Chapter 14 POLITICS Here is some trivia from the world of politics: As everyone knows, George Washington was the first President of the United States. Wrong! The first was John Hanson of Maryland who served for one year before George Washington. George Washington grew marijuana on his plantation. In his time, pot was a legal crop. It was not used for smoking, but instead the stalks of the plant were used to make ropes, canvas and paper. If you have a book in your house older than 1883, there is a 75% chance it is made out of marijuana. So far, there has not yet been discovered a better natural material for ropes and nautical material in terms of strength and weather resistance. It can also be used as a good fiber in clothing. Properly utilized, marijuana stalks, called hemp in this application, yield fibers up to twenty feet long and they could be made into all sorts of industrial materials ranging from paper to two-by-fours. Smoking pot did not become particularly fashionable until it was made illegal starting around 1938. In 1971 it was listed as a narcotic that cannot even be legally prescribed by any doctor who might find it beneficial to patients. Then, smoking marijuana suddenly became very fashionable among young people who felt a need to test the bounds of society. Smoking pot is becoming less interesting even to those people today who need to do something "naughty" because we are finding out that it does have long lasting negative effects on our bodies. Some day soon, people who are hooked on pot will seem stupid to everyone else. But it will make a comeback, not as a drug, but as a cash crop that will save the worlds old-growth forests and will even make a good substitute for gasoline. In Brazil over one million cars and trucks are running on methanol, made from corn. Pot yields up to forty times more methanol than corn. President James Garfield could do a neat trick: He could write Greek with one hand while at the same time writing Latin with his other hand. President Grover Cleveland, before he was the president, escaped the military draft by hiring someone else to take his place. You do not put a period after the S in Harry S Truman's name. This is because his middle name was S, this was not an abbreviation. Eugene Debs was a candidate who ran for the office of President of the United States from within jail. At least one out of every fifty elegible voters voted for him. The President of the United States gets 20,000 letters a day. Most of the corespondents probably expect a personal reply. If the President took only two minutes to answer each letter, he would have to work 82 days to answer a single day's letters. In 1957, a senator, Strom Thurmond, made a speech that lasted 24 hours, 19 minutes. When Ripley's Believe it or Not reported that the Star Spangled Banner (which was originally called "Defense of Fort McHenry") was written to the music of a "rousing tavern ballad" from a popular songbook, 5 million Americans wrote letters to "Washington." Although he was not a skeleton in the closet of America, David Rice Atchison was a president who served for only one day. He was leader of the Senate on a Sunday when James Polk, the President of the United States' term ended. There was a law that the new President, Vice-president Zachary Taylor, could not be sworn in on a Sunday, so that left Mr. Atchison officially in charge of the country. He neglected to do any president-like things that day because he never knew that he was the boss. He didn't find out until a long time after it was over. One snowy night in 1967 George and Barbara Bush arrived in Washington, D.C. The moving van arrived near midnight and the movers unloaded the bedding first, but were having trouble with the snow storm. The Bushes told the movers to take it easy - quit until morning - and invited them in to spend the night. The record for shaking hands may belong to Theodore Roosevelt who shook the hands of 8,513 people in one day, January 1, 1907. The government owns 34 percent of all the land in America. Until the work of Richard Nixon (who despite his screw-ups was a great president) which opened relations with Mainland China, it was illegal for U.S. citizens to collect Chinese stamps. Ex-U.S. President Gerald Ford had his name changed when he was younger. He was born Leslie King, Jr. The United States imports 22 metal ores that are crucial to self-sufficiency such as chrome, manganese, cobalt and platinum. If we were involved in a war and our supply of these metals was cut off, our increasingly high-tech industry would be unable to make the things we are used to ranging from televisions to cars. Scientists are working to find synthetic replacement materials. In 1989 President George Bush shook the hands of 25,000 people, or about one out of every 10,000 Americans. He traveled well over one-tenth of a million miles, more than enough to circle the globe five times, and he spoke 3 million words to Americans.