Memorial Day is more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year's first sunburn. Here’s a handy 10-pack of facts to give the holiday some perspective.]]>

Memorial Day is more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year’s first sunburn. Here’s a handy 10-pack of facts to give the holiday some perspective.

1. It started with the Civil War

Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War, in which some 620,000 soldiers on both sides died. The loss of life and its effect on communities throughout the North and South led to spontaneous commemorations of the dead:

• In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pa., put flowers on the graves of their dead from the just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Miss., cemetery.

• In April 1866, women from Columbus, Miss., laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. It was recognized at the time as an act of healing sectional wounds. In the same month, up in Carbondale, Ill., 219 Civil War veterans marched through town in memory of the fallen to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Union hero Maj. Gen. John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance.

• Waterloo, N.Y., began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. Although many towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as the “birthplace of Memorial Day.”

2. General Logan made it official

Gen. Logan, the speaker at the Carbondale gathering, also was commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans. On May 5, 1868, he issued General Orders No. 11, which set aside May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion….”

The orders expressed hope that the observance would be “kept up from year to year while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.”

3. It was first known as Decoration Day

From the practice of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, the holiday was long known as Decoration Day. The name Memorial Day goes back to 1882, but the older name didn’t disappear until after World War II. Federal law declared “Memorial Day” the official name in 1967.

4. The holiday is a franchise

Calling Memorial Day a “national holiday” is a bit of a misnomer. While there are 11 “federal holidays” created by Congress—including Memorial Day—they apply only to Federal employees and the District of Columbia. Federal Memorial Day, established in 1888, allowed Civil War veterans, many of whom were drawing a government paycheck, to honor their fallen comrades with out being docked a day’s pay.

For the rest of us, our holidays were enacted state by state. New York was the first state to designate Memorial Day a legal holiday, in 1873. Most Northern states had followed suit by the 1890s. The states of the former Confederacy were unenthusiastic about a holiday memorializing those who, in Gen. Logan’s words, “united to suppress the late rebellion.” The South didn’t adopt the May 30 Memorial Day until after World War I, by which time its purpose had been broadened to include those who died in all the country’s wars.

In 1971, the Monday Holiday Law shifted Memorial Day from May 30, to the last Monday of the month.

5. It was James Garfield’s finest hour—or maybe hour-and-a-half

On May 30, 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant presided over the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery—which, until 1864, was Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation.

Some 5,000 people attended on a spring day which, The New York Times reported, was “somewhat too warm for comfort.” The principal speaker was James A. Garfield, a Civil War general, Republican congressman from Ohio and future president.

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” Garfield began, and then continued to utter them. “If silence is ever golden, it must be beside the graves of fifteen-thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung.” It went on like that for pages and pages.

As the songs, speeches and sermons ended, the participants helped to decorate the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.

6. God knows, not even the Unknown Soldier can avoid media scrutiny these days

“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” That is the inscription on the Tomb of the Unknowns, established at Arlington National Cemetery to inter the remains of the first Unknown Soldier, a World War I fighter, on Nov. 11, 1921. Unknown soldiers from World War II and the Korean War subsequently were interred in the tomb on Memorial Day 1958.

An emotional President Ronald Reagan presided over the interment of six bones, the remains of an unidentified Vietnam War soldier, on Nov. 28, 1984. Fourteen years later, those remains were disinterred, no longer unknown. Spurred by an investigation by CBS News, the defense department removed the remains from the Tomb of the Unknowns for DNA testing.

The once-unknown fighter was Air Force pilot Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, whose jet crashed in South Vietnam in 1972. “The CBS investigation suggested that the military review board that had changed the designation on Lt. Blassie’s remains to ‘unknown’ did so under pressure from veterans’ groups to honor a casualty from the Vietnam War,” The New York Times reported in 1998.

Lt. Blassie was reburied near his hometown of St. Louis. His crypt at Arlington remains permanently empty. [Image courtesy of VisitingDC.com.]

7. Vietnam vets go whole hog

On Memorial Day weekend in 1988, 2,500 motorcyclists rode into Washington, D.C., for the first Rolling Thunder rally to draw attention to Vietnam War soldiers still missing in action or prisoners of war. By 2002, the numbers had swelled to 300,000 bikers, many of them veterans. There may have been a half-million participants in 2005 in what organizers bluntly call “a demonstration—not a parade.”

A national veterans rights group, Rolling Thunder takes its name from the B-52 carpet-bombing runs during the war in Vietnam. Rolling Thunder XXIII (and you thought only Super Bowls and Rocky movies used Roman numerals) took place today.

8. Memorial Day has its customs

General Orders No. 11 stated that “in this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed,” but over time several customs and symbols became associated with the holiday.

It is customary on Memorial Day to fly the flag at half staff until noon, and then raise it to the top of the staff until sunset.

Taps, the 24-note bugle call, is played at all military funerals and memorial services. It originated in 1862 when Union Gen. Dan Butterfield “grew tired of the ‘lights out’ call sounded at the end of each day,” according to The Washington Post. Together with the brigade bugler, Butterfield made some changes to the tune.

Not long after, the melody was used at a burial for the first time, when a battery commander ordered it played in lieu of the customary three rifle volleys over the grave. The battery was so close to enemy lines, the commander was worried the shots would spark renewed fighting.

The World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrea, inspired the Memorial Day custom of wearing red artificial poppies. In 1915, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael began a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to veterans and for “keeping the faith with all who died.” The sale of poppies has supported the work of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

9. There is still a gray Memorial Day

Several Southern states continue to set aside a day for honoring the Confederate dead, which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day: Alabama: fourth Monday in April; Georgia: April 26; Louisiana: June 3; Mississippi: last Monday in April; North Carolina: May 10; South Carolina: May 10; Tennessee (Confederate Decoration Day): June 3; Texas (Confederate Heroes Day): January 19; Virginia: last Monday in May.

10. Each Memorial Day is a little different

No question that Memorial Day is a solemn event. Still, don’t feel too guilty about doing something frivolous, like having barbecue, over the weekend. After all, you weren’t the one who instituted the Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911. That credit goes to Indianapolis businessman Carl Fisher. The winning driver that day was Ray Harroun, who averaged 74.6 mph and completed the race in 6 hours and 42 minutes.

Gravitas returned on May 30, 1922, when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Supreme Court chief justice (and former president) William Howard Taft dedicated the monument before a crowd of 50,000 people, segregated by race, and which included a row of Union and Confederate veterans. Also attending was Lincoln’s surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln.

And in 2000, Congress established a National Moment of Remembrance, which asks Americans to pause for one minute at 3pm in an act of national unity. The time was chosen because 3pm “is the time when most Americans are enjoying their freedoms on the national holiday.”

