On the Adamses, the Harrisons, and Presidential Descendants
EACH YEAR the sitting president marks each of his predecessors by sending wreaths to their tombs on their birthdays. Branches of the US military oversee the formal wreath laying, but many of the presidential gravesites go beyond these already elaborate processions and throw birthday parties for their charges. Wanting to see one, I headed down to Quincy, Massachusetts, for President John Quincy Adams’s 246th birthday party. Quincy calls itself the “City of Presidents,” and United First Parish Church is at the heart of a “presidential district” where there is an Adams Building and a Presidential Pub and lots of “Discover Adams” banners up on the lampposts. On one side of the street there’s a statue of John Adams; on the other, his wife Abigail with a young John Quincy. The city has been working to turn the narrow, congested street into a pedestrian path.
The church throws big birthday parties featuring speeches, music, parish tours, and birthday cake at the big Adams house, Peacefield. And the celebrations are apparently a top national priority: during the government shutdown in 2013, church officials worried that they might have to put off the John Adams party, but they say navy officials told them that the wreath-laying ceremonies were considered an essential government service and would go forward even if the government was partially closed.*
I walked in just behind two young women carrying an enormous floral wreath, made up of red and white carnations, blue irises, and white asters, and addressed only to “The President,” and we sat down in a creaky enclosed wooden pew in the front row. The Navy Band Northeast, up from Newport, Rhode Island, played “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and a downbeat rendition of “Home on the Range.” I studied the wall installations extolling the careers and virtues of the two presidents. My two-year-old son waved his miniature American flag and stacked hymnals on the seat.
The first of several speakers was a man called Peter Boylston Adams, who was listed on the program as “descendant.” I didn’t need a program to tell me this—the man looked, to a stunning degree, like the man we’d come to honor. This distracted me so much that I could barely focus on his speech, which is a shame because Peter Boylston Adams spoke about the parallels between naval piracy in John Quincy Adams’s day and international terrorism of today, and he knows something about war, having won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart flying combat missions in Vietnam. “Terror on the high seas was not what you see in Pirates of the Caribbean,” said Peter Boylston Adams. These were “angry, cruel young men—absolutely ruthless. . . . Terror was their business.”
Still, as he talked, I kept thinking back to the famous daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams, taken when he was a grizzled congressional firebrand, and saying to myself, Man, this guy looks just like that.
“By 1735 there were no pirates anywhere. Gone. Except in the Mediterranean . . .”
I wonder if he’s ever gone to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington just to stand by the Quincy Adams portrait and freak people out.
“They said, ‘If you resist us, we will kill you.’”
I might not have been following the speech, but my son had been, and he started repeating some of the lines. “We will kill you!” he shouted, much more gleefully than Peter Boylston Adams had. Fortunately there was no need to shush him, as Adams closed out his speech by asking the audience to honor a man he described as “the gatekeeper for the Adams crypts” with three cheers. Adams, who had spoken rather quietly, suddenly bellowed, “Hip hip,” and we all shouted, “HOORAY!”
After the ceremony we headed downstairs to see the tomb, which, as presidential tombs go, is pretty nondescript. It’s basically four big stone sarcophagi marked JOHN ADAMS, ABIGAIL ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, and LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS. The second president once asked for an epitaph that referred to his proudest accomplishment as president: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.” The tomb has that entire inscription on it, except for the words “here lies” and “who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.” These tombs are in an underground room that’s not that different from, say, my basement. A few of the visitors on this humid summer day made jokes about “the smell,” though there really wasn’t one—it smelled like a basement in the summer, which is what it was. As far as I’m concerned, when there are two presidents and two first ladies in a room, that room can smell any way it wants.
The Adamses may have been buried together, but as families go they weren’t the most cheerful. John Adams was a demanding dad and set impossibly high expectations for his offspring. John Quincy was the only one who met them; the others weren’t so fortunate. Daughter Nabby, the first child born to a president, died relatively young after struggling for years with breast cancer; at one point she had to endure surgery without anesthesia. Son Charles had a drinking problem; as his alcoholism grew worse, he abandoned his law practice, left his family, and lost the life savings John Quincy had entrusted to him to invest. In 1798 John Adams disowned Charles; two years later, the president’s thirty-year-old son was dead, probably of cirrhosis.
