When his daughters were young, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns sent them off to sleep with a call and response routine perhaps only someone who has devoted his life to chronicling American history would invent. He taught them to memorize the names of the U.S. presidents, in chronological order, by feeding them a first name – say, “George” – and waiting for them to finish with, say, “Washington.”
“Pity the four girls who have me as a father,” Burns said.
It all went smoothly until No. 24, Grover Cleveland, who was also, of course, No. 22. Cleveland was the only man to serve two, non-consecutive terms as president. When Burns would say “Grover” a second time, his daughters would shout, “Cleveland, AGAIN!”
“I promised them one day I would do a book and that would be the title,” Burns recalled, fulfilling his pledge decades later with a collective biography of the U.S. presidents titled, Grover Cleveland, Again! (Knopf, July), which arrives in time for this year’s presidential election conversations at home and at school. Each of America’s 43 presidents is given his own spread, with curated facts and anecdotes designed to illuminate the “fascinating characters,” as Burns calls them, who have led our nation.
Every president, that is, with the exception of Grover Cleveland. He gets two spreads.
Burns looked for the details in each president’s life that revealed the most telling aspect of their character. Andrew Jackson was a consummate practical joker. Teddy Roosevelt was shot right before he was to deliver a campaign speech; he gave the (50-page) speech, bleeding from the chest with a bullet lodged in his ribs. Martin van Buren grew up in a tavern in Kinderhook, N.Y., so Kelley’s illustration shows him delivering beer steins to customers, “which is completely appropriate,” Burns said, “because that tavern is where van Buren learned politics.”
Burns’ love of historical facts began with his father, a deep believer in rote memorization who had “hours and hours of poems and plays and speeches etched onto his ‘hard drive,’ ” Burns said. Though he initially envisioned the book as something akin to a presidential abecedarian, he found himself adding more details to each president’s entry, until he realized what he was creating would be a useful tool for slightly older kids than he had originally imagined – kids who were already reading on their own, and tasked with writing book reports. “It mirrors the process of filmmaking,” Burns said. “Lots of layers, lots of detail. It’s kind of like the Grand Canyon,” says the man behind the PBS documentary National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
Though Burns has done work for Democratic candidates, the book does not take sides. “Because this is for relatively young kids, we made a conscious decision toward neutrality,” Burns said. “You don’t have to score all your political points here. We didn’t ignore scandals or slavery, but most of these men were dads, most of them had pets. We looked for the facts that would lure kids to history.”
Burns’ track record suggests he knows what he’s doing. All four of his daughters share his love of American history, and as the filmmaker shows in this video, his granddaughter, Willa, has already mastered the presidential memory game at age five.
Knowing all the names of the presidents is impressive, Burns said, but more important is the cherished family memory he and his daughters created simply by spending a few moments together each night before the lights went off.
“You don’t realize it at the time but bedtime, those moments at the dinner table, those are the most critical times you have with your kids,” Burns said. “If you’re not too distracted, you can offer who you are, and pass on to your kids the things that are important to you.”
Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents by Ken Burns, illus. by Gerald Kelley. Knopf, $25 July ISBN 978-0-385-39209-9