David Holzel is a freelance writer. He edits The Jewish Angle. This article originally appeared in 2008.

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Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, begins at sundown on December 21. To celebrate, we’ve answered eight questions about the mysteries of Chanukah – one for each night. And yes, one of the mysteries involves the proper spelling.]]>

Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, begins at sundown on December 11 with the lighting of one candle on the eight-candle menorah. Every night an additional candle burns, until the eighth night, when eight candles are lighted.

To celebrate, we’ve answered eight questions about the mysteries of Chanukah – one for each night. And yes, one of the mysteries involves the proper spelling.

1. What is Chanukah?

To put yourself in the right frame of mind, think 2,000 years ago. Better yet, think 2,200ish years ago. Thanks to Alexander the Great, Hellenistic kings rule in the Middle East, and Hellenistic culture has been embraced by the region’s elites.

Now focus on Judea – at the time, the area immediately surrounding and including Jerusalem. It was from the mountains and caves of Judea that a rebellion of traditionalist Jews, known as the Maccabees, broke out against the rule of Antiochus, the Damascus-based Hellenistic king, and those Jews who had abandoned their traditions in favor of Hellenistic ways.

King Antiochus tried to root out local religions in his empire. In Judea, that meant outlawing circumcision, kosher food and the Jewish Sabbath and, in 169 BCE, introducing pagan sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The Maccabees fought a guerrilla war against Antiochus’s forces for three years, before recapturing Jerusalem in 166 BCE. They immediately began to cleanse the Temple of its ritual impurities. And on the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev (roughly corresponding to December), they made the first burnt offering in the rededicated Temple.

That was the first Chanukah, which means “dedication” in Hebrew. And it has been celebrated beginning on the 25th of Kislev every year since.

2. So why is Chanukah 8 days (nights) long?

The first Chanukah celebration lasted eight days, in imitation of the eight-day fall harvest holiday called Sukkot (the festival of Huts), which the Maccabees had not been able to celebrate in their mountain redoubts. Jewish holidays begin at sundown because that’s when the new day begins, according to the Jewish calendar.

3. What about the miraculous oil?

You’re referring to the wonderful story that, when the Temple had been purified and there was nothing left to do but light the eternal lamp, they found only enough pure oil to burn for a single day. By a miracle, the oil lasted for eight days – long enough to process more kosher oil and rush it to the Temple.

The story of the oil offers an alternate reason for why the festival is eight-days long. It comes from the Talmud, which contains the law and lore of the early rabbis. And while the earliest rabbis lived long after the pious, honorable Maccabees, they were contemporaries of the Maccabees’ despotic descendants, who ruled Judea by combining the offices of king and high priest, corrupting both.

The miracle of the oil was the rabbis’ spin on Chanukah, which enhanced the holiday’s religious meaning while de-emphasizing the political role of the Maccabees.

4. Speaking of spin, what’s the deal with that top?

That’s the dreidel in Yiddish; sevivon in Hebrew. It has four sides, marked with the Hebrew letters nun, gimel, hey and shin. (They make the sounds “n,” “g,” “h,” and “sh.”)

The dreidel found itself connected to Chanukah because the four letters form the abbreviation of the phrase “Nes gadol hayah sham” – “A great miracle happened there” – “there” being long-ago Judea, and the miracle being that high-mileage oil.

(In Israel, the sevivon is marked nun, gimel, hey, pey, for “Nes gadol hayah po” – “A great miracle happened here.”)

But the Israeli version is a relatively recent adaptation. It seems the dreidel is based on a German top. The four letters also stand for four words in Yiddish, a European Jewish language based on German. Nun stands for nitz (nothing), gimel for ganz (everything), hey for halb (half) and shin for shtell-arein (put in). And these are the keys to playing the dreidel game.

Traditionally dreidel is played with nuts, rather than coins or chips, which are divided between the players and a pot in the middle. Each player takes a turn spinning. The letter facing up when the dreidel stops determines whether the player can take the whole pot, half the pot, nothing, or must add nuts to the pot.

5. Why do you get a present each night?

For the same reason that people line up outside Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. There aren’t any set rules for gift-giving. But how can you not do something everyone else is doing? When it comes to commerce, Chanukah has been absorbed into the larger Christmas gift parade.

It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, children might get a few coins during Chanukah. I have a book about Jewish holidays published in 1938, which put it this way:
“The children eat pancakes and count their coins, and consider themselves fortunate.”

6. Is this the big Jewish holiday of the year?

You’d think so. And, in fact, a 2000 survey found that 72 percent of American Jews light Chanukah candles – slightly fewer than the 77 percent who hold or attend a Passover seder, but a lot more than the 59 percent who fast on Yom Kippur. So Chanukah is certainly just about the most popular Jewish holiday.

But for most of the 21 centuries after that first celebration in Jerusalem, Chanukah was a low-key, minor holiday. That began to change in the 19th century when, under the secular influences of the Enlightenment and Zionism, the Maccabees and their struggle began to be seen as heroic.

Today in Israel, Chanukah is celebrated as an act of national liberation. In the United States, the holiday’s subtext of religious freedom resonates.

7. What were you saying before about pancakes?

Forgive me. You can’t go without a nosh. Potato pancakes – latkes in Yiddish – are the traditional holiday food for Jews whose background is in Eastern or Central Europe. They’re usually topped with sour cream or apple sauce. In the Middle East, sufganiyot – jelly donuts – are the holiday delicacy.

What they have in common is both are fried in oil. So there’s a reminder of the miracle in every delicious bite.

8. So how do you spell it – Chanukah? Hanukkah? Hanuka?

The short answer is yes. We’re dealing with a transliteration that – because English and Hebrew don’t share all of the same sounds and none of the same letters – is inexact.

The first Hebrew letter in the holiday’s name has the sound of a guttural “h.” How would you prefer to render that in English – with an “h,” which can lead people to think that the word starts with an English “h” sound? Or how about using “ch” instead – which could lead some to think the sound is like the “ch” in “cheese”?

Then there’s the final letter hey, which does have the sound of “h” – except when it comes at the end of the word. Then it’s silent. So, do you use an “h” to be as true to the Hebrew spelling as possible? Or do you leave it out, because the word doesn’t end with an “h” sound?

The choice is yours. Chew it over while you polish off your jelly donut.

David Holzel has a little dreidel. He writes on other Jewish subjects at The Jewish Angle.

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If you’ve lost track of those wonderful spacecrafts NASA has been launching for a half-century, here is an opportunity to catch up with a few of them.]]> This is the International Year of Astronomy. The U.N. and International Astronomical Union have declared it so, but with a slogan like “The Universe — yours to discover,” it could be sponsored by the auto club.

