If there’s one great thing about our country, it’s that our presidents have always been a rich source of entertainment, in the form of humor. And as such, every year, around Presidents’ Day, I’ve been putting together a list of fun facts about a given president, almost zero of which I make up. Though I suppose that as we get closer to our more recent presidents, things will be less and less funny. But this is not something we’ll have to worry about for at least 40 years, and by then I’ll be old enough to be president myself. So I won’t care.
As this is our sixth year doing this, the president we’re going to be talking about today is… (checking…) John Quincy Adams.
Wait, didn’t we already…? Hang on.
-John Quincy Adams was the second president we ever had named John Adams. (The first one was John Adams.)
-He was also the first president to have had a father who was also president. Which everyone thought was a big deal at the time until they realized that this was how the entire British royalty worked.
-To this day, no one knows what Quincy is short for. Quinctopher?
-John Quincy Adams was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, which one would think is why he was given the name, but the weird thing is that the town wasn’t named Quincy until John Quincy turned 25.
-John Quincy was actually named after his maternal great grandfather, Colonel John Quincy, who died 2 days after his birth. (The grandson’s birth.) And who wasn’t actually very maternal.
-John Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams and Abigail Smith, who were third cousins, which is not as weird as you think. It’s basically like you marrying literally any other frum Yid.
-John Quincy Adams had a son named George Washington Adams and another named John Adams Adams, or John Adams Jr. I don’t think this family understood how last names work.
-From this point on, we’re going to call him Quincy, because I have a maximum word count.
-As a child, Quincy would travel around Europe with his father, who was trying to secure aid for the colonies. His father was not thrilled with having a little kid climbing around in the background of all his meetings, so he encouraged his son to start keeping a journal, which was the tablet of the time. And sure enough, Quincy became addicted. Between the age of 12 and his petirah at 80, Quincy wrote 50 volumes of this journal, which historians have been reading because geneivas daas expires when the person dies.
-Quincy got a law degree from Harvard in 1787, which might be lashon hara, but it was the local school, so what are you gonna do?
-He was very into science. In his later years, he helped start the Smithsonian Institution, which is often called “the nation’s attic” because of how it smells.
-Although described at the time as a sloppy dresser, Quincy was pretty progressive. He was the first president to wear pants to his inauguration. Which is where we stand today.
-Ok; the earlier presidents all wore those knee breeches that looked like they had water in the basement. Which the White House did, for a short while after it was burned down in the War of 1812.
-Quincy spent 3 out of the first 4 presidencies as an ambassador to various countries in Europe, where he met his wife, Louisa. According to most historians, the couple did not have a very happy marriage. Hence the 50-volume journal.
-Quincy had an eye wound, sustained while trying to instruct his sons in the correct use of firearms. “Not like this,” he said.
-Most of the things Quincy accomplished in politics were while he was Secretary of State under James Monroe, whom we wrote about last year. For example, he was able to buy Florida from Spain thanks to the shrewd tactics of: 1. Being able to talk to them in Spanish, thanks to his years abroad, and 2. Somehow not knowing the Spanish word for swamplands (pantano). The Spanish were like, “Pantano!” and he said, “Yeah, I’m wearing pantanos! What, should I wear knee breeches, like I’m walking around in some swamp?”
-In 1824, Adams ran for president for the Democratic-Republican party -- which sounds like it combined Democrats and Republicans into one peaceful party -- against 3 other candidates who were also running for the Democratic-Republican party. And as can be expected, no one got the majority vote. Andrew Jackson got the most votes, but that wasn’t how it worked. The House had to vote on who would be president, and they picked Quincy. The pants are probably what put him over the top.
-So Jackson and his Congressional friends decided, as revenge, to make Quincy’s presidency as uneventful as possible. Whatever law Quincy proposed, they’d make up an excuse to shut it down.
-Quincy said, “I want to build a national system of roads,” and Congress said, “We don’t need roads.” This created our current system, in which there is always road construction, but you can’t actually see anyone working on the roads.
-Quincy tried to provide Native Americans with territory in the West, but Congress said, “Why should we give the Native Americans anything? Let them go back to where they came from!”
-Quincy tried to build schools! But Congress said, “We don’t need no schools.”
-In desperation for something, Quincy proposed the establishment of a uniform system of weights and measures, because in those days, people were measuring things using whatever random word came to mind, such as furlongs and scores and pecks and bushels and leagues and ha’pennies. So Quincy said, “This is very confusing. Can we do like inches or something?” and they said, “Come back to us in a fortnight.”
-Quincy was actually obsessed with weights and measures, and talked about it all the time. In 1812, he noted, “I have found, by experiments frequently repeated, that my ordinary pace is 2 feet 6 inches and 88/100 of an inch, or about 29 French inches, and that in my ordinary pace I walk 120 steps to a minute.” This was one of his less famous quotes. And his wife said, “Quincy… There’s a war going on.”
-He even wrote a book on the subject, much to the chagrin of his wife. People would come up to him on the street and say, “Oh did you write that book, Report Upon Weights and Measures? I couldn’t put it down!” and his wife would roll her eyes. And Quincy would say, “Thank you… You made me lose count of my steps.”
-As a result of constantly being shot down, Quincy spent his presidency almost clinically depressed. He later said, “The four most miserable years of my life were my four years in the presidency.” Though he did run again in 1828.
-He did do several things to keep his spirits up, though, besides counting his steps:
-For example, he bought a pool table for the White House. The table measured 9 feet by 4 ½ feet. He was instantly attacked by Jackson, who claimed he’d used government funds, but Quincy was like, “No, I actually got it second hand.”
-There has never been a pool table in history that someone got firsthand.
-According to some stories, Quincy had a pet alligator, which a friend had brought him back up from a trip to Florida. (“Did you know there were alligators there? Caimanes!” “Oh! I thought I was buying the Caymans!”)
-Adams kept the alligator in the east bathroom of the White house, and as the story goes, he didn’t warn guests that he had an alligator in there, because he enjoyed “the spectacle of guests sprinting from the room in terror” with their belt buckles rattling as they ran.
-Every morning in the summer, from age 50 until 78, Quincy would wake up at 5 a.m., walk down to the Potomac River, and go swimming – sometimes by himself, and sometimes with his son, George Washington. Sort of like a Pharaoh-at-the-Nile situation.
-His wife didn’t love it so much, as she was convinced he would drown. It did not help that…
-One time, early in his presidency, he almost did drown.
-Then there was the time someone stole his clothes from the side of the river and he had to send a boy to the White House to ask his wife for new clothes. He should have maybe hired someone to watch his clothes, like Pharaoh did.
-And then there was the time a reporter who wanted an interview sat on his clothes and refused to get up, so he had to stand in the river and answer her questions.
-Nowadays this kind of stuff doesn’t happen so much, because the White House has a pool.
-In 1828, after one term, Quincy lost the election to Andrew Jackson. Quincy didn’t attend Jackson’s inauguration, making him one of only four presidents to skip the inauguration of their successor. Unless you count the 8 presidents who died in office.
-He did, however, leave the alligator in the bathroom for Jackson to find.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.