The third Monday of February is known as Presidents’ Day in the United States. For nearly 100 years, America honored its first president, George Washington, on February 22. That was his birthday. But the date was not a national holiday until 1968.
That year, the U.S. Congress passed a measure known as the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. The measure meant that some public holidays would always fall on a Monday. Today, the country honors its first president on the third Monday in February -- and not on Washington’s real birthday.
And the holiday is now commonly called Presidents’ Day. Many say it also honors Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The nation’s 16th president was born on February 12.
The federal government, however, still recognizes the holiday as “Washington’s Birthday.”
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act gives workers a three-day weekend. It also gives shops and marketers a chance to have special Presidents’ Day sales.
Presidential Facts and 'Firsts'
Last year, Donald J. Trump made history when he took the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States. At 70 years old, he became the oldest elected president. Before Trump, Ronald Reagan was the oldest person to take office. He was 69 years old when he became president in 1981.
As the first billionaire president, Trump also replaced John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, as the richest man to serve as president.
Kennedy still holds the record for the youngest person to be elected president. He was 43 when he took office. Kennedy is also the youngest president to die in office. He was assassinated in 1963 in Dallas, Texas. He was 46 years old.
Another presidential assassination actually put the youngest person in the office of the president. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, then the vice president, became president at the age of 42. He took office after William McKinley, the 25th president, was shot and killed in Buffalo, New York.
The first president to die in office, though, was William Henry Harrison. The country’s ninth president only served 32 days, the shortest time of any president.
Another Roosevelt holds the record for the longest time in office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president, held office for 4,422 days. After his death, the 22nd amendment was passed. It limited a person to two four-year terms as president.
Most Americans know that the two Roosevelts were related. But they may not know how, exactly, they were related. Here it goes.
Franklin Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt was also his fifth cousin once removed. And Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, was Eleanor’s uncle. That makes the two presidents distant relatives.
But they were not the first relatives to both serve as president. That title belongs to the Adams. John Adams was America’s second president. His son, John Quincy Adams was elected as the nation’s sixth president.
The Bushes are the other father-son presidential pair. George Herbert Walker Bush was elected as the 41st president. His son, George W. Bush, was the country’s 43rd president.
Not everyone can run for president.
The U.S. Constitution says that a person must be at least 35 years old. A person must also have lived “within the United States” for at least 14 years. And they must be a “natural-born citizen.”
But the meaning of “natural-born citizen” is not exactly clear. People read the rule in different ways.
The first “natural-born” American president was not George Washington or John Adams. It was Martin Van Buren, the eighth president. He was born in 1782, six years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
All seven presidents before Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison, the ninth president, were not “natural-born” citizens. They were born before 1776, when the American states were still British colonies.
Hai Do wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.
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Words in This Story
uniform - n. staying the same
cousin - n. a child of your uncle or aunt
assassinated. - v. killed usually for political reasons
distant - adj. used to describe a relative who is not closely related
pair - n. two people who are related in some way or who do something together
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FEBRUARY, 2018 | NATIONAL LASH DAY | PRESIDENTS DAY | NATIONAL CHOCOLATE MINT DAY
NATIONAL LASH DAY
National Lash Day is observed annually on February 19. This is a day to promote the love and need for true and false eyelashes. It is a day we all can honor our lashes.
Eyelashes are a key staple to every makeup look and beauty enthusiast. Lashes have always been known to make your eyes pop and stand out from the crowd. They help keep dirt or substances from entering your eye and aid in preventing infections. Eyelashes also help prevent eye moisture from evaporating. Needless to say, eyelashes are a true necessity for every person at any age.
HOW TO OBSERVE
Use #NationalLashDay to post on social media.
HISTORY
National Lash Day was submitted by House of Lashes and proclaimed by the Registrar at National Day Calendar to be observed annually on February 19.
At House of Lashes we believe in an Eco-Chic green environment and pledge to keep our products animal cruelty-free. In this way, we manufacture all of our lash boxes out of recyclable packaging and our lashes are hand-crafted using 100% sterilized premium human hair and cruelty-free synthetic fibers. Our inspirations are derived by remarkably creative and diverse communities and have a passion to serve individuals to make them look and feel beautiful. We strive to become the top pioneering eyelash brand around the globe as we pride ourselves in premium quality products and continue to provide excellent customer service. “HOL” is founded by a beauty and fashion expert who spent four years researching lashes from all over the world narrowing down the top ten most flattering styles for every eye shape. At House of Lashes, we believe lashes make everything better and stand behind the mantra ‘Quality is Queen.’
