Dead Presidents

THERE IS one rule when it comes to gift shops at presidential sites: you must carry at least a couple of items that highlight all the presidents. Coffee mugs, playing cards, place mats—as long as they have portraits of every president on them, they will end up on the shelves. Lately there’s been a set of presidential PEZ dispensers making the rounds; they’re part of something called the PEZ Education Series. I don’t know how much education we’re spurring with candy dispensers, but had Chester Arthur seen his handsome whiskers emblazoned on a PEZ holder, he might have rethought his quest to be the most obscure president ever.

My parents’ generation didn’t have presidential PEZ, but they had something similar: little presidential figurines produced by toymaker Louis Marx. My mom gave me the three she had as a kid—adorably cheap and plasticky replicas of Lincoln, Wilson, and Eisenhower. Marx sold these figures in grocery stores in the early 1950s, to honor the election of his friend Dwight D. Eisenhower. They sold well, but Marx ran into the usual problem with “sets” of presidents—once the current guy leaves office, you’re out of date. Marx added figures of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon and played off each new election cycle with figures of some of the potential candidates—including Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Ronald Reagan. But by the early 1970s Marx was out of the presidential figurine racket; for the set to stay up to date, Richard Nixon would have to stay president forever. (I suspect at least a few of the votes against Nixon’s impeachment in the House were cast by Marx collectors.)

Today you can buy an up-to-date set of the whole cast, thanks to the collector and television writer Patric Verrone, who kept his old presidential figurines in the writing room for the show Futurama. Despairing that Marx had never cast a little Gerry Ford or Jimmy Carter, Verrone casts his own, selling copies on his website. The secret? New heads on top of Marx presidential bodies. “I turned Nelson Rockefeller into Clinton,” he told Wired in 2009. “The first Bush was based on a George Romney, and the second, George W. Bush, was an alternative Eisenhower.” President Obama is the John F. Kennedy figure with “a different arm.” (The only difference is the arm?)

Some presidents get monuments, libraries, and museums; others have to settle for PEZ dispensers and Marx figurines. I have a soft spot for some of these guys. Take Millard Fillmore—now there’s a president who could use a little love. The Charlie Brown Christmas tree of presidents, Fillmore ended up leading the nation after Zachary Taylor spent too much time at the unfinished Washington Monument. The thirteenth president served in interesting times—he took office just before Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, fueling the already hot national fire around slavery—but no one accuses him of being interesting. Even his official White House biography calls him an “uninspiring man.” His most notable paper in office is his first message to Congress, in which he makes an impassioned plea to bring more bird crap into the country. Seriously:

Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price. Nothing will be omitted on my part toward accomplishing this desirable end.

Now, guano was hot stuff for farmers in the 1850s, and knowing that, you can read the above as a trade policy of some seriousness. Still, as slogans go, “Fillmore: He stood for guano” doesn’t exactly rival Woodrow Wilson’s “He kept us out of war.”

Yet there are plenty of sites named in this uninspiring president’s honor. One can visit the Millard Fillmore House in East Aurora, New York—the cottage where Fillmore started his political career, and the only presidential house built by its owner. One can attend Millard Fillmore College in Buffalo. Or, perhaps after being pelted with too much guano, one can obtain medical treatment at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital. Fillmore has his own statue in front of Buffalo’s city hall, “erected by the State of New York to honor an illustrious citizen of Buffalo.” And for decades music fans could see shows at Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore clubs in New York and in San Francisco, where the Fillmore West even stood on Fillmore Street.

Not bad for a guy who’s best known for being mediocre. But the takeaway here isn’t that being mediocre can get your name on a landmark Allman Brothers album; rather, it’s the importance of “the presidents” as a group that makes that happen. Fillmore gets his name on schools, streets, and nightclubs because he had the same job that George Washington once had. Like the little Marx figures, he’s part of the set.

Fillmore also became something of a hometown hero in later life, following his guano-filled White House years by serving as the first chancellor of the University of Buffalo and helping to found the Buffalo Historical Society. When he died in 1874, Fillmore was lauded more for his community work in New York than for anything he did in Washington. He is known for being an illustrious citizen of Buffalo. The only area where he had continued to excel at not excelling was politics; he was the very unsuccessful presidential nominee in 1856 for the American Party, nicknamed the “Know Nothings.” Even Fillmore’s final words—“the nourishment is palatable”—were unremarkable; they were just about the soup.

