I'm a Stranger Here Myself (Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away) by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780767931182
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2008-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

It’s Presidents Day tomorrow. I know. I can hardly stand the excitement either.

Presidents Day is a new holiday to me. When I was growing up, we had two presidential holidays in February—Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Washington’s Birthday on February 22. I may not be exactly right on those dates, or indeed even very close, because frankly it’s been a long time since I was growing up and anyway they weren’t very interesting holidays. You didn’t receive presents or get to go on a picnic or anything.

The obvious shortcoming with having a holiday on a date like February 12 or February 22 is that it can fall on any day of the week, whereas most people like to have their public holidays on Mondays, which gives them a long weekend. So for a while America celebrated Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday on the Mondays nearest the appropriate dates. However, this bothered some people of a particular nature, so it was decided to have a single holiday on the third Monday of February and to call it Presidents Day.

The idea now is to honor all the presidents, whether they were good or bad, which I think is swell because it gives us an opportunity to commemorate the more obscure or peculiar presidents—people like Grover Cleveland, who reportedly had the interesting habit of relieving himself out of the Oval Office window, or Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn’t even vote for himself.

As everyone knows, America has produced quite a few great presidents—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. More interestingly, it has also produced several great men who incidentally became president, among them James Madison, Ulysses S Grant, and—you may be surprised to hear me say this—Herbert Hoover.

I have a certain regard for Hoover—fondness would be much too strong a word—because he was from Iowa, and so am I. Besides, you have to feel a little sorry for the poor man. He was the only person in American history for whom attaining the White House was a retrograde career move. Nowadays when people think of Hoover at all, it is as the man who gave the world the Great Depression. Hardly anyone remembers the half century of remarkable, even heroic, achievements that preceded it.

Consider his curriculum vitae: Orphaned at eight, he put himself through college (he was in the first graduating class from Stanford University) and became a successful mining engineer in the western United States. He then went off to Australia, where he more or less started the mining industry in Western Australia—still one of the most productive regions in the world—and eventually ended up in London, where he became a vastly wealthy and influential pillar of the business community.

Such was his stature that at the outbreak of the First World War he was invited to join the British Cabinet—a signal honor, to say the least, for an American citizen—but declined and instead took on the job of directing famine relief

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