First Lady Michelle Obama recently outlined her initiative to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation. In her kickoff speech for what the Obama administration is calling the “Let’s Move” campaign, Mrs. Obama said “the physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”
“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved overnight,” she continued. “But with everyone working together, it can be solved. So, let’s move.”
The administration has been putting the “Let’s Move” campaign together for over a year, and dismissed several other possible projects for Mrs. Obama along the way, including “Let’s Dance,” an appeal to resurrect post-disco, synthesizer-driven dance music from the early-to-mid 1980s; “Let’s Seriously Get Way Baked,” which was deemed too close in substance to Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” appeal, and “Let’s Get It On,” a challenge to elderly Americas to don their rain coats more speedily.
Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative continues a long tradition of U.S. presidents’ wives taking up a social or political cause. Some of those efforts were either rejected by administration officials, or have simply been lost in the annals of presidential history.
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- Martha Washington never lived in the White House, but some historians have claimed that her hobby - and later commercial enterprise - of crafting dental implants from cherry wood was the first cause, of sorts, promulgated by a First Lady. Owing to an unspecified, but profound childhood trauma, the taste of cherry wood, gave President Washington an intense rush that allowed him to concentrate more fully on matters of state. Mrs. Washington realized that she’d stumbled into a money maker, and was soon peddling the inexplicably popular, “Martha’s (Splinter Free!) Cherry Bomb Chompers,” in Battery Park.
- Despite the rechristening of the Red Room as the Goofy Foot Room in 1809 when the Madison’s moved into the White House, few in Washington knew about Dolley Madison’s fascination with surfing. The “Bro, That is Perilous!” campaign sought to improve surfing etiquette on the increasingly crowded east coast shoreline. “I’ve inquired about promised sick big water off New Symrna Beach, for my plans are to depart on the morrow by carriage and I don’t mind reporting to you, Brosef, that I am so amped,” Mrs. Madison wrote in an 1802 letter to her friend, Margaret Rawlson Pauling. “And yet when last I was there, I spent the better part of sunrise turning my spy-glass in every direction, watching with unwearied aggro, hoping to discover the approach of some epic crunchers. But, alas! I descried only dick draggers in all directions. When those ass clowns get worked, they can cause full on dings in my stick and - Heaven forgive me - I pray a rip the size of a Redcoat regiment will take them far to sea.”
- Elizabeth Monroe became a foodie in France where her husband James had been named U.S. Minister by President Washington in 1794. Twenty-three years later, when the Monroes moved into the White House, Mrs. Monroe had become addicted to red meat. In 1821, she discovered a sublime steak sauce created by the head chef of England’s King George IV, and secretly began importing cases of it into Washington for her own consumption, and for presidential dinner parties. When the king found out about Mrs. Monroe’s fixation with his steak sauce, he ordered her supply cut off, partly in retribution for his father’s defeat in the Revolutionary War. In response, Mrs. Monroe founded an initiative promoting American-made steak sauce and called it, “Are You Fucking Kidding Me? British ‘Food’ Is Fucking Disgusting Anyway. Go Fuck Yourself, King Whatever Fuck Your Fucking Name Is.”
- When Sarah Polk and her husband James arrived in Washington from their native Tennessee in 1845, they brought with them a style of southern charm to which the White House has since become accustomed. But Mrs. Polk was wary of big city ways, and bristled at whispered insults about rural life in the south. To combat what she considered northern ignorance, Mrs. Polk undertook an educational campaign called “My Kinfolk Is Your Kinfolk.” The campaign highlighted the achievements of backwoods cornfed yokels to sophisticates in Philadelphia and New York. A favorite of Mrs. Polk’s was a poster depicting a young hillbilly, half his overalls unbuckled, urinating in a jug while shooing away a critter, and the tagline: “See? A American Did That.”
- Abigail Fillmore - “Who Doesn’t Love a Poached Egg?”
- James Buchanan, president from 1857 to 1861, is still the only president who never married. As First Lady, he chose Harriet Lane, his favorite niece. The two had been inseparable during Buchanan’s years as minister to the Court of St. James, where Queen Victoria gave Ms. Lane the rank of ambassador’s wife. Soon after Buchanan (or “Nunc,” as Ms. Lane called him) and his niece moved into the White House, Ms. Lane became the toast of social Washington, and launched “It’s Not Weird!,” a campaign aimed at de-stigmatizing intimate uncle-niece relationships across America.
- Lucretia Garfield was First Lady for only six months before her husband James died in office after being shot in 1881. While Mrs. Garfield did not have much time for causes during her husband’s presidency, she had always had two, unrelated, joys in life - lye and sad clowns. In the middle of June, three months after moving into the White House, Mrs. Garfield asked her husband if she could embark on two social crusades as First Lady - one to be called “Lye!” and the other to be called “Sad Clowns!” “Sure,” President Garfield responded, but then it never came up again and then he got shot and died.
- Epilepsy was a constant in the White House life of Ida McKinley, and her husband William. Perhaps because her own serious illness was such an obstacle to a normal, healthy life in Washington, Mrs. McKinley focused her public attention on an issue she believed would boost the spirits of Americans saddened by the plight of their First Lady. But Mrs. McKinley’s crusade promoting tiny shower caps to protect babies’ hair-dos, called “Keep Her Pretty,” was met with befuddlement rather than approval, and it was soon scuttled by President McKinley who called his wife’s idea “looney,” “batty,” “zany,” “moofie,” “shaapie,” “truggly” and “garbanzo.”
- Her years as an Army wife in a variety of posts around the world prepared Mamie Eisenhower for the many heads of state she and her husband Dwight would receive at the White House in the 1950s. But it was Mrs. Eisenhower’s concern for a domestic crisis that would lead her to declare her own personal war on the Chordettes. The songs “Mr. Sandman” and especially “that goddamned annoying ‘Lollipop’ shit,” were enough for the First Lady to create, The Whoredettes, a group of four slutty teenagers with terrible voices and worse hygiene that toured the country parodying the Chordettes and spreading rumors on stage about the original group members’ sexual dalliances with old women, donkeys and Mao Zedong.
