When I was a child, I surrounded myself with those place mats designed for children that have educational material printed on them. I loved those and collected them, wanting to drink up as much knowledge as I could about history. I would take them home and study them and sometimes even used them as posters on my wall. I guess that is how my love of history began all those years ago. One of those place mats I always found particularly memorable and fascinating had portraits of the presidents, from George Washington to probably Gerald Ford, I would guess, based on the time period in which I remember this happening.
What I learned from that place mat is that a good way - and maybe the only way - to get people to remember the presidents is to show pictures of what they actually looked like. To this day, I can summon a mental image of a bemulleted James K. Polk, thanks to that place mat.
This brings me to the topic of this week's post: Remembering Our American Presidents!
Using a No. 2 pencil, please share your opinion of William McKinley.
Like many guys born in the 1960s, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything related to television sitcoms. In the 1970s, the Simpsons premiered and, like many people, I mostly avoid it, finding its humor crude, surprised that it still survives to this day as the longest running television show ever. But, on those occasions when I am presented with the name “Chester A. Arthur,” my mind immediately jumps to a bit of dialogue from an episode entitled “Lisa the Iconoclast.” If you share certain demographics, you probably know where this is going.
In that episode, Lisa Simpson is visiting Springfield Historical Society to learn more about Jebediah Springfield, the town’s founder. The overzealous curator of the museum (voiced by Donald Sutherland) warns her that she might be coming down with “a serious case of Jebeditis.”
“Just as I was getting over my Chester A. Arthritis!” Lisa jokes.
“You had arthritis?” the curator asks, confused.
“No,” Lisa replies meekly.
It is all in the delivery, of course, but it sticks with you. In part because one comes across the name “Chester A. Arthur” infrequently enough that the former president’s star turn on an enormously popular television show is a robust anchor point for your memory.
Sadly, many Americans have no such association. In a poll conducted by YouGov a couple of months ago, more Americans said they had not heard of Arthur than any other president. He is, perhaps deservedly, our least-remembered president.
The point of the poll was to evaluate how people felt about the presidents. Those results were not very surprising: people like the presidents who either (a) have extensive hagiographic tributes woven throughout our history and who (b) served recently and aligned with the respondent’s own party. So, Democrats and Republicans both had Abraham Lincoln near the tops of their lists, but Republicans placed Donald Trump far higher than did Democrats (far higher) and Democrats placed Barack Obama (far) higher. This is how it goes, I suppose.
But, I think that the question of who is most - and least - remembered is far more interesting. There are margins of error in this polling that make the difference between having 1 percent of Americans say they have not heard of you (like Lincoln) negligibly different from having 5 percent say they have not (Harry S. Truman). But it is certainly statistically significant that 21 percent of people have never heard of John Tyler, compared to the 4 percent of Americans who have never heard of Gerald Ford.
There are some oddities in there.
Why, for example, do twice as many people say they have never heard of Warren G. Harding than William Howard Taft? (*coughs into hand* bathtub *cough*) How is it that people are about twice as likely to say they have never heard of Millard Fillmore as James Garfield, given that each should most immediately be associated with newspaper comic strips? Is it possible that newspapers have declined as a cultural touchstone?
What is particularly interesting about the YouGov data, though, are the breakdowns by age. On average, about 16 percent of Americans under the age of 30 said they had not heard of any individual president, a far higher rate than among those aged 65 and over, where the average was 3 percent. Some of this is probably a function of simple lack of familiarity with the diaspora of American presidents, many of them forgettable. Some of it, too, is probably a function of people pretending they know who Benjamin Harrison is and, more ridiculously, having any opinion of his tenure.
The least-known president among the youngest respondents was Arthur, followed by Zachary Taylor and Harding. Among those age 30 and older, John Tyler was also commonly forgotten. Among the oldest respondents, Franklin Pierce slipped into the top three.
And now the kicker: Among those under the age of 30, an average of 6 percent said they had never heard of presidents who served during their lifetimes. That average was inflated by a remarkable (and almost certainly anomalous) 16 percent who said they had never heard of George W. Bush, a guy who served as president (*checks calendar*) a little over a decade ago. Even among those ages 30 to 44, the average percentage who said they could not remember any particular president who overlapped with that age period was 3 percent.
Two percent of Americans said they have never heard of President Biden, a guy who (*checks calendar*) is currently the president of the United States.
It makes me wonder what percentage of that group could, however, correctly identify all of the members of the Simpsons family.
Kommentarer