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

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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.

Love history?

Then you probably want to join the New England Historical Society community by signing up for our e-newsletter, which comes out once a week. Click here to sign up.

 

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Louisa Adams Parties Into the Presidency

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Louisa Adams wanted her husband to be president of the United States. Her husband didn’t have much choice in the matter.  John Quincy Adams grew up believing he would disgrace himself if he didn’t.

“If you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy,” wrote his father, the founding father, John Adams.

In 1824, the time was right for John Quincy to run for president. One man stood in his way: the U.S. Senator from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson.

Louisa Adams tried to help get Jackson out of the way — by throwing a magnificent ball in his honor. Because that’s the way they did it in 1824.

Louisa Adams

Louisa Adams

She met her husband in England in 1790. He was a rising young diplomat, the son of the vice president of the United States. She had been born in London and spent much of her childhood in France as the daughter of a wealthy American merchant and diplomat. The two probably couldn’t have differed more.

She was a charming, fashionable, hot-blooded socialite. He was reserved, taciturn and cold. Louisa described him in a novel:

“a man of extraordinary talents…his natural disposition was ardent and impetuous, but a perpetual watchfulness over these natural defects, had taught him to master them completely, and it was only those who were the most constantly with him, who were aware that occasions could arise in which the internal volcano would sometimes produce an eruption that was short but violent in its explosion. “

They married in 1797. Around the time of the wedding, Louisa’s father told John Quincy he had lost most of his money. Financial troubles plagued the Adamses for the rest of their lives.

Louisa followed her husband to his diplomatic postings in Russia, Ghent and London. During their marriage she had 15 pregnancies and delivered three sons and a daughter, who died in infancy.

Back to the USA

In 1817, President James Monroe appointed John Quincy Adams secretary of state. They moved to Washington, D.C., and eventually bought the house Monroe had lived in on F (now I) Street.

The house that James Monroe and John Quincy Adams lived in.

By 1824, Monroe neared the end of his term, which gave John Quincy Adams a chance  to run for president. He knew he’d probably face Jackson, a war hero, for the prize.

Adams and Jackson had little in common other than their age (57), their ambition and their early promise. Adams’ career as a diplomat began at 14, when he went to St. Petersburg to work as secretary to the U.S. minister to Russia, Francis Dana. Jackson began his career as a soldier at the age of 13, when he volunteered to fight in the American Revolution for the local militia.

Andrew Jackson

In 1824, men did not campaign for president the way they do today. There was no gladhanding the public, no caucuses or primaries. In six of the 24 states, legislators cast the vote for president. And in all the states, only white male adults could go to the polls.

Politicians shunned retail politics. Instead, they played social politics, appealing to political power brokers in their own parlors.

It was not something Adams was good at.  Jackson, on the other hand, was. Dashing and tempestuous, he had won enormous  popularity after winning the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

Louisa Adams made up for her husband’s shortcomings. She had shone as a diplomat’s wife and a society hostess. She threw herself into Washington’s social whirl, hosting dinners and levees at their F Street mansion for people important to her husband’s career.

john-quincy-adams-president

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Louisa Adams’ Ball to End All Balls

Louisa held a grand ball on Jan. 8, 1824, the ninth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. The purpose of the party was ostensibly to honor Jackson, but really to eclipse him. On the social front, Jackson’s backwoods wife, Rachel, couldn’t hope to compete with the worldly Louisa. Plus, by “honoring” Jackson, the Adamses hoped to win his endorsement for president. They might even persuade him to run as vice president.

Louisa invited a thousand people to the house on F Street, so many they had to remove all the furniture and doors. They even built pillars to keep the floor from caving in. Louisa filled the house with flowers, hired the marine band and served a lavish buffet.

The party was a smash, Louisa a legend. People talked about it for days. The National Republican printed a poem in her honor, which ended,

Belles and matrons, maids and madams,

All are gone to Mrs. Adams.

They continued to go to Mrs. Adams. In March, her husband recorded they’d had 235 visitors in their home that month alone.

The prize

Jackson still ran against Adams for president, and he even won the popular vote in a three-way Electoral College tie. The election then went to the House of Representatives.

