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Chester A. Arthur

New Release: ‘Eat Like a President’ in Paperback and Ebook

If you really want to know what a president was like, find out what he ate. That’s what Leslie and Dan Landrigan did with the six presidents from New England. The authors wrote the New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President: 30 Recipes from the White House to Your House, which tells you about the presidents’ families, their servants, their friends — and how they struggled to run the White House and the country at the same time.

You’ll find some surprises in Eat Like a President. Calvin Coolidge, for example, loved to play practical jokes on the servants. Chester A. Arthur indulged in fine dining despite having a fatal kidney disease. John Quincy Adams had a passion for Madeira wine.

Other presidential preferences won’t surprise you. The revolutionary presidential couple, John and Abigail Adams, served distinctly American food. Franklin Pierce, the backwoodsman, preferred comfort food from his native New Hampshire. And Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy loved fancy French cuisine.

The book also explores the historic setting in which the food was made and served. Each president grappled with America’s defining conflicts over freedom and equality. How they treated their servants revealed a lot about their attitudes toward servitude and slavery. Abigail Adams hated the Constitutional compromise that allowed slavery, and she hated watching enslaved servants toiling just outside the White House. She treated her own servants like family. Then, more than a century later, Calvin Coolidge tried to pass an anti-lynching bill and took his ill African American wine steward with him on an Adirondacks vacation to improve his health.

You’ll get a fuller picture of the difficulties a president faces from Eat Like a President. Among pressing cares about war, disaster, legislation and re-election, they still have to meet with hundreds of people every week – and feed many of them. A presidential couple still must host a state dinner even if their child is dying. A president has to spend hours shaking hands even when his enemies are killing his infrastructure bill. In the midst of all that, the first couple has to try to make the White House presentable.

You’ll also get a fuller picture of the presidential couples and their times just from what they ate and drank. Jane Pierce, a teetotaler, came from a cold roast Boston family, while Franklin, an alcoholic, grew up in a tavern. They didn’t appear together publicly very often.

Calvin Coolidge loved the Vermont pickles of his modest boyhood. People even said he looked like he was weaned on one. And yet he also enjoyed Chinese food, a cuisine embraced by aspirational middle-class city dwellers. Coolidge was both.

In the reckless 1960s, the Kennedys served tumblers of Cuba Libres at their White House Twist parties. Those were prosperous times, and the Kennedys — Jackie especially — spent lavishly. At one party they served 10 pounds of caviar in a gold bucket.

Finally, Eat Like a President describes where the presidents ate – in the White House. The first couples had to keep improving the building as America grew in power and prestige. In 1800, Abigail Adams furnished a drafty, unfinished 36-room house; 162 years later, Jackie Kennedy turned a 132-room mansion into an elegant showplace.

In the book…

Let’s face it, food is a fun way to learn about history. And history is a fun way to cook food.

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 30 different kinds of presidential food in a modern American kitchen. The foods range from fairly simple colonial fare to fancy French dishes preferred by the Kennedys and the Chinese entrees the Coolidges loved.

You will also get an engaging account of each president’s White House years, with historical background and context. High school students might find it a compelling way to learn about American history — and American cooking.

Just click here to buy the ebook, here for the paperback.

About the authors

Dan and Leslie Landrigan are the authors of the New England Historical Society website. Over the past decade, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history. They now live on an island in Maine, where they do a lot of cooking for themselves.

This books is the fourth in a series about historic foods. The others are 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods, 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, and Historic Italian Christmas Cookies, all ebooks available from Amazon.

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John La Farge, The Stained-Glass Artist Who Wanted To Crush Louis Comfort Tiffany

One day in the middle of the 1870s, a young glassmaker named Louis Comfort Tiffany visited John La Farge in his studio. La Farge was figuring out how to make stained glass as radiant as the windows at Chartres, and Tiffany wanted to know how he did it.

La Farge showed Tiffany his experiments with putting thin plates of glass together and with opalescent glass. He would come to regret his generosity.

