"Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, who served two terms with President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921, claimed that most of the "nameless, unremembered" jobs assigned to him had been concocted essentially to keep vice presidents from doing any harm to their administrations. One of these chores, according to Marshall, was that of regent of the Smithsonian Institution. The vice president recalled that at his first board meeting the other regents, including the chief justice of the United States and the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, discussed funding an expedition to Guatemala to excavate for traces of prehistoric man. With the breezy manner of a self-described "light-hearted Hoosier," Marshall asked if the Smithsonian had ever considered excavating in Washington, D.C. Judging from the specimens walking about on the street, he said, they would not have to dig far below the capital to discover prehistoric man. "And then the utter uselessness and frivolity of the vice-presidency was disclosed," Marshall confessed, "for not a man smiled. It was a year before I had courage to open my mouth again." -
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