Adams beat Jackson by making a deal with Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House. After Clay threw the election to Adams, Adams made Clay his secretary of state.

Drawing of the President’s House by Benjamin Latrobe

That enraged Jackson, who accused Adams of making a corrupt bargain. Jackson was already furious with Adams’ supporters because they had attacked Rachel. He resigned his Senate seat and almost immediately launched a grassroots campaign to defeat Adams for reelection. Jackson and his supporters would make the next four years the most miserable of John Quincy and Louisa Adams’ lives.

Images: Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, Architect. The White House “President’s House” Washington, D.C. South front elevation / Jan. , B H Latrobe. Washington D.C, 1817. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001698953/. Adams house By APK – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117668495. With thanks to Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas.

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Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

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Nothing cheered Abigail Adams so much as a wedding. During her lifetime of difficulty and sadness, she needed cheering. Her husband was often absent, a beloved son died young, a daughter lost a battle with breast cancer, another son became a dissolute alcoholic. Through it all, her family and servants came to view her as Abigail Adams, matchmaker.

She thought of her servants as family, kept their secrets and hosted their marriage ceremonies. She married off six pairs of them, five of them in her own home.

In 1801, that meant the White House.

1793 plans for the White House by James Hoban

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker

Abigail’s nephew, William Smith Shaw, knew how much she loved weddings. “I declare I wish you would have, Aunt, a wedding every night in the week, for I plainly see that it gives you better spirits and consequently better health, than all the medicine in the world,” he wrote to her in 1798.

“I am a great friend to Matrimony, and always like to promote it, where there is a prospect of happiness & comfort,” she replied.

william-smith-shaw-stuart

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

She had just hosted the wedding of her servant Abigail Hunt and a local farmer, Ebenezer Harmon, at her farm in Quincy, Mass.  “I regaled them with a Glass of wine, & some cake and Cheese,” she wrote. Then she went to bed as the wedding party went off dancing. “I retired to rest at about nine, and with the pleasurable reflection of having made Several honest families happy & pleasd I enjoyd a comfortable nights repose.”

John Adams heartily approved of Abigail’s matchmaking among the servants. “I hope you will marry Louisa & Betcy Howard and all the single ones, who are ripe,” he wrote to her from Philadelphia in 1798.

The First Wedding

In 1784, Abigail Adams made her first match. John Adams was then serving as minister to Great Britain and she was about to sail for London to join him. She hired John Briesler, a local man, to accompany her across the Atlantic. Before she left, she wrote to her husband about him . She called Briesler “a steady frugal fellow, with a mind much above the vulgar.” The Adamses came to depend on Briesler. “As good a servant as ever bore the name,” she later wrote. If it hadn’t been for him, she wrote years later, she never would have gone into public life. He was “virtuous, handy and attentive.”

Briesler was especially attentive to Abigail’s 23-year-old ladies’ maid, Esther Field. In 1788, just a few weeks before they were to return to America, Esther came to Abigail in much distress. She confessed Briesler had gotten her pregnant.

“[P]oor Brisler looks so humble and is so attentive, so faithfull & so trust worthy, that I am willing to do all I can for them,” Abigail wrote to her sister, Mary Cranch.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-portrait

Abigail Adams by Gilbert Stuart

Abigail Adams, matchmaker, got them married a few days later in St. Marylebone church in London. Abigail worried about Esther delivering the baby aboard the ship returning home. She arranged for a nurse to come with them to help with the childbirth. The baby, a girl, was born aboard the ship. “We got through this business much better than I feared we should. I had for the first time in my life, to dress the little animal,” she wrote to her daughter.

Over the years, Esther had more babies. Abigail, however, found ways to keep her employed.

In 1797, she hosted the wedding of another servant, Polly Doble Howard, and Jonathan Baxter, Jr.

The White House

Abigail had managed the farm and family during her husband’s long absences. She engineered the moves to join him. She set up official houses in London and Paris on his diplomatic missions; to New York when he served as vice president of the United States and to Philadelphia as president. Then, three years into his presidency she had to set up another house. This time, she did it in the Wilderness City – Washington, D.C. – where the seat of government had moved.