Still, if you’ve lost track of those wonderful spacecrafts NASA has been launching for a half-century, here is an opportunity to catch up with a few of them.

1. Pioneer 3 & 4 (1958, 1959)

The space race was running its first lap when NASA aimed for the moon and launched Pioneer 3 in late 1958 and Pioneer 4 in early 1959. Pioneer 4 successfully passed within 30,000 miles of the moon, and traveled 407,000 miles from Earth before the ground station could no longer track it. Pioneer 4 became the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the sun, which it is still doing. Pioneer 3, however, wasn’t as successful: a glitch sent it 63,000 miles into space, after which gravity brought it back to Earth. In the meantime, Pioneer 3’s Geiger counter discovered a second radiation belt around Earth.

2. Viking 1 & 2 (1975)

Launched within weeks of each other in the summer of 1975, the Vikings were the first spacecrafts to reach the surface of another planet safely. Then, as now, the big curiosity was about life on Mars, and the Vikings were sent to search for microorganisms in the Martian soil. The Viking ships were composed of two parts: orbiters, which circled the planet, and landers, which were directed to land on the surface of the planet itself. Viking Lander 1 shot photographs that revealed the Martian sky is pink; Viking Lander 2 recorded a “Marsquake.” They continued to send data to Earth until the early 1980s.

3. Voyager 1 & 2 (1977)

The Voyagers, which made a tour of the outer solar system before heading toward interstellar space, are the oldest functioning spacecrafts. There were launched in 1977, because that year the planets literally aligned: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were all collinear at that time. The crafts were able to use the gravity of each planet to slingshot them into the orbit of the next. The Voyagers passed by Jupiter in 1979 and viewed for the first time Jupiter’s rings and volcanic activity on its moon Io, and Saturn in 1981. Voyager 1 then turned and headed away from the ecliptic, the plane in which the planets orbit.

Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Last year, it reached the transition zone between the solar system and interstellar space. From information radioed to Earth, scientists determined “the bubble of solar wind surrounding the solar system is not round, but has a squashed shape,” according to Science Daily. NASA believes the two ships will continue functioning until at least 2020.

4. Galileo (1989)

As Voyager 2 reached Neptune, the spacecraft Galileo headed for Jupiter by a circuitous route that took it past Venus and twice past Earth. In 1995, it became the first spacecraft to orbit the largest planet. Galileo also dropped a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere and witnessed the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. It also discovered a magnetic field generated by Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and found that another moon, Europa, has a saltwater ocean under a layer of ice. Scientists deliberately crashed Galileo into Jupiter in 2003. They were afraid the spacecraft might otherwise hit one of the planet’s moons, where life is theoretically possible, and contaminate it with Earth-bred microorganisms.

5. Cassini-Huygens (1997)

Launched in 1997, Cassini entered Saturn’s orbit in 2004, and sent the Huygens probe parachuting through the atmosphere to the surface of the planet’s largest moon, Titan. Together, Cassini and Huygens discovered vast methane lakes on Titan. Cassini revealed the complexity of Saturn’s ring system, and found a moon, Daphnis, embedded in the rings. The spacecraft also found rings around Saturn’s second-largest moon, Rhea, and a plume of microscopic ice particles ejected from the south pole of the small, inner moon Enceladus. Cassini’s mission has been extended to study the effects of the equinox on Saturn, which will occur in August. The sun will shine directly on the equator and begin to illuminate the planet’s northern hemisphere and the rings’ northern face.

6. Mars Spirit & Opportunity (2003)

Spirit and Opportunity are two rovers that have been poking around opposite sides of Mars since 2004, searching for the arid planet’s watery past. According to NASA, “each has found evidence of long-ago Martian environments where water was active and conditions may have been suitable for life.” Both descended using a parachute, then a thruster shot, with airbags cushioning the landing. Although they were designed to operate for only three months, the two are still rolling over the Martian surface today. Opportunity has driven more than seven miles; Spirit more than four. Spirit lost the use of its right-front wheel in 2006, and now drives backward. Some months ago it failed to activate when the morning light hit its solar panels, although it later responded to commands from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA has since referred to these hiccups as “amnesia.”

7. Messenger (2004)

Nobody’s been to Mercury for 30 years, even though it’s just two planets away from us. To rectify this, Messenger was launched in 2004 with the express purpose of observing Mercury. Messenger has already made two flybys of the small planet closest to the sun, and is scheduled to make a third in September, before settling into orbit in 2011. Messenger’s assignment is six fold: it will examine Mercury’s extreme density, its geologic history, its magnetic field (an unusual feature it shares with Earth, but not Venus or Mars), the size of its core, the unusual reflective materials at its poles, and the composition of its thin atmosphere.

David Holzel would like to tour the solar system. Until then, he blogs at David Wrote This.

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From the moment Justice David Souter announced he'd be stepping down, Washington has been gearing up for a confirmation fight. Let's take a look back at eight nominees who didn't make it to the bench.]]>

Since George Washington nominated the first batch of justices, the Senate has confirmed all but 34 of 156 nominations. From the moment Justice David Souter announced he’d be stepping down, Washington has been gearing up for a confirmation fight. Let’s take a look back at eight nominees who didn’t make it to the bench.

1. Robert Bork

In our time, the most famous rejected nominee is Robert H. Bork, a legal scholar and U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a long paper trail of conservative opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork could have tilted the Court decisively to the right. As a known quantity, he was an easy target for liberal opponents, who organized a campaign against him. He was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee after 12 days of hearings.

2. Alexander Wolcott

“Oh degraded Country! How humiliating to the friends of moral virtue – of religion and of all that is dear to the lover of his Country!” the New-York Gazette Advertiser wailed over President James Madison’s nomination of Alexander Wolcott, in 1811. “Wolcott’s strong enforcement of the controversial embargo and non-intercourse acts while a U.S. collector of customs had cost him support in the press and the Senate. His qualifications for becoming a justice also were questioned,” according to the CRS Report for Congress. The Senate turned him down by a 9-24 vote, the widest rejection in Supreme Court history.

3. Roger Taney

Roger B. Taney (pronounced tawny) is largely remembered as the chief justice who handed down the Dred Scott decision in 1857. With his sepulchral countenance, Taney is inextricably linked to the grim ruling that all blacks — slaves as well as free — were not and could never become citizens of the United States. But when President Andrew Jackson nominated him in 1835 as associate justice, opposition Whigs were still smarting from Taney’s removing government deposits from the Second Bank of the United States while he was a recess-appointed secretary of the treasury. The Senate voted to indefinitely postpone the nomination. But after Chief Justice John Marshall died in 1836, Jackson sent Taney’s name up again. He was confirmed, this time as chief justice.

