Election Day Trivia: Fun Facts About Dead Presidents
Happy Election Day, everyone! Tomorrow our country will have elected the 47th President of the United States … finally. It’s been a long, strange trip of an election year, and no matter how you feel about the results, at least most of us can agree that we will be glad when it’s behind us.
But while we wait for those electoral votes to be tallied, why not reflect on the more interesting aspects of the POTUSes who have gone before us — the dead ones, at least. We’ll start with perhaps the most popular bit of death-related trivia …
8 presidents have died in office
Four presidents died of natural causes: William Henry Harrison (pneumonia, 31 days into his presidency), Zachary Taylor (gastroenteritis from eating bad cherries), Warren G. Harding (heart attack), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (cerebral hemorrhage)
Four presidents were assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (gunshot wounds), James A. Garfield (septic shock from infection from gunshot wounds), William McKinley (gangrene from gunshot wounds), and John F. Kennedy (gunshot wounds)
Reagan broke the death curse
For more than 160 years, many people believed that presidents elected in a year ending in zero would die in office, thanks to the so-called Curse of Tippecanoe. Legend has it that Shawnee leader Tecumseh hated William Henry Harrison so fiercely that he placed the curse on not only Harrison, but all future presidents — and year after zero-ending election year, it seemed to come true. Seven of the above-named eight presidents who died in office were elected in a year ending with zero, including Harrison (elected in 1840). Only Zachary Taylor, who was elected in the non-cursed year of 1849 (but died in 1850) was not a supposed victim.
Despite assassination attempts, however, Ronald Reagan (elected in 1980) and George H. W. Bush (elected in 2000) did not die in office, and if Biden (elected in 2020) can make it through the night, he will be the third president to break the Curse of Tippecanoe.
Reagan’s was the most expensive presidential funeral
When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, his seven-day funeral eclipsed John F. Kennedy’s $15 million goodbye with a total price tag of more than $400 million. But that tally wasn’t due to a solid gold casket or an extravagant crypt. Instead, the real cost of the funeral skyrocketed because then-President George W. Bush declared a national day of mourning, closing the stock market and giving all federal employees the day off, racking up those millions in internal expenses. (Fun fact: $13 million of JFK’s total funeral expense was the purchase of his burial plot in Arlington National Cemetery).
Presidents plan their funerals when they take office
According to the White House Historical Association, each president is “asked to attend to the strange task of imagining his own funeral service” shortly after taking the oath of office. They are tasked with selecting “personal touches that can elucidate their character and legacy on a national stage for the last time.”
Four presidents were buried in a Marcellus casket
The Marcellus Casket Company, founded in 1872, produced exquisite “Rolls Royce”-quality caskets until 2003 — including those in which four U.S. presidents are buried. Kennedy, Nixon, Truman, and Reagan were all buried in Marcellus caskets. The last casket to roll off the Marcellus production line was a “The President” model 710 — and that same casket is now on display at the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston.
JFK’s first casket was sunk to the bottom of the ocean
Although President John F. Kennedy was buried in a hand-rubbed-500-year-old-African-mahogany Marcellus 710, his body first rested in a Handley Britannia casket from the Elgin Casket Company. The Elgin casket suffered so much interior damage during initial transport due to the president’s horrendous wounds that it was not fit for public viewing and was replaced by the 710. After more than one year in the possession of the funeral home that embalmed Kennedy, the Elgin casket was moved to the National Archives to keep it away from the “morbidly curious.” In 1966, at the request of the Kennedy family, the casket was buried at sea by the U.S. Air Force, who drilled 42 holes and placed three 80-pound sandbags in the box, then dropped it into the Atlantic Ocean, adding two parachutes to ensure it wouldn’t break apart.
Presidents are buried in only 18 states (and one district)
The 39 presidents who have died are buried in only 18 different states and the District of Columbia, leaving 32 states with no presidential plots. The state that’s most saturated is Virginia, which is the resting place of seven dead presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler, Taft, and Kennedy. The only presidents who are buried in the same cities are father-son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams (Quincy, Massachusetts), Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk (Nashville, Tennessee), James Monroe and John Tyler (Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia) and William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy (Arlington Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia).