PRESIDENTS DAY
Presidents Day is a federal holiday which, in the United States, is observed on the third Monday in February.
This day is set aside, by more and more of America’s population, to honor all of the past United States Presidents that have served our country. Two of our nation’s most prominent Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are brought to mind as we celebrate this day. Their birth dates, which fall close to this same time, have been honored for decades and always will be.
Presidents Day is celebrated with public ceremonies in Washington, D.C. and throughout the United States.
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HOW TO OBSERVE
Use #PresidentsDay to post on social media.
HISTORY
The origin of Presidents Day lay in the 1880s when the birthday of George Washington was celebrated as a federal holiday. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Bill, which moved several federal holidays to Mondays. During the debate on the bill, it was proposed to have George Washington’s birthday be renamed Presidents Day to honor the birthdays of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Washington’s birthday is February 22nd and Lincoln’s birthday is February 12th. Although Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was celebrated in many states, it was never an official federal holiday. Following much discussion, Congress rejected the name change. However, after the bill went into effect in 1971, Presidents Day became the commonly accepted name.
NATIONAL CHOCOLATE MINT DAY
Recognized by the US National Confectioners Association, National Chocolate Mint Day is observed annually across the nation on February 19th. This holiday has been set aside for all the chocolate mint lovers to eat their favorite treats all day long.
The Aztecs and Mayans are given much credit for their ways with chocolate, and while chocolate was brought back to Europeans, they were not fond of the dark, bitter bean, and it was used more for medicinal purposes.
As it was mostly consumed as a hot beverage, Europeans mixed mint, cinnamon and other spices to make it more palatable. Over time, sugar was added, and the combination of chocolate and mint became fashionable.
Fast forward to the mid-1800s when inventions and improvements in processes made it possible for confectioners to begin mass producing chocolates. Even then, small candy shops served a local public. Advertisements for mint chocolates, or chocolate mints, did not start showing up in newspapers until the turn of the century.
The International Dairy Foods Association states that mint chocolate chip is the 10th most popular flavor of ice cream.
One of the earliest mass-producers of chocolate mints was Huyler’s in New York, which had a chain of stores across the country.
Today we find mint chocolate in everything from ice cream to brownies, cookies and candies, liquors and sauces.
Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies were first sold in 1953 and are still their most popular cookie.
Mint chocolate is also the name of an herb with edible leaves that taste like chocolate and mint.
HOW TO OBSERVE
Below is a favorite frosting recipe for chocolate cake. It looks great decorated with chocolate mint candies, a perfect to celebrate National Chocolate Mint Day!
Mint Frosting for Chocolate Cake
1 package cream cheese (8 0z), softened
1/4 cup butter or margarine, softened
3-1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon mint extract
Green food coloring
In a large bowl, beat cream cheese and butter on medium speed until light and fluffy. On low speed, beat in mint extract, 2 to 3 drops of green food coloring and 3-1/2 cups powdered sugar until mixed. Beat on medium speed until fluffy. Store frosted cake in refrigerator.
The following are some other chocolate mint recipes for you to try:
Layered Mint Chocolate Fudge
Chocolate Mint Brownies
Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Mint Pie
And, for those who are thirsty:
Chocolate-Mint Martini
Use #ChocolateMintDay to post on social media.
HISTORY
Within our research, we were unable to identify the creator of National Chocolate Mint Day.
Happy Presidents Day! Even though it’s not exactly Presidents Day. According to the federal government, the name of this holiday is merely Washington’s Birthday. The Office of Personnel Management insists that while “other institutions such as state and local governments and private businesses may use other names, it is our policy to always refer to holidays by the names designated in the law.”
The OPM is grumpy about this because a majority of U.S. states do call this Presidents Day. It’s popularly become about all U.S. presidents, not just Washington. Even the U.S. Mint says “it’s a great day to celebrate everything that our past presidents, including Washington and Lincoln, have done for our nation.”
