How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (12 page)

Full disclosure: I may have played with the truth a little bit. Not
everything
I said above might be considered “accurate” in any sort of “factual” way, though I do maintain that it’s all true in a broader albeit less truthful sort of way.

Okay, my publisher has informed me that I need to be more specific. The only true things about the above paragraphs are: 1) We had a president named Millard Fillmore, and 2) He had parents.

I’m sorry. I know this book is about pointing out interesting
true
facts about presidents, and for every other chapter, that’s exactly what I did, but holy crap, Millard Fillmore is just
terrible
. If you’ve never locked yourself in your apartment with eleven books about our thirteenth president only to come away with absolutely nothing interesting or usable while a deadline looms over your head, then you’ll never truly understand frustration. That’s me. I did that. I read more about Millard Fillmore than any man should, and the only conclusion I’ve arrived at is that Millard “Not Even Cool Enough to Get a Nickname” Fillmore sucks and is boring and sucks.

Plus, “Millard”? Come on; get a real name, you jerk.

Few men can start with nothing, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and proclaim proudly, “Someday, I’m going to be president on the off chance that the
real
president dies suddenly and I happen to be vice president at that time.”

Millard Fillmore is such a man.

It’s crazy, because his life story so closely mirrors Lincoln’s (both were born poor in log cabins, both were mostly self-taught, both were members of the Whig Party early on, both studied law, both eventually became president), except Fillmore didn’t do
any
of the cool or noble things that Lincoln did. He even publicly opposed Lincoln on slavery, because that’s high up on the list of things that assholes are supposed to do.

No one wanted him to be president. He was only named vice president in the first place because he lived in New York, and the Whig Party wanted a Northeastern fancy boy to balance out Taylor, a rough Southern cowboy who was considered off-putting by Northern Whigs. That’s it. The Whigs needed someone to balance their ticket who was the opposite of a cowboy war hero, and boy did they find him.

As soon as Taylor died and Fillmore took office,
the entire cabinet resigned
and his own party didn’t support him for reelection. He was mostly responsible for getting the Compromise of 1850 passed, which eased tensions between the northern free states and southern slave states. (Temporarily, obviously. We still Civil Warred about it.) The Compromise, while good for America, was incredibly divisive for Fillmore’s Whig Party. Some, like Lincoln, fled the party for the newly formed Republican Party, and some tried to form their own party while the Whig presence in the South just vanished completely. Whatever Whigs remained agreed on one thing: they did not want to endorse Fillmore as their nominee in the next election. Like Tyler before him, Fillmore was dropped by his party, but Fillmore’s Compromise did more damage than the Whigs could handle. The weakened and scattered party ran one more candidate, Winfield Scott, in the next election, and when he lost in a landslide to Democrat Franklin Pierce, the Whig Party died.

No other president can say that they were singularly responsible for destroying a political party, so that’s something. It’s not interesting enough that I can write an entire chapter about it, so
go to hell, President Fillmore, you’re no help at all
.

He helped open up trade with the Japanese, ending Japan’s isolationism. Is that badass? No? Okay. During the Civil War he formed a militia out of men over forty-five, but the only “action” they saw involved marching in parades. Never mind.

Oh! There is one
kind
of cool story about Fillmore. After his presidency, he was offered an honorary Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Oxford, but he declined on the grounds that he had no formal or classical education, and therefore didn’t deserve the honor.
The diploma was in Latin, and Fillmore maintained that “no man should accept a degree he cannot read.” That’s sort of respectable. But, before you go ahead and consider Fillmore a class act, please know that after his presidency he also formed the Know Nothing Party, a political party that was sort of okay but mostly racist, and that during his presidency he casually protected slavery. Because Fillmore wasn’t just a boring and bad president, he was a dick, but also not an INTERESTING enough dick to make this or any other essay about Millard Fillmore halfway readable because
goddammit Millard Fillmore, you are the worst
.

His party believed him to be a traitor, as did the people in his home state of New York; he’s consistently ranked as the fifth or sixth worst president of all time; he signed and obsessively supported the Fugitive Slave Act (the most oppressive law in American history); and now you’re about to fight him. Please enjoy this fight. He’s not too tough—he was a sturdily built guy who did his fair share of chores while growing up—but he also worked as a cloth-maker’s apprentice, which doesn’t do much in terms of toughening a man up. Poke him in the eyes. Slap him in his stupid face. Just standard fight stuff, really; you’re going to win because Millard Fillmore sucks at everything except sucking, at which he stands alone as champion.