To his credit, John Adams learned from his mistakes and warned John Quincy not to repeat them. But the son was no easier on his children than the father had been on him: John Quincy pestered his kids with long letters about their inadequacies. “I had hoped that at least one of my sons would have been ambitious to excel,” he grumbled. “I find them all three coming to manhood with indolent minds.” One of the three, Charles Francis Adams, did go on to prominence as a member of Congress, diplomat, and public figure, but the other two buckled: John Adams II died of alcoholism at age thirty-one; George Washington Adams started hearing voices and died after falling—or jumping—off a steamboat headed to New York.
The highs and lows the Adamses saw have come time and time again for presidential families. James Madison spent his retirement years paying off the gambling debts of his stepson, John Payne Todd; as a plantation owner, Madison was already financially stretched, but Payne’s debts made things worse. When Madison died, the family had to sell the plantation, Montpelier, and the Father of the Constitution’s grave went unmarked for two decades. Like the Adamses, William Henry Harrison and Andrew Johnson each lost sons to alcoholism. And the celebrity press hounded John F. Kennedy Jr. in life and in the wake of the plane crash that killed him.
On the other hand, Webb Hayes (son of Rutherford) and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. each won the Medal of Honor for military heroics. Elizabeth Harrison Walker, Benjamin Harrison’s daughter and William Henry’s great-granddaughter, was a pioneering lawyer and economic commentator at a time when women weren’t expected to practice law or invest. George W. Bush, of course, became the second son of a president to serve in the White House as well. “There’s good and there’s bad,” Doug Wead, author of All the Presidents’ Children, told CNN. “But there doesn’t seem to be much in between.”
FAMILIES CAN be complicated, and President Benjamin Harrison’s family story was no exception. The twenty-third president was also a presidential descendant, the grandson of William Henry Harrison, and as a politician he seemed to have mixed feelings about the connection. As a presidential candidate in 1888, he vowed, “I will show all that my family’s famous name is safe in my keeping,” but he also said to aides, “I want it understood I am grandson of nobody.”
Harrison saw six states come into the Union during his four years in the White House, more than any other president, but his tenure is barely remembered, partly because he was one of the least personable presidents. Adults called him “the human iceberg,” but around kids, he warmed up, and there were three grandchildren living in the Harrison White House. We have a White House Christmas tree because of him; having a natural white beard, he was game to play Santa Claus for his grandchildren. Newspapers wrote glowing stories about how the president sat for dinner at his formal White House table with his two-year-old grandson, Benjamin Harrison McKee, sitting nearby in a high chair.
The second President Harrison lived through his term, but his wife didn’t; Caroline Harrison died just before Election Day 1892, after fighting tuberculosis for months. Both the president and his opponent, former president Grover Cleveland, suspended campaigning on account of the first lady’s death.
One of those on hand at Caroline’s deathbed was her niece and secretary, Mary Scott Dimmick. Several years later, after returning to Indianapolis, Benjamin shocked his grown children by announcing that he and Mary, twenty-five years younger, were getting married. Harrison’s adult children were mortified, refused to attend the wedding, and cut off their children’s contact with their grandfather. Harrison wrote sad letters about missing baby McKee and the other grandkids: “Grandpa came home from Richmond yesterday afternoon,” went one letter, “and there was no little boy to meet him in the hall—but there was your bicycle—the first thing I saw to remind me of you. But the bicycle . . . could not talk and I didn’t want to.”
Benjamin and Mary had a child of their own, Elizabeth, who sat at a high chair at the big table in the Harrisons’ Indianapolis home, much as her nephew had done at the White House. But pneumonia struck the Harrisons again: the twenty-third president, just like his grandfather, succumbed to the disease. There was a sweet-sad little story about four-year-old Elizabeth trying to cheer her fading father by bringing him a pie; the president was so ill he could only smile back at his daughter.
Harrison’s eldest children heard that their father was ill and raced to see him before it was too late, but they didn’t make it. Perhaps owing to that estrangement, or perhaps owing to the fact that they were both grown, Benjamin Harrison’s will made no mention of his adult children. He left everything he owned to Mary and to Elizabeth.
Whatever their differences in life, though, they are together in death: at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Benjamin Harrison is buried at the foot of a large grave marker. Caroline Harrison is on one side of him, Mary Harrison is on the other, and the two eldest children are buried nearby.
