Abstract
In February 1924, Harriet Eleanor Fay, from Savannah, Georgia, died at the age of 94 in Boston. A little over three months later, her great-grandson was born. Both he and his son, born in 1946, became President of the United States. For in 1859, the same year that John Brown launched his raid on Harper’s Ferry, Fay, a Southerner, had married a Northerner, the Reverend James Smith Bush, from Rochester, New York. Ninety years and three generations of their family later, George H. W. Bush was living in Texas, at that time still racially segregated, and his son, raised there, would become Governor of the former Confederate state before moving to the White House. Indeed, George W. Bush, more so than his father, could claim to be the first representative from Abraham Lincoln’s party whose political career was forged in the South and who became President.
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Notes
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Roper, J. (2007). After the Wars are Over: ‘Lost Cause,’ ‘Noble Cause,’ National Unity and the Presidency. In: Roper, J. (eds) The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. Global Conflict and Security since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591769_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591769_8
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