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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

35. Hoaxing America’s Most Useless Vice President

Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, won a second term by joking about the position’s “utter uselessness and frivolity“. He liked telling a story about having two sons, one of whom went to sea and drowned, while the other became vice president. The punch line was that “neither son was ever heard from again” He often referred to himself as “the Wilson administration’s spare tire – to be used only in case of emergency“.

So on the one hand, Marshall was not the type to take himself or his position too seriously. On the other hand, Marshall had zero confidence in himself, and lived down to that self-assessment when the country needed him the most. When Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke in 1919, Marshall became incapacitated by fear of actually taking the reins of government. It was against that backdrop that somebody pulled a cruel prank, by convincing Marshall that the president had died.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.