And so if i wanted to say, well, the presidency in humor, humor in the white house didnt quite do it. But then i thought about it some more and actually it does work because neither of the first two president has a sense of humor. So it gets me out of that problem. But, im going to follow the lead of perhaps the most successful humorist in the white house. It might not be the person youre thinking of by doing what he always did, in most cases what he did at the beginning of a talk, he started with a joke. Again, some of you will have heard this joke, but please pretend you havent heard it before and laugh at the appropriate point. So this is a joke and this is a key to part of my story. That Ronald Reagan used to tap. And the key is, as youll see, Ronald Reagan was effectively telling the story on himself. It related to a time in his career when he didnt know sort what he was doing or where he was going. As you will know of Ronald Reagan, he had two careers primarily. He was a film actor. And then he became a politician. But there was an interregnum. A period between the time basically after he stopped getting calls from hollywood producers. He couldnt get any good roles. Between when his career ended and his political career. Film career and political career began. And he had, well, a rather unusual position. In fact, it was a job that was invented for him by the General Electric corporation. General electric was at the time the behemoth of the american economy. And reagan was their spokesman. He was a Television Host for the ge theater. And the ge theater was, well, an experiment in television. This is in the 1950s. And nobody knows quite what to do with tv. So, they think, what you do with the Television Camera is you film a play. And people would watch plays on tv. So reagan was the host. He wasnt the star. He was in a couple of these, and he mostly introduced them and then the show went on. Thats what he would do on weekends. During the week, he would travel the country giving speeches on behalf of General Electric. And the glories and wonders and conveniences of electricity. Better living through electricity. And he would define himself because reagan in that phase of his life was afraid to fly. And he had a written contract that he would not supply and so he traveled by train across the country. He would go through very small towns and very often find himself addressing the local rotary club or elks or chamber of commerce. Or he used to call it the rubber chicken circuit. He would find himself in small towns because he wasnt famous. He wasnt an alist actor, he was sort of a blist actor. As jack warner, his boss said, when he heard that reagan was running for governor of california in the 1960s. He said, no, no, jim . Stewart for governor. Reagan for best friend. That was the kind of roles he played. Hes this relative nonentity and going to obscure towns and giving standard talk. The story that reagan told went like this. He is about to give a talk in some small town in the midwest, and he doesnt know the people hes going to be speaking to. Its been lined up by his publicity agent. So, hes going to address this group. And one of the locals, the Program Director of whatever club it was, well call it the elks. Is going to introduce reagan. But the problem is the Program Director is not familiar with Ronald Reagan and he sees the printed name, Ronald Reagan and ask like hes going to introduce him. The problem is he doesnt know how the last name reagan is supposed to be pronounced. It could be reagan, it could be reagan. People pronuns it both ways. This man is in a quandary. Today, you can go on youtube and hear how its pronounced. You couldnt do it then. He doesnt want to embarrass his group. Hes trying to figure out how to resolve the problem. How hes going to discover how the name is pronounced. Hes deep in thought the morning before the talk. Its a small talk Walking Around one of the neighborhoods. And while hes walking he encounters one of his neighbors. The neighbor is guy actually doesnt encounter the neighbor. He trips over the dog. And the neighbor says, joe, boy, you really look like youre worried. Whats going on . And joe starts to say he explains the deal. So he reaches in his pocket and pulls out the program. And he says, do you know this guy . How do i pronounce his name . And he looks, its Ronald Reagan. He used to be an actor. And joe says are you sure its reagan . Yeah. And he starts walking back and repeats to himself, reagan, reagan, reagan. As hes walking back, he trips over the dog. And he looks and says thats a cute dog. What kind of dog is it . A bagel. [ laughter ] so this is Ronald Reagans approach. And it characterizes a large part of where im going to be going with my talk. By the time reagan was president , humor was considered a necessary part of the political arsenal of a president , of a candidate. And this, because, well, you know, i told you this story and no one would say its an enormously clever story. Its enough to get a ha ha ha. Reagan recognized for those years on the rubber chicken circuit, if theres an audience that doesnt know you, might be skeptical about your message that youre conveying, if you can get them to laugh, it loosens them up. It makes them feel that youre a real person and not simply this flak at ge. And it represents something of a culmination of a trend that had been going on for a long period of time. So im going to cover some of that trend. Now, while i was after i told him what the topic was going to be tonight. I got to thinking about it a little bit more. And i happened to be teaching well, this january. Just last month. A course. I teach this course every other year. Its a course on the history of the presidency. Its standard for me to begin with the course with