John the Baptist by Louis Comort Tiffany, Arlington Street Church in Boston

Tiffany took what La Farge showed him and ran with it. They became arch-rivals, leaders in their field of stained glass. La Farge, wrote his friend Henry Adams, ‘seemed bent on crushing all rivalry.’

Today, Tiffany is a household word. La Farge is pretty much forgotten, though his work still radiates in churches and museums throughout New England.

Tiffany vs. La Farge

They became bitter rivals, despite, or perhaps because of, their similarities. Both came from wealthy, cosmopolitan families in New York City and studied painting early in their careers. They pioneered similar techniques in the burgeoning field of decorative arts and stood at the top of their field. Both made stained glass windows for wealthy and institutional patrons – the Vanderbilt houses, Harvard, Yale, Trinity Church in Boston, the White House. Both even had eight children.

Louis Comfort Tiffany

But there were some differences between them that may explain why the younger Tiffany eventually eclipsed La Farge. Tiffany’s father was Charles Lewis Tiffany, who started the world-famous Tiffany & Co. Sharing the name of a widely known retail establishment helped perpetuate his fame as a glassmaker. Tiffany’s studio also made smaller objects, now collector’s items, which keeps Tiffany’s name before the public.

Or perhaps the difference was this: Tiffany was the better, and possibly more ruthless, businessman.

The Decorative Arts

John La Farge and Louis Tiffany both trained as painters, but the Gilded Age appetite for opulent decoration lured them away from the easel. Tiffany once wrote, “I believe there is more in it [the decorative arts] than in painting pictures.”

La Farge visited England in 1873, and met Pre-Raphaelite artists who wanted to revive medieval principles in art. Stained glass making was in a sorry state, as people just didn’t know how to recreate the rich, subtle color and luminescence of medieval stained glass.

Battle Window at Harvard’s Memorial Hall by John La Farge

So when La Farge returned to America, Harvard’s Class of 1844 wanted him to design a stained glass window to remember the Civil War dead. La Farge figured out how to use layers of glass using complementary colors rather than just painting on glass, the current practice. The radiant, jewel-like Chevalier Bayard window in Memorial Hall was well received.

La Farge continued to perfect his technique. After he showed Tiffany how he did it, his willingness to help the younger man soon faded. By 1879 La Farge called Tiffany a “knave” for stealing his ideas.

Riding High

By 1880, Tiffany and La Farge were riding high. They had no rivals, except for each other. Tiffany won a commission to decorate Mark Twain’s house in Hartford in 1880, followed by one in 1882 from President Chester A. Arthur to redecorate the White House. The interior design, of course, included Tiffany glass.

Tiffany with President Arthur in front of the stained glass screens he designed for the White House. They were later removed.

La Farge created a stained-glass window around 1880 for the Newport, R.I., home of Henry Gurdon Marquand, later president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston displayed the window, called Peonies Blown in the Wind. Glass commissions then came rolling in, and he set up a studio in New York’s West Village with specially trained glass workers. He also created murals and stained glass windows for H.H. Richardson’s masterpiece, Boston’s Trinity Church, from 1876 to 1888.

Patent War

On Feb. 24, 1880, La Farge got a patent for the glass he used in his windows. Nearly a year later, on Feb. 8, 1881, Tiffany also got a patent for making stained-glass windows.

John La Farge

Glass conservator Julie L. Sloan of North Adams, Mass., explains: “La Farge’s patent was for the use of the material, while Tiffany’s was for its assembly. Both patents were important in theory: without permission to use La Farge’s, Tiffany’s was not possible, but without permission to use Tiffany’s, La Farge could not assemble windows of opalescent glass.”

Something, apparently, happened between the granting of the two patents. La Farge explained it 20 years later, writes Sloan. Charles L. Tiffany, the glassmaker’s father, proposed a business partnership between La Farge and his son. They would make stained glass together under La Farge’s patent. But Tiffany’s son was ill and traveling in Europe, so could La Farge give him unofficial permission to create glass under his patent” asked the father. At least “until the partnership could be perfected.”