So let’s take a look at all of America’s presidents. We don’t need to celebrate them, but it’s important to rescue them from the drab, sepia-tinted version of U.S. history. There’s a conscious effort to drain all human interest out of our past. But in fact it was shockingly vicious, ghastly and fascinatingly bizarre, and if you don’t understand it you will never comprehend our present.
Here’s an assortment of some of my favorite facts about every U.S. president:
Photo: Keith Srakocic/AP
George Washington (1789-1797) appears to have had dentures that used the teeth of some of the people enslaved on his plantation. This is not 100 percent proven, but the evidence is, let’s say, highly suggestive. The good news is the teeth weren’t stolen, although the suppliers only received one-third of the market rate.
John Adams (1797-1801) endorsed, in 1776, the concept of what Friedrich Engels would 117 years later call “false consciousness.” According to Adams, “very few men who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.” The solution, said Adams, was massive property redistribution.
Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) was an intelligent man torn between his desire to see himself as moral and his desire to own lots of other people. To resolve this conflict he needed to believe Africans were a different type of being from Europeans. It didn’t matter how and it didn’t need to make sense. Therefore, in his book “Notes on Virginia,” he revealed that Africans need less sleep than normal, white people. Then six sentences later he said that Africans sleep more.
James Madison (1809-1817) was America’s shortest president at just 5 foot 4, perhaps due to bad nutrition.
James Monroe (1817-1825) promulgated the Monroe Doctrine, which, as Dave Barry says, states that:
1. Other nations are not allowed to mess around with the internal affairs of nations in this hemisphere. 2. But we are. 3. Ha-ha-ha.
John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) frequently went skinny dipping as president in the Potomac River. There’s an excellent story about an investigative reporter named Anne Royall sitting on his clothes while he was swimming and refusing to get up until he agreed to an interview, although it is marred by the fact that it is not true.
Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was famously in command at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in what’s now Alabama. After they won, some of his troops cut strips of skin off dead members of the Red Stick tribe and used the skin for bridles for their horses. You can read about this and much more in an 1895 book that recounts the testimony of some of the soldiers.
Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
was perhaps our schmanciest president, wearing outfits that make you regret he came along before color film. An observer of an early Van Buren campaign stop at a church remembered him like this: “He wore an elegant snuff-colored broadcloth coat, with velvet collar to match; his cravat was orange tinted silk with modest lace tips; his vest was of pearl hue; his trousers were white duck … his nicely fitting gloves were yellow kid.”
William Henry Harrison (1841-1841) was the first president to die in office, after just a month. Only recently have we realized that he was probably killed by Washington, D.C.’s lack of a sewage system: There was a giant field of human excrement a few blocks upstream of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and bacteria likely got into the White House’s water supply.
John Tyler (1841-1845) looked like a horse but had a lot of energy and fathered (at least) 15 children. The last of them was born in 1860 when he was 70. Two of his grandchildren are still alive!
James K. Polk (1845-1849) was almost picked off by the same crap-filled swamp that got Harrison. However, he survived to leave the White House and then immediately die of cholera.
Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) was not as lucky as Polk and became the second president to be felled by the neighborhood’s huge feculent pond. This era not a high point of U.S. science.
Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) is today best-remembered as the inspiration for the name of Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in human history.
Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) completed the Gadsen Purchase of territory from Mexico, buying a chunk of territory in what’s now southern New Mexico and Arizona. Mexico was likely willing to sell because we’d simply stolen Texas a few years before and they figured they might as well get some bucks this time around.
James Buchanan (1857-1861) often comes in last in historians’ rankings of all U.S. presidents, thanks to his dithering as America drifted toward civil war. On the upside, he’s the basis for the most historically-sophisticated masturbation joke ever made. (Here starting around 1:55.)
Photo: Rischgitz/Getty Images
does not get enough credit for kicking off the Golden Age of Presidential Facial Hair, a period of 52 years during which 9 of the 11 presidents had a beard, mustache, or miscellaneous.
Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) had strong feelings, such as, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Also, during a speech purportedly celebrating Washington’s Birthday — i.e., this holiday — Johnson mentioned himself over 200 times. It’s difficult today not to wonder if there’s a correlation between believing in white supremacy and constantly talking about yourself.
Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) won the 1868 election, the first in which African American men could participate, by 300,000 votes. About 500,000 black men voted, providing Grant with his margin of victory. This was immediately noticed by white Americans, who have gone on noticing such things ever since.
Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) took office thanks to the grievously evil Hayes-Tilden Compromise. It was difficult to say who’d actually won the 1876 election, so the Republican Party agreed to withdraw all remaining federal troops from the South in return for Democrats accepting Hayes as president. Every promise of Reconstruction was betrayed. The white Southern plantation class took the opportunity and ran with it, essentially reinstituting slavery for the next 90 years.
James Garfield (1881-1881) was nominated by the GOP as a compromise candidate on the 36th ballot after an exhausting fight between the party’s delightfully-named “Half-Breed” and “Stalwart” factions. Chester A. Arthur was added to the ticket to keep his obstreperous fellow Stalwarts happy. Then a Stalwart assassin shot Garfield soon after he took office so that Arthur would become president. This should put today’s intra-party twitter spats in perspective.
Chester A. Arthur (1881-1885) came up in the staggeringly corrupt New York State Republican machine. The Nation (it’s been around since 1865) called his origins “a mess of filth.” Frederick Douglass later said Arthur “allowed the country to drift … towards the howling chasm of the slaveholding Democracy.” On the other hand: Check out his mutton chop whiskers.
Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897) is the only president elected to non-consecutive terms. He also appears to have been a rapist who brutally smeared his victim.
Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) had policies that were no great shakes but he said some remarkable stuff that’s been totally forgotten, along with Harrison himself:
“We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.” “Things may be too cheap. They are too cheap when the man or woman who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age.” “When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? … This generation should courageously face these grave questions, and not leave them as a heritage of woe to the next.”
William McKinley (1897-1901) started America’s extremely brutal colonization of the Philippines. One Kansas soldier told a reporter that “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers [i.e., Filipinos] are killed off like the Indians,” impressively squeezing all of America’s ugliest racial ideology into one sentence.
Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909) was an appropriate choice for the U.S. at the dawn of the 20th century with its incipient industrialized genocides. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian,” Roosevelt said pre-presidency, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
William Taft (1909-1913) didn’t want to be president and wasn’t good at it. But he was renominated in 1912 by GOP mandarins even though they knew he’d lose, in order to block a rebellion from progressive rank and file Republicans. “When we get back in four years,” explained Sen. James Watson of Indiana, “instead of the damned insurgents, we will have the machine.” Once you understand this kind of maneuver, politics makes much more sense.
Photo: Three Lions/Getty Images
is a great lesson in never believing what politicians say about foreign policy. In 1916 he campaigned on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Then he led the U.S. into World War I one month after his second inauguration.
Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) would be more exciting if he had in fact, as malicious rumors had it, been poisoned by his wife. Instead he almost certainly died of a heart attack.
Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) believed “The chief business of the American people is business,” which gets more profound the more you think about it. Moreover, he said it in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, as part of an argument about why it wasn’t a problem that the press was, as Coolidge put it, “controlled by men of wealth.”
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) is scorned for his dreadful response to the beginning of the Great Depression. But he was in many ways an incredible, exemplary person, and just a prisoner of the time’s awful conventional wisdom on economics. The relief effort he led in the early 1920s before becoming president rescued untold numbers of Soviet citizens from starvation. Maxim Gorky told Hoover: “Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was president for twelve years, yet not nearly long enough. In 1944 he called for the U.S. to have a “Second Bill of Rights,” including the right to a job and the right to medical care.
Harry Truman (1945-1953) was encouraged by his advisers to increase tensions with the Soviet Union while running for president in 1948 because it would help him win: “There is considerable political advantage to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. … In times of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.” To the detriment of everyone on earth, Truman took this advice.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
did 9/11. Let me explain.
Eisenhower approved America’s covert support for the 1953 coup which overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected prime minster and replaced him with the dictatorial Shah. The Shah allowed the U.S. to use Iran as a base for American power in the mideast. We now know that when the Shah was finally overthrown in 1979 and the U.S. was kicked out of Iran, the Soviets were worried that America would try to take Afghanistan, or that there would be a similar Islamist revolution there, or both. The Soviets invaded, the U.S. funded the mujahideen, and Osama bin Laden rose to prominence and got the idea it was easy to defeat superpowers. Hence 9/11.
Funnily enough, American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon on 9/11, took off from Dulles Airport in Virginia. Dulles Airport is named after John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state and one of the main forces behind the 1953 Iranian coup.
