Have you ever wondered if any of our presidents were entrepreneurs? Steve Strauss with USA Today dug deep and found an answer to that question.
Yes, many of our presidents were in fact small business owners, but some sure were more successful than others.
Certainly our first presidents had, if not small businesses, at least then an entrepreneurial bent. Prior to leading the continental army, George Washington was a farmer. John Adams, James Madison and James Monroe were all lawyers (among other occupations) and take it from me, that too constitutes owning and running a small business.
But it was really with the advent of the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) that a president actively courted and promoted small business. Jackson railed against the power of the big banks of the time (The Bank of the United States) and as a populist, he actively fostered small business and entrepreneurship, which was maybe not surprising since his early career was as a “frontier lawyer.”
Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) was quite the entrepreneur. He bought a newspaper that was going out of business when he was only 19 (although he had to borrow his share of the $300 total paid.) Not long after, the paper, the Marion Star, became so successful that it earned income for Harding for the next several decades while he was off running for office.
Similarly, Jimmy Carter was known as “the peanut farmer from Georgia” but the truth is again far more interesting. After a stint in the Navy, Carter took over the family peanut farm yes, but it turned out that he was also a savvy businessperson and eventually grew that small farm into a multi-million dollar business that included warehouses, a peanut-shelling plant, and farm equipment supplies.
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