The Accidental President: John Tyler

Everyone seems to know quite a bit about those presidents who served during crisis points in our history: George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson during WWI and FDR who held his hand on the rudder for four terms through the Great Depression and most of WWII. As for all those tweeners, how much does the average person know about Millard Fillmore, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Chester Arthur and the others who filled the gaps? 

This is why it’s enjoyable, informative, fascinating (choose your own descriptor) to read biographies. I’m currently reading a biography of James Polk who began his political career carrying the water for Andrew Jackson. His career coincided with numerous other familiar names of people whose names we recognize even if we’re fuzzy on details, men like Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. 

It was this 1844 incident in Tyler’s presidency that caught my attention. Tyler was among 400 dignitaries and friends invited for a Potomac cruise on the USS Princeton, a new steam frigate. The Princeton had three brand new 12-inch 27,000 pound cannon which the Commander was eager to show off. 

Among those on board was a wealthy New Yorker named John Gardiner along with his two daughters. Tyler had taken a fancy for Gardiner's 20-year-old daughter Julia. The president's wife Priscilla had died from a stroke two years earlier while First Lady, the first person in U.S. history to die in the White House.

Captain Robert Stockton was thrilled to have this opportuity to entertain so many guests on his new gunboat and discharged the big guns would make it an even more memorable occasion. Long story short: when the third cannon was lit it exploded, killing a number of guests including John Gardiner himselr. Julia, hearing the news, passed out. Tyler, in what would surely have become a viral video today, whisked her up in his arms and carried her away to safety. Later the two were wed and she became his second First Lady. (Full account here on the History channel.)

 

John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States and the first to become president without being elected. He assumed office as result of death of a sitting president. William Henry Harrison had become the ninth president in .the 1840 election but died one month after taking office in early 1841. Some say Harrison caught the pneumonia that killed him by speaking for too long in inclement weather during his inaugural address.

What's interesting here is that the Constitution did not actually specify that vice presidents become presidents when a sitting president dies in office. Some believed that the VP becomes acting president or president. Tyler settled the matter by declaring that he was indeed president, which set a precedent until it was formalized with the 25th Amendment after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

EdNote: Harrison must have been a popular figure because in my genealogical line there is a Harrison Newman who was born about that time. (Years later, when U.S. Grant was a national hero, my great-grandfather Grant Newman was born and so named.)

Being the first vice president ever to become president,  Tyler was dubbed the “Accidental President” and opinion was divided on how much power he should assume. When he used the presidential veto to block the creation of a U.S. Central Bank his entire Cabinet resigned (except Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who stayed on for a year to complete the treaty with Britain settling the Maine-Canada border). Tyler immediately assembled a new Cabinet.

Another bit of Tyler trivia: John Tyler holds the record of any U.S. president for the most children fathered (that we know of), 15 in all. Perhaps even more astonishing, as of 2026 (this year) one of Tyler's grandson's is still alive, even though he was born in 1790.

Tyler, a Virginian, was pro-slavery and a strong believer in Manifest Destiny, the concept that it was the mission and duty of the United States to conquer, redeem and re-make the West. In Tyler’s mind westward expansion essentially meant creating more slave states. By the time the Civil War commenced, Tyler had been elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. When Tyler died in January 1862, the Lincoln administration officially ignored his death.

Top of page: Official portrait of President Tyler by George Peter Alexander Healey.

A Literary Dabbler

He was ordinary. That is the kindest thing we can say about him. Nondescript. No one knew where he came from, so being a man of no importance was to say quite a lot.

His eyes were such a pale blue it was difficult to discern where the pool of his irises merged with the surrounding whites, whites that were closer to off-white so that the tone leaned into a mysterious dull grey mist similar to an overcast mid-summer dawn. Like his other features it gave his face a washed out feel. 

When he spoke, which was seldom, the words mingled with a wheezing breathiness that made him hard to understand. People often asked him to repeat himself, but even then he was hard to follow and people would walk away instead of making an effort to capture whatever meaning he was trying to convey.

