{"id":95140,"date":"2016-03-01T16:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T21:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95140"},"modified":"2016-03-01T16:37:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T21:37:28","slug":"plastic-presidents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/01\/plastic-presidents\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic Presidents"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Marx Presidents.<\/p><\/div>\n

Growing up, our house was filled with presidents and almost presidents. WIN WITH WILLKIE!<\/small> blared a sign on our front door. Wilson, having \u201ckept us out of war,\u201d looked down benevolently as you mounted the stairs. At the top, you might be confronted with a Nixon caricature and a poster for Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Bull Moose ticket. And that\u2019s to say nothing of the large case of assorted campaign buttons in the living room, or the cedar closet that had been completely given over to posters, terrifying rubber LBJ and Reagan masks, and other such ephemera.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t think to question it any more than we would\u2019ve questioned why there were two large antique baby carriages in the dining room or a 1920s wringer washer in the corner of the living room or an enormous bust of JFK on the mantel. Any more than we questioned the \u201cPresidents of the United States\u201d place mats that prompted nightly quizzes, or the bits of trivia and mnemonic devices our dad would impart at the dinner table: Pierce\u2019s son\u2019s head was\u00a0<\/em>pierced<\/em>\u00a0by a telegraph pole, so his wife was in perpetual mourning; Buchanan ate too many iced cherries on the eve of his inauguration, so diarrhea shot out of him\u00a0like a cannon<\/em>\u00a0and they had to mount privies along the route.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The items of most interest to me were a set of plastic presidents, each about four inches tall. (I know they weren\u2019t chalkware because I once made an illicit scrawl with Martin Van Buren on the edge of a chair and nothing happened.) My dad had a lot of presidents, although I don\u2019t think all of them, and some were definitely in better shape than others; William Henry Harrison was particularly crummy-looking. (Their names were written on their pedestals in case you aren\u2019t able to identify, say, Zachary Taylor or Millard Fillmore at a glance.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

My dad\u2019s figurines were doubtless made by Louis Marx and Company, a legend among hobbyists and collectors. (The presidents, presumably, were less popular with children than the model cars and trains\u2014unless the child was my dad.) The figurines were first produced in the Eisenhower administration (Marx and Ike were pals) and continued through 1968. That election year, in fact, saw some of the most collectible Marx \u201cpresidents\u201d of them all, including Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You can get a display for them that mounts all the figurines on a sort of set of stairs. We didn\u2019t have that; you\u2019d just open a drawer and find Chester A. Arthur, or discover Harding in the medicine cabinet. You could say we really\u00a0lived<\/em>\u00a0with them. But they weren\u2019t very good to play with. Even in our imaginative games\u2014when FDR had to sub in for the father of the bride in a wedding, or when Grover Cleveland got stuck in the cab of a toy truck\u2014they were always too dignified, in their suits and powdered wigs and unbending austerity. They didn\u2019t really lower themselves to cheap pantomime. And when you\u2019re a child, that\u2019s a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up, our house was filled with presidents and almost presidents. WIN WITH WILLKIE! blared a sign on our front door. Wilson, having \u201ckept us out of war,\u201d looked down benevolently as you mounted the stairs. At the top, you might be confronted with a Nixon caricature and a poster for Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Bull Moose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[8892,14918,21351,13623,21352,14825,2426,9081,21353,21350,2049],"class_list":["post-95140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-childhood","tag-family-life","tag-figurines","tag-growing-up","tag-louis-marx-and-company","tag-mnemonic-devices","tag-politics","tag-presidents","tag-presidents-of-the-united-states","tag-super-tuesday","tag-toys"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering Louis Marx and Company\u2019s Presidential Figurines<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 1, 2016 \u2013 Growing up, our house was filled with presidents and almost presidents. 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