Presidents as Readers (and Writers)

In honor of Presidents’ Day, it occurred to me that it would be fun for us to learn a bit about our presidents as readers.I learned, as I did a bit of research, that many of our presidents were poorly educated and came from humble beginnings. That meant they were exposed to few books in their early years, but those books often provided them with a roadmap on how to live wisely. What did they read? Take a peek.

Here are a few highlights of a BuzzFeed article I found that lists the author’s researched answer to the question: What was each president’s favorite book?

Presidents and Their Reading Styles

John Adams was an inveterate reader and frequently made notes in a book’s margins. Apparently he had a love-hate relationship with An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft, a sympathetic telling of the French Revolution. He wrote more margin notes in that volume than any other–10,000 words, and apparently many of them were “unkind.” A critique is born!

Bibliophile Thomas Jefferson read–and bought–so many books that, when the British burned down the first Library of Congress, Jefferson sold his collection to the government to give the second Library of Congress a vigorous beginning. He loved reading so much that he kept different books in different rooms, lest he have a free moment and could read a few pages.

President and Author

Our first president was also the first to hold the office as a published author. As a schoolboy, Washington copied by hand a list of 110 ‘Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.’ Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America’s first president, says historian Richard Brookhiser. The book was re-released in 2003 with the spelling, punctuation and language modernized. You can read more about Rules of Civility here.

John Quincy Adams loved poetry above all other written forms and wished he could be a great poet. He tried his hand at poetry, but it generally met with poor reviews. One poem was eventually included by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a collection of his favorite poems, which must have pleased Adams a great deal. Apparently realizing that writing verse wasn’t his gift, Adams channeled his love of poetry into translating the epic German fairy tale poem Oberon, which is still one of the few English versions of Weiland’s masterpiece.

Martin Van Buren spent his later years writing his autobiography, which oddly, never mentioned his wife.

Greatest Influence

Millard Fillmore was raised in a family that owned one book—a Bible—from which he learned to read. While apprenticing with a clothes-maker as a teenager, Fillmore bought a dictionary and used it to expand his vocabulary, sometimes studying it while carding wool.

Franklin Pierce would probably say his favorite book was the one that got him elected president. A no-name senator from New Hampshire, Pierce’s old college buddy, best-selling and wildly popular Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote an inspiring biography of Pierce that painted him as a national hero. And it was published just before the election.

Abraham Lincoln often carried Shakespeare’s collected works tucked under his arm.

The Gift of One Book

The gift of a book changed one young man’s life. Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, Andrew Johnson’s parents were illiterate and most likely considered poor white trash, and he was apprenticed to a tailor shop, where he was taught the basics of reading and writing. Customers used to come into the shop to read to the tailors and one gave Johnson a copy of The American Speaker, the first book he ever owned. Johnson practiced his reading with the book and kept it with him for the rest of his life. “How many times I have read the book I am unable to say,” he would say years later. “But I am satisfied it caused my life to take a different turn from what it otherwise would.”

Reading as Distraction

Reading popular novels proved to be a distraction from studies for Ulysses S. Grant. In his memoir, written at the end of his life, Grant admits to blowing off his studies at West Point and instead spending his time in the library, reading the likes of  James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Walter Scott. But Edward Bulwer-Lytton is the one whom Grant recounts reading the most. This fascination with the wrong types of books might help to explain Grant graduating near the bottom of his class.

James Garfield grew up on a farm in Ohio, raised by his widowed mother and older brother. The Garfields didn’t own many books, just a few volumes plus the Bible and some school books, so when Garfield borrowed a copy of Robinson Crusoe he was captivated by it. He spent hours reading and rereading it by the fire and from then on would compare all other books to it. As one biographer put it: “The impression made by that book upon his mind was never effaced. It only sharpened his appetite yet more for reading.”

Adoration for Books

Another president who loved poetry was William McKinley. After signing up to fight in the Civil War, he purchased a volume of Lord Byron’s poetry to take with him.

Woodrow Wilson was an unadulterated fan of Walter Bagehot, a 19th-century journalist and essayist who wrote about government and economics. Wilson, the academic politician, discovered Bagehot’s writing his junior year of college and was so influenced by his work that Wilson even took a pilgrimage to where Bagehot is buried and picked a leaf off his grave, which he mailed with a letter to his wife asking her to save it for him.

The biggest influence on our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, was the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, whom Coolidge discovered while studying classics in high school. According to biographer Robert Sobel, Coolidge read so much Cicero that he became fluent in Latin.

The Book That Touched a President’s Heart

We often associate Lyndon Johnson with the Vietnam war, but he also fought a “war on poverty.” And a book was a strong influence on him to do so. Michael Harrington’s The Other America, as well as a popular New Yorker review of it entitled “Our Invisible Poor,” claimed that more than 20% of Americans at the time lived in poverty. The book reportedly struck a chord with Johnson, who was aware of many Americans living in what he called “the outskirts of hope” trapped in “inherited, gateless poverty.” Millions were lifted out of poverty because of Johnson’s efforts.

Richard Nixon was fond of Leo Tolstoy’s books; Gerald Ford liked the affable heroes that Horatio Alger created; and Jimmy Carter was deeply touched by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, which documented the plight of Depression Era sharecroppers and influenced Carter to do something for the have-not’s in a world of have’s.

A President’s Praise

The Hunt for Red October was given as a gift to President Reagan, who mentioned the book in a press conference, calling it “”unputdownable.” The praise helped to launch Clancy’s career.

Bill Clinton has created three lists of his favorite books, but only one title appears on all three: Marcus Aureilus’s Meditations.

The Quiet Reader and the List Maker

George W. Bush often is portrayed as the kind of guy you want to have a beer with (picture a bar and a flat screen TV), and his many verbal flubs during speaking engagements doesn’t suggest he’s much of a reader. But Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece stated that he and Bush had a contest each year as to who could read the most books. One year Bush put away 95 to Rove’s 110. But the book Bush read each year cover-to-cover was the Bible.

Barack Obama is a great promoter of books, going on a very public outing each year to buy books as Christmas gifts. He still releases, each year, a list of the books he plans to read. He even wrote a personal note to Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, to let the writer know how much Obama and his daughter enjoyed reading the novel. Whenever he is asked about his all-time favorite books, he often lists quite a few titles and usually a different group of titles each time, but two books that have consistently been listed are Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

Joe Biden is a reader, but he isn’t very forthcoming about his favorite books. Here’s an article that speculates as to what he enjoys reading.

Donald Trump has recommended 48 books for others to read. Take a look and draw your own conclusions about Trump as a reader.

Which president’s reading surprises you the most? Which touches you the most as an American (if you are)? as a reader? as a writer?

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