The Rodney Dangerfield of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Millard Fillmore is the Rodney Dangerfield of Presidents (he gets no respect). Perhaps being POTUS number 13 was a bad start. Fillmore was never elected to the Presidency, he got the job upon the death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850, and was only put on the ticket with Taylor in the election of 1848 to appease northern Whigs. Fillmore was an abolitionist and was added to balance concerns that Taylor, the southerner, would expand slavery into Texas and other territories acquired as the result of the Mexican War. He was also chosen in order to piss off Thurlow Weed, a New York political boss. Fillmore, also from New York, was not Weed's guy.

When Taylor died on July 9, 1850, Fillmore decided to make a fresh start and appointed his own cabinet. Like many presidents of that era, the issue of slavery was front and center during his administration, and it would have been difficult for anyone, let alone a yankee abolitionist, to gain the confidence of a divided Whig Party, and poor Millard failed to gain his party's nomination for re-election in 1852. By not being a stronger advocate against slavery even abolitionists refused to support him.

Fillmore had another go at the presidency in 1856, running not as a Whig, but as the standard bearer for the Know-Nothing Party (so named because party members were supposed to deny any knowledge of its organization.) The party finished third in the election, winning only Maryland's 8 electoral college votes.

Much of Fillmore's historical legacy has been the butt of jokes. For example, on December 28, 1917, author H. L. Mencken wrote a bogus article in the New York Evening Mail entitled “A Neglected Anniversary” which claimed that the bathtub had been introduced into the United States in 1842, the first made of mahogany lined with lead. The article went on to describe how the introduction of the bathtub initially was greatly discussed and opposed, until President Fillmore had a bathtub installed in the White House in 1850, making the invention more broadly acceptable.

In February 2008, a television commercial for Kia Motors featured Millard Fillmore, referring to him as "unheard of." It repeated the Bathtub hoax, and presented a Millard Fillmore bust as a 'Soap-on-a-Rope'.



The Millard Fillmore Society was founded in 1963 in order to commemorate and "perpetuate the memory of the 13th President, holding his actions as exemplary examples of inconsistency." The webpage of the Millard Fillmore Society notes that "Some members of the Millard Fillmore Society celebrated Millard Fillmore's 210th Birthday on January 7th by visiting his grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York. Others, constrained by weather or distance, marked the occasion by taking a bath." It also quotes Fillmore as saying "may God save the country, for it is evident that the people will not."

That's far more eloquent than Fillmore's last words. On his death bed he's reported to have said his last words on earth {after having been fed some soup): "the nourishment is palatable."

I'm surprised Campbell's never adopted that as its slogan.