Somewhere around Fort Worth, we have our first argument in the car. Frances says something crude about immigrants, which I let pass, then she brings up Franklin Roosevelt. This is a game we play. I tell her my favorite president was FDR, then she says something like, “he was OK, except for all the handouts he gave.”
Which is when I remind her of 1936. After her father died and her mother disappeared, FDR’s relief checks kept her and her siblings alive.
“Yeah,” she says, “but we were just kids.”
“And welfare still helps kids today, along with single women like your mother.”
“But it’s different now,” she says. “People just don’t wanna work.”
And when I remind her again that a majority of welfare recipients are employed, she waves me off.
“My favorite president was Ike,” she says, which I know. Frances is quick to praise men she sees as having backbone – her father, Ike, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump – and deplores whiners and eggheads. That morning, she couldn’t find Fox News in her hotel room and had to settle for “some puny guy” on another network. I’m shocked when she tells me Barack Obama was “cute”.
“Hated him as president, but I could watch him run up and down those stairs all day long,” she says. “But Lincoln – boy, I really hate him.”
I’d never heard this before. I nearly swerve out of my lane. “Lincoln? Who hates Abraham Lincoln?”
“He stood on that platform and watched those boys kill each other,” she says. She’s referring to the Battle of Fort Stevens in July 1864[1]. Confederate troops came within striking distance of the Capitol. Lincoln watched
