Posted
on March 18, 2014
There
have only been 75 men, so far, to serve as President and/or
Vice-President of the United States. (Notice: zero women. So far. We
gotta change that!)
There
are 365 days of the year. (Once in a while, 366 days.)
My un-informed gut feeling is that the chance that there were two birthdays
of the presidents/VPs on the same day would be really slim, since
there are almost FIVE TIMES as many days of the year as there are
former presidents and vice-presidents.
 |
| This is not quite what I had in mind when I mentioned "the birthday paradox." |
But
my educated brain tells me that it is not at all surprising to find
that President Grover Cleveland and Vice-President John C. Calhoun
share a birthday. I know about the birthday paradox, and it
turns out that, in any group of 75 people, there is a 99.9% chance
that two people will share a birthday!
Did
you know that there are two presidents who share a birthday? Both
Warren Harding and James K. Polk were
born on November 2.
And there are three vice-presidents born on the
same day: Abraham Lincoln's first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin;
Calvin Coolidge's vice president, Charles G. Dawes; and John
Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (later president
himself) were all born on August 27!
Mr.
Cleveland
Born
on this date in 1837, Grover Cleveland was the 22nd
and 24th
President of the United States. He is the only person who served two
non-consecutive terms.
Cleveland
was elected (in 1884) as a bachelor (one of only two bachelors
elected president) and became the first president to be married in
the White House. (John Tyler, who was a widower when he was elected
president, got remarried while serving as president—but not in a
White House ceremony.)
During
Cleveland's 1888 reelection race against Benjamin Harrison, he got
more votes than Harrison but still lost because he had fewer
electoral votes. There were a lot of accusations of fraud, and many
historians believe that Cleveland should have won the electoral vote,
too. Some have said that there are some similarities between this
election and the 2000 contest between Al Gore, who won the popular
vote but lost the election, and George W. Bush. There were some
big-time problems with ballots and charges of fraud during that
election, too!
Cleveland
ran against Benjamin Harrison again in 1892. This is strange: neither
presidential candidate went out campaigning! Harrison's wife was
dying at the time, and so Harrison of course wanted to be with her.
Out of respect for Mrs. Harrison and his opponent's desire to be with
his sick wife, Cleveland also refrained from actively campaigning.
Amazing,
huh?
That
time, Cleveland won against Harrison by a landslide.
Mr.
Calhoun
John
C. Calhoun served as the United States' 7th
Vice-President. He was in the interesting position of serving as V.P.
under John Quincy Adams, but then running AGAINST Adams in the 1828
election—running instead with presidential hopeful Andrew Jackson,
and winning. So he had two terms as Vice-President, but under
different presidents with different political party affiliations.
(At
the time, political parties were in major flux; there wasn't a stable
two-party system.)
Calhoun
did a lot to promote slavery. When many other Southern white people
regretted the obvious ethical problems with slavery but explained
that it was a “necessary evil,” Calhoun insisted that it was a
“positive good.” He was a “war hawk” who worked in Congress
to declare war against Britain (the War of 1812), and he firmly
thought that states had the right to secede from the union if their
rights were somehow diminished. Even though he died before the Civil
War started, his war-hawk nature and states' rights ideas obviously
helped lead the nation to the Civil War.
In
the last paragraph, I said that John C. Calhoun “firmly thought”
blah blah blah. I'm thinking that “firmly thought” is too mild a
phrase—because Calhoun was admired by some and criticized by others
as a “cast-iron man” because he held onto his ideas so rigidly.
The
weirdest and worst thing I read about Calhoun was that he was chosen
as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators of all time in 1957! I'm
sure he had his good qualities, but I would hardly choose a war-hawk
pro-slavery anti-union senator as one of the top 5!!!
Also
on this date:
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
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