I THOUGHT I’d call around to some descendants for their thoughts on life as a presidential relative. Then I got an e-mail from one. “Here’s something odd to ponder,” it began. “Every year in April, I go to the Marshfield Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival and Presidential Family Reunion and Missouri Walk of Fame Celebration. It’s in Missouri at the top of the Ozarks. . . . One of these days you should think about coming.” It was signed by George Cleveland, “Grover Cleveland grandson.”
George Cleveland lives in Tamworth, New Hampshire, about an hour north of where I live. We’d never met, but he’d been a part of several of my trips: there’s a photo of George at the Grover Cleveland Birthplace in Caldwell, New Jersey, and the presidential memorabilia collection at Founding Fathers Pub in Buffalo includes a picture of George as well; it’s kept behind the bar. When I mentioned this to him he wrote back, “I think my photo is behind several bars, but not all for the same reason.”
George’s grandfather died in 1908 in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been serving on the Ivy League university’s board. His stately grave marker stands near the west edge of Princeton Cemetery, and if you look closely you’ll find the top of the stone covered in Hawaiian beads.† Cleveland was a big supporter of Hawaiian independence. His successor in the White House, Benjamin Harrison, had pushed for a treaty to annex Hawaii, but when Cleveland won the office back, he withdrew the treaty, on the grounds that America’s just character would be impugned “if a feeble but friendly state is in danger of being robbed of its independence and its sovereignty by the misuse of the name and power of the United States.”
William McKinley re-reversed course after Cleveland retired, but native Hawaiians never forgot the gesture, and clearly didn’t hold a grudge about the “feeble” designation. So each year a group from the Pacific Justice and Reconciliation Center comes to New Jersey to say thanks. George Cleveland is usually there. “Oh, it’s nuts, it’s great,” is how he described the festivities. “They have people doing hula on the front porch of the birthplace. And down [in] Princeton they have a very solemn ceremony where they put leis on the graves of Grover and Frances. They eat a lot. They always eat a lot. And it’s just sort of one big party.”
The festival in Marshfield is more like a big reunion, with representatives of twenty-six presidential families on hand. “We’ve got Polks, Washingtons,” George tells me. “Monroe is going to be big this year”—a Monroe descendant is giving a presentation on the fifth president. The event schedule is pretty eclectic; there’s a 5K road race, a “presidential prayer breakfast” with Billy Graham’s daughter Gigi, and a look back at the costumes of Gone with the Wind, complete with a recorded greeting from Olivia de Havilland. First Lady Laura Bush is one of the keynote speakers; another is the woman who played Zuzu in It’s a Wonderful Life. You can meet Princess Diana’s butler and descendants of Dred Scott. “It’s impossible to explain this event to someone,” George Cleveland says, “telling them I’m going to a cherry blossom festival/presidential descendant festival/pop culture adventure—and eating a lot.”
Marshfield isn’t the town you’d expect to have a presidential-themed anything. The town at the “Top of the Ozarks” boasts six thousand residents, one stretch of historic Route 66, and the longest-running Independence Day parade west of the Mississippi River. But its presidential connections aren’t any bigger than anywhere else’s: the first President Bush came to Marshfield in 1991, but that’s it. The town’s most famous native is the astronomer Edwin Hubble; there’s a large-scale replica of the Hubble telescope on the lawn of the courthouse downtown.
Judging by the local history, you might expect a Tomato Canning Festival; there used to be hundreds of plants in this part of Missouri. Instead, there are presidential grandsons and cousins and great-grandnieces running around Marshfield each spring. This is thanks to Nicholas Inman, a local pastor and presidential history buff who had a dream of putting a museum honoring the presidents in town. “I spent some time in Washington, DC, after I graduated high school,” he says. “So I thought, we’ll plant cherry blossom trees in Marshfield, and we’ll tie them around the museum, and we’ll have a history festival each year to celebrate American history.”
Inman started inviting presidential descendants to Marshfield as a way to publicize the museum idea, but as soon as the descendants got to town the plan started to change. “They’d never had an opportunity like this to all get together,” Inman said. “It was so much fun to watch them visit. Suddenly they began to talk, well, my grandfather ran against your grandfather and my grandfather was your grandfather’s vice president . . . they started making all these comments, can we come back next year? And I thought, well, wow, I never thought they’d want to come back!” Locals took to it, too, and the one-time festival quickly became an annual event.