I used to be that way. His indistinct diction left me muttering to myself so that others sometimes asked that I repeat what I'd said. I now find this funny. I was only talking to myself.

His name was Carlton Pennington. Carlton used to refer to a place before making the leap from geography to personhood. Carl descends from the root ceorl, meaning "a free man" or non-servant peasant. The latter syllable comes from the root tun, meaning town, farm or enclosure.

Pennington is an old Anglo-Saxon name that may have meant Penny Farm. The Penningtons are listed in census records from a thousand years ago. Carlton, it would then seem, had a good pedigree.

We met at a writers group in the Poconos in Eastern Pennsylvania. I was a newby to the group, having recently moved to Lehigh Valley to escape the suffocating expansion taking place in Harrison, New Jersey. Townhouses and condos were metastasizing like malignant tumors. 

Pennington had been a regular with the group, which had been active more than 40 years, I was told. After attending awhile, I noticed that he had yet to share anything he'd written. When I privately commented on this after one of the  meetings, our host shrugged. "He's actually quite perceptive and when he brings something to share it's always good."

Pennington sat in the same chair every Thursday evening, third from the end, next to a window that looked out upon the parking lot and, beyond that, a stand of white pine. In winter the window became a black mirror. During the warmer months Pennington occasionally watched the birds.

He brought a notebook with him, one of those black-and-white composition books schoolchildren use, and kept it on his lap. I never saw him write in it.

For the first several meetings I assumed he was simply shy. Writers groups attract shy people for reasons that should be obvious. We spend months alone arranging words and then discover, to our horror, that someone expects us to read them aloud.

There were eleven of us then. Martha wrote murder mysteries. Tom was working on a Civil War novel he had been revising since the Clinton administration. Ellen wrote poems about her mother. Two others were writing memoirs, though neither appeared to have done anything yet worth remembering.

Pennington listened. Whenever someone finished reading he would nod. That was about it. Then one Thursday in October, Martha turned to him and said, "Carlton, you've been coming here longer than any of us. When are you going to read something?"

Pennington looked toward the window.

It had been raining most of the afternoon. Water wandered down the glass in crooked little rivers. "I can read something," he said.

Everyone became quiet. It was the longest sentence I'd heard him speak. He opened his composition book.

The first thing I noticed was that his hands were trembling. "The man had recently moved to the Lehigh Valley," he began.

I lifted my eyes. There was nothing remarkable in that. Half the people in the room lived somewhere in the Lehigh Valley, but it made me perk up anyways.

"He had come from Harrison, New Jersey."

It seemed a strange beginning and I stopped breathing for a moment.

Pennington continued. "He told people he had moved because he wanted more room. This was partly true. The town where he had lived was disappearing beneath townhouses and condominiums. They seemed to him less like homes than tumors."

Someone chuckled.

I didn't. That was the word I had indeed used, but not at the writers group. I had written it in an email to my brother two months earlier.

Pennington turned the page.

"The man sometimes talked to himself. He had done so since childhood, though in recent years he had begun pretending that he was merely thinking aloud."

Now everyone turned to glance at me.

"That's enough," I said.

Pennington stopped. His pale eyes rose from the notebook.

For the first time I noticed something I hadn't noticed before. They weren't expressionless. They were sad. "I haven't reached the interesting part," he said.

No one laughed.

I asked him where he had gotten what he had written.

Pennington seemed puzzled by the question. "Where does anyone get anything they write?"

"That's not what I mean."

"I know."

He closed the notebook.

The rain tapped softly against the window as Pennington leaned toward me and said something in that breathy, indistinct voice of his.

"What?" I said.

When he repeated it I still couldn't make it out.

He leaned closer. This time I heard him.

"I wouldn't go home by Route 309 tonight," he said.

I stared at him. "Why?"

Pennington slipped the composition book into his satchel.

