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Many US presidents had unusual middle names

Scott Schaffer gives us all a history lesson starting with Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

When Joe Biden takes office as America's 46th president, he'll also continue another White House tradition, the tradition of unusual presidential middle names.

The president's given name is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. 

Biden told a reporter once that Robinette was his grandmother's maiden name.

He won't be alone in the presidential gallery of middle names.

The president for whom Biden served as vice president, Barack Obama, was saddled with the politically burdensome middle name of Hussein, which detractors use derisively against him to this day. 

Go back 50 years to president number 37, Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Milhouse, like Robinette, came from the president's maternal side of the family.

A generation before Nixon, Harry S Truman served as America's 33rd president. 

The S in Truman's name stood for just that S. 

It's said his middle initial was a compromise selection since two of his grandfathers had names that began with S. 

Immediately preceding Truman, perhaps the most famous middle name of all: president number 32 Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Again, Delano was his mom's maiden name. 

FDR's fifth cousin, 26th president Theodore Roosevelt had no middle name. 

Also named for mom, Rutherford Birchard Hayes, who served as our 19th president. 

Birchard was his mother's maiden name. 

Grover Cleveland was actually Steven Grover Cleveland; he chose to use his middle name as an adult. 

So did John Calvin Coolidge.

So did Thomas Woodrow Wilson. 

But all conversations about unusual presidential middle names generally end with our 29th commander in chief Warren Gamaliel Harding.

It's said Harding's mother was a fundamentalist Christian. Gamaliel was a first-century religious leader. 

Another fact about Harding: his ancestors came from northeastern Pennsylvania, the same region that produced the incoming president with a similarly strange middle name. 

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