i hadn't thought of john calhoun since, well, probably high school. that is, until i saw the photo in this post this evening. i remembered that guy from some american history class that i must have taken at some point. not really because of his vice presidency, his tenure in congress or his role in the nullification debate, what really rang a bell with me was the picture:
what a scary looking dude! and he happened to be a bad guy too, or at least in the sense that he was on the wrong side of that nullification thing.
which made me wonder: i assume that picture rang a bell because it was used in some history text book i read 25 years ago. did they just use that awful picture because he was a bad guy? aren't there any good pictures of him?
wikipedia provides a tepid yes. his entry has one not-so-bad portrait from when he was a youngish man:
but the rest of the images in the wiki entry are all pretty creepy, especially this sketch showing his dracula look:
even this one that looks like one of those official portraits that try to be flattering, but in his case they couldn't quite pull it off:
did calhoun actually look like that? or did he just piss off the portrait and the sketch artists guild? yes, he actually looked like that. wiki has a photo, which is just as scary as the artists' conceptions.
which made me wonder: i assume that picture rang a bell because it was used in some history text book i read 25 years ago. did they just use that awful picture because he was a bad guy? aren't there any good pictures of him?
wikipedia provides a tepid yes. his entry has one not-so-bad portrait from when he was a youngish man:
did calhoun actually look like that? or did he just piss off the portrait and the sketch artists guild? yes, he actually looked like that. wiki has a photo, which is just as scary as the artists' conceptions.
