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Presidential Business

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While February is known for Valentine’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday, it’s also when we celebrate President’s Day, the third Monday of the month when Americans fete the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, two of a very few class of commanders in chief who launched their own small businesses.

While many a politician has campaigned on a promise of “running the government like a business,” the presidential track record on running businesses is spotty at best. Here are a few startup ventures of some of our most memorable presidents.

A sobering affair

At age 65, several years after leaving office, George Washington launched a distillery at his vast Mount Vernon estate which, at its height in 1799, produced nearly 11,000 gallons of whiskey in a single year. Washington jumped in the booze racket just as whiskey was replacing rum as colonial-era America’s spirit of choice, and his venture took off. Unfortunately, only after a couple of years in the whiskey game, Washington died and left no succession plan for the business. His heirs sold the distillery, and within a decade the operation was kaput.

 

The merchants of New Haven

As a young man, future-POTUS16, Abraham Lincoln lived in New Salem, Illinois and partnered with his buddy Bill Franklin Berry to operate the Berry-Lincoln Store, a general store and dry-goods market. Despite business in the small town being slow at times, the pair moved into a larger building when another merchant’s stock became available, christening the shop the Second Berry-Lincoln Store. Turns out neither merchant had much of a stomach for retail—Lincoln is said to have spent most of his time reading books and talking politics, while Berry over-indulged in the stock made available from their liquor license. After a few months, Lincoln sold his stake in the store to Berry, who soon sold out to a local family named Trent.

 

Between the buttons

The “buck” famously stopped with Harry S. Truman—as did many a fashion faux pas. At least that was the case in his Roaring Twenties days when he partnered with war buddy Ed Jacobson in Truman & Jacobson haberdashery, a gents-wear business selling accessories and suits to local dandies in downtown Kansas City. The store prospered for a while until the recession of ’22 hit, driving them out of business and leaving the future president heavily in debt. Truman continued smarting from the episode for years, blaming his bankruptcy on a “good-for-nothing bunch of bankrupt lawyers.”

 

A mind for mines

Herbert Hoover is largely remembered for allowing the U.S. economy to sink into the Great Depression on his watch—a cross to bear for any president. But few realize that, prior to moving into the White House in 1929, the 31st POTUS ran a highly successful mining-consultant business in the early years of the 20th century. The Iowa native earned a geology degree from Stanford University in 1895 and cut his teeth with student gigs on geological surveys and, at one time, pushing ore carts at a gold mine near Nevada City, California. His consultancy business turned him into one of the most sought-after mining consultants in the world, according to the National Mining Hall of Fame, which made Hoover its 11th-ever inductee in 1988.

 

A nose for news

Before his presidential administration made headlines for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal of the 1920s, Warren G. Harding was writing headlines as the owner and editor of the Daily Star in Marion, Ohio. The hometown daily was a failing publication in 1883 when the 18-year-old Harding borrowed $300 from his dad to purchase the paper. His pithy opinion pieces and passion for covering the local social scene— and the various invitations that came from that—earned the Daily Star a loyal readership and before long the paper was earning him healthy profits. As biographer Andrew Sinclair described, Harding “turned a dying rag into a powerful small-town newspaper.”

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Jason Walsh
Jason Walsh
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