Dr. Frank Einstein (29 page)

     This can be achieved only in a capitalistic system. The people, all the people, throu
gh the government can agree on how to regulate business and economic behavior for everyone in this system.  The government will be a check and balance against business.  Can the government over regulate?  Of course it can.  However through the Democratic process the government will find the proper balance for business and the economy.

       I went to Palmdale a month before Noeme.  Palmdale has three thousand Filipino American residents.  I found a house to share with an older Filipino-American mixed couple.

      I had subbed at Palmdale Unified School district for three years.  Already I had been written up for not allowing a child to eat lunch alone with me in the classroom.  Being alone with a student is against state law.  I was punished for not breaking the law.  But since the parent was unhappy that I did not let her child do what he wanted, despite its illegality, I was still written up.   

              
                  Chapter Forty One 

   
  Without Noeme I wrote articles again:

      The nineteenth Century was a bad time for Presidential health.

      From President Martin Van Buren to President Calvin Coolidge no president lived to the age seventy five years old.

      The period from which President Martin Van Buren was inaugurated in eighteen
thirty seven to when President Calvin Coolidge left office in nineteen twenty nine will be called the Middle Presidential Era.  President Millard Fillmore lived the longest in the Middle Presidential Era.  He lived to seventy four years old.  Believe or not the three hundred pound President William Howard Taft was second.  He lived to seventy three.   All the Presidents before President Van Buren lived past the age of seventy five except for George Washington. After the nineteen twenty’s all but three (Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson and the assassinated John F Kennedy) of the eleven lived past seventy five. Thus the Middle Presidential Era was the worse of the three eras for presidential health.

      I believe that they earlier Presidents lived longer than those of the Middle Presidential Era because they all lived on large farm
s. On these large farms, they lived in sparsely populated area where it was less likely to get contagious diseases.  These larger farms meant they were wealthier than those in Middle Presidential Era.   This country living made it easier to depose of their waste. This caused better sanitation which prevented air borne diseases.  Farm living gave them fresher food, producing healthier diets for the Early Presidential Era.  In the later nineteenth century the United States was more densely populated.   Dense population made it easier to get contiguous diseases. This era was more urbanized, which caused poor sanitation and its diseases.  In this era, Presidents got diseases from such poor conditions and died young. Of twenty one presidents who served during this era only five lived past seventy.

    
In the twentieth Century, technological and medical advances improved sanitation and conquered many of the diseases that had kill many of the presidents in Middle Presidential Era.  Thus the Latter Presidential Era kept seeing Presidents living longer than Middle and Early Presidential Eras.

    
Each President will be examined to demonstrate how their life and death prove the thesis that the Middle Presidential Era was worse than the other two eras.

    The reason that President George Washington died so young, at sixty seven, was his doctors bled him as a cure for severe strep throat. This illness was believed, by doctors at the time, to be caused by bad blood.  If a doctor bled the patient, the bad blood would be replaced with good blood that was manufactured by the body. 
     This treatment never seemed to work, but doctors did it for centuries.  Washington would have a better chance of recovering if the doctors had just left him alone. 

    
In the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century Braintree, (now Quincy) Massachusetts was on the rural outskirts of Boston.  President John Adams, the second President, was raised there on a farm.    Later his father built a large house next to his birth house.  Then President Adams built a stately manor on his farm a few miles from his father's house. President John Adams lived a long life.  The longest of any president until President Ronald Reagan surpassed him in two thousand and one.   President Adams had the benefit of having his wife live almost to the end of his life. She died a few years before him. Also his son, John Quincy, and his wife, who already having lived him, stayed with him until he died on July fourth, eighteen twenty six. So he was not without family in his last years.  These factors may contribute to his long life.  Stress is a factor that affects live span. I do not think stress occurs greater in any era.  Stress must be factored in however as a control.  The presence of a spouse and to lesser extended family members usually lessens stress.

   
  President John Quincy Adams lived to Eighty one.  His wife lived about as long as him.  He had a vigorous old age.  The only president to serve in the United States House of Representatives after his presidency, he died where he loved to be.  He died, at his desk, on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

     President Thomas Jefferson lived to eighty three.  His home for much of his life was Monticello.   Monticello was a huge estate in th
e middle of nowhere. It was a very productive plantation.  Thus he had fresh food, clean water and little chance for contagious diseases because his neighbors lived far away.  His wife died early in his life.  He never married again, but there is speculation that his slave and sister in law, Sally Hemmings, was his common law wife.  He never mentioned her in his correspondence.  But they did it with good reason.  He and she could have been criminally prosecuted in the colony of Virginia if their common law marriage was publically known.  There is little DNA doubt that Sally bore him three children.  Sally and her children were set free at his death.  She was of course a house servant whose duties were primary to attend his first wife, her half-sister.   Her children never worked in the fields except to learn how things operate like he did with his  legitimate children.  There are every indication that Sally Hemming and her children were most favored by President Jefferson and his legitimate children. Sally Hemming outlived him so if Sally was his wife that could have contributed to his long life because during his twilight years he would have never been alone.

     President James Madison lived to eighty five.  He inherited a big estate that was close to President Thomas Jefferson.  Again, this estate had fresh food, fresh water and not too many neighbors to get diseases from.  He was outlived by his beloved wife,   Dolly.

