
Sighting of Santa Claus in RI
A Newport, R.I., resident wrote this
Clement Moore wrote A Visit From St. Nicholas for his children, never intending it to become the most popular Christmas poem ever. Nor did he expect it would forever define Santa Claus as a jolly old elf who flew around on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.
Moore grew up the son of the Episcopalian bishop of New York who twice served as president of Columbia University. His mother inherited a vast estate, now the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. Moore was an intellectual, a professor of Biblical Learning and author of the first Hebrew-American dictionary.
In 1822, Moore borrowed some Dutch and German Christmas lore for his poem, a gift to his six children. A friend copied it and submitted it to the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel. The newspaper published it on Dec. 23, 1823, and for many years thereafter. It wasn’t until 1837 that Moore was identified as the author. Moore himself didn’t acknowledge authorship until 1844 – and only because his children insisted.
So how does Rhode Island fit in?
Sometime in the 1850s, Moore bought a home in Newport, R.I., and became a summer resident.
The house is known as ‘Cedars,’ ‘Clement C. Moore House,’ and ‘The Night Before Christmas House.’ It still stands at 25 Catherine St., though it has been broken up into apartments. Some have claimed that he wrote ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ in Newport. The Redwood Library tells us that’s unlikely as the house hadn’t been built when Moore wrote the poem.
The First National Christmas Tree from Vermont
The National Christmas Tree.
In 1923, a General Electric engineer named Frederick Morris Feiker wrote to President Calvin Coolidge suggesting he light the national Christmas tree on the Ellipse. Coolidge asked the president of Middlebury College to donate a tree from Vermont.
Wealthy Middlebury alumni paid to ship the 48-foot-tall balsam fir to Washington, D.C. A crane put the tree in place a few weeks before Christmas, and $5,000 worth of GE electrical cables illuminated the 2,500 red, white and green Christmas lights.
At 3 p.m. on Dec. 24, a choir began a two-hour concert of Christmas carols. At dusk, President Coolidge pushed the button to light the tree. As many as 9,000 people came to the Ellipse to sing carols over the next four hours.
This story was updated in 2020.
When the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower, they brought with them two dogs described as a spaniel and a mastiff. Though their names are unknown, the pet names of many famous four-legged New Englanders have not been lost to history.
John Adams and his wife Abigail were the first inhabitants of the White House, and their dogs were the first to romp on the White House lawn. The Adamses had two mutts named Juno and Satan. “If you love me … you must love my dog,” Abigail wrote in a letter to her granddaughter, Caroline Smith. As president, John Adams had the White House stables built, presumably to house his horse Cleopatra.
‘Love me, love my dog.’ Abigail Adams, detail from painting by Gilbert Stuart
Satan and Sin
Mark Twain loved cats and loved to play pool. Whenever he played, he put a kitten into the corner pocket.
“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote. So great was his affection for cats that he once rented two kittens, named Sackcloth and Ashes, during a summer stay in Dublin, N.H.
His pet names for his cats also included Sour Mash, Appollinaris, Zoraster, Blatherkite and Beelzebub. His favorite: Bambino.
Mark Twain and friend.
He had a black cat named Satan and a tortoise-shell cat named Sin. They got along well.
“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote.
“I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one,” he said. “They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”
Henry David Thoreau had a pet cat named Sylvia. Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently didn’t much like animals and had no pets. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Una had a Newfoundland named Leo.
Smart Setter?
Author Thomas Bailey Aldrich had an Irish setter named Grip, who he believed was smarter than some men he knew. The dog loved to bring Aldrich’s slippers from the bedroom to the parlor. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier had a dog named Robin Adair.
Daniel Webster wasn’t terribly fond of dogs or cats, but he loved oxen. When the great statesman returned to his Marshfield farm to die, one of his last pleasures was to sit in his window and admire his oxen. He was said to know them all by name, but alas, those pet names are lost to us.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., during his two-year voyage aboard the Pilgrim, adopted a dog he named Bravo in San Diego. Frederick Law Olmsted took a bull terrier named Judy along when he traveled the South to write about slavery.
Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait
Abolitionist John Brown loved animals and gave pet names to many. As a boy he had a pet squirrel named Bobtail. He raised sheep and had two shepherd dogs named Toss and Jack.
A Vice Named Cuddle Bunch
Louisa May Alcott joked her vices included an inordinate love of cats. She had a black cat named Cuddle Bunch who “had a fit,” and fell out of a window to her death.
Harriet Beecher Stowe loved her cat named Calvin who, according to Charles Dudley Warner, “walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home.” Stowe named Calvin after her husband and let him sit on her shoulder while she wrote.
Marian Anderson owned two Kerry Blue terriers, Falla, after President Roosevelt’s dog, and Fenon.