4. Ebenezer Hoar

You might think the Senate just couldn’t stomach elevating to the highest court in the land a man with the name Ebenezer Hoar. But it seems the senators were offended by something other than aesthetics. As President Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general, Hoar had insisted on rewarding merit rather than political loyalty, thus blocking a well trod route for patronage. So when Grant nominated Hoar to the Court in 1869, miffed Republican senators gave the virtuous Hoar thumbs down.

5 & 6. Wheeler Hazard Peckham and William B. Hornblower

A senator has the right to reject a court nomination simply because the nominee is from the senator’s home state. Upon this invocation of “senatorial courtesy” rests the demise of Wheeler Hazard Peckham and William B. Hornblower. Both men were nominated by President Grover Cleveland. Both nominees were New Yorkers, and New York Sen. David Hill invoked senatorial courtesy to squelch their nominations in 1894. (Peckham’s brother, Rufus Wheeler Peckham, became a justice in 1896.)

7. Harriet Miers

Some nominees withdrew themselves from consideration before they could be rejected. Such was the case of Harriet Miers, whom President George W. Bush nominated in 2005, but withdrew under criticism that she was unqualified.

8. Douglas Ginsburg

Another withdrawal was that of Douglas Ginsburg (pictured, and not related to current justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the conservative, former pot-smoking federal appellate judge who is a footnote in the Bork saga. After Bork was Borked, Reagan mooted the more moderate Anthony Kennedy for the seat. But Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) threatened a filibuster. So Reagan turned right again and proposed Ginsburg. Embarrassingly, there was no getting around the revelation that Ginsburg had inhaled. Ginsburg withdrew himself from consideration, Reagan put forward Kennedy and the Senate, eager to move on, easily confirmed him.

David Holzel is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. He writes the ezine The Jewish Angle.

Monday was Australia Day. In India, it was Republic Day. How does a country decide on a national day of celebration? There are more than 190 countries in the world. We decided to explore the national days of six of them.]]> Monday was Australia Day. In India, it was Republic Day. While both are national holidays, the reasons for their celebration couldn’t be more different. So how does a country decide which is the day for fireworks, parades, marching bagpipers, and the odd display of nuclear-capable missiles? And why? There are more than 190 countries in the world. We decided to explore the national days of six of them.

1. Australia Day – January 26

Like the 13 colonies that formed the United States, the British colonies that were settled on the Australian continent after 1788 didn’t originally see themselves as parts of a larger country. But unlike the American colonies and a host of other one-time British possessions, Australia didn’t struggle for its independence. Perhaps the absence of that struggle is one reason it took more than 200 years for all the continent’s states and territories to agree to celebrate Australia Day together as a public holiday each Jan. 26th.

It was on Jan. 26, 1788, that the Union Jack was first raised in Sydney Cove, as a fleet of 11 convict ships were anchored to begin British colonization of the territory they called New South Wales – the eastern half of the continent. By the early 19th century, those convicts and their descendants had begun to celebrate the foundation of Sydney and New South Wales with annual anniversary dinners.

It wasn’t until 1818 that the continent was given the name Australia. In 1888, representatives of the five other Australian colonies traveled to Sydney to celebrate the centennial of the colony’s founding.

In 1901, the Australian colonies joined as a federation within the British Empire, and there was some jostling over what the national day would be. In Victoria, in southeast Australia and home to the city of Melbourne, an organization called the Australian Natives’ Association – referring not to the aboriginal peoples of the continent, but to the descendants of the original colonists – worked to promote Jan. 26 as the country’s national day.

In 1931, Victoria adopted the date as Australia Day, while other states called it Foundation Day. In New South Wales, where the story began, Jan. 26 was Anniversary Day. Still, by 1935, the timing of the celebrations was synchronized. And by 1994 the national celebration of Australia Day was established. The focus of the day was shifted from Sydney, where the nation’s story began, to Canberra, the national capital.

2. India: Republic Day – January 26

This year the elephants won’t be marching in New Delhi. The jewel-laden pachyderms are a beloved part of the Republic Day parade – even carrying children who are the recipients of bravery awards. But the defense ministry decided to take the elephants off the invite list after pressure from animal rights activists and because the animals have a tendency of “going slightly berserk,” according to a spokesman.

The national day of India, home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, celebrates cutting its last colonial ties on Jan. 26, 1950, after more than a century of British rule. India achieved independence from Britain on Aug. 15, 1947 (marked on calendars as the more minor Independence Day). But it wasn’t until three years later that Indians ratified their constitution and inaugurated their first president, replacing Britain’s King George VI as head of state.

Jan. 26 already was a significant date in the movement for Indian independence. On that day in 1930, the Indian National Congress symbolically declared independence from Britain. So 20 years later, Jan. 26 was a ready-made date to complete in reality what had begun symbolically.

Republic Day is a government-sponsored event that features a military parade down the Rajpath, the ceremonial avenue in New Delhi. In 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was guest of honor at the parade, which showcased India’s latest military hardware, including nuclear-capable missiles.

Celebrations also include a parade of floats from the various Indian states, folk dancing competitions and displays of Malkhamb, an ancient form of gymnastics involving balancing on a pole.

3. Guyana: Republic Day/Mashramani — February 23

A South American country that looks to the Caribbean. A diverse population that is 50 percent East Indian, 36 percent black, and 7 percent Amerindian (what Americans call Native American). Guyana uses its national day to build ethnic unity.

Guyana became independent from Great Britain in 1966, but retained nominal ties to the crown. It severed those ties on Feb. 23, 1970, and declared itself a “cooperative republic.”

The creators of Guyana’s Republic Day looked to Trinidad’s Carnival for inspiration, but to give it a local identity they gave it a new name. They settled on Mashramani, popularly called Mash. It’s derived from an Arawak (Amerindian) word meaning “celebration after a successful cooperative effort.”

In the capital, Georgetown, Mash activities include a Calypso competition, a parade of costumed participants, floats and “towering stacks of speakers that line the streets,” according to Guyana by Kirk Smock. There is also an early-morning ceremony, “hoisting the Golden Arrowhead,” which refers to Guyana’s flag.

Mash has its corporate cheerleaders, and the theme of this year’s celebration seems to have been written in Chamber of Commerce boosterese: “One Dream, One Celebration, One Design in 2009.”

4. Zimbabwe: Independence Day – April 18

No country came out of the colonial period with more promise than Zimbabwe, but that promise has never been realized. The country became independent of white minority rule and British colonialism on April 18, 1980. Ever since, it’s been impossible for the southern African nation to win independence from President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s first and only leader, who took a relatively prosperous country with a bright future and has presided over its utter collapse.

