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President Donald Trump won the 2016 election by promising, in part, to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C., a vow that prompted GOP pundit Newt Gingrich to serve notice on fellow Washingtonians that the alligators should be worried. They were speaking metaphorically, of course, about Trump's intention to rid the federal government of corruption and waste. Still, it reminded us of a more literal claim about alligators in the nation's capital, namely the oft-repeated fun fact that at least two previous chief executives, John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover, kept alligators as pets on the White House grounds. It has become a very popular trope on social media: The online source most frequently cited for these claims is a highly entertaining web site called The Presidential Pet Museum. An article there explains how Presidents Adams and Hoover each supposedly came into possession of the unconventional pets: Finding no sources cited in the article, we decided to look into both stories for ourselves, beginning with the tale of Gen. Lafayette re-gifting an alligator to John Quincy Adams. We weren't surprised to learn that it's been making the rounds for more than a hundred years. Among the pre-Internet mentions we encountered was a variant in the 1958 book The White House and Its Thirty-Three Families, by Amy La Follette Jensen, suggesting that the creature wasn't so much a gift to the White House as an item temporarily stored there: An equally brief account appeared 70 years before that (in 1888) in an article by Harriet Taylor Upton in the children's magazine Wide Awake: We were unable to locate any earlier published references to Lafayette and his alligators, a result confirmed by presidential history blogger Howard Dorre, who reports finding no primary sources confirming the anecdote at all. Though he concedes that the story could be true, Dorre feels the paucity of evidence points in the other direction: We agree with Dorre, and rate the John Quincy Adams story Unproven. As to the claim that alligators roamed the White House grounds during Herbert Hoover's administration, we can report more definitively that it is false. Here's how that story was synopsized in a 1997 syndicated trivia column by L.M. Boyd: There's a wee grain of truth in that (as we learned from the blog of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum), but the fact is that Hoover's son, who graduated from Stanford University the same year his father was elected and went straight from there to Harvard Business School, never resided at the White House. Allan was fascinated by alligators as a young man, to be sure, and even raised two as pets, according to Herbert Hoover himself: But Allan Hoover divested himself of both specimens shortly thereafter, when his interest in reptiles gave way to stamp collecting. According to the 1922 annual report of the Smithsonian Institution, one Allen [sic] Hoover donated two alligators that year to the National Zoological Park in Washington. His father wouldn't move into the White House until 1929. Parenthetically, our research uncovered at least two other reported instances of alligators taking up residency in the executive mansion, both predating the Hoover story. We can't disprove these accounts, mind you, but given the journalistic standards of the day it would be wise to take them with a grain of salt. The first is an Associated Press item, dated 9 February 1921, announcing the impending arrival of a new White House pet in the company of President-elect Warren G. Harding: And, lastly, here is our favorite alligators-in-the-White-House story, as told in 1890 (the second year of President Benjamin Harrison's term in office) by the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune, via the San Francisco Chronicle:
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