It was November 1800. Abigail was 56 years old and not looking forward to the move. She had stayed at her Quincy farm fighting off raging fevers as her husband fought off his political enemies. He moved into the President’s House a few weeks earlier than she.

John Briesler was with him. Abigail had also sent William Shipley ahead of her to help. Another of John Adams’ servants was also probably in Washington: Richard Dexter, an “honest and faithful domestick” who handled horses.

abigail-adams-attacked-thoas-jefferson

John Adams by Gilbert Stuart

White House Wedding

A week before Abigail was to leave for Washington, she sent two of her housemaids ahead. John Adams had called the White House “habitable,” but that may have been charitable. The staircases hadn’t been finished, the plaster hadn’t dried on the wall and none of the rooms had been furnished.

Rebecca Tyrell was one of the maids Abigail sent ahead. Rebecca had worked for Abigail since 1790 and nursed her through various illnesses. Abigail viewed her almost as a daughter.  She called Rebecca “my most beloved domestic who was to me as a child in sickness and in Health.”

Betsy Howard went with Rebecca. She was Polly Doble Howard’s sister, and one of the domestics John Adams considered “ripe.” She would sleep on the same floor of the President’s House as Abigail and John Briesler. Their rooms, wrote Abigail, were as “handsome and well-furnishd as any of my Bed chambers at Quincy.”

The other servants slept along the ground floor corridor, in the basement.

So why did Betsy Howard get special treatment? “[F]or Many reasons I chose to have her under my own Eye,” wrote Abigail to her doctor, Cotton Tufts.

Abigail was probably worried that Betsy might find herself in the same position as Esther Field had 16 years earlier. Or maybe she had.

In January 1801, Betsy Howard married William Shipley in the President’s House.

Abigail Adams, Matchmaker Twice More

Abigail Adams spent only four months in the cold, unfinished White House, where she had famously hung her washing to dry in the East Room.

Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, would observe, “there is something in the climate and habits of this place very hostile to the happiness of New Englanders.” She and John had, in fact, been miserable in the White House.

Two weeks after Abigail Adams arrived in Washington, their son Charles died, a homeless alcoholic, in New York City. Two weeks after that they would learn John had lost the presidential election. During that time they had only 13 servants to do the work of 30 – furnishing the big house, hosting official entertainments and keeping the fires going to dry the plaster.

Abigail left Washington happily in February 1801. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. I am sick, sick and sick of Publick life,” she wrote as she left.

Peacefield, the Adams home in Quincy

She wasn’t sick of matchmaking. In 1802, Elizabeth Epps and Tilly Whitcomb married at the Adams’ farm in Quincy.

Rebecca Tyrell stayed with Abigail another three years after they left Washington. John Adams had brought Richard Dexter back with him to Quincy. In 1804, Rebecca Tyrell married him at the Adams farm. Abigail would remember Rebecca in her will, bequeathing her $30 and a gown.

After the ceremony, Abigail Adams, matchmaker, bragged of her love matches to her friend, Hannah Phillips Cushing.

“At the Wedding,” Abigail continued, “amongst other Guests were six couple who had lived with me during her residence with me all of whom had been married from me in that period & all but one married in my family. This I believe is rather a singular instance.”


 

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JFK One-Liners: Presidential Wit and More

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President John F. Kennedy managed to seduce reporters with witty retorts to their questions during presidential news conferences. Many JFK one-liners are still remembered, such as his observation that “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”

His childhood friend Lem Billings remembered his sense of humor before he moved into the White House. “I’ve never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor — the ability to make one laugh and have a good time,” Billings once said.

Lem Billings and the future president. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Here, then, is a collection of JFK one-liners from well before and during his presidency.

Early JFK One-Liners

His mother, Rose, remembered him as a funny little boy. He once said to her, “Daddy has a sweet tooth, hasn’t he? I wonder which one it is.”

He also had a sharp tongue, which he directed at his mother.  Rose didn’t show her children much warmth and took long trips away from her family. Just before she left on one journey, five-year-old Jack said, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone!”