Presidential Pet Names
Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace brought a menagerie to the White House. Their pets included white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, terriers named Peter Pan and Paul Pry, a Shetland sheepdog named Calamity Jane, chow chows named Tiny Tim and Blackberry, a bulldog named Boston Beans and a German shepherd named King Cole.
The Kennedy family on vacation with their dogs. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
The John F. Kennedy White House was filled with pets comprised of a mutt named Pushinka, a gift from Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev. Other pet names included a German shepherd named Clipper, a cocker spaniel named Shannon, an Irish wolfhound named Shannon, and the president’s favorite dog, a Welsh terrier named Charlie.
The First Couple often took one or two of the family dogs out for a walk under the cover of darkness. Traphes Bryant, the White House dog handler, said the people didn’t recognize them as Secret Service agents followed discreetly in a car. Sometimes, Bryant said, they “looked like two young college kids taking the dogs for a walk. They looked so happy.”
Cultural Pet Names
Leonard Bernstein, who grew up in Lawrence and later lived in Redding, Conn., owned a series of Dachsunds all named Henry. As an adult he owned a sheltie named Honey.
Bernstein incorporated the pet names of his friends’ animals into his music. The Library of Congress’s collection of his music manuscripts includes a trumpet score in Bernstein’s writing called Rondo (for Lifey). He sent it to actress Judy Holliday, whose dog was named Lifey. The music and lyric sketches for Bernstein’s orchestral composition Slava! have an alternate title on the title page: Puk – the pet name for Rostropovich’s dog.
The Bernstein family and Honey. Photo courtesy Library of Congress .
T.S. Eliot, though he grew up in St. Louis, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Eliots and summered in Gloucester, Mass. Eliot wrote “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” full of eccentric pet names like Skimbleshanks, Growltiger, Mr. Mistoffelees and Gus.. The book became the Broadway musical Cats.
And Lillian Jackson Braun, a native of Chicopee Falls, Mass., also invented fictional cats — Koko and Yum Yum — in her The Cat Who… mystery series.
This story about the pet names of famous New Englanders was updated in 2022.
The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.
Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.
Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.
The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.
A Thimble island
According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.
The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.
Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.
Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.
The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.
Bar Harbor, Maine
President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.
President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.
Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.
Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.
Hancock House
A Summer White House in Maine
Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.
He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.
“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”
However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.
Taft at his summer White House
And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.
Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.
Hyannis Port, Mass.
The Kennedy Big House
The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.
The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.
In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.
John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.
The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931
The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.
To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.
Cornish, N.H.
Harlakenden House
Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.
Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.
On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.
The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.
At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.
Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.
Newport, R.I.
Eisenhower House
In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.
He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.
Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.
It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.
Plymouth Notch, Vt.
Plymouth Notch
Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.
His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.
Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.
The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.
Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.
Brigadoon as a Summer White House
The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”
Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916
Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.
“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.”
Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.
This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2022.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams may be tied for the honor of worst presidential father, or “Tiger Dad,” according to Joshua Kendall.
Kendall presents psychological profiles of every president as a parent in his book First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama. Franklin Pierce and Calvin Coolidge, for example, were grief-stricken by the loss of their sons. Chester A. Arthur indulged his children, and his son Alan grew up into a polo-playing playboy. The Adamses were ridiculously strict, with sometimes tragic results.
“John said to John Quincy, ‘Unless you’re president you’re a failure,” Kendall said in an interview with the New England Historical Society.
John Adams, Tiger Dad
John Adams was obsessed with instilling greatness in his sons John Quincy, Charles and Thomas.
He demanded they translate Thucydides at age 10 and sent them to foreign cities as preteens to work under fellow diplomats. When 14-year-old John Quincy was in Petersburg, Russia, working as secretary for diplomat Francis Dana, Adams criticized his letter writing.
You have not informed me whether the Houses are brick, stone or wood, whether they are seven stories high or one…You have said nothing about the religion of the country; whether it is Catholic or protestant.
In 1794, John Adams even chastised his teenaged son for possibly not becoming president of the United States:
You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre. And if you do not rise to the head not only of your own profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness and obstinacy.
John Quincy Adams responded to his demanding father and became not only president but secretary of state and member of Congress, where he led opposition to slavery.
“The first and deepest of all my wishes is to give satisfaction to my parents,” John Quincy Adams once wrote.
John Adams’ other two sons didn’t fare so well. Both became drunks and failed as lawyers. Thomas ended up living with his parents, unable to support himself and disappearing for days on drinking binges. He died in a carriage accident at 59.
Kendall writes that Charles may have been gay. “Some think he may have had a relationship with Baron von Steuben,” he said. John Adams eventually disowned Charles, which horrified Abigail, Kendall said.
Adams later rued his harsh treatment of his sons, and rebuked John Quincy for following his own example.
