44 Facts About the U.S. Presidents - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep.52)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon and my fake fireplace

This is Mental Floss on YouTube. And did you know that George Washington is considered by experts to have been America's richest president

I mean, in today's terms, Washington's net worth was around 500 million dollars

Anyway, that's the first of 44 facts about American presidents that I'm going to share with you today

One for each presidency. That's right, Grover Cleveland gets two facts. Although these days, of course, he's known as a founding father, as a warrior, John Adams

defended the eight British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and he got six of

them acquitted. The Jeffersonia plant is actually named after Thomas Jefferson. Botanist Benjamin Smith Barton knew that Jefferson was interested in botany, so in 1792, he renamed

the Wildflower in honor of him. James Madison's second cousin was American President Zachary Taylor

The capital of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after James Monroe. When John Quincy Adams and his wife Louisa used the Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley method

of baby naming, their four kids were called George Washington Adams, John Adams II, Charles

Francis Adams, and Louisa Adams. In 1835, a man named Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson

Lawrence's two separate pistols both misfired, then Andrew Jackson chased him away with a

walking cane. The first president to be born a citizen of the United States was Martin, look at those

sideburns, Van Buren. Although for the record, they weren't called sideburns at the time, they were called side whiskers

They wouldn't be known as sideburns until Civil War General Ambrose Burnside

Extra fact for you today on Menno Floss. William Henry Harrison dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School

and then went on to be a quitter as president as well because he died after just like a month in office

John Tyler had the most children of any president. Eight with his first wife and seven with his second wife for a grand total of 15 kids

When he was a baby, James K. Polk's parents intended to baptize him as a Presbyterian

but his father, Samuel Polk, wouldn't profess his own faith, which the ceremony required

Samuel got into a fight with the minister and the baptism never happened James was baptized however later in life as a Methodist I mean much later in life It was on his deathbed Before he was president Zachary Taylor had never voted Millard Fillmore great was a pirate Nathaniel Hawthorne

and Franklin Pierce attended Bowdoin College together, which helps explain why Hawthorne

later wrote the biography The Life of Franklin Pierce, a boring subject for a very boring writer

I'm just kidding. I like the Scarlet Letter. Anyway, James Buchanan never married

so his niece, Harriet Lane, took on the role of hostess for White House events

She developed a large art collection throughout her life, which she left to the government

The Smithsonian Institution knows her as the First Lady of the National Collection of Fine Arts

She's also previously mentioned in a Metal Floss video for having married her cousin. Abraham Lincoln, also pictured down there, had a son named Robert Todd Lincoln

who was not at Ford's Theatre when his father was assassinated, but he witnessed the assassinations of both James A. Garfield and William McKinley

Mark, I think that was technically two facts, so can I skip a president now? Can I skip Rutherford B. Hayes, please, or one of the Grover Clevelands

No. Okay. No. Apparently not. A physician named Samuel Mudd bandaged up John Wilkes Booth's leg after Booth shot Lincoln

It was unclear what information Mudd had, but he was convicted of conspiracy to kill the president

In 1869, Andrew Johnson pardoned Dr. Mudd, but the whole thing remains as clear as Mudd

Legend has it that Ulysses S. Grant smoked somewhere between seven and twenty cigars a day

He's also the only president so far to die of cancer. It was throat cancer

During the Civil War, four of Rutherford B. Hayes's horses were shot while he was riding them

I mean, not all four at the same time. No one can ride four horses simultaneously

You know what I meant. Oh, come on, Mark. I guess it's technically possible to ride four horses at the same time

I mean, shut up! When James A. Garfield was shot, Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone

tried to locate the bullet with a metal detector that he had invented

The invention was a failure. Garfield died. And that brings us to Chester A. Arthur, who liked fashion

hence his nicknames Gentleman Boss and Elegant Arthur. He allegedly owned over 80 pairs of pants

During Grover Cleveland first term he got married in the White House He married the 21 daughter of one of his former law partners He was 49 and had known the girl since she was born

That's creepy. In 1878, the body of Benjamin Harrison's father was stolen by grave robbers

It was recovered at the Ohio Medical School in Cincinnati and returned to its rightful spot

In 1893, at the beginning of his second term, Grover Cleveland had a secret surgery to remove

a tumor from the roof of his mouth, which surgery turned out to be successful, as you

already know because of the Ulysses S. Grant thing. The TV shows Glee, Freaks and Geeks, and The Wonder Years all feature the same fictional

high school, William McKinley High. Why? Well, according to Judd Apatow, who produced Freaks and Geeks, we chose it because it was

the only president's name which was legally clearable. Teddy Roosevelt gave the White House its name in 1901

Then Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, built the first Oval Office before it

was destroyed by a fire. Did you know that there is a $100,000 bill? They were only made

between December 18, 1934 and January 9, 1935, and they were only created for use within

the Federal Reserve Banks. But if somehow you ever see Woodrow Wilson's face on a bill

you are about to be pretty rich. Though JFK's assassination is most commonly associated

with conspiracy theorists, Warren G. Harding's death has attracted some as well. His wife

Florence was even accused of murdering him in the 1930 book The Strange Death of President Harding

Calvin Coolidge was born on the 4th of July, which was the last interesting thing he ever did

Herbert Hoover was sworn into office by William Howard Taft. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to fly in an airplane while in office

In 1943 he flew to North Africa to strategize with Winston Churchill about World War II

It took Roosevelt and company four days to get there because of all the stopping and refueling

Harry S. Truman is the only president from the 20th century or later who did not have a college degree

Dwight D. Eisenhower loved to play golf so much that he was good friends with Arnold Palmer

When John F. Kennedy applied to Harvard University, his father wrote a letter to the admissions dean describing JFK as, quote

careless but ambitious At one time an entire first family had the initials LBJ Lyndon B Johnson Lady Bird Johnson Linda Bird Johnson and Lucy Baines Johnson For the record Lady

Bird's real name was Claudia, but no one called her that because they didn't want to confuse

Lady Bird with, you know, the Claudia from the Babysitter's Club. Richard Nixon loved

to play poker. In fact, when he ran for Congress, he even used poker winnings to finance his

campaign. Gerald Ford worked for a summer as a ranger at Yellowstone National Park when

he was 23 years old. He later referred to that time as, quote, one of the greatest summers

of my life. In 1969, Jimmy Carter claimed he saw a UFO in Georgia. He never blamed aliens

but he said that he saw a green light in the sky appear and then disappear. It's usually

called a Gatsby. During the 50s, Ronald Reagan had a lull in his acting career, so he spent

some time doing stand-up comedy. There's a Japanese slang word, Bushusuru, which means

to do a bush, or to vomit in public. This, of course, refers to when George H.W. Bush

vomited at a dinner in Japan. Bill Clinton played rugby when he was in graduate school

at Oxford, not inhaling. George W. Bush is the only president to have completed a marathon

In 1993, he finished one in three hours and 44 minutes. And finally, I return to my salon

to tell you that Barack Obama and I had the same first job, scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins

P.S. me from the future here. Sorry about my cold. I just want to let you know that this episode of Mental Floss was made possible by Audible.com

Audible has a huge library of audiobooks and other forms of audio entertainment

They have over 150,000 titles. Like, if you like American politics as much as I do, you might want to check out The Passage

of Power, the biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. You can download a free audio of that book or most any book, including all of mine, at

audible.com slash mental floss