"That's where the next page begins."

 

A Censorship Case That Might Surprise You

This week I read an article in Reason magazine about a U.S. film maker whose movie The Spirit of '76 landed him in prison for ten years. Damon Root's article zeroes in on a rather scary encounter between the State and free expression. I was well acquainted with the excesses of government during Woodrow Wilson's two terms in the White House. 2000 people were arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 for speaking out against the war effort. U.S. federal government aggressively prosecuted people for anti-war speech, criticism of the government or military, or making statements seen as obstructing the war effort or recruitment. Reliable historical accounts have stated that of those arrested, around 1,050–1,055 were convicted. Many received prison sentences (some up to 10–20 years), though others faced fines or shorter terms.

What's bizarre is that filmmaker Robert Goldstein's offense wasn't for making antiwar statements. Writes Root, "Goldstein's 'crime' was producing a silent film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of '76. Among other things, the film reportedly contained scenes that depicted British troops bayoneting women and children. Because Britain was then an ally of America's in the First World War, the U.S. government quickly suppressed the film and prosecuted Goldstein for interfering with the war effort." 

Under the Espionage Act he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.   

* * *

 

This took place in a country where "Freedom of Speech" is the first amendment to the Constitution. 

What does this have to do with us today? Well, we live in a time when spokespersons are at war over what is acceptable as regards free speech. Who decides what is good and what is bad? Since funding propaganda is included in our nation's budget, how do we know what is true and what is spin? [OK, we already know that spinning is ever ongoing from all sides, Left and Right, media and governments.] Who decides who the good guys and bad guys are in this battle for control of the narrative?

We live in a mediated world. Before entering World War One, very few Americans knew much about Germany, its history and its aims. (The 8 million Germans who had immigrated here, of course,  knew their history.) But as the drums of war began to sound, there were plenty of messages being piped into our brains through the news media, striving to form a national will to take up arms against Kaiser Bill and those German brutes.

But who were these brutes, really? Stories of German aggression were circulated as if Otto Bismarck and later Kaiser Wilhelm were out to take over the world. In point of fact, history didn’t bear this out at all. It was the British Empire that had had a 300 year hold on the world, famously declaring with pride, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.”

The spin was in, and America began creating the rationale it needed for to enter the war. Thus was born the Committee on Public Information (CPI), whose aim was to influence U.S. public opinion to support the war effort. Wilson’s Executive Order 2594 set in motion an ever broadening series of events.

This anti-German sentiment had serious consequences. Hatred was aroused toward German-American citizens and “being anti-German became a way of showing patriotism for the American war effort.” Even though there were more immigrants from Germany than from any other country, many libraries pulled books off the shelves that might be considered pro-German. Laws were passed specifically hostile to German-Americans.

The climate became so paranoid and hateful that by 1918, South Dakota prohibited the use of German over the telephone and in public assemblies of three or more persons. “By the early 1920s, 34 states had passed English-only requirements in their schools. These laws were argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Meyer v. Nebraska.”

Years ago I remember reading about German Americans having their dachshunds murdered by hostile neighbors. These actions were generated by the propaganda machinery of our government, hand-in-glove with the powerful newspaper media network. This anti-German sentiment came directly from the Wilson White House. (He’d formerly been president of Princeton, an idealist and educated fool, which he’d soon have ample opportunity to prove before the end of his second term.)

Getting back to the main point, the Wilson White House had an agenda and used its power  to promote the war effort. Of this I was aware, and the practice of using government power and tax dollars for whatever ends those in power believe is justified continues to this day. I was unaware that a film maker would be sentenced to ten years in prison for a scene portraying an actual historical moment. How many other such imprisonments have taken place in this manner?  

Related Links

Damon Root, 4-16-2026. Remembering the infuriating case of United States v. “The Spirit of ’76.” 