George Cleveland has been here nearly every year and has turned into a bit of a rock star. At the prayer breakfast he introduced me to John Ross Truman, great-nephew of Harry and “one of my favorite people in the whole world.” John has a quick wit and got us both laughing with stories of President Truman’s mother-in-law, who “would come to the White House to visit and tell the staff that the president wasn’t good enough for her daughter.” He started to tell me about how Great-uncle Harry had shown him the famous Truman Balcony at the White House—“a fun spot and a heck of a view”—and given him personal tours of his presidential library, but then a woman came over with an iPad and asked the two of them for a picture. They get this a lot in Marshfield; to give them and the others time to see each other, there are VIP-only events like the “presidential descendant luncheon.” “They lock us in a room,” George Cleveland says, laughing, “and we tell each other secrets.”
As the descendants bared those “secrets,” I headed over to the local diner, Freda’s Uptown Cafe, where I ate fried okra, found yet another place with a George Cleveland photo on the wall, and thought about what this wonderful and wild festival would have been like if Nicholas Inman had been born decades earlier. Inman has thought about this, too; when I asked him which historical descendant he most would have wanted to have at the festival, he had an answer right away. “Alice,” he says, “would have made a great festival guest.”
He was referring to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, first daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and one of America’s greatest political wits. TR’s first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died just days after giving birth to baby Alice, and he was so devastated that he went west to raise cattle and left his new daughter in the care of his sister for the first few years of her life. Alice rejoined the family after her father remarried, but there was always some distance between them; Alice was both fascinated by Teddy and determined to rebel against him.
And rebel she did. The press followed the White House antics of the Roosevelt kids like a reality show, and the teenaged Alice was the breakout star. She placed bets with bookies, snuck movie stars into the Executive Mansion, and occasionally enlivened dull parties by pulling out a cap gun and firing it at the ceiling. Once she waltzed into the president’s office with her pet garter snake, Emily Spinach, coiled around her arm. “I can be president of the United States or I can control Alice,” TR sighed to his guest. “I can’t possibly do both.” At Alice’s wedding in 1906, at which the bride used a sword to cut the cake, Edith Roosevelt told her stepdaughter: “I am glad to see you leave. You have never been anything but trouble.”
Alice made trouble for politicians of every stripe for the rest of her life, including her father; she once visited the Cuban hills TR and the Rough Riders had so famously charged up, and declared them to be “hardly more than mildly sloping.” Nonrelatives fared even worse. Warren Harding, she said, “wasn’t a bad man, just a slob.” As for Herbert Hoover, she said, “The Hoover vacuum cleaner is more exciting than the president. But, of course, it’s electric.” Politicians courted her anyway; Lyndon Johnson teased Alice about her wide-brimmed hats, saying they made it hard for him to give her a kiss. “That, Mr. Johnson, is why I wear them,” she replied.
Alice’s wit became so well known that people attributed other people’s quotes to her. She wasn’t the first to say Calvin Coolidge looked like he’d been weaned on a pickle, and she didn’t describe two-time Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake,” but they sounded like things Alice would have said, so that’s how they were remembered. Her most-loved quote, though, was an original: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
By the time Alice Roosevelt Longworth died in 1980, at age ninety-six, she had adored the Kennedys, befriended Richard Nixon, supported gay rights, and chastised Jimmy Carter for giving back the Panama Canal her father had annexed. Unusually perceptive, unafraid to speak her mind, unfailingly entertaining, Alice had earned the nickname the political class gave her: “the Other Washington Monument.”
Any of the Roosevelt kids would have made great guests at the festival in Marshfield. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. won virtually every military decoration possible for bravery, including the Medal of Honor, serving in both World Wars. In 1944, the fifty-seven-year old Brigadier General Roosevelt was the only man of his rank to be in the line of fire on D-day, directing the landing on Utah Beach with his cane despite the danger—and despite the fact that he was having a series of minor heart attacks at the time; he would die just weeks later. When asked to describe the most heroic act in the entire war, Omar Bradley answered, “Theodore Roosevelt on Utah Beach.” Despite his unparalleled heroism, Roosevelt felt he could never measure up to his presidential dad. “Don’t you think that it handicaps a boy,” he said, “to be the son of a man like my father, and especially to have the same name? Don’t you know there can never be another Theodore Roosevelt?”
