Handism
When Leonardo da Vinci was about 60 years old, he drew this self-portrait with his left hand using red chalk. Da Vinci was left-handed, and his peers called him “Mancino”, Italian slang for a left-handed person.
In 1881, James Garfield became the first left-handed American president. As a kid, his parents and teachers wanted him to use his right hand more. They didn’t tie his left hand behind his back, like some parents did to children in the 19th century. But they encouraged him to write and eat with his right hand.
By the time he graduated from Williams College in 1856, Garfield could write in two languages at the same time, Greek with his left hand and Latin with his right.
As far as we know, Garfield was the only left-hander among the first 30 American presidents. The second didn’t come along until Herbert Hoover in 1929.
Then something happened… we started electing lefties.
In the last century, 37.5% of American presidents have been left-handed, compared to ~10% of the general population.
Herbert Hoover
Harry Truman
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
George H.W. Bush
Bill Clinton
Barack Obama
What happened? Statistical anomaly? Rise of a secret society of lefties?
One likely explanation is that James Garfield wasn’t actually our first President who was born left-handed.
Any of his predecessors who were born lefties would likely have been forced, as children, to become righties. Because until the mid-20th century, left-handedness wasn’t socially acceptable in most cultures, including America. It was even seen as dysfunctional.
In many European languages, including English, the word for the direction "right" also means "correct.”
In Sanskrit, the word "वाम" (waama) stands for both "left" and "wicked".
In Chinese, the adjective "left" (Chinese character: 左) can mean "improper.”
Still today, left-handedness is taboo in Ghana. Pointing, gesturing, or receiving items with the left hand is rude. A person giving directions will even put their left hand behind their back.
But around the time we elected Herbert Hoover, left-handed bias started to fade in America and other Western countries. In 1971, a newspaper in Florence, Alabama reported that left-handed people "are becoming increasingly accepted and enabled to find their right (or left) place in the world.”
According to Gwenaëlle Douaud, a neuroscientist at Oxford, lefties have structural differences in the white matter tracts - the neural highways that connect language regions. And left-handedness may lead to more natural proficiency in math, art, and music.
Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa with his left hand. Sir Paul McCartney used his left hand to write the lyrics to Yesterday. And Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs batting with a left-handed stance.
But for most of the last 2,000 years, left-handedness was considered a dysfunction.
Some dysfunctions appropriately require intervention. But what other “dysfunctions” are we still miscategorizing?
And how many Mona Lisas are we missing out on as a result?
