u/MetalRetsam

We're used to there being so many living ex-presidents, but this wasn't always so. A number of ex-presidents were alone in their retirement.

• George Washington, from Adams' inauguration in March 1797 to his death in December 1799.
• John Adams, from Jefferson's inauguration in March 1801 to Madison's inauguration in March 1809.
• John Quincy Adams, from Madison's death in June 1836 to Van Buren's inauguration in March 1837.
• Andrew Johnson, from Fillmore's death in August 1874 to his own death in July 1875.
• Ulysses S. Grant, from Hayes' inauguration in March 1877 to Garfield's inauguration in March 1881.
• Rutherford B. Hayes, from Arthur's death in November 1886 to Harrison's inauguration in March 1889.
• Grover Cleveland, from Hayes' death in January 1893 to his inauguration in March 1893.
• Benjamin Harrison, from Cleveland's inauguration in March 1893 to McKinley's inauguration in March 1897.
• Grover Cleveland, from Harrison's death in March 1901 to his own death in June 1908.
• Theodore Roosevelt, from Taft's inauguration in March 1909 to Wilson's inauguration in March 1913.
• William Howard Taft, from Roosevelt's death in January 1919 to Harding's inauguration in March 1921.
• William Howard Taft, from Wilson's death in February 1924 to Hoover's inauguration in March 1929.
• Calvin Coolidge, from Taft's death in March 1930 to his own death in January 1933.
• Herbert Hoover, from Roosevelt's inauguration in March 1933 to Eisenhower's inauguration in January 1953.
• Lyndon Johnson, from Truman's death in December 1972 to his own death in January 1973.
• Richard Nixon, from his resignation in August 1974 to Carter's inauguration in January 1977.

Ah, the Whig Party. Four Whigs entered the White House, and only one exited. Harrison and Taylor were carried out in a coffin, and Tyler had quit the party. Leaving only Millard Fillmore as the Whig's sole ex-president, until that ship sank a few years later.

Or is he?

John Quincy Adams served as president from 1825 to 1829, his own faction in the Democratic-Republican Party. But that party soon fractured, leaving ex-president Adams to find a new party. In 1834, he joined the Whigs, and stayed with them until his death 14 years later. Making him not a Whig president, but the longest tenured Whig EX-president.

As in many walks of life, Adams was only stepping in his father's footsteps.

With the Federalist Party quickly losing relevance during the Jefferson administration, the elder Adams switched his allegiance to the Democratic-Republican Party. This seems to have been around 1808, in the final year of Jefferson's presidency.

Meaning that yes, the longest tenured ex-president in the Democratic-Republican Party... was none other than John Adams.

From The Phonogram, Vol. 1, No. 9 (Sept. 1891), page 14.

Not too long ago, Thomas Jefferson ranked as one of the most beloved presidents in American history. If you asked any vaguely libertarian-aligned person about their favorite president, they would automatically mention Thomas Jefferson alongside the likes of Washington and Lincoln.

As Jefferson has become more controversial, he's no longer the go-to answer that he once was. At the same time, Calvin Coolidge has become very popular. Has Coolidge taken over Jefferson's role, or does he represent a different place in the popular memory?

I saw a post on this sub about Hancock the other day, and I thought to myself: wow! A post about Winfield Scott Hancock!

So I wondered, who are the most obscure major party candidates according to this sub? I'm discounting third party and segregationist runs for this moment, that's an easy cop-out. Even then, some people like LaFollette and Weaver have nothing on these guys in terms of obscurity.

Here are my picks for the most obscure presidential candidates from most famous to most obscure. Starting with...

10. Charles Evans Hughes. Coverage on the election of 1916 mostly focuses on Wilson and his promise to keep American out of war, but Hughes gets a look in. His accidental snub towards California governor Hiram Johnson caused him to narrowly lose the state and the election. 1916 was one of the squeakers, but is often forgotten. I guess 1912 gets all the fame.

11. George McClellan. This is a bit of a cop-out, as McClellan is pretty famous, just not for this electoral activities. The election of 1864 is very little discussed on this sub (and on Civil War discourse generally), but it was a major worry of Lincoln and his team. So much so that they resorted to Andrew Johnson as Lincoln's running mate.

12. James M. Cox. Another 'famous by association' candidate, this time with his running mate FDR. If the election of 1920 gets a shout-out at all, it's because both candidates were fairly obscure media moguls from Ohio. It's a shame, this is one of the more interesting elections of the early 20th century. It's no 1932 and no 1912, but it isn't a sleeper either.

13. John W. Davis. He defended the Klan! Most coverage of the 1924 election focuses on LaFollette or Coolidge, the fallout from Harding's cabinet, and how the Republicans failed to denounce the Klan. Davis is another one of those boring 1920s Democrats, whose positions were virtually indistinguishable from Coolidge's. Is that justified?

14. Alton B. Parker. The man famous for not campaigning, getting the nomination because the election was a shoe-in for Roosevelt anyway. Like Fillmore among the presidents, he's notorious precisely because he's so obscure, making him marginally less obscure than the candidates that follow.

15. Alf Landon. If Alf Landon is known for anything, it's for his extreme longevity. The man lived to 100 years old! Sadly, this has no bearing on his campaign. Highlights of the 1936 election include a totally lopsided Reader's Digest poll suggesting that Landon was going to win, and a hoax from the Roosevelt campaign that Landon had gone missing, due to how little he campaigned. He was a pretty popular governor.

16. Lewis Cass. The only Jacksonian Democrat to never win an election, he receives almost no attention. There's very little interest in the Jacksonian ideology to start with, and Cass didn't distinguish himself in the way that a Van Buren or a Buchanan might. I mean, the average history nerd probably sees the main plank of Jacksonian democracy as undisguised racism, and fair enough. It's little appealing to our time.

17. DeWitt Clinton and Rufus King. I'm putting these two together, because neither were effectively nominated by their party and basically didn't campaign for the title. DeWitt Clinton is most famous for being his uncle's nephew, and being Martin Van Buren's primary opponent at the latter's entry into politics. He was a pretty effective governor of New York, but his tenure is entirely forgotten today. Rufus King is even more obscure. I know nothing about this guy.

18. Charles Coteworth Pinckney. Despite contesting Thomas Jefferson AND James Madison, you'll never hear anyone talk about Pinckney's candidacy. Most you'll hear is that he was extremely racist. Even among fans of the Federalist era, he's basically a cypher. Unfortunately, the history of this period was written by the Democratic-Republicans, and they buried him pretty deep.

19. Winfield Scott Hancock. There was a four-part miniseries on the election of 1880 last year. Hancock doesn't feature. He barely gets a mention, and this is a series where even Levi Morton makes an appearance! Hancock is best remembered by Civil War buffs, but unlike McClellan, his presidential run is detached from it by 16 years. His candidacy was totally inconsequential, the ultimate Gilded Age nobody.