I spend almost every single day of my life reading the news, taking in the week's political hot takes, and writing stories for this website. Even so, I couldn't tell you exactly what Donald Trump is doing to the White House. I think it has something to do with the East Wing and a ballroom, and to be honest, I don't really care. I don't live there. I don't hang out there. I most likely never will. If he wants to make changes, so be it. I'm tired of hearing Democrats complain about it as if it's the most important thing going on in the world.
Plus, as I've said before, I cover Latin America a lot, and it's quite difficult to work up the enthusiasm to be outraged over perfectly normal renovations to a building when I learn daily of the horrors people face in some of those countries. And besides, former presidents have done far worse to the White House. I was thinking about that today when I remembered a little story about a former president and, well, a huge block of cheese.
That president was Andrew Jackson. While it's not always popular to say, I think he's one of the most interesting presidents to learn about, and stories like this are the reason why.
It all started when the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts, gifted Thomas Jefferson a 1,235-pound block of cheese in 1802. It was allegedly made from the milk of every cow in the town, and engraved with the motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." After a three-week trip that included a sleigh, a boat, and a horse-drawn carriage, the cheese finally made it to the White House. Jefferson cut a piece of it and presented it to the town, and the rest of it remained at the White House for two years. Bits and pieces of it were served during White House dinners, but eventually, the staff disposed of what was left.
Not to be outdone, a few decades later, some of Andrew Jackson's supporters decided he deserved the same honor, only better. According to Benjamin Perley Poore, in his 1886 book Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, "Jackson's admirers thought that every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid him, so some of them residing in a rural district of New York, got up…a mammoth cheese for Old Hickory."
That cheese, which was made by dairy farmers in Oswego County, New York, was 1,400 pounds of cheddar. It took 24 horses to move it, as it made a national tour through New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. It eventually found its way to Washington, D.C., where Jackson kept it on display at the White House for over a year.
In 1837, during what would be the last of Jackson's famous public receptions at the White House, he decided to throw a little cheese-tasting party to celebrate George Washington's birthday. "I intend to have eaten on the 22nd instant, my large cheese, presented by my friends of the state of N. York - can you… be here & partake of the feast… & any of your friends who may wish to accompany you - it will be my last & only possible day," he wrote in a letter to Henry Toland in Philadelphia.
Andrew Jackson owned a 1400-lb block of cheese. pic.twitter.com/MSZCPsIbTg
— Weird History (@weird_hist) September 11, 2017
Jackson welcomed the public to eat as much of the cheese as they wanted. It was stationed in the White House's formal foyer, and everyone from the highfalutin political class to "rag-a-muffins" off the street grabbed a bite. It's said that the doors were so jammed full with people that some came in via the windows, and within two hours, the cheese was gone.
Here's more from Perley's:
For hours did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks of it away with them. When they commenced, the cheese weighed one thousand four hundred pounds, and only a small piece was saved for the President's use. The air was redolent with cheese, the carpet was slippery with cheese, and nothing else was talked about at Washington that day. Even the scandal about the wife of the President's Secretary of War was forgotten in the tumultuous jubilation of that great occasion.
Not only were the floors and carpets at the White House ravaged, but the story goes that the place smelled like stinky, rotten cheese for months. Some even say you could smell it from blocks away from the White House. Staff reportedly had to whitewash the place and air it out for weeks to even make an attempt at removing the scent.
But Jackson saw it as giving back to the people, even if it made a mess. Apparently, he didn't have Hillary Clinton and several newsrooms full of info babes clutching their pearls over it to contend with, though even if he had, I doubt he would have cared.
