< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Almost every president gets a museum, but Huntington, Ind., just came up with a new hustle: the Dan Quayle Museum, which its promoters claim is the only museum to honor a vice-president.
Others who have served as vice-president have museums -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, etc. -- but they also served as president. Thus the distinction for Indiana.
It would be easy to make light of a museum that holds
young Danforth's grade-school spelling tests, but as former
vice-president Nixon once said, it would be
wrong.
Instead, we should recognize this innovation as an
opportunity for other communities to honor their sons who
attained, in the words of vice-president John Adams, the
most insignificant office that ever the invention of man
contrived or his imagination conceived.
Or, as
vice-president John Nance Garner explained, a position
not worth a pitcher of warm spit.
Little Britain, N.Y., would be a good place to start, for it was there that George Clinton was born on July 26, 1739. He was the only vice-president to serve under two presidents -- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He was also the first obscure vice-president; his predecessors were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, all renowned to this day.
Further, his surname should inspire the current administration to include a Clinton Museum in an economic-stimulus package.
Unfortunately, Little Britain has faded since 1739; my atlas has Bill, Wyo., (pop. 1 the last time I visited), but no Little Britain. The George Clinton Museum will just have to wait until someone finds and resurrects Little Britain.
Instead, they'll have to start with the Aaron Burr Museum in Newark, N.J., where he was born on Feb. 6, 1756. He was the only vice-president ever indicted for high treason; he also killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
Burr is so notorious that it's hard to believe that there isn't already a Burr Museum, but those folks in Dan Quayle's home town wouldn't tell stretchers just to attract tourists, would they? After all, they're in Indiana, not Colorado.
A nation-wide vice-presidential museum program would be a pork-barrel godsend, right up there with Steamland and the Lawrence Welk Birthplace, for spots like Wallace, S.D. (pop. 90, birthplace of Hubert Humphrey) and Paris, Maine (pop. 4,168, Hannibal Hamlin).
But we'd miss out. Colorado has produced scores of second-rate hacks, ideal for ticket-balancing and funeral attendance, but not one has ever become vice-president.
No matter. Certain vice-presidential museums will not inspire sufficient enthusiasm at the proper locales, and Colorado could perform a service to those communities, as well as to political history buffs, by promoting the Museum of Otherwise Unhonored Vice-Presidents.
There, visitors might ponder the career of Schuyler
Colfax, eponym of Denver's Colfax Avenue and a major player
in several Gilded Age scandals. Where else would Spiro T.
Agnew be remembered? Or John C. Calhoun, first
vice-president to resign, and author of the Doctrine of
Nullification which led to the Civil War? John C.
Breckinridge, later Secretary of War of the Confederate
States of America? Elbridge Gerry, contributor of
gerrymandering
to our political discourse?
The opportunity is open, now that Huntington has shown the way, and if Colorado doesn't jump on it, somebody else will.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >