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The Nutty Lives of these American Leaders Were Anything But Ordinary

Khalid Elhassan August 25, 2022 38 min

Nutty things moments and America seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. And from the country’s birth, our leaders have led us in the nuttiness. Take the hound dog Founding Father whose love conquests spanned the glove, and who killed himself when he stuck a bit of whalebone up his male member to clear up a clog. Or the country’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, who got his noggin cracked in a riot against doctors sparked by grave robberies. Below are thirty things about those and other nutty moments from the lives of America’s leaders.

30. The US Supreme Court’s First Chief Justice Was Wounded in a Nutty Grave Robbers’ Riot

John Jay (1745 – 1829) was a patriot, diplomat, and jurist who served the nascent United States in a variety of roles. A New Yorker, he was elected to both the First and Second Continental Congresses, and served as president of the latter. As ambassador to Spain from 1779 to 1782, he persuaded it to help the American colonists in their war against Britain. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris that secured the United States’ independence, and later served as America’s first Secretary of State. Jay was also the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. When it came to case law, his years on the bench were mostly uneventful: in six years, his court decided only four cases.

John Jay in a 1958 stamp. US Postal Service

The tranquility of Jay’s service on the bench, to which he was appointed in 1789, was in sharp contrast to the tumult he experienced a year earlier in 1788. A doctor nowadays is a respected professional, but it was not always so. Indeed, one of America’s biggest riots after the country gained its independence was against doctors. The so-called “Doctors Riot” was sparked by popular abhorrence of what now seems nutty and ghoulish, but was a common medical practice at the time. Back then, doctors routinely robbed graves of corpses for dissection. The riot erupted in New York City on April 16^th, 1788, and killed over twenty people. As seen below, the future first chief justice of the US Supreme Court almost got killed in the tumult.

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.