John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) is the subject of one of the best videos on the entire internet.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) opined, in a 1948 speech in Congress, that “without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.” He then vigorously put these views into action during the Vietnam War.
Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was likely the most cruel and cynical human being ever to hold the U.S. presidency. And not because of Watergate.
Gerald Ford (1974-1977) was the first modern president to use his status to cash in after he left office, setting an example for everyone (except Jimmy Carter) who followed. You can see pictures of one of Ford’s homes, his huge mansion in Vail, Colorado, here. Note the seal of the president of the United States inlaid in the marble floor.
Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was, in the popular made-up version of American history, a namby-pamby weak-kneed capital-L Liberal. In fact, he commenced the turn to the right in U.S. politics that would accelerate under Reagan. Of course, he’s changed a great deal since then, and now calls the U.S. “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”
Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) was the prototype for the final product that is Donald Trump.
George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) privately told Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 that “Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him.” Bush also said to Gorbachev that he would have to use harshly anti-Soviet rhetoric while running for president in 1988, but that Gorbachev shouldn’t take it seriously.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
helped lay the groundwork for the today’s terrible present-day relations between Russia and the U.S. While “the problems today I think are mostly … Russian actions,” Perry recently said, “it’s as much our fault as it is the fault of the Russians, at least originally.” Perry specifically cited the expansion of NATO and Clinton’s decision to send U.S.-led NATO troops to Bosnia in 1996.
George W. Bush (2001-2009) told a Bush family friend in 1999 that if he was elected he wanted to attack Iraq because it would help him politically. According to the friend, Bush said, “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. … If I have a chance to invade … if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
Barack Obama (2009-2017) lived in Indonesia for several years just after a 1965 U.S.-supported coup and subsequent mass slaughter there. In his book “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote, “we had arrived in Djakarta less than a year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times … rivers of blood [had] once coursed through the streets.” You can listen to Obama reading this section for the audio version of his book here.
Donald Trump (2017-present) has never said or done anything worth noting, but perhaps one day he shall.
Of course, this barely scratches the surface of our presidents’ freakish lives and American’s vagarious history. So if you have your own favorite facts not mentioned here, please leave them in the comments — maybe we can do this every year.
IT’S CALLED Presidents’ Day, but it’s really about the two national leaders whose birthdays fall 10 days apart in this otherwise dreary month. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were very different sorts of men in background, breeding and education, but they shared a common trait that has, to paraphrase Lincoln’s ringing words, lit them down in honor to the latest generation: an unshakeable commitment to the survival of the new national union on these shores. Both devoted their lives to it.
Washington did not wish to take on the job of president in his later years. Although a well-to-do landowner (and holder of enslaved people), he had subjected himself to prolonged hardship and danger, including the possibility of being hanged for treason, as he led the Continental forces to victory in the American Revolution. He was tired. But he assumed the office because he could see even then how difficult it would be, without solid and respected leadership, to form a unified nation in the face of all the forces of division working against it. He went on to provide the country with an essential model of decorum, dignity and respect for democratic ideals.
And yet, a half-century after his presidency, the unity seemed all but gone as the country came to blows over its greatest sin: human slavery. In that difficult time, Abe Lincoln, who rose from poverty and developed an early loathing of slavery, became the leader of the new Republican Party, which fought to keep the institution from spreading into the territories. He hoped to avoid civil war but would not do so at the cost of accepting a breakaway Confederate nation, a large part of whose population could be bought, sold and tortured with impunity for who knows how many years to come. The conflict that ensued cost some 750,000 American lives, and yet at the end of it Lincoln called for malice toward none, charity for all — for forbearance and unity.
The historian Robert Dallek, in an essay last year in Vanity Fair magazine, relates how a third president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was able to reach “across cultural and political lines to remind Americans that they were one nation” at a time when the country was suffering through a crisis far more severe than anything that has faced it since.
Today the party of Lincoln is under the sway of a president more openly divisive, on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion and culture, than any in our modern history. Donald Trump would, writes Mr. Dallek, “do well to study Roosevelt and, surely, Lincoln, along with other presidents, to grasp how they sought (or failed to seek) broad popular unity. It says something fundamental about the man that no one imagines he would actually do this. The problem is not just that it would take work. The larger problem is that he has no interest in the goal.”
And that is the sad truth on this Presidents’ Day.
