Dr. Bumsted sends us an alert to a site dedicated to President Franklin Pierce, the Franklin Pierce Pages. A delight to historians, no?
Not necessarily. The page designers chose Pierce, our 14th President, as the most obscure and trivial of the presidents. They claim Pierce as even more trivial and obscure than Millard Fillmore!
How close did we come to having “the Millard Fillmore Pages?” You’ll shudder to find out.
Leo Todd relates the story, here, The Great Franklin Pierce Debate.
The wonders of the intertubes: We can afford to have a set of pages dedicated to our 14th President, Franklin Pierce! Let’s see you do that on broadcast or cable television, or on radio.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
When is someone going to start RutherfordBHayes.com? Talk about obscurity!
LikeLike
So we’re all grounded in good clean fun and scholarship!
Once, late at night, with a report on Paraguay due the next morning, I realized that Paraguay was not the Paris of the Patagonia, a great place to be at the time, or much of anything — but there was great humor potential in the real events that went on in the country. Most of those reports are rather dull recitations of when the first explorers got there, who founded the first city, how many tractors there are, etc. I reported the truth, straight: Paraguay was screwed up by misapplied USAID programs (the tractors got there, the gasoline to run the tractors didn’t — they rusted in the fields), a stupid and disastrous war against three neighbors at the same time, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina (as I recall now) — after which there were so few men left over the age of 13 that the Pope authorized polygamy. At the time, it was a haven for former Nazis fleeing war crimes trials in Europe.
My geography teacher sat with his jaw on the floor for the entire presentation. Nobody went to sleep during the presentation, and the class applauded when I was done — warm, enthusiastic applause. I didn’t think the instructor would believe any of it, so Id dragged in several volumes of our Encyclopedia Britannica with the references bookmarked. I eventually got an A on the presentation and report, but the teacher asked me to warn him next time I panned an entire country.
I’ve got a small handful of e-mails from kids doing reports on Fillmore. About half are grateful they read he didn’t really install the first bathtub, and I encourage them to tell the story of the hoax and how important it is for historians to get things right; the other half claim to be ticked off because, they claim, they now don’t have anything to report about Millard Fillmore.
One of these days I’m going to track down the story of Hannibal Hamlin. That’ll be worth something. Just where was the vice president of the U.S. during most of the Civil War?
Keep up the good work over there, and thank you so much for dropping by. Don’t be a stranger here, okay?
LikeLike
One of the influences on the Franklin Pierce’s page was Mencken’s hoax about Fillmore being the father of the White House bathtub. We wanted to see how such misinformation might spread in the age of the internet. I must say that Mencken still had more influence in his time than we have in ours.
LikeLike