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You can’t just walk up to the Millard Fillmore house, knock on the door, and get invited in for tea. You have to call the docent in advance and arrange a tour. So, since I was going to be in Millard’s neck of the woods (near Buffalo, New York) on September 9, I got myself on their calendar. The chief curator herself would be my guide, and I was to be the only visitor that day, perhaps that whole month? I was looking forward to being the sole student that day, eager to lap up the knowledge of a woman seeped in Fillmore-lore. It would give me time and space to communicate with Millard’s ghost and soak up the ambiance of the small house he’d built himself. On the morning of September 9, I arrived 30 minutes ahead of time, sat on the porch, and read a book of published letters between Mr. Fillmore and the social crusader, Dorothea Dix.
My first surprise came when a non-expert showed up to substitute for my guide. It turned out the expert had been called away to cook for a funeral dinner that morning, so she sent this other guy to replace her.
My second sudden disappointment came when he delayed the start of our tour in order for the “other party” to arrive. I had been looking forward for weeks to having the Fillmores all to myself. Now someone else was going to butt in on my Millard-time. I asked where the other person was from, and the guide squinted at his clipboard and said, “I have no idea, it’s just some guy named Paul Giamatti.” He then disappeared inside the house and told me to wait on the porch until the guy got there. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
When Giamatti arrived, with one of his business partners, the light bulb went off. Oh… he looks familiar. I discreetly checked my iPhone, and the lights came on all the way. (Not the bright light on my iPhone that turns itself on in order to embarrass me, but the light inside my brain.) Mr. Giamatti played John Adams in the HBO series by that name. He also starred in a number of movies, and is one of my daughter Mindy’s favorite actors. In order not to embarrass him or myself, I just played ignorant during the whole two-hour tour. He acted like any other tourist, and we quipped and commented throughout the tour, sharing our own limited knowledge of Millard Fillmore, entertaining ourselves while the guide kept meandering off into indigestible factoids and stories about his own wife.
I asked Giamatti what brought him to the Fillmore house, and like me, he likes to visit historic presidential sites. I told him I was headed to Martin Van Buren’s home the next day, and he said he hadn’t been there yet, but would put that on his list.
It wasn’t until the tour was over and we walked outside that I tipped my hand. “Do you have one extra minute to do me a favor. My daughter Mindy is in community theater and is playing “Catherine” tonight in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer. She is a big fan of yours. If I get her on Facetime, would you tell her to break a leg?” He said he loved that play and would be glad to talk to her. And so he did. And so it is that I came to learn more about Paul Giamatti at the Millard Fillmore house than I did about Millard.
An hour later, Mindy posted on Facebook: “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever posted. Paul Giamatti just called me from the Millard Fillmore house and told me to break a leg.” She would have posted it sooner, but she has a friend (Matthew Hester) who looks a bit like Giamatti. It took an hour for her to confirm that Hester was in Danville, IL, not New York at the time.
That was my biggest surprise of last month’s vacation--and Mindy's.
But consider poor Millard Fillmore. He didn’t even get to be the star in his own home that day. This was nothing new for him, however. Mr. Fillmore, our 13th president, was intermittently unlucky during his entire 74 years on this earth (1800-1874). There’s not a lot available if you want to sleuth out the physical leftovers from his life, only this salvaged house in East Aurora, New York and his grave in Buffalo. Even his personal and official papers disappeared. It would be a shame, however, if I wrote to you about his house and didn’t mention anything about him.
Plus, it’s high time we had an adult conversation about Millard Fillmore. Adult conversations about any president, particularly recent ones, seem an impossibility. But I’m an optimist, and if we take baby steps, perhaps we’ll learn to talk rationally about those who have ascended to the highest office in the land. Millard Fillmore is the perfect historical figure for baby steps. Not only do few people still feel emotional about him (he left the White House in 1853); the majority of Americans have never heard of him. It should be easy to speak rationally of Millard… right?
But how can you hear the name “Millard” and not start thinking weird things? Right off we’re prejudiced, before we even know what party he belonged to. The name “Millard” literally means “a million-million, an odd name for a chap born poor, who had to work instead of going to school, and whose father rented him out as an indentured servant. Millard studied at night to become a lawyer, but was cheated out of income by the man who mentored him.
