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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

33. Discombobulating the Vice President With a Prank Call

On November 22^nd, 1919 – two months after Woodrow Wilson was felled by a stroke – vice president Thomas Marshall was delivering a speech in an Atlanta auditorium. Mid-oration, a policeman approached a man sitting on stage, telling him to interrupt the vice president and direct him to call Washington immediately: the president had died.

A stunned Marshall froze, before muttering: “I cannot take up the burden of the great chieftain“. As he confessed later: “I dreaded this task“. As an organist played “Nearer, My God, To Thee”, audience members sobbed, prayed, and left. However, when Marshall reached the telephone in the lobby, the line was dead. Inquiries revealed that no long-distance call had come through from Washington: the vice president had been cruelly hoaxed. Relieved, he resumed his role as a non-entity and finished his term paralyzed by fear, alongside a president paralyzed by stroke.

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.