JFK in his first Communion suit. Image courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

In Sickness

Throughout his life, he suffered through a series of illnesses. At Harvard, he was rushed to the hospital with an illness the doctors misdiagnosed as leukemia. He wrote to a girlfriend.

Took a peek at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.

He also had chronic back pain and several surgeries to correct it. After one unsuccessful operation, he wrote,

In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I …will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.

World War II

Kennedy joined the Navy during World War II and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific.

The most famous JFK one-liner during his naval career wasn’t funny.

Kennedy aboard PT-109. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

A Japanese destroyer had rammed his boat in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy swam for five hours to an island, a wounded shipmate on his back. He held on to the man by clenching his lifejacket straps in his teeth. Kennedy carved a message for help in a coconut and sent it with a native.

NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY

Rescued after seven days on the island, he came home a hero. As president, someone asked him how he got to be a hero.

“It was involuntary,” he said. “They sank my boat.”

Before the Japanese sank his boat, he had already grown disillusioned with the war effort. In a letter, he expressed his cynicism. “We are at a great disadvantage–the Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same,” he wrote. “The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap.” And then:

I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing much better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to secure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most possess.

After his boat sank, he had little use for the desk duty to which he was assigned.

“Once you get your feet upon the desk in the morning, the heavy work of the day is done,” he wrote to a friend.

His brother Robert joined the Naval Reserve in Boston while in his senior year of high school. Their parents had sent Jack a clipping of Robert taking the oath. He wrote to Robert, “The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on.”

Politics

After the war, Kennedy decided to run for Congress from the Massachusetts district once represented by John Quincy Adams.

His father spent lavishly on his House campaign and interfered with the decision making. When one of his campaign aides objected, Kennedy said, “I know you’re right about this, but Dad’s putting up the money and we have to let him win a couple.”

Congressman John F. Kennedy

On the campaign trail, he was late to a communion breakfast in Chicopee, Mass. He urged his driver to speed up, and he did. Kennedy than turned to his seatmate, Billy Sutton, and said,

Billy, if we get into an accident, you’ll have to remain conscious to that you can give our names, but more important than that, don’t forget to tell the reporters I was in a state of grace.

Once elected, he only lasted three terms in the House, which didn’t satisfy his ambition.

“We were just worms in the House–nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” he later said.

And so in 1952 he ran for Senate against incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the incumbent. It was a classic Boston grudge match: Lodge’s grandfather had defeated Kennedy’s grandfather for the seat in 1916. “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names,” Kennedy once said.

Though considered a long shot, Kennedy beat Lodge by about 70,000 votes, helped by his father’s cash. He spent five times more than Lodge on the campaign. Joe Kennedy had a one-liner of his own:

It takes three things to win in politics. The first is money, the second is money, and the third is money.

The Senate

Even before he ran for Senate, Jack Kennedy had his eye on the White House. He knew he needed a wife, and in 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier. She fascinated the public as much as he did. Once, as president, he introduced himself during a press conference in Paris.

I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.

September 1953 Hammersmith Farm, Newport, Rhode Island Wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier. Photograph in the Toni Frissell Collection, Library of Congress.

In the Senate, Kennedy grew into a political star.

Tip O’Neill once wrote that until Kennedy won election to the Senate, “You just couldn’t imagine that he was really going anywhere.”

In 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won the Democratic Party nomination, which prompted another JFK one-liner: “Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.”

His father again spent heavily on his son’s campaign. Kennedy acknowledge as much on the campaign trail.

“I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy,” he said: “’Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide’.”

When asked his favorite song, he replied, “I think ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.”

President JFK One-Liners

Kennedy didn’t lose his sense of humor as president.

He defended his choice of his 35-year-old brother as attorney general. “I see nothing wrong with giving Robert some legal experience as Attorney General before he goes out to practice law,” he said.

JFK and his brother Robert. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

He said he liked the job.

I have a nice home, the office is close by, and the pay is good.

However, he faced serious challenges.

“When we (The Democrats) got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

He joked about his approval rating after a vacation in Florida.

“I’ve been back in touch with my constituents and seeing how they felt,” he said.  “And frankly I’ve come back to Washington from Palm Beach, and I’m against my entire program.”