He joined the Whig party (that was a thing back in the 1840s, if you didn’t want to be a Democrat) and got caught up in inter-party conflict. To get him out of New York, his enemies agreed to nominating him for vice-president of the United States, a meaningless, (normally) dead end job. When the president (Zachary Taylor) died just two years into office, Fillmore became president. His entire cabinet hated him and resigned his first day of office.
The country at the time was torn over slavery, and both the Senate and House of Representatives were known for duals, fistfights, and pistol stand-offs in those years. Fillmore tried to get everyone to compromise, but this only made him more unpopular. When the 1852 election rolled around, neither the Whigs nor the Democrats wanted him, and he was involuntarily retired back to New York.
He and his beloved wife Abigail planned to travel as soon as he left the White House. But she caught pneumonia at the next president’s inauguration and died just 26 days later—the shortest post-White House life of any first lady. Just a year later, Fillmore’s cherished 22-year-old daughter, Abby, also died. Fillmore returned to Buffalo, New York, where he had a law practice and became active in Buffalo’s civic life. He ran for president again in 1856, this time as head of the new “Know Nothing” American party, on a platform that was anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant. He brought bad luck upon himself that time for lowering his personal ethics to get those votes. Everything else we know about him indicates that he was personally against such bigotry.
But Fillmore wasn’t always unlucky. Evidently he was quite the good looking stud. Queen Victoria, upon meeting him, remarked that he was the “handsomest man” she had ever seen. Fillmore remarried five years after Abigail’s death, this time to a wealthy widow. They lived happily and peacefully in Buffalo, where the two of them helped found a hospital, a university, and a library, among making other civic improvements.
Dismissed by historians and lampooned by comedians, Fillmore has been relegated to the academic basement, where we keep our most unglorified presidents. But I love to dwell among our basement presidents. It fascinates me how much political pettiness and slashing continues long after a person dies.
Millard Fillmore is one of those presidents who is worth a second look. He had more courage and integrity than either of his successors, Pierce or Buchannan. He had more savvy and intelligence than his predecessor, Taylor. But he served at a time when it was humanly impossible to keep the country together peacefully. Not even Abraham Lincoln could do it without half a million battle deaths.
Historically, Fillmore was just the right size man for Buffalo. He didn’t fit into the polarized hell of the Washington D.C. of the 1840s and 50s. Ordinary folks don’t function in hell… at all. Fillmore made every effort to balance justice and compromise. It simply couldn’t be done. And he is casually ridiculed and judged by self-righteous historians for trying to be relevant while he was president.
I wouldn’t say we are in hell today, not yet anyway. In both church and state, however, we can feel the flames lapping our way. Our polarization is becoming more hateful and aggressive, with no end in sight. Most of our leaders in both church and state are modern Millard Fillmores, folks who are “just the right size for Buffalo,” good people who are not equipped for the fires of hell they face. They try to stand in the breach of our polarities but win only contempt. Out and out champions of either side expire in the flames and get no where either. Denominations start to cave in on themselves and the nation teeters as before. Millard Fillmore-like optimism is discredited weekly.
And in this light we see the wisdom of Millard Fillmore: he went back to Buffalo. He anguished to leave Washington behind, it tempted him to return several times. But he took up his life in Buffalo with relish: where his resources made a difference, his gifts were welcomed, and his sanity sustained.
Washington D.C. was not were the fires of hell would be extinguished. Even Abraham Lincoln would be the first to say that only God quenched the fires back then: and only one person at a time, one town at a time, one abolitionist at a time, one library at a time, one reconciliation at a time. Of course, the fires of hell were never entirely extinguished by the Civil War, they were only driven back for a time.
But history reveals that baby steps, much to our chagrin and impatience, are the only path God gives us out of our politically made hell, whether in church or state. Hell always consumes the grand staircase that leads out; so the sooner we notice the baby steps, the Millard Fillmore lesson, the sooner we will be safe.
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