#24 Grover Cleveland (1893-1897) The Return of The Fat Man

The day Uncle Jumbo got booted out of the White House, his almost child bride declared that they would be back in four years.  Uncle Jumbo spent those years making babies, obsessively fishing, drinking copious amounts of booze, and smoking numerous cigars.  He also went back to lawyering, but this was mostly so he could have an office in which he could drink and smoke in peace.  The intervening years were a Rocky training montage, only with Uncle Jumbo getting fatter and less fit.  In 1892, the Uncle Jumbo versus Little Ben rematch finally took place.  The 1888 election had been a down and dirty grudge match, and many people expected 1892 to be one for the ages.  Those people were disappointed.  Uncle Jumbo won by a landslide thanks to his competitor being too busy taking care of his dying wife to have time to campaign.    

Uncle Jumbo, with the haughty (and heavy) footsteps of a vindicated man, victoriously returned to the White House, and was promptly blindsided by the collapse of the American economy.  Uncle Jumbo attempted to solve the problem by begging rich people for money, having the Army shoot railroad strikers, and even doing absolutely nothing.  When none of these solutions worked, Uncle Jumbo tried developing a cancerous tumor in his mouth.  The tumor didn’t fix the economy, but it did force Uncle Jumbo to have a secret surgery on a friend’s yacht in the middle of the night.  The media of course grew curious about all of the secretive goings on.  When they asked Uncle Jumbo why part of his jaw was suddenly missing, he told them that they were mistaken and that was what his face had always looked like.  It being a very different time, people took him at his word, and the matter was dropped.  

The shitty economy took its toll on Uncle Jumbo’s presidency.  He was not nominated to run again in 1896, and so, his husky tail back between his legs, he went back into retirement.  Uncle Jumbo spent his second retirement much like the first; fishing and drinking himself stupid.  However, instead of making babies, he started a new hobby of writing articles for women’s magazines advising that sensible and respectable women did not want the right to vote.  Uncle Jumbo died of a heart attack, probably brought on by the fact that he was a big fat bastard.  His wife soon after remarried an archeologist who was closer to her own age and weight bracket.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grover_Cleveland_(cropped).jpg

#23 Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) The Human Iceberg

Little Ben, also called the Human Iceberg for his stiff and formal manner when dealing with people, was the grandson of President Tippy.  Born on the family farm, Little Ben spent his youth happily hunting and fishing.  However, as he got older, he apparently turned into a fastidious little bitch.  Worried about infection, Little Ben started wearing leather gloves all the time, earning himself the nickname Kid Gloves.  As if being a germaphobe wasn’t bad enough, when Little Ben went to college, he gained a reputation as a brown-noser.  He was such a suck up that he married Lavinia Scott, the daughter of one of his most prominent professors. 

After graduating from university, Little Ben went to work as a lawyer.  When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Army, but spent most of his time guarding railroads.  As the war came to a close, his unit was sent into Georgia where Little Ben went a little nuts, burning and looting like some kind of half madman, half human wrecking ball.  Though to be totally fair, everyone in Georgia was doing basically the same thing at the time.  After the war, Little Ben decided to get into politics, but despite running numerous times, no one would vote for him.  This made Little Ben super mopey, so mopey that one of his friends finally got him appointed as a Senator just so he’d quit being such a whiney little bitch.  In 1888, Little Ben was nominated to run for president because the other two possible people were total ass hats.  Little Ben won, mostly because at the time having an epic beard was still considered enough of a qualification to be president.    

It rained the day of Little Ben’s inauguration, bringing back bad memories of President Tippy’s demise, but luckily, former president Uncle Jumbo agreed to hold an umbrella over Little Ben while he made his speech.  Little Ben loved making speeches.  Once during his presidency, he made 140 different ones in a single month.  All of them were boring as hell.  Little Ben also had a thing for goats.  He kept several goats with him at the White House, and gave all of his grandchildren goats for their birthdays.   Little Ben was the first president to have electricity installed in the White House.  However, both he and his wife were afraid of getting electrocuted and refused to touch the switches.  This led to many an awkward night where they were forced to sleep with the lights on.  Worried about his chances for re-election in 1892, Little Ben brought six new states into the Union to better his chances.  This strategy proved pointless since his wife got sick, and instead of campaigning, he stayed at her side until she died. 

After his presidency, Little Ben went back to being a lawyer.  He also got himself a hot new young wife, twenty-five years his junior, named Mary Scott Dimmick, who just so happened to also be his wife’s sister’s daughter, which is a roundabout way of saying he married his niece.  For some weird reason his kids weren’t happy about their father taking their cousin as his bride, and most of them never talked to him again.  Little Ben died of pneumonia after getting a bad case of the flu, probably caught because he touched something while not wearing his god damn gloves.   

#22 Grover Cleveland (1885-1889) A Fat Pervy Bastard

Uncle Jumbo, so called because he was a big fat bastard, was the son of a middle class Presbyterian minister.  His given name was Steven, but due to mean kids calling him Big Steven Cleveland, he changed it to Grover, which was definitely a much cooler name at the time.  The mean kids then changed his nickname to Uncle Jumbo.  Uncle Jumbo was a cheeky youth, often playing pranks on his friends and neighbors, as if he was some kind of chubby Dennis the Menace.  After putting himself through college he worked for a time as a teacher for the blind, and then a lawyer.  Not a lawyer for the blind, just a regular lawyer. When the Civil War broke out, Uncle Jumbo got drafted, but got out of having to fight by paying a Polish immigrant to take his place.  He then went on to become a sheriff for a time, where he gained a reputation for hanging numerous people and getting drunk in saloons. 

Growing bored of drunken executions, Uncle Jumbo went back to lawyering, but soon found himself in a dilly of a pickle.  Possibly as some kind of bizarre team building exercise, all the partners in his law firm had been sleeping with the same woman.  When the woman became pregnant, Uncle Jumbo, being the only bachelor, bit the bullet and started paying child support.  This situation became more difficult as Uncle Jumbo began getting into politics, but he solved it by having the woman committed to an insane asylum and putting the baby up for adoption.  In 1884, Uncle Jumbo was chosen to run for president because all the other possible candidates were somehow bigger jackasses than he was.  Unfortunately, the question of his possibly illegitimate child came up again.  Where most politicians would have lied, Uncle Jumbo took the unorthodox approach of just shrugging his shoulders and admitting that the baby might have been his, but he really wasn’t all that sure.  And while this didn’t exactly set a precedent in truth telling for future candidates, he did win the election.       

The first thing Uncle Jumbo did after becoming president was marry a college-aged woman twenty-seven years his junior named Frances Folsom.  Frances was the daughter of one of Uncle Jumbo’s best friends.  Uncle Jumbo had doted on the child since the day she born, bouncing her on his knee and buying her numerous gifts.  When she was eleven, her father died, so he took it upon himself to supervise her upbringing.  Looking back at all of this today, the creepiest part wasn’t the fact that Uncle Jumbo apparently groomed Frances from a young age to be his wife, but that pretty much the whole country was okay with it.  Uncle Jumbo did other things during his presidency, such as vetoing more bills than all his predecessors combined, but holy shit, the man was basically Woody Allen if Woody Allen had somehow gotten himself elected president and gained 130 pounds.   

Uncle Jumbo lost his bid for re-election in 1888, but not for reasons related to the fact that he was creepy as fuck.  As Uncle Jumbo left the White House, his almost child bride swore they would be back in four years. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Grover_Cleveland.jpg