For me, the saddest family story is that of Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest brother. As a kid, Quentin was the leader of a group known as the White House Gang, whose hijinks included “redecorating” a portrait of Andrew Jackson with spitballs. Quentin’s fuming father made him get up in the middle of the night to undo the damage. All the Roosevelt boys served during the Great War, but Quentin arguably took on the riskiest job: fighter pilot. He won a reputation for his daring and his skill, but on July 14, 1918, his luck ran out; Quentin’s plane was shot down by a German squadron behind enemy lines. TR had long championed the virtues of fighting, and even dying, in war; he called the day he charged up San Juan Hill “the great day of my life.” But seeing his own son dead in battle was devastating—his health quickly declined, and six months after the tragedy, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Vice President Thomas Marshall observed that “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight,” but maybe not. Quentin’s death had hurt him deeply, especially since he felt responsible for sending his sons off to war in the first place. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death,” he wrote a friend, “has a pretty serious side for a father.” The forceful, noteworthy man who, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, wanted to be “the corpse at every funeral” is buried on a small, quiet hill overlooking New York’s Oyster Bay. There’s a rock near the grave with a TR quote: “Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground.” When I see that quote, I think of Quentin.
“You know how Billy Graham was the minister for all the living presidents?” Nicholas Inman says. “I feel like I’ve become minister to all the dead presidents, because I’m often called to do things—funerals and weddings and things—for these administrations now.” One of those funerals was at Monticello, in the same burial ground that holds the remains of Thomas Jefferson, and someday might hold the remains of his descendants through Sally Hemings. “It’s kind of neat how you develop these relationships, and you have to stop and think about, oh yeah, I know them because of the Cherry Blossom Festival, I didn’t just meet them on the street.”
The final public event of each year’s Cherry Blossom Festival is a panel discussion with some of the descendants. John Truman shared more funny stories about Great-uncle Harry’s “holy terror” of a mother-in-law, and George Cleveland said the extended Cleveland family was trying to decide what to do with some newly discovered family letters. Several audience members gasped as Susan Tyler, great-granddaughter of John Tyler, explained that her still-living father, Lyon, is the grandson of a man who led the country in the 1840s.
The most poignant story came from Laurene Anfinson, Richard Nixon’s niece. She described taking part in an event in 1988, just ahead of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration. New York City was marking two hundred years since the first oath of office at Federal Hall, an anniversary in which there were “forty presidents’ families represented. In a carriage came George [Washington], as a reenactor. In a car came George Bush.” Each family member wore a badge with the family name on it, and as the families walked by in a procession, people in the crowd called out their names—“Truman!” “Kennedy!” “Roosevelt!”—and the crowd cheered. “Pretty soon,” she said, “somebody yelled out ‘Nixon!’ and everybody booed. So our children walked back to us and said, ‘what do we do?’” Anfinson said Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of Lyndon, was incensed that anyone would boo a child for being related to a president that person didn’t like, and she mobilized the entire group of descendants to make a statement. “All the kids linked arms,” Anfinson said, “four lanes wide—and they didn’t let go the whole way.”
In a way, the presidential descendants have formed “a family of history,” as Nicholas Inman describes them. “This comes from people who may have served beside each other in Congress or may have had strong political differences, but they stand firm together and stand beside each other and they don’t criticize each other.” The Marshfield festival, he says, has “really become a family reunion. . . . It’s really its own community—they’re all over the country, and they gather here once a year.”
The family reunion always includes a family photo; the descendants and the other festival regulars gather together for a picture before heading off to the “state dinner.” Before leaving, George Cleveland comes over to ask for a photo of the two of us. “I hope this has been helpful,” he says, with gallons of understatement. “It sure has,” I tell him, because now I can add my house to the places with photos of George Cleveland on the walls.
* Dwight Eisenhower’s wreath-laying ceremony was held during the shutdown of 2013 but in a different location, as the federally-run Eisenhower Library was closed.
† Princeton Cemetery is also the final resting place of Vice President Aaron Burr, whose most notable accomplishment in office was killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel.