Happy 199th America!

This is a Historic Occasion. It is the year of America's sesquicentquadragenarinovennial--our 199th birthday. It is a year that makes us think back to our past, our heritage, our great traditions. And we at Playboy would be remiss if we failed to strike up a brass band and celebrate with a few fireworks of our own. And so, we salute you, America--beginning with your top men, our Presidents!

George Washington will always be remembered as the father of our country, but these days people enjoy going over his elaborate expense accounts and talking about his wooden false teeth. The accounts prove that he was gifted with considerable imagination, but the part about the teeth is a malicious slander. He had several sets of dentures in his lifetime. One was carved from walrus tusk; another was lead-based and inset with hippo, cow and elephant teeth; and his last set, built around a metal spring that held them in place, boasted a variety of such tusks and teeth, including a couple from people who weren't using them anymore. Let there be no more tasteless jokes about splinters.

Our next President, John Adams, was also known as His Rotundity. It was suggested in public during his term that he had sent someone to England to procure four mistresses--two for himself and two for his Vice-President. When Adams heard the allegation, he shrugged it off, saying that if it were so, the someone kept them all for himself. His son, John Quincy Adams, was our sixth President, and he was accused of serving on one occasion as a pimp for the czar of Russia, in spite of Washington's warnings about foreign entanglements. Old Quincy, in a departure from his proper New England upbringing, also went skinny-dipping in the Potomac every chance he got. Between the Adamses, of course, came Thomas Jefferson, who, in a democratic gesture, freed his slaves--after many democratic gestures in the barn with those who struck his fancy. Another of his interests was vivisection. Tom experimented with animals so frequently that one wing of Monticello became known as Dogs' Misery.

James Madison we remember for being all of five feet, four inches tall and for having a memorable idea on national defense: When war with Great Britain seemed imminent, he proposed that the U.S., instead of building a Navy from scratch, simply rent Portugal's. Martin Van Buren was rumored to be Aaron Burr's illegitimate son. He wasn't actually that interesting, but his Vice-President, Richard M. Johnson, was. He considerably improved on Jefferson's earlier example by keeping three black mistresses and making absolutely no secret of it.

Then there was Millard Fillmore.

There were a few vague rumors about Honest Abe's having other women; but talk chiefly centered on his family, most of whom--such was the loyalty he inspired--were Southern sympathizers and slave-holders. One of Lincoln's brothers-in-law called him "one of the greatest scoundrels unhung." Word of Mary's disloyalty reached such proportions that Abe felt obliged to go up Capitol Hill and assure a Congressional committee that there was no treason in his family. The unfortunate Andrew Johnson was drunk when he was sworn in as Lincoln's second Vice-President. He was drunk again when he took the Presidential oath. General Grant, as President, did his best to follow in Johnson's footsteps. Like many drinkers, he trusted his fellow man. On the solid advice of his phrenologist--whom he saw twice a week--he let his friends pull off the great Crédit mobilier scandal. But then, during the Civil War, eight generals were appointed from his little prewar home town of Galena. Illinois--making it the richest lode of military talent since Sparta.

You probably don't remember President Tilden, even though he actually won the election of 1876, since he made a deal that gave it all to his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes. Another of our finest elections took place shortly afterward, in 1884, featuring Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine, Back in Buffalo, Cleveland had carefully cultivated his bachelorhood and liked to relax at a men's club where women were allowed--provided they weren't related by marriage to a member of the club. A fling with one guest resulted in child support and some attempted blackmail for Cleveland. The Republicans did their best to tell people about it. On Blaine's side, he had clearly taken some bribes and was blithe enough to admit it--though it seemed honestly earned money to him. So the Democrats chanted, "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine/The con-ti-nen-tal liar from the state of Maine!" and the Republicans replied. "Ma, ma, where's my pa?/Gone to the White House--ha, ha, ha!" It never got that lively again.

Our most celebrated Presidential philanderer, and justly so, is Warren G. Harding. His brief Administration was highlighted by the Teapot Dome scandal, rumors about his affair with young Nan Britton (substantiated a few years later, when she wrote a book about it, claiming she had a child to prove it) and general ineptitude. He once told his biographer, "My God, this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my goddamn friends, White, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor nights." When he died, many people believed that his wife had poisoned him.

Certainly, there is more to know about our Presidents. But we can stop with Harding. It is a hell of a job. We should give every man who takes it a mistress and credit at the liquor store.

Like the republic for which it stands, the Liberty Bell boasts a long, glorious heritage. Originally cast for the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, it didn't crack until 1752--the first time it was rung. It has been melted down and recast only twice, and in 1828 civic-minded Philadelphia gave it to a bellmaker as part payment on a new one. A hardheaded businessman, he left it behind as worthless scrap.

