this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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He also got shot in the chest at the beginning of a speech, calmed everybody down and told the crowd to give the assassin to the police and make sure nobody hurt him, and then spoke for 50 minutes before he left to get medical care.
He said later that because he wasnโt coughing blood, he was confident the bullet hadnโt pierced his lung, so he could go for a while before needing it looked at.
Before the invention of TV stupefied everybody, America was fuckin WILD.
America was so wild that our West was called The Wild West. There were like 12 rules in the United States for a hundred years. Beyond that you could do whatever the fuck you wanted. I'm sure it was fraught with peril, and subject to multiple attacks from all sides, but it probably felt free as fuck. You needed to be strong to survive. There were no safety signs for those without a sense of self-preservation.
Yeah given how warped our understanding of the old west is from movies and TV I'm gonna bet most of what we think we know is bullshit and it was actually a lot more chill since people liked living. A lot like how if you check TV you'll see all sorts of stories on murder because those are prominent events. You'll see the same in history books and wiki articles. Years and years of nothing special being recorded, everyone being chill, but check out this Sheriff who did a backflip off a horse and shot three people in the dick in 1762.
You were a hell of a lot more likely to die of dysentery, or break a wagon wheel and starve to death, than you were to die in a gunfight, but gunfights could and did happen. If you were a homesteader then you had all sorts of wild shit to deal with, since you were literally living in the wild. Attacks from natives who didn't like the idea of you just claiming their land and fencing it off, wild animals stealing your livestock that you needed to live. Drought killing your crops that you needed to live. It was fraught with peril on all sides. But you were free as fuck.
Yeah free to die from drinking shit water, absolutely. I don't idolize that way of life whatsoever. Shit was brutal, most everyone died from things we easily prevent today, and nearly all of the things we use to make us comfortable didn't exist. Like the concept of ice in your drink was mind blowing. No thanks. I'll be a corpo slave with air conditioning.
That's called technological progress, baby!
I forget which president it was, but I remember that one of them would frequently insist on bathing in the Potomac.
John Quincy Adams.
Every day, at about 5:30 in the morning, totally naked.
Anne Royall, one of the first female journalists, allegedly forced Adams to do an interview with her by taking his clothes and refusing to give them back to him until he answered all her questions.
Andrew Jackson for his inauguration party invited literally anybody who showed up to attend, and a bunch of people got roaring drunk and wrecked up the White House.
The fuck happened to us man
As a huge fan of the musical 1776, I unfortunately imagined Mr. Feeny as John Adams in the nude. Shudders
Back then everybody swam naked in the Potomac. Ben Franklin is another one with written records about it.
If you see the Potomac River today, you'd wonder what the hell happened, it is absolutely filthy and not even a rat would swim in it. well maybe a rat would drown & die in it.
Free market baby! You sound like a commie.
The Potomac ain't that bad.
That was John Quincy Adams. I remember because I also learned that he did this nude, an image I've been trying to get out of my head for 30 years.
You've been trying to get that image out of your head for 30 years? How often do you have to try hard not to picture John Quincy Adams naked?