He had a rocky relationship with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. When asked why he didn’t fire Hoover, Kennedy said, “You can’t fire God.”

Last Words

Kennedy’s life ended on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The First Lady and President arrive in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

His last words before an assassin’s bullet struck him were mundane, but ironic.

Nellie Connally, the wife of Texas Gov. John Connally, was traveling in the open limousine with him. “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” she said.

“No, you certainly can’t,” he said.

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The Fabulous McLeans and Their Hoodoo Diamond

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When Evalyn and Ned McLean got married in 1908, they seemed to have it all. A golden couple, they had wealth, connections and loving families. As a wedding present, the McLeans got a summer cottage (read “mansion”) in Bar Harbor, Maine. Bar Harbor had for decades been a magnet for Gilded Age show-offs.

That first summer was perhaps their happiest.  But then their lives over the next 30 years would descend into madness, scandal and ruin. Their demise almost coincided perfectly with their ownership of the Hope diamond.

The Hope diamond

Was it bad luck, brought on by the Hope diamond, or their own recklessness and mental illness?

Or was it just too much money? Evalyn, after their divorce, wrote that Ned’s problem was “unearned wealth in undisciplined hands.”

Pot, meet kettle.

The McLeans

Evalyn, born Aug. 1, 1886, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant carpenter, Thomas Walsh, and Carrie Bell Reed, his school teacher wife. During Evalyn’s early years, she and her brother traveled the west with her parents as her father prospected for gold. When she was 10, he came into her bedroom and said, “Daughter, I’ve struck it rich.” He had found the Camp Bird gold mine in Colorado, one of the most lucrative ever.

The family moved to Washington, D.C., where they ate off gold plates in their 60-room mansion. Evalyn went to school in her own coach with matched horses and a coachman who wore silk. If she wasn’t wearing jewelry, Evalyn said, you knew she wasn’t feeling well.

Ned McLean came from older money and more distinguished ancestors — military heroes, diplomats, explorers, capitalists. His mother, Emily Truxtun Beale, was the daughter of Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a prominent diplomat, explorer and military officer. His father, John Roll McLean, co-founded the Great Falls and Old Dominion Railroad in Virginia, and the town that grew up around it was named McLean. The elder McLean also owned the Cincinnati Post and part of the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Later he bought the Washington Post.

As Evalyn later observed in her autobiography, the Beale genes had weakened by the time they got to Ned.

Ned and Evalyn

Ned met Evalyn in dancing class when she was 11 and he was eight. He fell in love with her at first sight. He asked her to marry him a number of times, but she refused because of his heavy drinking.

Evalyn Walsh McLean

When she finally said yes in 1908, they eloped to Colorado. Their parents gave them $200,000 for a three-month honeymoon in Europe and the Middle East. They blew through it all and couldn’t pay their hotel bill in Paris.

They moved into a huge mansions called Friendship in Washington, D.C. From there they hobnobbed with heads of state, traveled the world and partied around the clock.

One of their lavish parties prompted a guest to remark, “This is what brings on revolutions.”

Ned befriended President Warren G. Harding, who Evalyn thought might be a good influence on Ned. It turned out that Ned was a bad influence on the president.

The McLeans Buy the Hope Diamond

In 1910 in Paris, the McLeans first saw the Hope diamond. Called the most expensive item you can hold in one hand, it’s now worth $200 million. Pierre Cartier sold it to them after telling them about the curse. A French gem merchant named Tavernier had stolen it from the eye, or maybe the forehead, of a statue of the Hindu goddess Sita. Then wild dogs tore him apart. Another owner, Princess de Lambale, died when a French mob beat her to death. Marie Antoinette owned it. In 1908, Sultan Abdul Hamid bought it and lost his throne. His concubine who wore it died young.

Few of the stories had any truth to them. Tavernier died of old age. Marie Antoinette, however, had owned the diamond.

Ned bought the gem for $154,000 in the offices of the Washington Post, where he worked as managing editor.

To be extra careful, Evalyn had the stone blessed in a church. As the minister said a prayer over it, a flash of lightning toppled a large tree across the street.