Independence Day is celebrated with parades, dancing and singing, political rallies, and fireworks.

At the first Independence Day celebration in 1980, reggae star Bob Marley performed his song “Zimbabwe,” as Mugabe and Britain’s Prince Charles watched. The performance was interrupted when tear gas began blowing through the stadium where the celebration was being held, as police fought Zimbabweans who had not been invited to the concert, but were trying to enter the stadium.

By 1982, Mugabe was rubbing out his opponents and rigging elections, tactics he continued using through last March’s polling, which the opposition won. Nearly a year later, though, after a recount, a run-off and a series of power-sharing negotiations leading to a series of power-sharing compromises, Mugabe is still very much in charge.

Official mismanagement and corruption have led to economic collapse and serious food shortages in Zimbabwe. Schools and hospitals are closed, and a cholera epidemic attests to the breakdown of basic infrastructure. Inflation rages at 321 million percent – last year the government issued a 100-billion-Zimbabwe dollar bill. Last week, a 100-trillion-dollar note was introduced.

5. Portugal Day – June 10

Portugal has a number of historical dates that could easily qualify as its national day. In picking Dia de Camões, de Portugal e das Comunidades Portuguesas (“Day of Camões, Portugal, and the Portuguese Communities”), the country has chosen to commemorate the death in 1580 of its national poet, Luis de Camões. Camões wrote the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), whose central theme is the discovery of the sea route to India by Vasco da Gama.

In 1580, the year Camões died, Portugal came under the control of Spain. In 1640, Portugal regained its independence, which is celebrated each Dec. 1 as Restoration Day.

Oct. 1 is known Republic Day. It marks the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, and the establishment of republican government.

Republican government didn’t necessarily mean democratic government. It was during the long dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar (1932-1968) that June 10 became Portugal’s national holiday and the long-dead poet entered the picture. In fascist style, the dictatorship used Camões as a symbol of the Portuguese race, and in 1944 Salazar referred to June 10 as Dia da Raça – the “Day of the Portuguese Race.”

The dictatorship outlasted Salazar and was finally overthrown in 1974. (April 25 is celebrated as Liberation Day.) Camões then became the centerpiece of the June 10 celebration, which was later broadened to include Portugal itself and the numerous Portuguese communities worldwide.

One hotbed of June 10 festivities is Rhode Island. That small state has the highest percentage of Portuguese-Americans in the United States – about 10 percent of the state’s population is of Portuguese heritage. In typical American holiday style, when June 10 falls during the week, the celebration is shifted to the weekend to encourage larger crowds. Farther north, a 2001 proclamation declared June 10 as Portugal Day in Canada.

6. Indonesia: Independence Day – August 17

World War II was over, although the vanquished Japanese were still nominally in charge, when Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno read a proclamation of independence on Aug. 17, 1945.

The Dutch, who had ruled what was called the Dutch East Indies for 300 years, were not ready to lose their colony again, after being expelled by the Japanese. Over the next two years, the Dutch fought to suppress Indonesian independence.

By 1949, negotiations were underway at the Hague, and on Dec. 27, 1949, after a 10-week-long peace conference, Dutch and Indonesian representatives signed an agreement setting up the “United States of Indonesia.”

The concept of Indonesia as a nation-state was new. Even the name Indonesia was new. It was created from the Greek Indos meaning Indian and nesos for islands.

Among Independence Day activities are egg-and-spoon and sack races, and panjat pinang, in which a player climbs a greasy pole to get a prize – like a bike. Public buildings are dressed in red and white bunting, reflecting the two-stripe Indonesian flag.

In a 2005 visit to Indonesia on the eve of Independence Day, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot said the Netherlands now recognized that Indonesian independence occurred on Aug. 17, 1945, when Sukarno read his proclamation.
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These are only thumbnail sketches and they just scratch the surface of these countries’ rich history and culture. If you have intimate knowledge of one of these or other national days and how it is celebrated, please tell us more in the comments.

David Holzel has not visited any of these six countries (yet), but really likes the idea of holidays in honor of writers. You can read more of his writing at The Jewish Angle.

The transition team has confirmed that Barack Obama's mother-in-law will be moving to Washington with the first family. Here are four stories that confirm the old truism: While America can choose its president, the president can’t choose his in-laws.]]>

Late last week, the transition team confirmed that President-Elect Obama’s mother-in-law will be moving to Washington with the first family, at least temporarily. Marian Robinson will be the latest in a line of presidential in-laws who, for good or ill, lived under the same roof as the president. Here are four stories that confirm the old truism: While America can choose its president, the president can’t choose his in-laws.

1. Ulysses S. Grant and ‘The Colonel’

You would think that the Civil War was settled at Appomattox, and no question of its outcome would have been raised in the White House of Ulysses S. Grant, who, after all, was the general who won the war.

But you would be wrong, because living with Ulysses and Julia Grant was the president’s father-in-law (pictured). Colonel Frederick Dent (his rank seems to have been self-selected) was an unreconstructed Confederate, a St. Louis businessman and slaveholder who, when his daughter Julia went to the Executive Mansion early in 1869, decided to relocate there as well.

The Colonel didn’t hesitate to make himself at home. When his daughter received guests, he sat in a chair just behind her, offering anyone within earshot unsolicited advice. Political and business figures alike got a dose of the Colonel’s mind as they waited to meet with President Grant.

When the president’s father, Jesse Grant, came from Kentucky on one of his regular visits to Washington, the White House turned into a Civil War reenactment. According to First Families: The Impact of the White House on Their Lives, by Bonnie Angelo, Jesse Grant preferred to stay in a hotel rather than sleep under the same roof as the Colonel.

And when the two old partisans found themselves unavoidably sitting around the same table in the White House, they avoided direct negotiations by using Julia and her young son, named for the president’s father, as intermediaries, Betty Boyd Caroli writes in First Ladies: “In the presence of the elder Grant, Frederick Dent would instruct Julia to ‘take better care of that old gentleman [Jesse Grant]. He is feeble and deaf as a post and yet you permit him to wander all over Washington alone.’ And Grant replied [to his grandson and namesake], ‘Did you hear him? I hope I shall not live to become as old and infirm as your Grandfather Dent.’”

The Colonel remained in the White House—irascible and unrepentant—until his death, at age 88, in 1873.

2. Harry S Truman and the Mother-in-Law from Heck

Harry Truman and Bess Wallace met as children. He was a farm boy; she was the well-heeled granddaughter of Independence, Missouri’s Flour King. When they married in 1919, Truman was a struggling haberdasher, and Bess’s mother, Madge Wallace, thought Bess had made a colossal social faux pas. Until she died in 1952, Madge Wallace never changed her mind about Harry Truman. Her Bess had married way below her station.

Madge had plenty of opportunities to let her son-in-law know it. The newlyweds moved into the Wallace mansion in Independence, and the three lived together under the same roof until the end of Madge’s life.

When Harry Truman was elected senator, “Mother Wallace,” as Truman judiciously called her, moved with her daughter and son-in-law to Washington. In the family’s apartment, she shared a bedroom with the Trumans’ daughter, Margaret. And when Truman became president, she moved with them into the White House, where she cast her cold eye on the new commander-in-chief.

“Why would Harry run against that nice Mr. Dewey?” she wondered aloud, as Truman was fighting for his political life in the 1948 presidential race, according to First Mothers by Bonnie Angelo. And when Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for insubordination, Mother Wallace was scandalized. “Imagine a captain from the National Guard [Truman] telling off a West Point general!”

In December 1952, shortly before Truman’s term ended, Madge Wallace died, at age 90. For the 33 years they lived together, she never called her son-in-law anything but “Mr. Truman.”

3. Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Mother-in-Law of the Year

If Truman’s story sounds like the set-up for a film noir, his successor’s relationship with his mother-in-law might have been a Technicolor musical. Elivera Mathilda Carlson Doud, Mamie Eisenhower‘s mother, was “a witty woman with a tart tongue,” Time magazine wrote, and Dwight Eisenhower thought she was a hoot. “She refuted every mother-in-law joke ever made,” Time wrote. There was no question that she would join her daughter and son-in-law in the White House.

Ike called her “Min,” the name of a character in the Andy Gump comic strip. Ike and Min “constituted a mutual admiration society, and each took the other’s part whenever a family disagreement would arise,” said Eisenhower’s son, John. The New York Times observed, “The president frequently looks around him sharply, and inquires, ‘Where’s Min?’”

Widowed shortly before Eisenhower became president, Min spent the winters in the White House and summers at her home in Denver. It was while visiting his mother-in-law’s home that Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Two years later, in failing health, Min returned permanently to Denver. She died in 1960, at age 82.

4. Benjamin Harrison and the Reverend Doctor

Benjamin Harrison’s father-in-law, John Witherspoon Scott, bore a double title: “reverend doctor.”

Scott (pictured) was born in Pennsylvania in 1800, did post-graduate work at Yale and took a professorship in mathematics and science at Miami University, in Ohio. He was also a Presbyterian minister and an outspoken abolitionist. The reverend doctor was rumored to have shielded runaway slaves in his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Whatever the truth, Miami University dismissed him for his anti-slavery beliefs.

He accepted a post at Farmer’s College, a prep school in Cincinnati, where he became a mentor of a student named Benjamin Harrison. During his visits to the Scott home, Harrison became friendly with the reverend doctor’s daughter, Caroline.

Young Harrison spent so many evenings at the Scotts’ home that he got the nickname “the pious moonlight dude,” according to The Complete Book of the Presidents by William A. DeGregorio. He and Caroline were married in 1853 at the bride’s house. The reverend doctor officiated.

John Witherspoon Scott later became a clerk in the pension office of the interior department.  He gave up the position when Harrison was elected president in 1888. A widower since 1876, Scott moved into the White House with his daughter and their family.

It was the president’s custom to lead the family in a half-hour of Bible reading and prayer after breakfast, Anne Chieko Moore and Hester Anne Hale wrote in Benjamin Harrison: Centennial President. When the president was absent, his father-in-law took his place.

Caroline Harrison died in October 1892, two weeks before her husband lost the presidential election. Her father died the next month, at age 92. An obituary described John Witherspoon Scott as “a man of wonderful physical vigor, tall, broad chested and well preserved mentally.”

David Holzel is a writer who lives outside Washington, DC, but figures the inaugural crowd will just about reach his front porch. He edits the Franklin Pierce Pages.

Ralph Nader and Bob Barr couldn't gain any electoral traction on Tuesday. But in honor of their campaigns, let's look back at some notable third-party candidates.]]> Ralph Nader and Bob Barr couldn’t gain any electoral traction on Tuesday. But in honor of their campaigns, let’s look back at some notable third-party candidates.

1. John B. Anderson, 1980: Doonesbury’s Choice

For most of the century, third-party candidates attracted the disaffected fringe voter. John Anderson—until his 1980 run an unknown Republican congressman from Illinois—drew from the center.

Anderson began his career as a conservative, but gradually became a progressive on social issues and foreign policy. Anderson was the first Republican congressman to call for Richard Nixon’s resignation. By 1980, after dropping out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, he was enough of a maverick to declare an independent candidacy.

“He is running in what he has called a ‘crazy’ year, one in which the Democrats and Republicans seem about to nominate candidates so unpopular that more than half the potential voters have been telling pollsters they wish there were another choice,” Time magazine wrote that spring, referring to Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan.

Anderson made an appearance on Saturday Night Live and received the endorsement of cartoon character Mike Doonesbury. “He has become a cult figure on campuses and with show-biz liberals,” Time wrote “That is the strangest irony of all, because Anderson is just about the reverse of a trendy personality.”

Reagan won the presidency with just over half the popular vote. Anderson finished a distant third with 5,719,437 vote—or 7 percent of the popular vote—and then dropped out of sight.

He spent the following years as a visiting professor—Stanford University, University of Illinois College of Law, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Oregon State University, University of Massachusetts. He now is a visiting professor at the Shepard Broad Law Center at Nova Southeastern University. Anderson also is chairman of the Center for Voting and Democracy and was president of the World Federalist Association, which lobbied to strengthen the institutions of the United Nations and for the creation of an international criminal court.

2. George Wallace, 1968: The “Law & Order” Candidate

After being elected Governor of Alabama in 1962, in a speech written by a known Ku Klux Klansman, George Wallace famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The next year, the Democrat Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to block two African-American students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

By 1968, the country was deeply divided over the Vietnam War, and reeling from anti-war protests and race riots. Much of the country wanted a president who would restore “law and order.” Running against former Vice President Richard Nixon (Republican) and sitting VP Hubert Humphrey (Democrat), the bulldog Wallace tapped into a deep well of white disaffection in the North as well as the South. Macho movie star John Wayne reportedly inscribed a check to Wallace with the words, “Sock it to ‘em, George.”

Nixon won the election, but Wallace received 9,906,473 votes—5.53 percent of the popular vote—and overwhelming majorities in Alabama and Mississippi. He took 46 electoral votes.

Alabama reelected Wallace governor in 1970. In 1972, he began a strong run for the Democratic presidential nomination, campaigning against school busing. The day before he won the Michigan and Maryland primaries, Wallace was shot and paralyzed while stumping at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland.

The assassination attempt ended Wallace’s campaign. He was reelected Alabama governor in 1974 and the next year announced another bid for the presidency. But another Southern governor, Jimmy Carter, drew Wallace’s regional support and he dropped out of the race.

Wallace was barred by law from seeking a third consecutive term as governor. In 1978, he was divorced from his second wife. (His first wife had succeeded him as governor in 1966 and died of cancer in 1968. A third marriage ended in divorce in 1987.)

Time effected a change on the old segregationist. In 1979, he contacted civil rights leader John Lewis—who was severely beaten by Wallace’s state troopers during a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965—and a number of other African Americans to ask their forgiveness for his past actions. He returned to the governor’s office in 1982, on the strength of Alabama’s majority black vote. And in a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he confessed that his opposition to school integration was wrong.

Wallace retired at the end of his term in January 1987 and died in 1998, at age 79.

3. Eugene Debs, 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1920: The 5 Timers Club

Eugene Debs had been a railway union organizer in the 1890s. While in prison for his union activities, he read the works of Karl Marx for the first time. In 1905 he helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, which became known as the Wobblies.

In the 1912 election—Debs’ fourth campaign for the presidency—Debs won 901,551 votes, just short of 6 percent of the popular vote, but a distant fourth behind Taft. Debs finished third in his 1920 run, with 913,693 votes—3.41 percent of the popular vote. That isn’t bad, considering the Socialist leader was in prison at the time.

An opponent of America’s participation in World War I—he saw it as a boon to capitalists—Debs had been jailed in 1918 for making a speech against the war. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime to interfere with the war effort.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and his citizenship was revoked. Debs appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction. In his majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared free speech does not include “the right to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

In 1921, President Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served. Some 50,000 followers welcomed him home on his release. He died of heart failure in 1926, at age 70. His citizenship was restored posthumously in 1976.

4. Norman Thomas, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948: The Losingest Candidate

Socialist Norman Thomas was perhaps America’s losingest third-party candidate, but he lived long enough to become an American institution. Of his six consecutive runs for president, his best showing was in 1932, when he received 884,781 votes.

He was the Socialist successor to Eugene Debs, but unlike Debs, Thomas did not have a working-class background. He began his career as a clergyman, the son and grandson of clergymen.

Today he probably would be called a social democrat, and his radical platform—low-cost housing, the five-day work week, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, minimum-wage laws and the prohibition of child labor—were absorbed into President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Thomas was neither a Marxist (Leon Trotsky quipped, “Norman Thomas called himself a socialist as a result of a misunderstanding”) nor was he satisfied with the two major parties. (Anticipating Nader, he called it the “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” choice.) He opposed America’s entry into World War II, protested the internment of Japanese Americans during the war, and denounced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the war’s end.

After his final presidential run in 1948, Thomas maintained his membership in the Socialist Party. “I enjoy sitting on the sidelines and Monday-morning quarterbacking on other people’s performances,” he said. He wrote several books in the 1950s and ‘60s and pursued efforts toward international peace. On his 80th birthday, in 1964, he received a check for $17,500, “raised by the dwindling Socialist faithful,” Time reported. “Thomas said he would divvy up the money among his favorite left-wing causes: ‘It won’t last long, because every organization I’m connected with is going bankrupt.’” He died in December 1968, at age 84.

5. H. Ross Perot, 1992, 1996: He Had $3 Billion Sitting Back Home

If Washington were the problem, and if politicians lacked the mettle to lead, the solution had to come from a straight-talking political outsider who had proved his leadership qualities by running a successful corporation and making himself wealthy in the process.

In 1992, 19,742,267 Americans agreed that man was Texas data processing tycoon Henry Ross Perot, who focused his campaign on trade and campaign finance reform. America’s industrial base was shrinking quickly, and Perot warned of “a giant sucking sound” of American jobs moving south to Mexico if the North American Free Trade Agreement were enacted.

The 19 percent of the popular vote the Texas billionaire received was enough to deny reelection to Republican President George H.W. Bush and send Democrat Bill Clinton to the White House.

How’d Perot make his fortune? He began his business career as an IBM salesman, founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, and sold the company to General Motors in 1984 for $2.5 billion. He resigned as EDS chairman in 1986 and founded the competing Perot Systems two years later.

Buoyed by his strong showing in 1992, Perot established the Reform Party in 1995 to institutionalize a platform calling for balancing the federal budget, overhauling the health-care and income-tax systems, and placing restrictions on lobbying.

As the party’s 1996 nominee for president, Perot received 8,085,402 votes, or 8 percent of the popular vote. In 2000, Perot declined to run again and worked to undermine conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan’s candidacy on the Reform ticket. In the general election, Buchanan took 0.4 percent of the popular vote and dealt the Reform party a death blow.

At 79, Perot remains chairman emeritus and a board member of Perot Systems. His pet cause is securing special medical care for injured members of the U.S. military. He also heads the Hillwood real estate firm in Dallas, owns the money management firm Perot Investment, and is principal investor in the intellectual property fund IP Advantage. He is the author of seven books and, according to the Perot Systems website, was named by MSNBC.com as one of “History’s Ten Greatest Entrepreneurs” of the last 1,500 years.

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There have been many more notable third-party candidates, including Teddy Roosevelt (in 1912), Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, “Fighting Bob” La Follette, James Birney, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. We’ll save those stories for 2012.

David Holzel has a thing for presidents. He is editor of the Franklin Pierce Pages.

There have been presidential daughters almost as long as there have been presidents. (George Washington had no children.) These women's lives are full of fascinating stories. Here are five you might not have heard.]]> There have been presidential daughters almost as long as there have been presidents. (George Washington had no children.) What these women did—both under the influence of and independent from their influential fathers—make fascinating stories. Here are five you might not have heard.

1. Sarah Knox Taylor Davis

She packed a lot of drama into her 21 years. The second daughter of future U.S. President Zachary Taylor, Sarah also was the first wife of future Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Her parents gave her the middle name Knox after Fort Knox, in pre-state Indiana, where her military father was stationed and where she was born in 1813 or 1814. Sarah was often called Knox or Knoxie.

The life of an army brat was certainly more dangerous in the early 19th century. During Taylor’s posting in Louisiana, Sarah and her two sisters came down with “bilious fever,” now thought to be malaria. Sarah survived, but her older and younger sisters died.

