When Associate Professor of English Colin Rafferty moved to Virginia a decade ago, he found himself suddenly surrounded by presidential history. He felt he had a lot of catching up to do.
“There were about 44 months until the next presidential election [and] there had been 44 presidents,” Rafferty, who grew up in Kansas, told host Sarah McConnell on a recent episode of the With Good Reason radio show called “Getting to Know the Presidents.”
That gave him, he reasoned, a month to read a biography about each of the United States’ commanders in chief before the next one took office. He decided to write his own essay about each one, from George Washington to current President Donald J. Trump. He plans to turn the collection, now 46 strong – one essay for each leader and a conclusion – into a book called Execute the Office, which is currently being considered for publication. He also authored 2016’s Hallow This Ground, inspired by monuments and memorials around the world.
“It was a way to conceive of the presidents … as human beings who had existed and had lives and loves and flaws and complications that made them into real people,” said Rafferty, who stretched his artistic talent through genres. He penned his essay on Ronald Reagan as a movie script, Franklin Pierce gets a diagnosis, James Monroe a comic strip, Thomas Jefferson a prayer, Grover Cleveland a palindrome and so on.
Twenty-three of Rafferty’s presidential essays have been published so far in publications like Brevity, Cobalt, Juked, Parcel and Waxwing. Here, below, for your President’s Day pleasure, he has boiled each one down to just a few words:
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- George Washington
loved exotic animals, paid to see an elephant - John Adams
thought the president should be referred to as “His Highness” - Thomas Jefferson
told Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for wooly mammoths while exploring the West - James Madison
shortest president: 5’4” - James Monroe
first president to wear pants instead of breeches - John Quincy Adams
first president to be photographed - Andrew Jackson
born in a small town on the border of the Carolinas; both states claim him - Martin Van Buren
spoke Dutch as his first language - William Henry Harrison
longest inaugural address—8,445 words - John Tyler
hated England so much he refused to cross into Canada for a better view of Niagara Falls - James K. Polk
surprise nomination for presidency is source of the term “dark horse” - Zachary Taylor
corpse was exhumed in the 1990s to see if he had been poisoned; he had not - Millard Fillmore
first president born after George Washington died - Franklin Pierce
nicknamed “Young Hickory” - James Buchanan
the only president from Pennsylvania - Abraham Lincoln
voice was apparently high-pitched - Andrew Johnson
didn’t learn to read or write until adulthood - Ulysses S. Grant
finished writing his memoirs five days before he died - Rutherford B. Hayes
wounded in battle five times during the Civil War - James Garfield
worked his way up from janitor to president of Hiram College - Chester A. Arthur
reputation as a fancy dresser, spent lavishly on clothes - Grover Cleveland
daughter Ruth is namesake of the Baby Ruth candy bar - Benjamin Harrison
first president to record his voice - Grover Cleveland
had a secret surgery onboard the presidential yacht to remove a tumor from his jaw - William McKinley
the last Civil War veteran to become president; there is a monument to him at Antietam, where he served food and coffee to troops - Theodore Roosevelt
more closely related to Eleanor Roosevelt than Franklin Delano Roosevelt - William Howard Taft
member of the Skull and Bones secret society while a student at Yale - Woodrow Wilson
only president buried in Washington, D.C. - Warren G. Harding
owned a dog named Laddie Boy, who had his own chair at Cabinet meetings - Calvin Coolidge
first president to appear in a motion picture with sound - Herbert Hoover
loved to fish and wrote a book about it, called Fishing for Fun—And to Wash Your Soul - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
served hot dogs to King George VI at a picnic at his home in Hyde Park, New York - Harry S. Truman
last president not to have graduated college - Dwight D. Eisenhower
first president to ride in a helicopter - John F. Kennedy
first president to have a poet at his inauguration—Robert Frost - Lyndon B. Johnson
taught fifth, sixth and seventh grades at a mostly Mexican-American school in Cotulla, Texas, where he also helped organized after-school sports - Richard Nixon
played football at Whittier College in California and wore #29 - Gerald Ford
worked as a male model for a time, even appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan - Jimmy Carter
… and his wife Roslyn are the only First Couple to have lived in public housing - Ronald Reagan
credited with saving 77 lives as a lifeguard - George H. W. Bush
met Babe Ruth when the Yankee visited Yale in 1948 - Bill Clinton
the only president to have been a Rhodes Scholar - George W. Bush
had both the highest and lowest approval ratings in U.S. history - Barack Obama
won two Grammy Awards - Donald Trump
at 70, the oldest person to become a first-term president
- George Washington