My new Taki’s Magazine column:
by Steve Sailer
March 21, 2023
But while looking up examples of just how many eons Biden has been around—he entered the United States Senate a half century ago in 1973, serving with six solons born in the 1800s, including Sam Ervin (1896–1985), the Foghorn Leghorn-like star of that year’s Watergate hearing—I got diverted by the question of how far back into history you could go with the fewest handshake links.
What are handshake chains?
Back around 1900, a popular vaudeville song was “Let Me Shake the Hand that Shook the Hand of John L. Sullivan,” the last heavyweight bareknuckle boxing champion. In those days, people were apparently fascinated by the thought of being linked to the famous via a series of handshakes. This likely helps explain why on New Year’s Day 1907, over 8,500 members of the public lined up and shook the hand of president Theodore Roosevelt (which is the most 1907 thing I can imagine: Picture a sped-up silent movie of Teddy vigorously pumping the hands of the citizenry).
This obsession may sound strange today, but it’s rather like how Americans in 2000 were into playing the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to find the shortest path connecting another actor with the Footloose star via mutual appearances. For example:
John Wilkes Booth appeared in an 1863 production of ‘Macbeth’ with Louisa Lane Drew.
Louisa Lane Drew appeared in an 1896 production of ‘The Rivals’ with her grandson Lionel Barrymore.
Lionel Barrymore –> ‘Right Cross’ (1950) –> Kenneth Tobey.
Kenneth Tobey –> ‘Hero at Large’ (1980) –> Kevin Bacon.
Read the whole thing there.
