APRIL 23 — 1791 Happy Birthday James Buchanan; 1985 New Coke is introduced; 1945 Truman has words with Molotov
APRIL 23
1791- Happy Birthday Old Buck.
The only US president from Pennsylvania to this date, James Buchanan was elected number 15 in the year 1857. He is also to this date the only president who’s never been married, although he did supposedly hook up with Dolly Madison’s niece. In reality, he was probably our first gay president. I’ll get into that in a little bit.
As a president, he was an overall failure. Doughface Buchanan didn’t understand the allegiance that the North would have towards its anti-slavery position and the South’s proslavery position. He tried to use the Constitution to settle all matters, and then discovered the north and south schism went way beyond the Constitution. He tried to make amends between the Democrats and the Whigs, but the Democratic party split and the Whigs dissolved, giving rise to the Republican party.
He was born to a wealthy family in Franklin County P.A., was elected five times to the House of Representatives, served as a minister to Russia, and then for the Senate. He became President James Polk’s Secretary of State and President Franklin Pierce’s Minister to Great Britain, where he drafted the Ostend Manifesto, which was an attempt to get Cuba from Spain.
He was engaged to Caroline Coleman, whose family was even wealthier than his, and he was accused in the public eye as marrying her for her money. He had an affair with one of her friends, and then Caroline shortly thereafter either committed suicide or died from the overdose of all the opium she took.
When he was elected president, his top priority was persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court interpreted it, and deal with territorial slavery disputes. The Dred-Scott decision was made, the south celebrated and the north was pissed.
Old Buck tried to get Kansas to be admitted to the Union as a slave state, which angered the Republicans, and Kansas was not admitted. In 1858, the Republicans won the House, and every important bill they dried to pas was vetoed by the Southern senate.
Buchanan was nicknamed the Do Nothing President. The Democratic party split between the north and the south, and the Republicans had nominated Abe Lincoln. The country was splitting in two, Buchanan tried to keep it together legally, but just couldn’t. He retired to his Pennsylvania home after politics and died seven years later.
It’s worth noting that he shared the same room for ten years with North Carolina Senator William Rugus King. Andrew Jackson called them Miss fancy and Aunt Fancy.
1985 – New Coke arrives.
For nearly a century Coca Cola the dominant soft drink, you’re welcome world, until recently when Pepsi and other soft drinks started catching up during the Cola Wars of the 1980s, digging into Coca Cola’s profits.
To counter this, Coca Cola unleashed one of the worst PR blunders in marketing history and taking their age-old proven secret formula and tossing it in the trash, replacing it with a new formula that tasted more like Diet Coke with a high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, as its sweetener.
The first question everyone asked was: When are you going to go back to the original formula. 13% of consumers approved of the change. The second question of course was why. Waist because of President Reagans War on drugs to ensure that no cocaine from the jungles of Peru was traced into the Coca Cola product? Probably not since Coca Cola has been free of cocaine since the 1920s.
Was it just a cheesy marketing ploy to take the famed but fading away from their loyal customers to make the customers angry and denounce the new formula, just so the company could reintroduce the original product in order to spike sales? Nope. Company President Donald Keough answered that theory by saying “We’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart.” The reaction was terrifying. Protesters, such as the Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing, would chant we want the real thing. Coca Cola folded, and in July 1985 announced it would reintroduce Coke Classic.
But Coke Classic was not the original, as it was made with HFCS instead of the more expensive cane sugar. This naturally would lead to the conspiracy theory that switching from sugar to the cheaper corn syrup was the ONLY reason Coca Cola changed its formula. We all know how much I love conspiracy theories. Let’s face it; some are just better than others.
With Pepsi cutting into Coke’s sales, Coke might just have to cut costs by changing from sugar to HFCS. It’s an interesting theory.
I’m not saying that’s why Coke changed formulas or not, I’m just saying I don’t have proof either way.
1945-Give Em Hell Harry delivers the one-two punch to Molotov’s jaw.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
This is considered to be the beginning of the cold war. On April 23, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov met at the White House with new president Truman. And Harry gave him hell, charging Molotov that the Soviets were breaking their post WWII agreements and that Russian Leader Josef Stalin was needed to keep his word.
Molotov couldn’t believe it. When Truman was done, Molotov indignantly said he’d never been talked to like that before, and Truman told him if he just kept his promises, he wouldn’t need to be talked to like that, and Molotov stormed out of the meeting.
The straight one-two punch, as Harry called it, thus sparking the Cold War.