Helen Keller's Forgotten History and Her Letter to Eugene V. Debs

A Look Back: Sedition, Free Speech and the President

Non-USA Aberdeens

On May 27, 2001, Robert Lookup assembled the following list of non-USA cities named Aberdeen.

Aberdeen, Saskatchewan (Just NE of Saskatoon)

Aberdeen, Jamaica

Aberdeen, Andaman Island (Bay of Bengal)

Aberdeen, Sierra Leone

Aberdeen, Australia

Aberdeen, South Africa

Aberdeen, Hong Kong

Aberdeen, Scotland

Aberdeen, Tasmania

Aberdeen, Guyana (South America)

Aberdeen, Nova Scotia

Aberdeen, Ontario

Aberdeen, British Columbia

Aberdeen, British Columbia

Aberdeen, Antigua

* * * 

Observations

First, the geographic spread is remarkable. All these Aberdeens give evidence to the global reach of the former British Empire. We see Aberdeens in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia/Oceania. That immediately suggests that the list is really a little map of the British Empire and Scottish migration. The original Aberdeen supplied a place name that traveled with settlers, administrators, merchants and colonial institutions.

Aberdeen, Hong Kong has an especially interesting history. The district was named for George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who served as British prime minister and foreign secretary—not simply after the Scottish city. So not every Aberdeen necessarily traces its name through the same route.

The Andaman Islands entry is intriguing. “Aberdeen” refers to the Aberdeen area/settlement around Port Blair, and the Battle of Aberdeen was fought there in 1859 between British colonial forces and indigenous Andamanese people. Every place name has its "origin story."

It's interesting that Robert Lookup identified two Aberdeens in British Columbia. One is a residential hillside area in Kamloops. The other is a suburban community within Aberdeen, Abbotsford.

When I Googled >>Robert Lookup ennyman<< the following information was generated by Google's AI Overview:

Background: He experienced homelessness and lived as a "street person" in Duluth, where he was befriended by local writer and artist Ed Newman* (the author behind the Ennyman's Territory blog) and his wife for the final decade of his life. 

Nicknames & Passions: He was affectionately nicknamed "Train Man" due to his deep obsession with trains. He meticulously watched every single movie available in the Duluth Public Library system and rated each one entirely on the accuracy and entertainment value of its train scenes. 

The Index Cards: Robert recorded his massive volumes of research on 4x6 index cards using a tight, crimped handwriting style. Newman frequently compares the visual look of his handwriting to Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics for the song Desolation Row. 

Obsession with Birthdays: He possessed a savant-like memory for dates and famously remembered almost everyone he interacted with by their birthday. 

 

Robert Wesley Lookup, 61, of Superior, died Friday, Dec. 12, 2003 in St. Luke's Hospital, here in Duluth.

* All credit goes to Susie for introducing us.

More Miscellaneous Notes I Found While Cleaning My Office

22 August 2026
Notes found on various scraps of paper.

Philosophical Anthropology

Political Philosophy

Contemporary Modern Philosophy

Philosophy of Science

Descartes / Kant

Some people want (need) clear cut answers, not ambiguity

Some are anti-fact / anti-science

Historical Responsibility

I worry about the way we set up issues

The fact that we don't agree -- how do we keep the conversation going?

Inflated Data

Willard Munger Wetlands Act destroyed usable real estate

Where do Duluth's unemployment numbers come from?

"We were so proud of you when you could draw when you were two. Grandpa Newman would send reams of paper so we could draw."

I have visions but lack the skill and motivation to follow through.

Blog Post: Learning to See

Atticus: To Kill a Mockingbird
Rhett: Gone with the Wind
Stella: Streetcar Named Desire
Kurtz: Heart of Darkness
Ishmael: Moby Dick
Pyle: The Quiet American
Harry Lime: The Third Man
Ann Sullivan: The Miracle Worker
Robert Jordan: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Winston: 1984
Billy Pilgrim: Slaughterhouse Five
Henry Wilcox: Howard's End
Sonny: The Godfather
Nurse Ratched: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Scribbled Signatures

Review the impacts of Executive Orders

What really matters?

