November 2 – Happy Birthday to Two Presidents!

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nI mentioned before – here and here – that, even though there have been only 45 individuals who have been president of the United States, so far, two of them share a birthday.

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nAnd, even though there are 365 days in most years, this isn’t a gigantic coincidence. As a matter of fact, the odds were strong – 94%! – that two presidents would share a birthday!

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nThis is the birthday paradox. If you haven’t heard of this famous statistics problem before, you might want to check out those links above to learn about it. And for fun, you might want to use the Birthday Paradox Calculator.
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nJames K. Polk and Warren G. Harding were both born on this date – but they didn’t have all that much else in common:

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nDifferent centuries, different regions of the country, different political parties, different accomplishments, different presidential rankings.

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nPolk was born in the late 1700s (1795, to be exact). He served as president in the mid-1800s and was dead before Harding was born.

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nHarding was born in 1865. He serve as president in the early 1920s…in the seemingly prosperous lead-up to the devastating Great Depression. 

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nPolk was born in North Carolina, in the slave-owning South.

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nHarding was born the year that the Civil War ended, so he was post-slavery, but he was also born in the North, in Ohio.

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nPolk had a college education and was a lawyer, a state legislator in Tennessee, a U.S. Representative and the Speaker of the House, the Governor of Tennessee, before becoming President.

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nHarding bought a newspaper at a young age and made it into a very successful newspaper. He was a politician for a shorter amount of time than Polk, although he did serve in the Ohio State Senate, as Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor, and as a U.S. Senator. 

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nPolk is considered a medium-good president – appearing in the first or second quartile in most rankings by historians. He was president during a time when the U.S. grew in size – annexing the Republic of Texas; adding California and most of the southwest, which Polk grabbed from Mexico by starting a war; and securing much of Oregon Country, which was disputed as U.S. territory by the United Kingdom. Polk threatened war with the U.K. in order to gain Britain’s recognition of Oregon as U.S. territory. (The U.K. did keep claim to the territory north of the 49th parallel, which is now Canada. Except the part that is Alaska – as you know, THAT part of the “north of the 49th parallel” joined the U.S. in 1959.)

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nHarding was running for president shortly after the end of World War I, and he ran on the basis that America needed to return to normalcy – in other words, the country needed to get back to the way things were before the war. He explained this thought more fully in a speech that will probably have you scrambling for your dictionary:

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n“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

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nHarding was only president for a short while, so he did not have a ton of accomplishments as president. But after he died in office, people discovered that his administration had been very corrupt and that he himself had had multiple extramarital affairs. His popularity, which had been high, plummeted, and historians rank him as one of the very worst of the U.S. presidents. 

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nOne thing that both of these presidents had in common was that they were both “dark horses” – their selection to be nominees for president, at their political party conventions, was a surprise. Harding didn’t do well in the primaries, but none of the Republican candidates had earned a majority of the delegates; when a deadlock occurred between the front-runners, party elders ended up choosing Harding in a back-room-deal sort of way. 

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nAnd Polk wasn’t even trying to run for president, but rather was angling for the Vice President position, and he didn’t even attend the Democratic Party convention. But…well, there were some shenanigans at the convention, and a special new rule was voted into being, requiring that the nominee win a supermajority of the delegates (instead of a mere majority). That new rule threw out the actual front-runner (Van Buren) and most of the also-rans. Polk ended up winning the nomination on the ninth ballot – and then people had to contact the absent nominee!!!

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nAlso on this date:

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• nNovember holidays

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• nNovember birthdays

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• nHistorical anniversaries in November

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• nDecember holidays

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• nDecember birthdays

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• nHistorical anniversaries in December

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