Evalyn said she didn’t believe the curse, though she never let her children or her friends touch it. But she let her dog wear it sometimes at parties.

Tragedy Strikes the McLeans

The blessing didn’t seem to work. Ned’s mother, who had told them not to buy the diamond, died within a year of its purchase. Evalyn’s father had died that year as well, and, grief-stricken, she lapsed into morphine addiction. Ned continued to rely on alcohol, sometimes using a sling to steady his drinking hand.

Evalyn’s mental health deteriorated to the point where she couldn’t recognize her party guests, and she started to hallucinate. Ned then had a sanitarium built for her on the top floor of their Washington mansion.

Their first son, Vinson, received quite a lot of publicity as the $100 million baby. The McLeans, fearful of kidnappers, hired bodyguards to keep watch over him. But at the age of nine, the boy slipped away from his minders and ran into the street, where a car ran over him. He died that night. Ned and Evalyn hadn’t been home; they’d gone to Louisville, Ky., to see the races.

Years later, the curse of the Hope diamond would claim another victim. The McLeans’ 19-year-old daughter, Evalyn, wore the gem at her wedding to 57-year-old Robert Rice Reynolds. He was an isolationist, a Nazi sympathizer and co-owner of a fascist anti-Semitic newspaper. Six years into their marriage, she committed suicide.

Ned McLean

Evalyn’s real curse, however, seems to have been her husband. At 22, Ned’s father made him managing editor of the Washington Post. He turned the newspaper into a reactionary, juvenile newspaper viewed with disdain by journalists.

Ned McLean

Even his pets were dissipated. Ned owned a trained seal and fed it a fifth of whiskey every day. Once he brought a trained bear to a Florida whorehouse, where it mauled two women inside.

While visiting his friend President Harding at the White House, he infuriated the First Lady by urinating into an East Room fireplace.

The McLeans owned two houses near the executive mansion, one of which they rented to Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Daugherty held a round-the-clock party at the house, called the Love Nest. One night, Ned brought call girls and prostitutes to the Love Nest. Things got out of hand and people started throwing things. A bottle struck one of the women in the head, and she died a few days later. An FBI agent who took her to the hospital recalled Harding leaning on the fireplace.

Ned then got implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. His friend, Interior Secretary Albert Fall, had accepted a bribe to lease oil reserves without asking for bids. Ned, at first, agreed to say he had loaned Fall the money. But the senator who led the investigation into the scandal figured correctly that Ned couldn’t have loaned Fall the money. He was broke.

The Lindbergh Kidnapping

In 1929, Ned left Evalyn for another woman and they divorced. But four years later, Evalyn had her ex-husband committed to an insane asylum, where he once danced the hokey-pokey with Zelda Fitzgerald.

On March 1, 1932, a kidnapper took Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son from their home in New Jersey. Evalyn, remembering her fears for her young son Vinson, hocked the Hope diamond to raise ransom money for the baby. She gave the money to a rogue FBI agent, who kept the money for himself. The Lindbergh baby was found dead, and the FBI agent went to prison.

Ned died of a heart attack in the insane asylum in 1941, leaving what little money he had left to his common-law wife.

Evalyn never got over the death of her daughter. She had to lease her Washington mansion to the government for office space. In 1947, she died of pneumonia, as the plaster falling from the walls of her home.

Aftermath

Evalyn left the Hope diamond to her grandchildren. In 1947, they sold it to jeweler Harry Winston to pay her estate taxes. In 1958, Winston donated the gem to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where you can see it today.

This story, updated in 2022, is based on a chapter in Bar Harbor Babylon by Dan and Leslie Landrigan. Click here to see Leslie Landrigan talk about the book on a podcast.

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Abe Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors (Cavaliers and Baptists, Too)

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Abraham Lincoln, the Great Unifier, didn’t talk much about his Puritan ancestors. Nor did he talk much about his ancestors from Virginia, where the original Anglican settlers were known as Cavaliers.

He had good reason to hide the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln had come to Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration. Lincoln also downplayed his Anglican, or Cavalier, ancestors who settled in Virginia.

obadiah-holmes-lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

“Exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky,” wrote David S. Reynolds, in his recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.

