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Why did Calvin Coolidge pardon a raccoon for Thanksgiving — and keep it as a pet?
“Coolidge Has Raccoon; Probably Won’t Eat It,” one contemporary Boston Herald headline blared.
Rebecca the raccoon arrived at the White House in November 1926 by way of a Mississippi admirer, with assurances of a “toothsome flavor” befitting the president’s Thanksgiving feast.
But rather than dooming the rascally little critter to his Thanksgiving table, President Calvin Coolidge opened his home; Rebecca was spared, and the Coolidges had an unorthodox new pet.
“It did not take us long to discover that she was no ordinary raccoon but an altogether amiable domesticated creature and an interesting pet,” First lady Grace Coolidge recalled in a 1929 article for The American Magazine.
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The first family built Rebecca a little treehouse and allowed her to roam freely indoors.
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“She was a mischievous, inquisitive party and we had to keep watch of her when she was in the house,” Grace Coolidge wrote. “She enjoyed nothing better than being placed in a bathtub with a little water in it and given a cake of soap with which to play. In this fashion she would amuse herself for an hour or more.”
While several presidents spared turkeys sporadically over the years, the annual Thanksgiving pardon didn’t become an official tradition until George H.W. Bush’s administration, per the White House Historical Association. Rebecca’s reprieve was something of an outlier.
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“Coolidge Has Raccoon; Probably Won’t Eat It,” one contemporary Boston Herald headline blared.
Per Smithsonian magazine, raccoons and other small game weren’t necessarily unusual fare earlier in American history. Mark Twain even included raccoons among the American foods he craved most while traveling abroad.
Yet Coolidge — a Vermont native and former governor of Massachusetts — wasn’t interested.
“As New Englanders, that just was not a familiar custom to them,” said Julie Bartlett Nelson, archivist at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum in Northampton. “For them, raccoon was not something that they had ever eaten or wanted to.”
The Coolidges, after all, were big-time animal lovers.
“Mr. Coolidge and I are particularly fond of pets,” Grace Coolidge wrote in 1929, adding, “I am unable to understand how anyone can get along without some sort of pet, just some living creature which looks to one for food and drink and comfort.”
Their White House menagerie included the typical cats and dogs, and even some birds. But the president and first lady were also gifted several larger and more exotic creatures, including a pygmy hippopotamus, a wallaby, and twin lion cubs named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau.
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“Rebecca and the President hit it off immediately,” wrote former first daughter Margaret Truman in “White House Pets.”
Coolidge and Rebecca “would take long evening walks together, with the raccoon waddling along at the end of a leash,” according to Truman. “It got so that the President never let a day go by without a brief visit with Rebecca.”
For Christmas, the president bestowed upon Rebecca a collar embroidered with the title “White House Raccoon,” per the White House Historical Association. As Truman tells it, Coolidge also worried about Rebecca when the first family moved into temporary quarters during a White House renovation.
“One afternoon, a limousine drove into the [White House] grounds, moved through the workmen, and stopped at Rebecca’s pen,” Truman wrote. “The President got out, led Rebecca into the car, and drove back to Dupont Circle, where he spent a brief hour playing with the raccoon. After that Rebecca was boarded out at the zoo until repairs at the White House were completed and the First Family and the raccoon were returned to a normal routine.”
Rebecca made an appearance at the 1927 White House Easter egg roll, where the first lady showed her off to throngs of children. Throughout her time at the White House, she also built a reputation as something of an escape artist.
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“There’s a few stories of her running loose,” Bartlett Nelson said. “Mostly she was confined to the residential quarters on the third floor, so she was not roaming in any sort of official spaces downstairs.”
The Coolidges even brought her along on a summer vacation to South Dakota in 1927.
“You may be interested to know that Rebecca came down out of the tree and is behaving all right now,” Everett Sanders, Coolidge’s presidential secretary, wrote in an Aug. 6 memo from Rapid City.
Worried Rebecca seemed lonely, the Coolidges at one point tried to set her up with a companion raccoon named Reuben. But Rebecca, accustomed to independence, proved “a little overbearing and dictatorial,” Grace Coolidge recalled.
“In any case, he deserted her,” she wrote in 1929. “Once he was apprehended and brought back, but the second time he made good his escape and Rebecca continued to live in single blessedness.”
As Coolidge’s term came to an end and he moved home to Northampton, Rebecca stayed behind in Washington and lived out her days at the zoo. Yet while her time at the White House was brief, she left a lasting legacy beyond her Thanksgiving near-death experience.
Bartlett Nelson noted the first pets remain a popular topic today, “But I have to say, the raccoon is probably the most fun story of [the Coolidges’] various pets — a little untraditional one that way.”
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