I think that most picture book authors get around to their presidential biography. It’s an important part. It’s an important obligation we have to teach the younger generation about our American history. So I wrote a book – my very serious presidential biography, President Taft Is Stuck in the Bath.
And that comes from a story –I was really big into facts about the presidents as a kid, and that was the one that you always learned about President Taft, I think because his four years in office were pretty uneventful years. That was the big fact about him.
And when I was looking into it as an adult, like the story – although there are a lot of embarrassing things that happened to President Taft around bathtubs, a surprising number of them, actually, that are verified, there was no proof that this actually happened, and that’s when it became very interesting to me, because I love stories that are at the border of fiction and reality.
Because, you know, it’s in books that are called, 101 Facts About the President. It is something that has been told for 100 years. And at that point, it’s not just a fiction anymore. It’s become woven into our culture. It’s somewhere in between. It’s definitely not historically true, but it’s also not a complete fiction. It’s affected the way that we live and think about our history.
And I love things like that. And actually, a lot of history is like that. The border between reality and fiction is a lot more porous in both directions than we think it is, a lot of the time. The reason that I think that that story about Taft has lived on about him is, it’s a story that humanizes a president.
I think we’re so often thinking about presidents as almost superheroes, and a lot of presidential biographies and picture book biographies of presidents, I think, feed right into that mythology. And hearing those stories as a kid, you think, I’m not anything like those presidents. You know, we tell kids, you can do anything in this country.
You could grow up to become a president. And at the same time, there are a lot of things telling kids that they can’t become president. You know, that kind of bromide that we send out gets complicated very quickly by things kids experience. But one of the first things they experience is actual stories we tell them about presidents that make them seem larger than life.
And better than life. And here’s a story that acknowledges that a president has a body, can get stuck in a bathtub. That’s the kind of stuff that happens to me all the time, and that’s a story, for me, that I’m like, there we go. Okay. Presidents are people. And I think that’s why that story has really lived on. I think it’s an important story.
Especially in a democracy, that we remember, oh, yeah, right, presidents are humans. And Taft had a quote which is on the back, at least half of it is: “We are none of us perfect, so we should not expect perfect government.” And I think that’s important to remember.