i put up on a screen like this, i put an image, an illustration, in this case a portrait, of our first president and our current president. And ive been teaching it long enough that i go back to this course, back to george w. Bush. And so our first president , our current president , and underneath, the one word explain. This is the theme of the course. This is what the students have to do on their final exam. How did we get from George Washington to george w. Bush, how did we get from George Washington to donald trump. One of the striking things is, if you go to George Washington to most president s, you see a linear progression. Some people would think that its declined, the curve slopes down. In fact, this question of this comparison between the first president and the current president goes all the way back to the second president. President s always look better in the Rearview Mirror they do than theyre right, front and center. Part of this is that we tend to forget the failures and remember the successes. Thats part of it. The other thing is, that president s are usually pretty talented people. And so theres they usually have a lot of positive things that can be said about them. But while theyre president , typically the other party, or sometimes factions with their own party, have an incentive to tell you all the bad things about them. But once they leave office, that incentive is largely gone. This is why certain president s fool themselves into thinking, you know, i could have run for a third term. Dwight eisenhower was more popular by polling at the end of his presidency than he was at the beginning of his presidency. And he used to think, boy, i could have gotten a third term. Bill clinton, bill clinton was more popular in the year 2000 than he was in the year 1993. He used to think, if he could have run for a third term, he would have run. They fool themselves because by 1960 the democrats had no incentive to go after dwight eisenhower. They were focusing all of their fire on the next one, richard nixon. The republicans in 2000 had no particular reason to go after bill clinton anymore. He got a free pass. They were aiming their guns at al gore. So this question of sort of popularity and how president s look better in the Rearview Mirror is partly due to this artifact that nobody is sniping at them anymore. But perhaps the clearest statement, the clearest assertion of president ial decline was made by henry adams who was an observer of president s from the well, he was the grandson of john adams. He was the great grandson of john adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams. And the adams family was in this state of political decline. There were two adams president s in the background, but henry adams couldnt make a start in politics. Henry adams became a historian. When he was writing in the 1860s, when grant was president , this was just ten years after the publication of charles darwin, introduction of the theory of evolution. Adams take was, anybody who looks at the progression of the presidency understanding that evolution is a crock. It refutes the theory. [ laughter ] i was going to say that, in most cases, it looks as though theres this linear line that maybe you think it goes down or up. George washington is a tough act to follow. Im going to propose this to you. You can decide whether you agree with this or not. There is one sense, at least, in which donald trump is positively and this is an adjective i havent heard applied to donald trump, that donald trump is positively washingtonian. Hes very much like the father of our country. And do you know what, can you guess what im going to say is that particular that particular characteristic . 603. Thats not too bad. Well, okay. So i hear it in the front. But im not going to advertise it just yet. You all know the story well, i dont know if you all know this. Its part of american historical lore. That George Washington, you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree and how he chopped down the cherry tree and his father asked who chopped down the cherry tree. He said i cannot delltell a lie. We have this impression that George Washington couldnt tell a lie. I actually dont think thats true. I read enough of his diaries and letters. He could not tell a joke. [ laughter ] and he couldnt tell a joke or maybe that its just that he wouldnt tell a joke. Nor would he laugh at jokes. And this in part because he selfconsciously presented himself to the world as this very soberminded, serious characteristic. As a young man he got a hold of this list of sort of maxims and principles of life for a young man. Theres 110 of them. One of them said laugh seldom and never indistinguished company. He wrote this down. And these were words that he came to live by. I really dont know if in his private life George Washington, i dont think he told jokes. He might have laughed at jokes. In his public life he certainly did not. And people would try to warm him up. Theres a story that is told on Good Authority about George Washington at the constitutional convention. This is before hes president. Hes president of the convention. And he is this austere figure. Hes the commander of the continental army. Hes the one who won the revolutionary war and the independence for the United States. And hes presiding over the constitutional convention. And he was chosen in part because he was very straightlaced soberminded individual. You make him president , the presiding officer, that gives him an excuse not to. But some of the members of the convention, governor morris, he lived in new york and pennsylvania. He was a delegate to the convention from pennsylvania. And he was very much a hail fellow well met type. And he walked on a wooden leg. And the story that was sometimes