Even so, I managed to have an inspiring moment at Millard Fillmore’s grave, a tall pink obelisk toward the back of Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. There’s a creek that runs through part of Forest Lawn, and on the other side of the creek is the final resting place of funk legend Rick James. As I drove, I had my car radio tuned to a Sunday morning gospel service—church announcements, choirs, and homilies. “We think Sunday school is for children,” said one speaker. “But you’re nothing but a child, a child of God,” he said, to cheers. It was Sunday morning, there was gospel on the radio, I was driving through a cemetery. It was lovely.

Then, precisely at 10 a.m., the station switched formats—in midservice—to the swishes and stings of modern commercial radio. The first song after the switch? Rick James and the Temptations’ “Standing on the Top,” which includes the line “Where do all the freaks and fancy people go?” Rick James doesn’t know, but I do. They go to Forest Lawn Cemetery.

BUFFALO IS full of inspiration, probably because it has, next to Washington, the richest presidential history of any city I’ve visited. Aside from Fillmore, Buffalo can boast direct connections to Grover Cleveland (a former mayor), William McKinley (who died there), and Teddy Roosevelt (who became president there). Buffalo is also home to my hands-down favorite presidential food connection: a downtown pub called Founding Fathers. You would have to be very drunk to mistake this place for anywhere else. There’s presidential memorabilia all over the place—behind the bar, on the walls, on the ceiling. There are classic portraits of George Washington and newspapers declaring “KENNEDY DEAD, SHOT BY SNIPER IN DALLAS.” The ceiling is home to large flags from all over the world, gifts from well-traveled regulars. Hockey is on the flat-screen; the stereo is playing Neil Young’s album American Stars ’n Bars in the corner; people are helping themselves to snacks from a popcorn machine.

For the full effect, you can order the “Hail to the Chef!” sandwich—grilled chicken breast with provolone cheese, mushrooms, spinach, and a sundried tomato pesto—but the real draw here may not be the food or even the drinks. It’s owner and proprietor Michael Driscoll. Driscoll once taught history at a Catholic school in Williamsville, some fifteen minutes away; now the pub is his classroom, as he peppers everyone within earshot with trivia questions while tending bar. He carries on three or four conversations at the same time, asking a question before dashing off to refill a glass or mix up a cocktail, then returning a few minutes later to answer the question and ask a new one. Not all of his questions are historical in nature—I hear answers ranging from “The Golden Girls!” to “Dr. James Naismith!”—but sooner or later the questions always turn back to the guys all over the walls. Driscoll says he makes trips to the library at least once a week to add new questions to his inexhaustible repertoire.

Driscoll vows to test my knowledge with a few stumpers. “Which president was exhumed in the twentieth century?” This one, of course, I know. “Zachary Taylor is right!” he says, and then tells a tongue-in-cheek version of the story to the rest of the bar. “They thought he might have been poisoned—they didn’t find any poison. But had he been poisoned, who was the number one suspect?” he pauses, before roaring, “The man who succeeded him . . . Fillard Millmore!”

Driscoll is happy to introduce his patrons to Buffalo’s rich presidential history, and they, in turn, are happy to try keeping up with his patter. The pub’s monthly trivia nights draw huge crowds, and Founding Fathers has had its share of celebrity sightings: David Sedaris has been here, as has Morrissey. Sedaris I could see enjoying this place, but I can’t help but giggle when I think of Morrissey, the Pope of Mope, nursing a drink while Driscoll, the sunny bartender, sprays him with Grover Cleveland trivia.

“Next he’s gonna ask you which presidents have one-syllable names,” says Glen, a gray-bearded guy with a beer at my end of the bar. His prediction is right on, so he and I sort out the answer together: Polk, Grant, Hayes, Taft, Ford, Bush, and Bush. Glen’s glad to have Founding Fathers in Buffalo. “I grew up learning this stuff,” he says, but “kids today don’t know any of this. My son”—a relatively recent college grad—“he doesn’t know any of this.” I add that it’s all around us, which in this city is true.

Driscoll’s enthusiasm is so contagious that I overhear some of the patrons asking each other history questions. There aren’t any trivia cards or books in sight; this is just what you do at Founding Fathers. People are talking here—I see at least a hundred people come in and out in the time I’m there, and they’re talking, joking, sharing trivia. Only once do I see a cell phone, which is viewed only briefly and then quickly put away.

As I head out, I thank Michael for a fun evening, and he can’t resist giving me one more trivia question: “What is the unusual name of the town where Millard Fillmore was born?” The answer is Moravia. I sure hope Buffalo gives this illustrious citizen his own statue somewhere down the road. One that peppers every visitor with a question or two about Millard Fillmore.

