Announcer 2 up next, mark webber, the complete history of residential drinking. He talks about the drinking habits of u. S. President s and how it shaped relations in u. S. Decisionmaking. Franken roosevelt Franken Roosevelt drank martinis and a coat closet to hide it from his mother. This is one hour. Mark i would like to welcome you to the mcgowan theater and washington, d. C. I would like to thank all of you for coming out today after the snow we had yesterday. I hope you deny can cabin fever or anything like that. Our talk is about mint juleps with Teddy Roosevelt the complete history of president ial drinking by mark will webber. It is presented in conjunction with our new exhibit. Americans have enjoyed a drink. At times many of us have enjoyed a lot of drinks. Other americans fearing the harm that would do to society and individuals have tried to stop or limit our drinking. These two different views of alcoholic beverages run throughout American History. Sometimes they have existed in relative peace, other times in war. Government programs and policies changed over time. The stories they tell the exhibit will be open until over the course of the next 10 months while the exhibit is open, the National Archives will present a series of talks discussions, films, and wine and whiskey tastings. To find out more about these and the exhibits, take one of our monthly event calendars from the theater lobby or visited our website. Our topic for today is mint juleps with Teddy Roosevelt the complete history of president ial drinking. Mark will webber is a seasoned journalist. He has published a noted historical feature on the battle of antietam. His grandfather served in three wars, Mexican Border war, world war i, and world war ii, and served as a United States congressman from 19331942. Mark has an extensive background in journalism, and has written for publications including the new yorks times. He is author of a trivia brick book. Pleas join me in welcoming mark will webber to the National Archives. [applause] mark it is great to be at the National Archives today. Thank you for having me. If you remember what yesterday was like, it was like in 1841 when William Henry harrison was ignoring it inaugurated here in the city. He is most famous for the president to served the shortest term because he died a month after he was inaugurated. The theory was that was in that terrible weather and did not wear a hat. He probably needed a whiskey chaser or two toward off the cold. For my research when i started this book, mint juleps with Teddy Roosevelt the complete history of president ial drinking harrison is most famous because his campaign had an alcohol slogan. He was the law can and hard cider campaign. They actually used the hard cider during campaigning, make these cabins at election sites, and his supporters would drink hard cider all the time. When i think of harrison, i think of that. The book itself came about because of a golf book. I am not a golfer, and i have not red this book, first off the tee. In that book, they talk about warren g. Harding, during prohibition, nobody is supposed to drink or transport alcohol and harding would go golfing at chevy chase and other golf courses around the city, and he would habitually stash a fifth of whiskey in his golf bag, and every couple of holes he would take a shot or two of whiskey. He rarely broke a hundred, which might explain why. [laughter] my friend red that and said he was fascinated by that or he wanted to know what all those guys drink. He suggested that i write this. I thought, what a mug and a with guys like carter of coleridge. They will be boring. I put it off, and he kept after me. Finally i said if i find the guys who did not drink much are interesting, then i will keep going. Billy carter drank a lot and embarrass his brother. I figured out how to handle the four or five president s who were very light drinkers. The rest of the guys drank enough that they were interesting on their own without their family members helping. That is how it came about. I am going to do a powerpoint for a half hour and then we can do a q a. I haven know stuff about millard fillmore, if you want to know about him. We will start. Drinking with the president s this is a cartoon by a washington, d. C. Area guide richard thompson. He gave me permission to use it. Nice guy. It shows the two extremes of a president. There is grover cleveland, whose real name was stephen, his name was big steve or uncle jimbo. There is calvin coolidge, he hardly drank it all. He did occasionally have a beer prior to prohibition. Coolidge was not the most exciting president. He was famous for not talking and he somebody wants that next to him at a dinner party and said to him, i have a bet that i can get you to say more than three words. He looked at her and said, you lose. [laughter] as i said, not a ball of fire. When he died, dorothy parker, the writer and humorist who held court at the Algonquin Hotel somebody told her that president coolidge died. She said, how could they tell . [laughter] cleveland was a fun guy. When he was a young politician in buffalo, he was running for some small office against a friend of his. They both agree that it would not look good if they were drinking all the time on the campaign trail so they agreed to limit themselves this will show you where he is coming from to four beers a day. After a week, they both agreed that was too arduous. They did not want to break their promise of four beers a day, so what they did is doubled the size of their beer stein, from 16 ounces to 20 answers. They stated the alledge for beer limit. That is what they did. Father of our country, George Washington, and i often get asked what washington drank. He drank madeira wine. They often fortified their wine with rom, so it was a potent drink. He loved champagne. One of his favorite drinks was a dark beer from philadelphia. An englishman brewed it. When you go through washingtons letters, it is fun when you stumble on one where he is writing to one of his friends in philadelphia and saying, if he has made any more of his exquisite porter could he pleas send three gross to mount vernon because i know there will be a great need for