July 19, 1917

On June 1, 1819, Pres. James Monroe paid an unannounced visit to Huntsville while on an inspection tour of southern military fortifications. At a quickly organized dinner that evening, Monroe toasted Alabama on the eve of statehood, saying, “May her speedy admission to the Union advance her happiness and augment the national strength and prosperity.” Six months later, the president signed the congressional resolution admitting Alabama as the nation’s twenty-second state.

 

 JFK was Among the presidents who have been to Alabama, in 1963: The Alabama Heritage website reports:

"A few sitting presidents have visited the state on multiple occasions. None, however, came more often than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose historically long tenure in office spanned a critical twelve years in Alabama’s economic and political history from the Great Depression through most of World War II. FDR visited Alabama on at least four occasions. On one of those trips, he came not only as president, but as a friend. In September 1940, he traveled to Jasper to attend the funeral of Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead. The president praised the Alabama politician, with whom he had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial partnership in Washington."

"Perhaps no Alabama presidential visit has carried more foreign-policy weight than Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 trip to Mobile. There, at an October 27 meeting of the Southern Commercial Congress ahead of the opening of the Panama Canal, Wilson outlined a new Latin American policy. He pledged that the United States “would never again seek one foot of additional territory by conquest.”

Learn more about presidential visits to Alabama HERE.