BEING PRESIDENT and being a local man made good can get you a few namesakes after you leave the earth—assuming, of course, the community wants to honor you. Concord, New Hampshire, was once home to Millard Fillmore’s successor, Franklin Pierce. His four years in office were eventful—he was in office when the fight over slavery in US territories turned into actual fights, known today as “Bleeding Kansas”—but unsuccessful. After being snubbed by his own party for a reelection bid, Pierce resumed a quiet life in Concord, where, on November 25, 1914, the state of New Hampshire dedicated a statue in his honor outside the State House.

What’s notable about this is that Franklin Pierce died on October 8, 1869—more than forty-five years before the statue’s dedication. As a proud Granite Stater, I can say without hesitation that this forty-five-year Pierce-less interregnum should not be mistaken as the by-product of some laid-back vibe, ’cause we don’t have one (even the surfers here are kind of intense). No, the delay was on purpose. For nearly a half century, New Hampshire thought about putting up some kind of memorial to its only president and said . . . nah.

20. It took Franklin Pierce’s home state of New Hampshire nearly half a century to put up a statue in his honor.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1850s Franklin Pierce was New Hampshire’s favorite son; his father, Benjamin Pierce, was a Revolutionary War hero who later twice served as governor. Visit the Franklin Pierce Homestead, in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, and you’re actually visiting Franklin Pierce’s dad’s house. “The father and the son,” a campaign poster proudly proclaims on the wall. “The one fought to make, the other labors to preserve the Union.”

Franklin did pretty well himself, for that matter—a prestigious, if undistinguished, career that included stints as State House speaker, US senator, Mexican War veteran . . . sure, he was a lawyer, people said, but nobody’s perfect. So when Pierce ended up as the Democratic nominee for president in 1852, his New Hampshire supporters didn’t spare the hyperbole. “The Statesman. The Soldier. The Estimable Citizen,” read one campaign poster. “We Honor New Hampshire in Honoring Franklin Pierce,” said another. And then—I am not making this up—there was this one, the dirtiest, and therefore best, campaign slogan of all time: “We Polked you in ’44, We shall Pierce you in ’52.” (This line may be why the 1852 election is called one of the more “ludicrous, ridiculous, and uninteresting” elections in American history.)

The Estimable Citizen also got a huge boost from an old classmate at Bowdoin College: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just written The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, wrote Pierce’s campaign biography. He not only explained away some of the rougher patches in the candidate’s history, he turned them into virtues. Pierce’s war record, for example, was not inspiring in the least: he was promoted to brigadier general largely through personal connections and fainted twice on the field of battle. Doesn’t sound too brave, right? But in Hawthorne’s book, Pierce only passes out because he’s already run his men through a gauntlet that would have killed off inferior soldiers; Pierce, he writes, has a “rare elasticity both of mind and body; he springs up from pressure like a well-tempered sword.” Hawthorne quotes from Pierce’s own war diary to show how he’d been battling diseases (“June 28. The vomito rages fearfully”) and incompetent superior officers; when a general orders the already woozy Pierce off the front, Frank replies, “For God’s sake, general, don’t say that! This is the last great battle, and I must lead my brigade!” And for Hawthorne, the second fainting spell isn’t a sign of weakness but the turning point of the battle: Pierce tells the men trying to move him to safety to get back to fighting. “‘Don’t carry me off! Let me lie here!’ And there he lay, under the tremendous fire of Churubusco, until the enemy, in total rout, was driven from the field.”

Pierce’s Whig opponent was General Winfield Scott. He had actually won battles in the Mexican War—he commanded Pierce, in fact, and had not fainted in the process—but he didn’t have Nathaniel Hawthorne spinning his life story into an epic biography. (The educator Horace Mann, the author’s brother-in-law, famously derided Hawthorne’s book as “the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote.”) Nor did Scott have any saucy wordplay to back his campaign. Pierce won an electoral landslide that November.

If Pierce had known what was coming, he probably would’ve Pierced his own campaign and voted for Scott. Not even Hawthorne could have made gold out of Pierce’s incredibly tragic and depressing transition to high office. Shortly after the New Year, the president-elect and his family—his wife, Jane, and eleven-year-old Benjamin, aka Bennie—were returning to Concord after a funeral when the train’s axle broke and it went off the tracks. The parents were unhurt; Bennie was crushed to death. Jane Pierce, who had already become extremely protective of Bennie after losing her first two boys at young ages, was completely (and understandably) inconsolable. Desperately looking for a reason why Bennie had been taken, she concluded God needed to clear Franklin’s worry list so he could steer the ship of state without distraction. After all, the country had called him to service; he hadn’t sought the job. Except she soon learned that he had sought the job, even after having promised her years before to get out of politics. Quickly altering the “God’s mercy on America” theory to something akin to “God’s wrath on her husband,” Jane spent the bulk of Franklin’s presidency not speaking to him and trying to speak to Bennie, through letters and, depending on whether you trust the sources or not, séances.