it. He loved his dark beer. The brewery in philadelphia, a microbrewery, makes a good facsimile of that beer. I am not sponsored by yards, but i wish they were. They have a George Washington tavern porter brewed with molasses. It was part of the formula. It is very authentic to the recipe of the beer that washington loved. The other interesting thing about washington is that he did not really drink whiskey, but he manufactured whiskey and sold it. He was in fact one of the biggest sellers on the mount vernon plantation. He went into the business a couple years after he put down the whiskey rebellion. [laughter] i dont think that was coincidental but he put down the whiskey rebellion and within a couple of years he decides to go into the whiskey business and they did cry a lively trade. They sold the whiskey off the back of wagons in Old Town Alexandria across the river. He wrote this in a letter to a friend or relative, i forget. Mr. Anderson has engaged me in a distillery on a small scale and is very desirous of increasing it, assuring me that i shall find my account in it. By that he meant make money, which he did. They have reconstructed the distillery. You can go there. It is expensive, 90 a bottle. Friends in the whiskey better than i do claim it is more like moonshine, not top shelf while turkey or anything. If you do shell out the 90 for it, be forewarned. Anderson was one of washingtons guise of mount vernon. He was of scottish ancestry. He knew how to make this stuff and pressing washington into it. They had five stills cranking out whiskey that they sold. As you can see this is monticello, and jefferson is often called the father of american wine. That would make ben franklin the grandfather since he taught jefferson a lot of about it when they were diplomats in france. The interesting thing about jefferson is that he almost went bankrupt because of his he loved to entertain. He had to have top shelf one all the time. He would not settle for the secondbest, and he entertains are frequently and so lavishly that by the time of his death monticello was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. His daughter, in fact, had to sell monticello not long after jefferson had died. When you go to his account books, it is interesting because he was brave meticulous about how much they drank the year before. So, he would also say things like, you would see 423 bottles of champagne, and then he would cross that out and write 500 for the next year. He did not want to because short. [laughter] his correspondence backandforth and forth to europe was often phrase such as, i dont care what it costs, but make sure youre giving me the top shelf, the best stuff. He always wants the really good stuff, and of course that amounts up over time. Jefferson was an antiwhiskey president , and the people that came after him like madison and monroe were also very much in that way. He said no nation is drunken where wine is cheap. Wine is in truth the only antidote to the bane of whiskey. It was a very aristocratic view of drinking, and he saw the damage that whiskey could do to the average man in the street. He wanted it to be a more refined drinking, as it was in europe, as the french had taught him. Jefferson was so into wine that there is as funny letter he writes to monroe after monroe is president for they were good friends. He sends them a fivepage letter. The first paragraph says something like, congratulations on being elected president. You will be a great president. That kind of thing. Lets not dwell on that any longer. The next one i have pages are all about what wines he is ordering and white monroe should also ordered them. Its like, hey, your president. Lets get down to ordering some wine. March 15 is Andrew Jacksons birthday. This is jackson after the inauguration in 1829. The masses were invited to the Inauguration Party at the white house. They burst in theirre and he almost had to have a protective scrum around him. Imagine a very large st. Bernard with muddy pause. They came in with muddy boots, stood on tables, broke crockery all inebriated, intoxicated. The upper crust of washington was appalled. They called them mob, rabble that kind of thing. Jackson was the first to be said to be the president of the people. Initially, he did not mind having these guys in the white house. The only way they finally got them outside again was that they carry these buckets of orange whiskey punch onto the white house lawn and they all went back outside. According to one account jackson had to crawl out a back window to get out of there, and he did and spent the night in alexandria at gatsbys tavern. Jacksons letters are Like Washington very fun to go through when you find out all references. Here is one. A guy made a really nice handmade pair of pistols. Jackson love to fight duels and things like that. He was in the president who killed a man in a duel. By the time he was president , he has a bullet or two in his body from some of these misadventures. This was a thank you note to the man who made in pistols. Dear sir, this morning your pistols was handed to me together with your letter for which i thank you. The whiskey you can have at any time in such quantities as you may think proper, or as you may require. Like washington, jackson had his own whiskey manufacturing at the hermitage in tennessee, and also at another property. He basically was telling captain robert hays to take as much as he wanted or needed. That was pretty common in his day, using whiskey almost as a currency. Not only did he may get an seleka, but he also used it for bartering. When you go through his notes you often see that he is trading whiskey for this and that. This is john adams, second president. This guy was an incredible drinker. I mean that in a good way in that he really did not show he was inebriated very often, and he could drink in amounts of alcohol and not show it, so he is one of the guys that i put in the heavyweight category for president ial drinking. He also used tobacco from the age of 10 or something. Imagine, he lived to be 91 which is incredible that he often had hard cider in the morning for his breakfast drink not just once just for these guys. When he was in