A few years back, some good friends of mine introduced me to The American Presidents Series, a biographical collection covering every Commander-in-Chief thus far from George Washington to George Bush. The biographies are more "bite sized" in length and focus mainly on their subject's time in the office of the President. They succeed in providing an excellent overview of each's legacy, and though I am only 5 books deep thus far, I'd recommend the collection as a starting point to anyone wanting to learn more about the American Presidency.

Perhaps there is no better time to do so, in light of the upcoming Presidential election this year (and what a doozy it is turning out to be). I am not the only one who seems to have taken a renewed interest in Presidential history as of late. From the Washington Post's "Presidential" podcast, to Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway musical "Hamilton", it would seem that many wish to bypass the predictable partisan exploitation of America's past in order to really get to know who these men were.

In my reading thus far, I have come across many interesting tidbits that I had not previously known about the Founding Fathers, or at least did not know accurately. I've listed 5 of them below for your indulgence. Some are humorous, others perhaps more instructive, and still others remind us that these were just ordinary people like you and me. I hope you enjoy, but as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it."

George Washington

Among his peers, Washington was never the smartest man in the room.

Over the course of his life, George Washington was a gifted surveyor, a fearless military commander, an adventurous frontiersman, a wealthy landowner, and one of the greatest leadership figures in American history - but he was never a university graduate. Although he did acquire his surveyor's license from the College of William & Mary at age 17, Washington's family simply did not have the money to send him to university, since his father (Augustine Washington) had passed away when George was only 11 years old.

Obviously, for most of his life this did not slow George Washington down at all. As a military hero, he could simply rely on his natural leadership instincts and his intimate familiarity with the American landscape acquired as a surveyor in order to succeed. In social settings, he was a handsome gentleman whose 6-foot frame towered over most. And he knew how to dress (more on that below). But when he was unanimously elected President in 1789, Washington was surrounded by men who did not just possess Ivy League degrees, but in fact were some of the brightest minds in the world. Thomas Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence, John Adams was a successful lawyer and diplomat, Alexander Hamilton had a genius sense for economics, and James Madison was "The Father of the Constitution." Washington was out of his league intellectually, and he knew it.

But rather than becoming self-absorbed in this weakness, Washington made it into a strength. His Presidential legacy was defined largely by his ability to listen to many different viewpoints and allow for a clash of ideas among his advisors before he made important decisions that shaped the course of America. As his biographers point out, "Part of Washington's greatness... lay in his understanding of how to lead with others, 'how to best use the rays' emitted by the dazzling geniuses of men like Hamilton and Jefferson."

"George Washington" from Amit Shimoni's "Hipstory" collection

If he was alive today, George Washington would have some serious hipster cred.

Washington was an avid dog lover, he built a successful whiskey distillery at Mount Vernon (up and running again since 2007), he imported coffee from overseas, and was known to be meticulously aware of his physical appearance and how it affected his public perception. It may be a step-too-far to imagine him rocking a lumberjack beard and sipping on a Chemex brew, but the point is that Washington utilized his "Jack of all trades" reputation to appeal to a wide range of people. He was truly an "everyman" who practically anyone could relate to, and yet still admire - and he always humble about it.

John Adams

John Adams could see far into the future of human (especially American) society.

As a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a fierce defender of the Constitution, Adams took very seriously his responsibility to set America on the right path and consider the implications for its future. He believed firmly that democracy was not enough to sustain a free society, but rather that it had to go hand-in-hand with the structural workings of government as laid down by the Constitution. Due to his more formalistic approach - at a time when America had just won independence from the Crown and the French Revolution was in full swing - many accused Adams of monarchical tendencies. While he may have been a bit too enamored with aristocratic style and ancient wisdom, Adams' critique of democracy was ahead of its time. He could see beyond what society was at the time to consider what it was capable of in the future. And he was dead on:

"Society on its own introduces what today our contemporary postmodernists call the 'spectacle of signifiers' and what Adams called 'the language of signs,' where much of life is ceremony and ritual, simulated rather than real, and what is seen is more important than what can be known and what is written more important than what can be proven."
"We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments, but there is great danger that these governments will not make us happy. God grant that they may! But I fear that in every Assembly members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense; by meanness, not greatness, by ignorance, not learning; by contracted hearts, not large souls."
"People, out of emotional need, look up to those they think deserve their respect or even curiosity or envy, and, Adams notes, as though anticipating today's People magazine, names and reputations are everything, and not necessarily the actual persons, whatever their character."
"Adams proves to be a very modernist thinker in his conviction that knowledge is not necessarily enlightening or redemptive. The increase of knowledge may lead to advances in science without contributing to the moral progress of the human condition. Indeed, knowledge may exacerbate human imperfections by making it possible to carry them out more effectively."
"With amazing prescience, Adams predicted America becoming an acquisitive society: 'A free people are the most addicted to luxury of any: that equality which they enjoy, and in which they glory, inspires them with sentiments which hurry them into luxury.'"
"Democracy, rather than overcoming inequality, reproduces it... Adams was trying to make us aware in the eighteenth century what contemporary post-structuralists teach us today: the presence of democracy by no means resolves the presence of power."

