Got this in a list of “fun facts” in an email forward today. True?
If so, anyone know how many of the candidates running on the opposing party ticket were?
This page agrees, although it qualifies the statement by noting that three presidents had no “full” siblings (Franklin Roosevelt had a half-brother, Bill Clinton has half-brother Roger, and Gerald Ford had six half-siblings).
Only child and oldest child are obviously overlapping categories but they aren’t the same and it takes more than smarts to become president. Birth order is commonly thought to be a strong determinant of personality but the research is controversial. The evidence is stronger for higher IQ’s in first borns but this is also controversial. Birth order studies are interesting but aren’t well suited to public forums, even ones like this, because there have been so many studies done with conflicting results and some researchers have a strong agenda one way or the other. People can throw out cites through infinity and never get anywhere because there is so much information on both sides and that is what happens in fact with the researchers themselves. It is like a GD thread gone bad.
FDR technically had a half-brother but for all practical purposes he was an only child. His brother James was from his father’s first marriage; he was twenty eight years older than Franklin and was himself married and the father of two children when FDR was born. There was no real sibling relationship between them.