Lincoln had to try to unify the country. So he hid his Cavalier and Puritan ancestors and claimed dubious Quaker roots. The North and the South found Quakers an acceptable compromise, something that would have astonished the early Puritans.

Puritan Ancestors vs. Cavaliers

During Lincoln’s presidency and afterward, people viewed the Civil War as a contest between Puritans and Cavaliers. More recently, Kevin Phillips in his book, The Cousins’ Wars, made the same argument. He maintained the American Civil War was merely an extension of the English civil wars.

The argument has some truth to it. Puritans from eastern England largely settled New England. Anglicans, or Cavaliers, from the west fled Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan uprising and settled in Maryland and Virginia.

The Puritan Northerners prized liberty, innovation, education, reform and hard work. From the southern point of view, they were fanatical, narrow-minded, money-grubbing commoners who disturbed the peace.

Prince Rupert of Rhine, considered the quintessential cavalier

In contrast, the Cavalier southerners thought of themselves as hospitable, chivalrous, traditional and aristocratic. Northerners called that oppressive, decadent and unjust – especially in regards to slavery.

In the late 1850s, The New York Herald wrote, “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate.” They think differently, wrote the Herald, and they spring from a different stock. Different in every way, they cannot coalesce.

“The Puritan and the Cavalier…will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”

Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors

Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock to a poor young woman who’d been taken advantage of by a plantation owner. Lincoln proudly described his mother as “the daughter of a nobleman…so-called of Virginia.” He told a friend he had inherited through his mother his brains and ambition from his Virginian grandfather.

Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had qualities associated with his Puritan ancestors: piety, honesty and lack of pretension.

Lincoln learned that his ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had settled Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration in 1637. He had come from Hingham in Norfolk County, a hotbed of anti-Anglican sentiment. His pastor arrived a year later, excommunicated for his radical views. Samuel Lincoln helped fund and build the Old Ship Church in 1681.

In 1848, Lincoln spoke in Dorchester and mentioned his Puritan ancestors, describing himself as one of the “Hingham Lincolns.”

Samuel had two brothers, and he and his wife had 11 children, so within the first generation Hingham had 60 Lincolns. Another Massachusetts Lincoln with Puritan ancestors from Hingham was Levi Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. His son, Levi, Jr., also won election as governor of Massachusetts, and another son, Enoch, served as governor of Maine.

Samuel’s son Mordecai moved to Scituate and brought smelting furnaces to Massachusetts. Mordecai’s son, also Mordecai, married Hannah Saltar. Their son, John, was Abraham Lincoln’s great-grandfather.

Obadiah Holmes

Significantly, Hannah Saltar was descended from Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist and therefore a heretic in Puritan eyes. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in 1651 ordered him whipped 30 times in public.

obadiah-holmes-whipping

An engraving of Obadiah Holmes about to be whipped.

News spread about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. Baptist minister John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre with a book that included a description of Holmes’ whipping. That put pressure on the Puritans to allow more religious freedom.

But Lincoln had no interest in summoning the memory of his illustrious Baptist ancestor. Baptists in Lincoln’s time reminded people of the divisions over slavery. The Baptist church in 1845 split apart into northern and southern conferences over the issue.

So Lincoln didn’t tell people during his campaign for president about his Puritan ancestors. Or about his Baptist or Cavalier forbears. He said he came from Quakers who left Berks County, Pa., for Virginia.

Mordecai’s son Mordecai had moved to Berks County, Pa. But it’s unlikely they were Quakers.

Everyone Likes Quakers

In the run-up to the Civil War, Quakers had broader appeal than Baptists, Cavaliers/Anglicans or Puritans/Congregationalists. Both southerners and northerners could tolerate them. The North saw Quakers as opponents of slavery, the South as a group unlikely to go to war over slavery.

By 1886, the perception grew that Lincoln served as a bridge between Puritans and Cavaliers. A Georgia newspaper editor named Henry Grady described Lincoln as both:

From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American…Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.

With thanks to David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln and His Times, published in September 2020.

Images: Samuel Lincoln sign By Timothy Valentine – https://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3232950290/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5821709. This story last updated in 2022.

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