      President James Monroe was from the same rural areas as Jefferson.  His farm was more the size of President Adams than Presidents Jefferson and Madison.   But like President Adams, rural living was good to him.  He had the stress-free pleasure of being unopposed for his second term.  His wife died before him at seventy eight.

      President Andrew Jackson
had an impoverished youth, he rose to prosperity.  He had a large estate outside Nashville.  Despite being bitter about how  the British enslaved his mother during the Revolution War and being a twelve year old prisoner of war; despite having been shot a few times; despite being deny his first bid at the presidency even though he won the popular vote.  (Henry Clay got the House of Representatives to elect John Quincy Adams in exchange for him being made Secretary of State).  Despite in his second bid for president his opponents harassed unmercifully his beloved wife Rachel for making a mistake and not properly divorcing her first husband, who has deserted her, before marrying Jackson. (This harassment he blamed for her early death just before his inauguration), he lived to seventy eight.

      President Martin Van Buren was the youngest man to become president up until that time.  So young, in fact, that after his term ended he waited sixteen years and then ran again for president on the anti-slavery free soil party and lost to President James Buchanan. He lived on a farm in Upstate New York. Certainly one of the longest living presidents of the Middle Presidential era, he still did not make it to seventy five.

      President William Henry Harrison may have been more of a first era president if did not make a costly mistake.  He always lived on big isolated estates.  First at his father's, Benjamin Harrison, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, estate.  Then he owned his own vast estate in southern Indiana.  Abraham Lincoln crossed this estate to get to Illinois. Even his wife outlived him.   His mistake was to make the longest inaugural speech on one of the coldest inaugural day.  He died a month later of pneumonia at sixty nine.

      President John Tyler succeeded him.   Tyler did not want to be president.  He was a Democrat among Whigs. Democrats were pro slaver
y less government. Whigs were less pro slavery and more government.  Republicans came primarily from the Whigs.  Tyler did not want be president with his Whig cabinet especially with Secretary of State Henry Clay.  He so not wanted to be president that he disappeared from the White House to elope with his second wife, a woman halve his age.  For three days the staff went around the White House saying, where's the president? Where's the president?

    
He lived all his life on a big estate near Williamsburg Virginia.  He had more children than any other president with fifteen. In eighteen sixty, he decided to commit treason by being elected to the Confederate House of Representatives but died before it convened, at age seventy.

    
The Youngest President to die, not by assassination, was John K Polk, at fifty three.  He started the Mexican war in hopes of getting more slaves states.  He was alarmed at the growing population in North that gave the North a strong majority in the House of Representatives. He wanted to balance the Congress by making most western states pro slave thus increasing pro slave states in the Senate.  No state acquired as territory in the Mexican war actually became a slave state. 

   
  He lived in a town just south of Nashville.   He did not have a farm.  He got TB and died. His short life was God's judgment for being so evil.

    
President Zachary Taylor grew up being neighbors to Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler on a big estate. It is suspected that he was assassinated by poison because he was about to abolish slavery.  On June twelve, nineteen ninety on, they exhumed his body to see if he was in fact poisoned.  The results were inconclusive.

    
President Taylor was succeeded by President Millard Fillmore.  An easy going do nothing guy who grew in a middle class home in New York.

   
  Next in line was President Franklin Pierce.  A son of a tavern owner who always lived in Manchester, New Hampshire.  It was an industrial city.  All his children died as children and his wife was constantly sick.  He was considered by his contemporaries as the worst president ever. The reason for this was he believed in a weak central government and his job as president, was to just to maintain the government. So he never did anything. The stress of being so unpopular, grief for his family and always living in industrial city, and alcoholism is why he lived only to sixty one.

     President James Buchanan served longest in congress of any future president. Washington DC, during his congressional tenure, was urban, dirty, with bad water and bad sanitation.  This could have contributed to his early demise.

      We will never know how long President Abraham Lincoln would have lived because his life was cut short by assassination.

    
President Andrew Johnson was born into poverty.  Along with Lincoln he was the first president to do so.  He was sold into indenture service as an apprentice.  He escaped and drifted about until he met the woman he would marry.  She taught him to read.  After that and after they got married he bought a nice farm in Eastern Tennessee.  He became prominent because the family of his wife had connections which would cause him to become a senator.  During the Civil War, he was the only senator from a seceded state to refuse to leave the Union.  As a reward for his loyalty, when the Union recaptured Tennessee, Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee. He was made President Lincoln's vice president, in the second term, for the same reason.

  
   As President, the radical Republicans saw Johnson as being too soft on the South.  They were desperate to impeach him so they made an unconstitutional law. The law said the President had to get congressional approval to fire a cabinet member.  The United States Constitution says the President has to appoint members of his cabinet with congressional approval.  However it says nothing about getting congressional approval for firing them. Congressional approval for firing violates the separation and balance of the three branches. Essentially, this law makes the Executive branch subjugated to Congress. Johnson fired Secretary Stanton, thus violating the law and justifying impeachment.  What President Johnson should have done is contest the law in the courts.  Ultimately he was exonerated in the United States Senate because his violation was not seen as high enough to be considered a high crime.  Essentially high crime is really treason, extensive graft and corruption or murder. President Johnson was still vilified by the impeachment and refused the next presidential nomination.  He was crushed by the events his presidency, coupled with bitterness over his childhood and lots cigar smoking, he died young.