Yankee Ingenuity

Someone famous once said, "Put an Englishman into the Garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blarsted consarn; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage." Good Ole Amurrican Know-how: It's what sets us apart as a people. Have you ever heard of Bulgarian ingenuity or Paraguayan inventiveness? We thought as much. Many other aspects of our heritage have parallels elsewhere, but it was America that singlehandedly gave the world the (continued on page 228) Yankee Ingenuity(continued from page 91) telegraph, the cotton gin, the light bulb and the airplane, to name but a few. Oh, yes, and we also came up with the Edsel, the H-bomb, the Big Mac and vaginal deodorant sprays. So if there's a central topic worth parading about our glorious 199th, it is this--our spirit of enterprise. To refresh your memory, we've gathered an assortment of ingenious solutions to nagging problems, all of them very American, all of them fairly dumb.

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Problem: Since the first three buildings to go up in Washington, D.C., should logically represent the three branches of Government, what to construct once the White House and the Capitol were under way? The architect in charge wasn't a lot of help: In a speech at the time, he "lamented not having studied architecture, and resolved to attempt the grand undertaking and study at the same time." So the next building to go up was a large saloon. It was only years later that someone discovered they'd forgotten about the Supreme Court.

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Clorox II hadn't put in an appearance in 1877, so what to do with laundry that wasn't whiter than white? Folks living in the neighborhood of Old Faithful devised their own solution. Alice Blackwood Baldwin's account of her visit to the geyser begins with a description of clotheslines waving in the breeze and follows with this close-up: "A sight it was to behold, to see the felt hats of the men and flannels . . . thrown into the boiling vat, where after a few forthwarning and premonitory signs of another eruption . . . the hats and almost entire wardrobes shot high aloft, bleached and cleaned to suit the wearer to his entire satisfaction."

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The American Colonization Society figured out how to solve the race problem. In the course of 40 years, at a cost of $1,000,000, the society shipped over 15,000 Negroes to Liberia. Toward the end of those 40 years, it was pointed out to members that the black birth rate had replaced that number during the first month of their efforts.

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A kids' magazine, The Youth's Companion, figured out a wonderful circulation-building gimmick in 1892: run a promotion for a really patriotic-sounding loyalty oath. And that's how the Pledge of Allegiance came to be. While we're at it, Paul Bunyan, a seminal figure in our cultural mythology, was dreamed up for an ad campaign by a lumber company.

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Patent number 560,351 is for a device resembling a demented corkscrew that serves to produce dimples on the cheeks.

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There was a rag shortage from 1850 to 1870, so American paper manufacturers imported mummy wrappings from Egypt.

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Promontory, Utah Territory, May 10, 1869. Tracks of the Central and Union Pacific railroads are about to be linked for the first time. Central president Leland Stanford is about to drive in the golden spike. The crowd presses in, the telegrapher is poised to relay this great moment in American technology to stations across the country. Stanford raises the silver-plated sledge hammer, swings gracefully . . . and misses.

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Patent number 1,183,492 went to Albert B. Pratt in 1916 for a hat that fires bullets. Made of metal, with a barrel above the visor, the hat is triggered by a rubber tube that extends downward and into the wearer's mouth.

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In 1897. Prescott Jernegan announced he'd found a way to extract gold from the sea. He formed a company, raised over $10,000,000 and repaired to Europe six months later with $300,000 of his stockholders' money. He promptly invested--and lost--the entire amount in a project thought up by an Englishman who claimed he could extract gold from the sea.

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The Honorable Timothy Dexter of Newburyport. Massachusetts, made a fortune exporting ice to Greenland.

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Peanut butter was invented in Michigan to feed mental patients. And Dr. Graham's crackers became a dietary success throughout the nation in the 1820s and 1830s when he announced they diminished young girls' sexual urges.

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Patent number 109,644 was awarded in 1870 to an F. H. C. Mey, who dreamed up a thing called a Velocopede, a vehicle powered by two dogs on a treadmill. Noted for its economical merits, the vehicle is said to have reached maximum speed in the vicinity of cats and almost no speed at all around fireplugs.

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Treasury Department officials in 1865 were stumped. This fellow William E. Brockway had come up with a counterfeit $100 bill so authentic-looking that they didn't know what to do about it. What they finally did was take the real bills out of circulation.

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John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in the mid-1800s with free love as its guiding philosophy--although he felt incest was best. The commune's early activities were supported by profits from a new steel bear trap.

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Patent number 1,062,399 was given to Abbie M. Hess and Alfred Lee Tibbals in 1913 for a device "for removing a double chin and wrinkles from the face of a wearer." It consisted of a kind of headset with a couple of thick wires with hooks on the ends of them. When the headset was worn, the hooks were inserted into the ears, pulling them upward and smoothing out the face. It was also good for conquering deafness, the inventors said.

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Joseph Glidden of Dekalb, Illinois, stuck some wire into a coffee grinder in 1873, fooled around with the handle some, and out came a new invention: barbed wire.

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1971: Richard Nixon invents a fool-proof way to keep precise records of Presidential conversations and write them off as a deduction, to boot.