They say that thirteen is an unlucky number, so it’s no surprise that our thirteenth president ended up on the wrong side of history and morality, and as fun as it might be to ramble on and on about the number thirteen and superstition and unfortunate legacies and
what it all means
, I’d be much happier watching you beat the crap out of a guy named Millard, so please do that.

Fuck Millard Fillmore
.

Widely regarded as one of the handsomest presidents, Franklin Pierce was your typical pretty boy, which gives credence to my longstanding theory that pretty boys can’t really be president for shit. Your average American doesn’t remember even having a president named Pierce, and even the most sympathetic biography ever written on the man admits that “not a single achievement can be credited to his administration.”

Not that you should feel
bad
for Pierce. Pierce had a reputation for being incredibly likable his whole life, but behind closed doors, he was a stone-cold son of a bitch, a quality plenty of presidents share but one that Pierce
embodied
. His wife, Jane, a lovable and fiercely loyal spouse, asked him to make only one promise to her: he would stay out of politics. She saw ambition in her husband’s eyes, but as much as she’d support him in almost anything, she
abhorred
politics, and with good reason. At this point in American history, it
was already clear to many, including Jane, that the presidency was a killing job that took a toll on the president as well as his family. Jane needed only to hear stories of Andrew Jackson’s wife dying from the grief and stress of being a presidential candidate’s wife once to know that she didn’t want any part of it. She didn’t want to live in Washington and didn’t want her husband consumed by the stress, depression, and overtime inherent to a career in politics. Pierce was already a popular player in the Democratic Party (in 1836, the youngest U.S. Representative at the time), but he left politics and opened up a law office to please his wife.

That was her only request of him. She didn’t even lose her cool when he went to go fight in the Mexican War without telling her first (even though, holy
shit
, that’s quite a whopper to keep from your wife).

In fairness to Pierce, he
really
wanted to go to war. His greatest frustration was that, by the time he had reached his post, the war was almost over (the “over” part is most soldiers’ favorite part of war). The night before one of the last major battles, Pierce came under enemy fire, was thrown from his horse, and severely injured his knee. His commanding officer honorably discharged him, but Pierce said, “No.” He refused to go home, refused to sit out another battle, and said, “This is the last great battle and I must lead the brigade.” Say what you want about Pierce’s do-nothing presidency, it takes a special kind of toughness to tell your boss, “Thanks but no thanks, I think I’d rather spend tomorrow afternoon getting shot at, if it’s all the same to you.”

Pierce, weakened but still determined to achieve some battlefield glory, fought in the Battle of Churubusco the next day and almost immediately injured the same knee, because obviously he did, because
of course
he did, because war is very dangerous. His men tried to take him off the field and he
again
refused, because Franklin Pierce invested all of his money in blind confidence and was still hoping it would pay sweeping dividends. Even though he couldn’t move, Pierce stayed on the field of battle, barking out orders and firing wildly from his place on the ground. He survived this way, all
through the battle, and his soldiers never forgot it. He’s the American, nonfictional version of the Monty Python knight who continued to fight even after his arms and legs got cut off.

And even though Pierce joined the war without telling Jane, and even though he almost got himself killed, she
still
stood by his side, because all she wanted was for him to keep his promise and stay out of politics.

And for many years after the war, he did. He kept his promise and lived a quiet, private life with his loving wife. And then he became the president—which, yes, is literally the opposite of not being in politics.

Perhaps claiming that Pierce “lived a quiet, private life” a couple sentences ago wasn’t entirely honest. Even though he wasn’t publicly campaigning for office, Pierce stayed in touch with his political buddies in Washington the whole time and quietly, privately, made sure that they all knew that, should someone nominate him, he wouldn’t turn down the offer.

It wasn’t
just
that he was running a whispered shadow-campaign despite his promise to Jane, but that he was doing it all behind her back. Jane was the only person in America in 1852 who didn’t know Pierce had his eyes on the presidency. The day she found out Pierce was considering stepping into politics was the day a fellow Democrat informed Pierce that he’d received the nomination. The couple was on vacation together and Jane was absolutely shocked and blind-sided by the news. Pierce grinned.