philadelphia for the continental congress, this is one of his entries. It is pretty common that he would write this, or sometimes in a letter back to his wife abigail, he would mention where and what he was drinking. Dined with mr. Benjamin chew wines most excellent and admirable. I drank of a deer at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it. They did not say hangover, but when they say they felt no inconvenience, it meant they had no hangover. If they broke they had great inconvenience, then you knew the word headache would appear along with it. One of the fun things about embarking on this subject was that i had to sort of learn a different language for the revolutionary president s because they used a different alcohol slang, inconvenience instead of hangover. They would also, instead of saying he was on a bender or a three day bench, they would say he was on quiet a frolic, which sounds so innocent, like they are skipping or something. [laughter] that was their code for this guy is at the bottle for several days. That alcohol slang was quiet interesting, and often instead of saying he was a drunk, they would say he was white bottled. White bottled fuddled. This is john quincy adams. He also mustve picked up his fathers gene for handling alcohol. He was no stranger to it. He starts out at harvard not really much of an imbibe her, but by the time he is a law student, he is added very heavy. Here is an entry i found in his diary. It is an interesting number of entries in this particular diary, where he does talk about over indulging. After this quote, he talks about how he did not really drink that much to feel as bad as he feels. Finally after the third day, he acknowledges that he has overindulged and said something that to the effect that the punishment is always more than the deed. We got to singing after supper, and the bottle got round with an unusual rapidity, and tell a dozen had disappeared. I then thought it was high time to retreat and slipped away from those of the company who appeared to be the most inspired. John quincy adams is often talking about these companions of his that are much more party oriented than he is, or occasionally dragging him to their misadventures. This is our boy, Teddy Roosevelt , i should say theodore because he did not like the name teddy. People ask me if he would have liked my book. I think they that he would but not the title. He was a moderate drinker unlike his relation, fdr, who was fairly heavy. Teddy was sort of moderate in his drinking partly because members of his family had rather severe issues with alcohol. People assumed that he drank more than he did. Especially some of his enemies. The title for my book, why did i settle on that . One of the things he did enjoy was an occasional meant julep. Usually, he like to have his meant julep when he had tennis matches. He was a big tennis enthusiast. They had a fine bed of fresh meant new the tennis court. When he got into something teddy did it for blast. He would want to play tennis even if it was raining. The younger men in his cabinet used to complain when he wanted to play tennis. He used these men to juleps as an enticement. He would reward these players with a mint julep. He would somehow hand them to someone, and they would thank him. You may recall that his cabinet became known as the tennis cabinet. There was a fine bed of mint at the white house, i may have drunk a half dozen in a year. Teddy roosevelt, giving Court Testimony against newspaper charges that he abused and roosevelt was sick of these attacks on his character. He went to michigan to hire a great lawyer out of chicago and went out and won the case quiet easily. He could have sued the man for enough to put him under. He settled for six cents and when he walked out of the court the reporters gathered around and said, mr. Roosevelt, why only six cents . He said that that is the price of a good newspaper. The guy when the guy sued them, newspaper sold for three cents. He used it to make a point. After that, these nuisance attacks on his character stopped. Here is teddys relative, fdr. Here was a guy who really could drink. He did so right through his harvard days and on. He liked rum swizzles, champagne, cocktails. We associate him with a cocktail more than anything. Surprisingly and my research, i found he also liked beer. You would not think he was a beer guy, but he would love to have four or five bottles of beer when he played poker. He loved to play poker. He would sometimes get in a poker game from 10 00 to 2 00 in the morning, and he would certainly have the better parts of a sixpack in that time. One of my favorite stories in the book, and my mother found this for me, and said she thought i would want this for the book. I was dubious at first. It turned out to be one of the nice finds i felt. It is the story of Martha Gilmore and hemingways third wife was often a guest at the white house. One day at the white house, she is coming down the stairs at and heres giggling from the coat closet. She is curious coming down the stairs and heres his commotion, and she cant resist peeking into the coat closet. In there is fdr with a couple of people around him, and he is mixing up a batch of martini secretly, and giggling like a schoolboy. There is the leader of the western world hiding in a coat closet, making a batch of martinis, and the reason was was that his mother was a very strong matriarch. She would admonish him if he had more than one in front of people. She did not care. He was hiding in the coat closet from his mother. There he was giggling like a schoolboy, pulling a fast one on his mother. We know that fdr revoked prohibition, and we should also lead him for that. Right before his fireside chat in 1933, he turned to his dinner guests and said, i think this would be a good time for beer. Of course, the entire country pretty much welcomed that decision after more than a decade of being in prohibition. Budweiser sent a wagon of beer down pennsylvania avenue to deliver to the white house when he made this decision. Fdr was always a wet and he never tried to four political can being ins convenience never tried to be anything else. He drank throughout prohibition. He would br