I am unable to confirm or deny the “God’s wrath” theory, but I have to say, it’s as good an explanation as any. Pierce came to Washington mourning his son. On March 4, 1853, he gave his inaugural address (from memory, no less) but spoke so long that outgoing first lady Abigail Fillmore caught a bad cold and fever, and died before the end of the month. And Pierce’s own vice president, William Rufus King of Alabama, was so sick with tuberculosis that he left the country to recuperate in Cuba; Congress had to pass a special law to allow him to take his oath of office on foreign soil. Not that it made any difference—a few weeks later he was gone, too.

(King’s early death brings up an interesting historical what-if: imagine if Franklin Pierce, and not Bennie, had died in the train accident. Upon Vice President King’s death, the succession laws of the time would have left the president pro tempore of the Senate in the White House. In 1853 that post was filled by a pro-slavery Missourian called David Rice Atchison, who during the fight over “Bleeding Kansas” would implore his supporters to “kill every God-damned abolitionist” in the area. Would President Atchison have led us to the Civil War eight years earlier? Hard to say, but Pierce’s greatest accomplishment may have been simply living through his term.)

Everyone around the new president was dying—and that was just the start of Pierce’s presidency, which, sadly, included more deaths thanks to the “Bleeding Kansas” debacle. Pro- and anti-slavery forces poured into the Kansas Territory, each hoping to outnumber and/or outmurder the other. Pierce’s poor handling of the crisis convinced Democratic Party leaders he couldn’t be reelected, and they decided not to renominate him for a second term.

Pierce took the news of his repudiation well. “There’s nothing left to do but to get drunk,” he reportedly said. And that he did, for many of his remaining days, dying of stomach inflammation brought on by, as his Whig political opponents liked to say, “many a well-fought bottle.” The New York Times didn’t exactly pour on the love in Pierce’s obituary, saying that “his place will not be missed by those actively engaged in political affairs” and “his record as a statesman cannot command the approbation of the nation.”

Nor did it command the approbation of New Hampshire residents, who, remember, pointedly voted down any attempt to honor the only president to hail from their state for forty-five years. During this period New Hampshire did honor two other native sons with statues at the State House. The best spot, the one right in front of the building, went to Daniel Webster, who, in truth, made his name representing Massachusetts but got his start in the Granite State; his statue went up in 1886. A few years later, in 1892, the state put up a statue of former senator John P. Hale. Two former senators—one who even moved out of the state—got statues, and not Pierce.

Once again, the Civil War provides the explanation. Webster’s last and greatest stand on the public stage was during the debate over the Compromise of 1850, in which he implored northern and southern people alike to find a way to stand together. “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause,’” he said. And Hale was one of the first members of Congress, if not the first, to explicitly run on a platform of ending slavery. In the days after the bloody War Between the States, New Hampshire was more than a little touchy about the fact that its only president was a “Northern man with Southern sympathies,” who very publicly criticized the Lincoln administration during the war and, after the fighting was over, visited Confederate president Jefferson Davis while he was in military prison facing charges of treason. So to rebuild some karma, the state honored one man who fought to preserve the Union and immortalized another who fought against slavery. As for the guy who hung out with the dastardly rebel president? He never existed, and if he did, he didn’t live here. Franklin who?

To be fair, Pierce was for preserving the Union, too; he just wasn’t very good at it—at least as a president. As a private citizen he was slightly more effective: there’s a great Civil War story about an angry mob gathering outside Pierce’s home in Concord, demanding to know why he didn’t have a flag out. His response was a more eloquent version of “Excuse me? While you clowns were out on a scavenger hunt for flags, I was, oh, I don’t know, fighting in the freaking Mexican War and being president?!?” The mob collectively went “Oh yeah, never mind” and hit the road.

The anger against Franklin Pierce didn’t disperse for quite a while. There was still opposition to a statue in his honor as late as 1913, but that was the year in which America marked fifty years since the Battle of Gettysburg, and at a time when old Union men were embracing old Rebels on the battlefields on which they had once shot at each other. People in New Hampshire apparently figured life was too short to hold a grudge against Frank Pierce any longer, so they voted in May 1913 “with practical unanimity” to put up a statue. Artist Augustus Lukeman of New York City whipped up a fine bronze statue with a granite base. The work was finished the following year, with ceremonies set for November 25, 1914.

