The answer is No! The idea that the president of the United States has to be born in the United States is the most widely believed and most often repeated political myth in the U.S. I have heard this myth all my life. I don’t know how or where it began.

The president of the United States can be born anywhere. There are only 3 Constitutional requirements for being president of the United States:

1. The president must be at least 35 years of age.

2. The president must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years.

3. The president must be a natural born citizen. A natural born citizen is not the same thing as being born in the United States.

There have been many presidential candidates who were not born in the United States. 

In 2016, Ted Cruz ran for president. Ted Cruz was born in Canada. 

In 2008, John McCain was the Republican candidate for president. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone. The Panama Canal Zone was never part of the United States and was not a U.S. territory. It was on land the U.S. leased from Panama and which was returned to Panama when the lease expired.

In 1968, George Romney, the father of Mitt Romney, ran for president. He was born in Mexico. His parents left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and moved to Los Angeles, where George Romney’s classmates derisively called him ‘Mex.’

There have been many other presidential candidates who were not born in the United States.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president. There were people at the time who questioned whether Goldwater was eligible to be president because he was born in Arizona Territory in 1909, 3 years before Arizona became a state.

The Birther Movement. In 2008, Donald Trump publicly doubted that Barack Obama was eligible to be president, siding with conspiracy theorists that Obama was born in a foreign country. This wasn’t the first time that birthers claimed that a president was born in a foreign country. It has happened several times before. There have been several presidents and presidential candidates who were accused of being ineligible to be president. The issue has come up again this year. Donald Trump has raised questions as to whether either Nikki Haley or Kamala Harris are natural born U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to be president.

Chester A. Arthur. In 1880, Chester A. Arthur was elected vice president of the United States. When president James Garfield was assassinated, Chester A. Arthur became president. His political enemies claimed that Arthur was ineligible to be president. They claimed that he was born in Canada. Chester A. Arthur’s father was born in Ireland. He was a British subject at the time of Arthur’s birth, so by the laws of that time, if proof had been found that Chester A. Arthur was born in Canada, he would not have been eligible to be president. However, no one ever found any such proof. Chester Arthur was born in Vermont, very close to the Canadian border, but he had no documentary evidence, like a birth certificate, to prove that he was born in the United States. None of our 18th and 19th Century presidents had birth certificates. Issuing a birth certificate when a baby is born didn’t become a common practice until the 20th Century.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE.

The movie ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (the 1936 version) was on TV a few weeks ago. It is on TV fairly often. It is a very well-made movie with a big-name cast, but it’s a hard movie for me to watch. That isn’t because this movie is wildly historically inaccurate, which it is, but because of the terrible things that were done to the horses in making this movie. In the cavalry charge at the end of the movie, a lot of horses were trip-wired. That was a common Hollywood practice at the time. It was done to simulate horses being shot in battle. Usually, no more than 1 or 2 horses were trip-wired in a movie, but in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, 125 horses were trip-wired. 25 of those horses were killed outright or had to be shot later due to the severity of their injuries.

Errol Flynn, the star of the movie, was an avid horseman. He was so infuriated by the number of horses killed and injured in the movie and by the indifference of the director, Michael Curtiz, that he physically assaulted Curtiz and had to be pulled away by crewmembers. Although Errol Flynn made many more movies directed by Michael Curtiz, the 2 men never spoke to each other again. Those movies include: ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, ‘The Sea Hawk’, ‘The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex’, ‘Santa Fe Trail’, ‘Virginia City’, and several other movies.

When the public found out what happened to the horses in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, it created a worldwide outrage. There was pressure on the California state government to regulate the treatment of animals in movies, but the state legislature was unwilling to do anything that was opposed by the film industry. However, within a few months of the release of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the British Parliament passed the ‘Cinematograph Films Animals Act’ in 1937. This law banned showing movies in Britain or anywhere within the British Empire that were: “directed in such a way as to involve the cruel infliction of pain on any animal.” This is still the law in Britain. At that time, Britain was Hollywood’s most important and profitable foreign market. The British Empire and Commonwealth covered 25% of the Earth’s population. Plus, several other countries passed laws modeled after the British law. As a result, Hollywood had to make major changes in the way they made movies with animals, including allowing people from the American Humane Association to observe the filming of scenes with animals in them. You may have seen a line at the end of a movie that says: “American Humane certifies that no animals were harmed in making this movie.” That can be traced back to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’

WORST APPLICANT EVER. Ding! Ding! Ding!

Many years ago, I was showing a house for rent when a woman came to look the place over. She walked through the house while I stayed in the kitchen and sat at the table. After she entered the first bedroom, I heard a little bell ring three times: ‘ding, ding, ding,’ followed by a minute of silence. Then she walked into the other bedroom, and the same thing happened again, ‘ding, ding, ding’, followed by a minute of silence. She continued walking through the house, ringing the bell in every room. When she returned to the kitchen, I asked her why she was ringing a bell. By that point, I was dying of curiosity. She said: “I’m checking out your house’s vibrations.” I told her that I didn’t know what that meant. She said that before she could fill out an application form, she needed to know if the previous tenants had left ‘negative energy’ behind. She said that she had a bad feeling in one of the bedrooms but that her tests were inconclusive, so my house needed a ‘vibration analysis’ by a ‘clairvoyant minister’ from the Berkeley Psychic Institute. She told me that this analysis would cost me $300. When I told her that I would not pay for a ‘vibration analysis’, she got angry and said: “Oh, you’re just like all the other landlords.” I assumed that meant that she had seen other houses for rent, and that the landlords there also refused to pay for a ‘vibration analysis.’ She walked out in a huff, and I never saw her again. People like this were common in Berkeley in the 1970s, but I never get prospective applicants like this anymore. I am not sure why that is. I think maybe it’s because Berkeley used to be a cheap place to live in those days, but that was a long time ago, and people like this can’t afford to live here anymore.