Presidential Firsts That Didn’t Stay First for Long

Every presidential administration claims a list of firsts. First president to use a particular technology, first to visit a particular country, first to sign a particular kind of bill, first to come from a particular state or background. The lists get assembled during the term, published in the obligatory anniversary articles, and then mostly forgotten when the next administration produces its own list.

Some firsts last. Most do not. The pattern of which firsts hold up over time and which ones get matched within a generation reveals something about which kinds of presidential novelty are durable and which are just news cycle decoration.

Technology firsts are almost never first for long

The list of "first president to use [technology]" is long and most of the entries lasted less than a decade as the singular distinction.

The first president to use radio for a formal address was Calvin Coolidge in 1925. By the time FDR was president, every public communication was assumed to include radio coverage. Coolidge’s first lasted maybe seven years before it was no longer a remarkable thing.

The first president to appear on television was Franklin Roosevelt at the 1939 World’s Fair. By 1952 the major political conventions were televised. The first lasted thirteen years and was eclipsed by an entire generation of television-savvy presidents.

The first president to use the internet, the first to use email, the first to use a social media account, the first to use a smartphone — every one of these firsts was matched within years. The technology adoption curve in the office is steep, and the first user is usually overshadowed by the second or third user, who figured out how to actually deploy the tool politically. The pattern is so consistent that "first president to use X" should be read as a marketing claim, not a historical one.

Demographic firsts are different

Demographic firsts — the first president of a particular background — operate by different rules. They do not get matched on a fast cycle because each one represents a barrier broken, and after the barrier is broken the next person from that group still gets attention but the structural significance is different.

The first Catholic president was John F. Kennedy in 1961. The next Catholic president was Joe Biden in 2021. Sixty years passed between them. The political weight of Catholic identity in the presidency changed in those decades, but Biden’s Catholicism did not produce the same kind of national conversation Kennedy’s had. The first had been the threshold; the second was just a name on the list.

The first Black president was Barack Obama in 2009. The next will be whenever it happens, and the political weight of that election will be specific to that moment rather than a repeat of the 2008 moment. The first non-white president lasted as the first non-white president for the duration; the question now is when the demographic novelty stops being remarked on at all, which is the actual marker of the change becoming structural.

No woman has been elected president as of the time of this writing. When that happens, the political weight will be substantial. The second woman elected will not produce the same conversation. Demographic firsts compress quickly into the new normal once they happen, but the gap between the first and the second is the measure of whether the first was truly a structural change or a one-time anomaly.

Policy firsts that lasted

A handful of policy firsts have stayed first for over a century, in the sense that no subsequent president has produced an equivalent. The first comprehensive federal income tax was implemented under Wilson in 1913 after the Sixteenth Amendment. No subsequent president has dismantled it or replaced it with something structurally different; subsequent presidents have only adjusted the rates and the structure.

The first major federal old-age and unemployment program was Social Security under FDR in 1935. No subsequent president has unmade it. The program has been adjusted, contested, and expanded, but the basic shape is the same. The first lasted as the first.

The first president to recognize the People’s Republic of China was Richard Nixon in 1972. No subsequent president has reversed that recognition or produced an equivalent reorientation of relations with another major power. The first lasted because the alternative — reversing it — is structurally costly in ways the country has not chosen to bear.

These are the firsts that hold. They are policy moves that build new structures rather than fill old ones, and the structures cannot be easily undone by subsequent administrations. The list is short. Most policy firsts do not produce structures of this kind.

The firsts that turned out to be embarrassments

A few firsts have aged badly enough that the administrations that claimed them rarely include them on retrospective lists.

The first president to use the income tax to investigate political opponents in a systematic way was probably Richard Nixon, although the precise honor is contested by historians. The first president to authorize warrantless surveillance of American citizens on a mass scale was George W. Bush, though the program was built on legal foundations laid by earlier administrations. The first president to refuse to commit to accepting the result of an election in advance was Donald Trump, in the 2020 cycle.

These firsts are not on the inaugural anniversary lists. They do not appear in the presidential museum installations. They are firsts in the strict sense — no previous administration had done quite that thing — but the administrations that produced them treat them as embarrassments to be elided rather than achievements to be celebrated. The pattern is that firsts get claimed when they are positive and forgotten when they are negative, even though the structural significance often runs in the opposite direction.

How to read a "first" claim

When an administration claims a first, the question to ask is whether the first is the kind that lasts. A technology adoption is almost never a durable first. A demographic milestone usually is, until the next one happens and recalibrates. A policy first is durable only if it builds new structure rather than fills an existing form.

The first to do something is interesting. The thing that lasts is the structure the first builds. Most administrations confuse the two and claim credit for the moment when the structure may not survive the next presidency. The structural firsts — the ones that build something subsequent administrations cannot easily undo — are the firsts worth caring about. The rest are decoration, useful for ceremony and easy to forget by the next news cycle.