La Farge gave him the information. Instead of a business partnership, Louis Tiffany applied for his own patent, the one he got in February 1881.

“Morning” by John La Farge. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To add insult to injury, Tiffany made a deal with one glassmaker to only sell to him. Since only a few glassmakers could produce the kind of glass both Tiffany and La Farge needed, the deal deprived La Farge of a much-need supplier for his burgeoning commissions.

Downhill Without Tiffany

Then things got worse for La Farge.

Without the promised Tiffany backing, he needed working capital. So he took on a partner in 1882. Then he took on two more partners. They soon fought over spending and artistic control.

In 1887, Frederick Lothrop Ames commissioned La Farge to make a window memorializing his sister, Helen Angier Ames, for the Unity Church. It proved his undoing. Ames paid $10,000 for the window, about a quarter of a million dollars today. La Farge’s partners thought he spent too much money on the project and tried to take artistic control of the window. La Farge hid the designs for the work, and his partners had him arrested in his studio.

“Angel of Help” in the Unity Church in North Easton, Mass. It got La Farge arrested.

The scandal made the front page of every New York newspaper. Ames canceled the commission and La Farge’s company went bankrupt. Though the charges against La Farge were dropped, he took a trip to Japan to escape his disgrace. Ames in the end hired La Farge back, and he finished the window in 1887.

Tiffany, too, had his troubles. His wife Mary Goddard died in 1884, and the next year he lost thousands of dollars in a failed investment.

War of Words

Early on, the press recognized La Farge as the innovator in using opalescent glass. But then Tiffany waged a PR campaign in which a close friend wrote an article claiming Tiffany invented the technique.

Then in 1889, the French awarded La Farge the ribbon of the Legion of Honor for a series of his stained glass windows at the Paris Exposition Universelle. He was called “the great innovator, the inventor of opaline glass” and credited with creating “an art unknown before, an entirely new industry.”

Tiffany Studios window at Woodlawn Cemetery Chapel in Dayton, Ohio

That no doubt galled Tiffany. Not coincidentally, an article soon appeared claiming “the idea is due to Mr. Tiffany.”

Tiffany further retaliated by exhibiting his stained glass at the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 – the only glass exhibitor at the giant fair. He wrote an article, American Art Supreme in Colored Glass, crediting mostly himself.

La Farge fired back with a privately published article. He pointed out the only reason Tiffany showed his work was that his father’s jewelry store had exhibit space. Then he took a shot at Tiffany, saying that “commercialism” created mediocrity in colored glass.

Tiffany Triumphant

La Farge never recovered fully from his ignominious arrest and business failure. He didn’t try to run a company again, but he accepted stained-glass commissions from his patrons. He continued mastering his craft to the point where his stained glass windows rivaled paintings. He wanted to create masterpieces along the lines of the Old Master painters.

Peacock by John La Farge

In 1908, he finished Peacock, “a window far finer in some ways than I have ever done,” he wrote. He made it on spec and called it ‘too dear to buy.’ It’s now in the Worcester Art Museum.

He also traveled to Japan and the South Seas with Henry Adams. He put on one-man shows and sold watercolors. With his old friend Henry Adams he traveled to the Far East and the South Seas, and wrote and illustrated travelogues about his journeys.

His lavish spending and business ineptitude dogged him, though, and he died deeply in debt in 1908 in a Providence insane asylum.

Tiffany, on the other hand, prospered. He established his own glassmaking firm, Tiffany Studios, which made thousands of stained glass windows. Adams called it “a concern as big as the national post office.” He died in 1933.

Is there a La Farge in your town? Find out here.

With thanks to John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study, by James Yarnall; Art of an Opaline Mind: The Stained Glass of John La Farge by Julie L. Sloan and James Yarnall; and The Rivalry Between Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge by Julie L. Sloan.

Image: John the Baptist at Arlington Street Church in Boston By John Stephen Dwyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13498050. This story was updated in 2023.

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John Adams Was A Tiger Dad. So Was John Quincy.

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.

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