Begin at the bwginning.

Our Greatest Threat Today According to Os Guinness

"The supreme global menace of our day is unprincipled, unbounded power."
--Os Guinness

This weekend I listened to a talk titled 84-yr-old Philosopher Os Guinness Has 3 Warnings for the West. In his talk Guinness reflects on the decline of Western civilization, drawing parallels to Ernest Hemingway's description of bankruptcy as happening "gradually and then suddenly."

The liquidation of a company's assets doesn't come about overnight. Like many disastrous endings, whether used cars or broken marriages, things can limp along far longer than imagined, until suddenly the anticipated collapse occurs, to no one's surprise. It was not an overnight disaster, just as The Beatles were not an overnight success.

At the same time, Guinness acknowledges--even demands--that we fight for a needed cultural renewal rooted in foundational values of human dignity, freedom, and faith. He highlights the significance of the Jewish contributions to Western civilization, the dangers of unprincipled power, and the importance of confession and cultural renewal driven by faith. 

His speech warns of the potential negative consequences of authoritarianism and AI, advocating for a globally inclusive, human-friendly future with a focus on returning to foundational truths and values.

Guinness began by talking about his personal experiences as a youth during the Chinese Revolution and compares them to the Russian Revolution, two events that shaped the 20th century. (His parents were missionaries in China.) He used this as a springboard into a discussion on the role of the English-speaking world in defending freedom and a critique of the current state of Western society, including rising anti-Semitism.

Essentially he spoke as an advocate for a "global, human-friendly future" that upholds the sanctity of life, individual dignity, and justice for all, urging a shift from national discussions to a focus on global humanity while emphasizing the importance of foundational ideas for sustaining human rights.

Happy endings are never guaranteed, he said while using the Titanic's fate as a metaphor for complacency about the endurance of civilization. He followed this with the Russian fable of the scorpion and the frog, illustrating the intrinsic nature of destructive ideologies.

From here he jumped to a Persian parable. "Someone is down on his knees searching desperately for something, and a policeman comes by and says, what are you looking for? My keys, he says. So the policeman gets down on his knees and searches furiously, and after a few minutes, they can't find anything. And the policeman said to him, are you sure you lost it here? And the man said, no, it was over there. And the policeman said, why were you looking here? Well, there's more light here." The point here being that a lot of the human search and discussion goes to the easy, the convenient, the fashionable, and the comfortable. When we're discussion the renewal of a civilization, it ain't gonna be easy. 

For Guinness, faith is the foundation of culture and civilization, with Western civilization deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian values. To ignore or dismiss contributions from Jewish culture to Western ideas is both evil and ignorant. The role of confession and acknowledging mistakes is a strength rather than a weakness in cultural renewal.

Guinness also states that cultural change is a byproduct of living certain values collectively, rather than an isolated goal. All people should be encouraged to contribute to society's improvement.

The potential for restoration within Western culture must emphasize a return to foundational truths.

His address concluded with a call to action against escalating authoritarianism and technology misuse, advocating for a future that prioritizes human dignity, equality, and justice, efforts that aim to create a "human-friendly future" amidst current global challenges.

* * * 

I found his talk thought provoking. In listening to Guinness I hear echoes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous "Men Have Forgotten God speech. The origin of this sentiment was something he heard from older Russian peasants when he was a child, recalling that they blamed the tragedies of their country on the fact that "men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

Feel free to comment below.

A Brief History of Lobotomy: The “Miracle Cure”

The history of lobotomy in the United States spans roughly three decades of widespread use, from its introduction in the mid-1930s to its sharp decline in the mid-1950s. It is a vivid example of the unreliability of experts.

Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz developed the prefrontal leucotomy in 1935, severing connections in the frontal lobes to treat severe mental illness. In 1936, American neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts adapted the technique, renaming it the prefrontal lobotomy, and performed the first such operation in the U.S. on September 14 at George Washington University Hospital on Alice Hood Hammatt, a woman with agitated depression. Their Freeman-Watts standard procedure involved drilling holes in the skull and using a leucotome to disrupt neural pathways between the frontal lobes and other brain regions. 

 

Lobotomy gained traction amid overcrowded asylums, limited effective treatments for conditions like schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, and postwar pressures including care for veterans. Freeman aggressively promoted it through media as a potential “miracle” cure. 

 

Early results were mixed: some patients became calmer and more manageable, allowing discharge, but many suffered personality changes, apathy, cognitive impairment, seizures, or death. In 1945–1946, Freeman refined a faster, less invasive version—the transorbital (“ice-pick”) lobotomy—inspired by Italian work. An instrument was inserted through the eye socket to sever frontal lobe connections, often after electroconvulsive shocks for sedation; no traditional operating room was required. 

 

The first U.S. transorbital procedure occurred on January 17, 1946, on Sallie Ellen Ionesco. Watts opposed the office-based approach and eventually parted ways with Freeman. Freeman then traveled widely, performing or supervising thousands of procedures (estimates around 3,400–3,500 of his own, including some on children) and training others. Roughly 40,000 to over 50,000 lobotomies occurred in the U.S., with the peak (“lobotomy boom”) in the late 1940s to early 1950s—around 5,000 annually at the height, many in state hospitals. 

 

A high-profile case was Rosemary Kennedy’s 1941 lobotomy, which left her severely incapacitated. Joe Kennedy (JFK's dad) submitted his daughter to the procedure without even telling his wife that he was doing this. The procedure was carried out by Freeman and Watts at the George Washington University Hospital, which provided a high degree of respectability to this action. The operation, however, was a catastrophic failure. Rosemary’s mental capacity was reduced to roughly that of a two-year-old. She initially could not walk or speak intelligibly and became incontinent. She was shuttled off to an institution in Wisconsin, out of sight, out of mind. Joseph and Rose Kennedy never visited her for 20 years. Believe it or not, she lived till 2005 and died at age 86. This story was, of course, kept hush-hush for many years.

Ethical concerns regarding lobotomy grew over consent, indiscriminate use, and irreversible harm. The American Medical Association had already expressed skepticism by the early 1940s.

 

The procedure’s popularity collapsed after the 1954 introduction of chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and other antipsychotics and antidepressants, which offered safer pharmacological alternatives. Lobotomies dwindled; Freeman performed his last in 1967 on Helen Mortensen (a repeat patient), who died of hemorrhage. By then the era had effectively ended. Lobotomy is no longer practiced in the U.S. and stands as a cautionary chapter in psychiatric history, illustrating both desperate therapeutic innovation and the risks of uncritical adoption of invasive treatments.

This above story came to mind when I read Michael Shellenberger's Substack yesterday calling out some facts about "gender-affirming care" that are seldom talked about.

For years, he wrote, many of America's most influential medical organizations, along with much of the news media, Democratic leaders, hospitals, progressive advocacy groups, and celebrities, have argued that "gender-affirming care" can save lives. This care can include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that alter a child's body. The guiding belief has been that if a child sincerely believes he or she is the opposite sex, medical treatment should help bring the body into alignment with that inner identity.

However, a newly released report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paints a much grimmer picture, writes Shellenberg. According to the report, adults who underwent gender-related surgeries had 12-fold higher rates of suicide attempts than those who did not. It also cites a long-term Swedish study that followed patients for up to 30 years and found that those who had undergone gender reassignment surgery died by suicide at a rate 19 times greater than the general population. If these findings hold up under continued scrutiny, they raise serious questions about whether these medical interventions have delivered the long-term benefits that many advocates have claimed.

In the future, will messing with children's hormones and pushing puberty blockers be looked at the same was as lobotomy is viewed today? Let's hope so.