Following Father’s Footsteps
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams demanded as much from his sons as his father had, with a similar outcome. A genetic disposition to alcoholism and depression may have contributed to the failures of two of his sons. George Washington Adams and John Adams II both died young.
John Quincy Adams so intimidated his son George Washington that the boy dumped a girlfriend after simply dreaming his father chastised him for kissing her. And he wouldn’t let his 14-year-old son Charles come home from Harvard for Christmas because of his grades. Charles spent the holiday studying at school.
John Adams II drank himself to death at the age of 31.
George Washington Adams managed to graduate from Harvard and to start a mediocre law practice, but he drank heavily, ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child with a chambermaid.
As John Quincy Adams was preparing to leave the presidency, he ordered George to Washington to help his parents move to Boston. George was said to have ‘quivered with fear’ at the prospect of his parents’ reproach. Distraught, George boarded a steamship in Providence, and on June 9, 1829, he fell or jumped overboard and drowned, an apparent suicide.
According to Kendall, John Quincy Adams felt extreme guilt over George’s death. He softened with his youngest son, Charles, who became a success: ambassador to Britain, member of Congress and historian.
And as the father of seven children, Charles did not repeat the mistakes of his father and grandfather.
Joshua Kendall
This story was updated in 2022.
Three of New England’s First Fathers lost children to death after they were elected President of the United States. Franklin Pierce and Calvin Coolidge were so grief-stricken they could barely cope with their duties. First Father John F. Kennedy reacted differently to the death of his infant son.
First Fathers who lost a son — Coolidge, Kennedy, Pierce.
In his book, First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama, author Joshua Kendall presents psychological profiles of every president as a parent.
“Psychologists say grief can either break a parent or reshape a parent,” Kendall said in a recent interview with the New England Historical Society. In the case of Pierce and Coolidge, it broke them.
Psychologists also have the concept of post-traumatic growth. “Sometimes it energizes a person in a strange way,” Kendall said. That seems to have been the case with Kennedy.
Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce was considered a dynamo when he was elected president in 1852. He was a popular speaker elected with more than half the vote, something no Democrat would do until 1932.
Kendall argues Pierce suffered chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in January 1853. He took the train from Andover, N.H., with his wife and his third and only surviving son, Benny. The train crashed, and wood fell on the 11-year-old’s head. Pierce picked him up, not realizing he was dead until he took off his cap. The boy’s head was like jelly.
Franklin Pierce, one of the grief-stricken First Fathers.
Pierce never got over it.
A week after his son died, Pierce wrote former Sen. Jefferson Davis — his future Secretary of War — “How shall I be able to summon my manhood to gather up my energies for the duties before me, it is hard for me to see,” he wrote.
“It fried his brain,” Kendall said. “His wife goes psycho, writes letters to dead children.”
Kendall said Pierce’s close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t mind that he was never invited to the White House because his wife was so impossible.
Pierce became fanatically obsessed with the health of children.
“OK, Pierce was a lousy president, but we have to give him some slack,” Kendall said.
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge was full of energy until his son Calvin, Jr., died of a staph infection on July 7, 1924, after playing tennis without his socks.
“Just like with Pierce, the before and after is very striking,” Kendall said. “His depression may have caused the Great Depression. He was asleep at the switch.”
Coolidge slept 11 hours a day. He was cold and distant to his remaining son John, treating him harshly. While still in the White House he said he always saw his boy playing tennis on the court out there.
Calvin Coolidge, wearing a black armband for President Harding
The death of his son probably caused Coolidge to decline running for re-election, a race he almost surely would have won. When he died, Dorothy Parker said, “How can you tell?”
Coolidge’s wife Grace grew past her trauma and move beyond her son’s death. “Grace mourns and integrates the experience, and was very present with her remaining child,” Kendall said.
First Father JFK
John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie had a rocky marriage because of all his womanizing, Kendall said. As a parent, he was disconnected from his two young children.
Then Jackie gave birth to a son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died two days later on Aug. 9, 1963.
Official White House portrait of John F. Kennedy by Aaron Shikler
“Most JFK experts believe this shared tragedy was bringing them together,” Kendall said. “It almost had a therapeutic effect on their marriage.”
Kennedy was assassinated less than three months later.
Playful Pal
The death of a child shaped still another president.
George W. Bush was what Kendall calls a ‘playful pal’ to his twin daughters. He was shaped by the death of his sister, Robin. “Barbara Bush is totally fried by the loss,” Kendall said. “George W. then become very playful in order to cheer his mother up.”
Three of New England’s First Fathers lost children to death after they were elected President of the United States. Franklin Pierce and Calvin Coolidge were so grief-stricken they could barely cope with their duties. First Father John F. Kennedy reacted differently to the death of his infant son.
This story about First Fathers was updated in 2022.