told about him, he liked to tell the story that, he had lost his leg in the revolutionary war. It was a battle injury. The other story that was told about him is that he badly injured himself diving out of the bedroom window of one of his lovers just at the moment that her husband was returning home. And it was badly set and the leg had to be amputated. Governor morris was one who wanted this convention to be, well, not quite as somber as it seemed to be. So he made a bet with some of his friends there, including alexander hamilton. And hamilton New Washington better than morris did. And so he made this bet that he could actually loosen up George Washington. And so hamilton said, you got a bet. What do you want the wager to be . It will be the finest dinner in philadelphia for a dozen of each of our friends. If i win, you treat us. If you win, i treat you. So he goes up to George Washington and this is a break in the gathering. And he puts he slaps George Washington on the shoulder. He says, george, how are you doing . Glad to see you. And the way governor morris tells the story, he said at that moment general washington fixed me with an icy glare. And he took my hand and lifted it off his shoulder and fixed me with that gaze and all i could think about was, how can i get out of this room as quickly as possible. That was George Washington. And that was the kind of person americans expected as their president. Thats the kind of person americans wanted as their president in the early days of the republic. In what i call the augusten age of the american presidency. It runs from George Washington to John Quincy Adams. Ordinary people did not elect George Washington. Ordinary people for the most part did not elect the electors who chose George Washington. According to the constitution youll read that each state shall select electors and it doesnt say how. They get to choose. The legislatures of the states get to choose how the electors are chosen. Until the 1820s, most state legislatures chose the electors, not voters in the state. In that era americans expected their president to stand above them. No one wanted George Washington to be just one of the gang. And this is why washington would get away with giving that reaction to governor morris because it served his purposes to be this one who he would himself apart from everybody else. Because thats what americans wanted. And the idea that the presidency when he became president , the presidency was a serious undertaking. And the idea that your president should have a sense of humor and laugh, especially in any kind of public setting, this just clashed with the idea that politics is a serious business. Governing this country is a serious business. And so youre really hard pressed to find a sense of humor, to find anybody in the white house telling jokes, really before about Andrew Jackson who is elected in 1828. Even with Andrew Jackson, its a little bit hard to find anything that looks like modern humor. I look up this subject understanding that conveying jokes or humor from the past to the present is a difficult undertaking. Because tastes change. Perhaps youve heard the saying a fee loanous monk, that writing about music is about dancing about architecture. To translate humor from the past to the present, something is lost in the translation. But im going to try anyway. You look like a learned audience. Andrew jackson is the first really popularly elected president. Hes the one who makes the presidency preeminently the peoples office. And his election appalled members of the establishment, members of the adams family and supporters of all those president s who had come from the elite, he was the first real common man to be president. And especially in places like new england, around boston, around harvard college. The idea that this unlettered, westerner, this uncouth militaryist should be president of the United States was something they had a really hard time getting their heads around. And John Quincy Adams, who was defeated by jackson in 1828 and went back to massachusetts to lick his wounds and to really fret over the dear alma mater. They decided, okay, we cant stop this, but we will show jackson up. In those days, it was not unheard of and it was still accepted practice on certain occasions for academics to give their addresses, to deliver their papers in latin, the traditional language of intellectuals in the academy. And so without telling the president of the university who was basically whose reputation was on the line here, okay, ill be happy to speak on this occasion. It was a commencement. There were several speeches. And the speakers before jackson stood up and gave their speeches in latin with the belief that this would really confuse jackson and would be so embarrassed and humiliated and that would be the end of it. Now as i say, explaining these historical stories, context is necessary. This was at a moment when jackson was Holding Together by maine force. South carolina was threatening to succeed from the union over a tariff and jackson was saying the union must hold. Jackson was the first of president s this became a fairly common thing over the years, for president s and other distinguished members of the government, secretaries of state, the marshal plan was announced in a harvard address. Jackson is going to give this pronouncement on the current state. And hes also going to deal with this attempt by the harvard faculty to embarrass him. So jackson stands up. And he says, e plurbus. Enough of you know latin to get the joke. Thats the best i got on a joke from jackson. And i have to confess, i have to confess that that story is probably somewhat exaggerated. Its in the nature of jackson wasnt a particularly funny guy. One of the things that you see in the evo