The Taylors were stationed at Fort Crawford (now Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin) in 1832, when Sarah met and fell in love with a young officer named Jefferson Davis. Zachary Taylor opposed the relationship, and accounts vary as to why—because he didn’t want his daughter to continue to be exposed to the hardships of army life, or because he and Davis didn’t get along. Or both.

Davis was transferred, so he and Sarah conducted a long-distance relationship for two years. They even planned their wedding by mail. The ceremony took place in June 1835, in Louisville, Kentucky. Sarah’s parents did not attend. Once again there is disagreement over why they were absent.

The newlyweds immediately headed south, and they visited Davis’s relatives in Louisiana. Sarah, mindful of the family tragedy the last time the Taylors traveled those parts, wrote home, “Do not make yourself uneasy about me, the country is quite healthy.”

But while staying with Davis’s oldest sister at “Locust Grove” in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, the couple fell ill with malaria. Jefferson Davis recovered, but Sarah died, barely three months into her marriage.

2. Elizabeth Harrison Walker

Her life straddled the Gilded Age of her father, President Benjamin Harrison, and the Television Age, when accomplished women were just beginning to enter in numbers into the mainstream of public life.

Elizabeth was born in 1897, four years after her father left office. A widower with two children by his first wife, Harrison had married Mary Scott Lord Dimmick, and Elizabeth was the couple’s only child. She was just 4 when her father, the last of the bearded presidents, passed away.

If Elizabeth’s dynastic 1921 marriage to James Blaine Walker—grandnephew of her father’s secretary of state and onetime Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine—was conventional, much of the rest of her life was not. By the time of her wedding, she had received several academic degrees, including a law degree from New York University Law School, and was admitted to the bar in New York and Indiana at age 22.

After her marriage, she began publishing a monthly newsletter, “Cues on the News.” Geared toward women, it offered economic and investment tips, and was distributed nationally by banks. Her expertise led to appearances on radio and, later, television, where she spoke on economic issues pertaining to women. She died in 1955, at the age of 58.

3. Margaret Woodrow Wilson

Thirty years before the Beatles went to India to sample and popularize its spiritual wonders, another musician and political activist, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, had already been. It was the final chapter in the peripatetic life of the eldest of President Woodrow Wilson’s three daughters.

Margaret was born in 1886, in Gainesville, Georgia. During her father’s presidency, both of Margaret’s sisters had White House weddings. So when their mother died in 1914, it fell to the unmarried eldest Wilson sister to become White House hostess. The president’s remarriage a year later allowed Margaret to pursue her passion—music.

She studied piano and voice at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore. In 1915, she made her singing debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in Syracuse, New York. During World War I, she gave recitals that benefited the Red Cross and performed at Army camps. In 1918, she began nearly a year’s stay in France, singing before Allied troops. The experience led to a breakdown, the loss of her singing voice, and the end of her musical career.

With the war over and women gaining the right to vote, Margaret became an advocate of a style of local participatory democracy in which neighborhood schools would become community centers. The annual $2,500 stipend bequeathed by her father upon his death in 1924 was not enough for her live on, so Margaret entered the advertising business. A speculation in oil stocks went sour, and as the 1920s ended, she ceased being a public figure.

In the 1930s she discovered the writings of Sri Aurobindo, a contemporary of Mahatma Gandhi’s, whose philosophy for ending foreign rule in India was grounded in yoga and meditation. Eventually she followed her guru east. When a New York Times reporter found Margaret in Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry, India, in 1943, she had been living there four years. At the ashram she was known as Dishta. She died there in 1944 at the age of 57 of uremic poisoning.

4. Elizabeth Ann Christian Blaesing

Probably the only advantage to being the child of one of America’s worst presidents was not having his last name. Warren G. Harding had no children with his wife, but a married man with two mistresses is bound to leave a legacy. Harding, the 29th president, left more than a stain on a blue dress.

Elizabeth Ann was the daughter of Nan Britton, who as a teenager began a six-year affair with Harding, which lasted until his death in 1923. Elizabeth Ann was conceived on a couch in Harding’s Senate office and was born in 1919. On the birth certificate, Britton wrote Christian as the baby’s last name.

Until his inauguration in 1921, Harding made child-care payments to Britton in person, but always refused to meet Elizabeth Ann. After he entered the White House, Secret Service agents delivered the payments. But when Harding died, the money stopped.

In 1927, after Harding’s widow refused to continue child support, Britton published The President’s Daughter. The tell-all book became a bestseller. As the years passed, the story of Nan Britton and the president’s “love child” faded, along with memories of Harding’s inept presidency.

As an infant, Elizabeth Ann was adopted by Britton’s sister and brother-in-law for the sake of appearances. As an adult, she married Henry Blaesing. They lived quietly in Glendale, California, and raised three sons.

Elizabeth Ann gave one of her first interviews, to the New York Times, in 1964. In it she revealed that her mother was living secretly nearby. Nan Britton died in 1991, “evidently so forgotten by history that no obituary was published,” the Los Angeles Times later wrote. Elizabeth Ann died in 2005.

5. Margaret Truman Daniel

The helicopter parent is nothing new. But that pesky parental hovering can whip up a lot of dust when Dad is straight-talking President Harry S Truman.

Born in 1924, Margaret was Harry and Bess Truman’s only child. Like Margaret Wilson, she began her career as a singer. She was studying history and international relations at George Washington University when her father became vice president in January 1945. Less than three months later, Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman became the 33rd president.

After intensive musical training, Margaret made her singing debut in 1947 with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on a nationally broadcast radio program. She began touring the country, appeared on radio and television, and signed a recording contract.

Then came her infamous 1950 concert in Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, in which her father played a role perhaps larger than hers.

“Paul Hume, the music critic of The Washington Post, while praising her personality, said that ‘she cannot sing very well,’ added that ‘she is flat a good deal of the time’ and concluded that she had no ‘professional finish,’ ” the New York Times recalled at the time of Margaret’s death last January.

“Incensed, President Truman dispatched a combative note to Mr. Hume, who released it to the press… It said, in part, ‘I have just read your lousy review . . . I have never met you, but if I do, you’ll need a new nose.’ “ (Read the review and Truman’s response here.)

The episode didn’t seem to impact her career, but her professional singing days were numbered anyway. Margaret would become a radio and television personality, co-hosting the 1950s radio program, Weekday, with Mike Wallace. She acted in summer stock. And in 1956 she married New York Times editor Clifton Daniel, with whom she had three sons.

But Margaret still had other media to conquer. She became a prolific author, writing several non-fiction books, including biographies of her parents. And she penned 13 mystery novels, beginning with Murder in the White House.

David Holzel can’t resist a good presidential story. You’ll find his websites here.

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