John Adams was an intense guy who had many love/hate relationships.

As a staunch defender of his own beliefs and opinions, it makes sense that John Adams had a strong personality. It is equally predictable that he would butt heads with the other brilliant minds surrounding him. These two factors combined to give us some hilarious stories to look back on:

Adams did not like being Vice President: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."
Adams fiercely debated the merits of Federalism against Alexander Hamilton's more centralist approach. It got so heated that he once called Hamilton "the bastard brat of a Scottish peddler" (it was commonly known at the time that Hamilton was indeed the product of an adulterous affair).

"Coonskin Benny" / photobucket — **"Coonskin Benny"** / photobucket

Despite their working together successfully, John Adams and Ben Franklin often irritated each other. A prime example is their time in France as diplomats. When Adams arrived in Paris in 1778, the 72 year-old Franklin was already the darling of society and the toast of the town. Franklin wore a coonskin cap, rode around in a fancy carriage with adoring crowds waving at him, flirted (and more) with all manner of women, wined and dined with the rich and famous until midnight, and then would sleep in and do it all over again the next day. Basically, Ben Franklin was behaving like the most French person ever. The serious Puritan Adams found this all a bit vain, disregarding what Franklin had come to appreciate about French diplomacy. "Adams utterly failed to grasp that these people combined politics with champagne, wit and duck à la bigarade. He grumbled in his diary that 'these incessant dinners and dissipations were not the objects of my mission to France" (Fleming). There is another comical story from a few years before, when Franklin and Adams had to sleep in the same bed when traveling through New Jersey. Reading like a Steve Martin/John Candy scene from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, they debated the merits of opening the window before both soon passed out from exhaustion.
Adams' most famous love/hate relationship was with Thomas Jefferson. Early on, the two admired and respected each other and worked well together despite the occasional clash. However, this drastically changed after the Presidential Election of 1800, which was the first election to see the kind of name-smearing and dirty politics that has become commonplace today. Jefferson unseated Adams as President after only one term in office, and Adams repaid by breaking off all communication for years. Luckily, the two reconciled in their old age and carried on a lengthy correspondence (still debating, of course) for years. In fact, they kept writing letters until the day they both died: July 4, 1826 - the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words? "Thomas Jefferson..."

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson liked to keep things casual.

If John Adams took himself too seriously and was a bit overly infatuated with the mores of aristocracy, then Jefferson was indeed his polar opposite. "Jefferson’s running battle [was] with the past. Everywhere he looked, he saw habits, customs, prejudices, veneration of the past obliterating the potential of the new, laying the heavy hand of tradition on youthful exuberance... When Jefferson pressed forward with plans to make government more accessible, he assaulted the Federalist conviction that good order required everyone to stay in his or her proper place." Thomas Jefferson was a deconstructionist of the first order, and he did not go through the trouble of writing one of the most radical political documents in human history only to see his countrymen repeat the rituals of the past. "Jefferson set in motion a variety of convention-shattering initiatives, based on the assumption that the body had to change what it did before the brain could imagine different ways of thinking." And he had a lot of fun doing it:

As President, Jefferson began with White House etiquette. "Jefferson banished protocol, that system of formalities carefully calibrated to reflect the relative importance of dignitaries at official gatherings... He refused to follow the rules for honoring foreign dignitaries. At his parties, he who was standing nearest the dining room door when the meal was announced went in first. He even chose a round table for his dinners to avoid arraying his guests in any semblance of ranked order."

Jefferson particularly liked to irk the British with his chill attitude. There is the famous story of when Great Britain's first ambassador to the United States - Anthony Merry - met President Jefferson. On November 28, 1803, James Madison (Jefferson's Secretary of State) escorted Merry to the White House for the introduction. The British minister was decked out in his full diplomatic regalia, ready to impress the Commander-in-Chief. But when they arrived, Jefferson was nowhere to be found. Madison nervously scrambled around the house to find Jefferson, and when the President finally emerged from his study through a side door, he was dressed like a total slob, "indicative of utter slovenliness and indifference to appearances and in a state of negligence actually studied."
Jefferson was so laid back that it was not uncommon for him to answer the front door of the White House dressed in his bathrobe, and he regularly rode his horse around Washington without any servant or guards.
Jefferson's mission even extended to the words and language that people used. "Demoting dictionaries, he called them 'but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage,' while society became 'the workshop in which new ones are elaborated.'"

The paradox of Jefferson's legacy is that, despite his radical changes to society, there was one longstanding institution that he did little to overthrow: slavery. Many believe this contradiction inside of Jefferson was emblematic of the America of his day, which embraced equality on the one hand and shackled it in chains with the other.