The New Hampshire Historical Society chronicled the statue’s dedication in a book, so we have a full record of the day’s festivities. The speakers tried to thread a very fine needle, explaining why they had gathered to honor a guy who they all agreed led an administration they didn’t admire. The speeches were full of qualifying statements, like how Pierce fought for the truth “as he saw it” and how he “should be judged in the light of the conditions as they existed in his time.” Frank Carpenter, chair of the Pierce Statue Commission, said, “We honor him to whom was given the task of guiding the destinies of the nation when vast forces were working for the ultimate good, but which, during his leadership, had failed to take form and direction.” In short: dude was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Judge Edgar Aldrich had an even less convincing appraisal: “England puts into her library of the House of Lords a bust of Cromwell, not because he was politically right according to English standards, but because he was a great Englishman and a man of notable achievements.” Now that’s a hell of a comparison—if Cromwell can get a statue, why not Franklin Pierce?

Some speakers brought up Pierce’s reputation as a legitimately skilled trial lawyer, and others told of small and large kindnesses he had paid to them and to others. My favorite speech, though, was by then-Governor Samuel Felker, who was clearly stretching in his attempt to laud Pierce. For example: “President Pierce appointed one of the strongest cabinets of any President in the history of the United States.” “His messages to Congress, considered from a literary view, were able state papers, clearly and strongly expressed.” And best of all: “Everyone admits that aside from the slavery question President Pierce met the expectations of the country.” It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer thinks he’s dying and can’t think of anything profound to tell Bart before he dies, so all he says is “I like your sheets.” Governor Felker could’ve written that line.

Thus far, the men honoring President Franklin Pierce had summed up his life and career this way: nice guy; pretty good lawyer; decent technical writer, knew a famous author; had a good cabinet; flubbed the slavery thing.

But several speakers picked up on the premise behind the ceremony, and the statue, and New Hampshire’s collective decision to finally recognize Franklin Pierce. Here’s Judge Aldrich again: “Franklin Pierce was a New Hampshire man, and he achieved the presidency.” He’s essentially making the same argument here that underlies the “buy local” movement today. Anybody who’s ever been to a farmers market or a craft fair knows some local products are truly great and some are painfully, desperately, obviously not. Franklin Pierce was not a great president, but he was a neighborhood guy who served in a great capacity, and there’s something to be said for celebrating the achievements of your neighbors. After all, if somebody from your hometown can make it to the White House, maybe you can be somebody, too. Another speaker, William Whitcher, summed up this sentiment perfectly with allusion, perhaps unintentional, to Pierce’s campaign posters of 1852: “In honoring him, she [New Hampshire] honors herself.”

There was a band on hand for the festivities; after the speeches, they played “America” and several other selections, and the people went on their way, having squared their relationship with their hometown president. In 1946, they even got Pierce a new tombstone, which you can see at the Old North Cemetery in Concord. I see his statue on Main Street almost every Saturday, as it stands next to the downtown farmers market. I always keep an eye out for angry mobs, just in case.

THE EASTERN New York town of Kinderhook is what Martin Van Buren called home. As a lesser-known, one-term president, he has almost the same complement of hometown honors that Franklin Pierce has in Concord, starting with a grave in a small rural cemetery. The inscription on the stone obelisk has become hard to read in the 150 years since his death, but you can still see that it’s the only presidential grave marker to use Roman numerals—Van Buren was the “VIIIth President of the United States.” The Little Magician also has a birthplace historic site, a portrait at the state capitol, and a statue in the heart of downtown. Van Buren’s statue is sitting on a bench with his walking stick in hand; there’s a second seat on which you’re clearly supposed to sit down and talk with the president.

Van Buren bought his 200-acre estate, Lindenwald, so he could have a house that looked as big and imposing as those of his predecessors, and one at which he could entertain VIPs from out of town. This was an important enough job for Van Buren to move the main staircase out of the front of the house to make way for a massive dining room, with room for twenty. The French wallpaper depicted hunting scenes; there were portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson on the walls.

But the most intriguing artistic item I saw was outside. There was a massive downed tree behind a wooden fence on the side of the house; a nearby sign explained, “The National Park Service Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and the Rhode Island School of Design Witness Tree Project have joined together to allow students to learn about United States History by creating items out of the hallowed wood of fallen trees.”

Witness trees are most often associated with Gettysburg—some of the trees that were alive at the time of the battle in 1863 still have bullets inside—and it was there that the RISD project was born. Professor Dale Broholm was touring the battlefield with a friend from the National Park Service, who mentioned a project to clear trees from a historic site. “What becomes of these trees?” he asked, and that question led to an informal deal: the Park Service tells Broholm when trees might become available. Broholm and his colleague Daniel Cavicchi give their students the wood and a theme upon which to base their research and, ultimately, their artwork. Not all the trees are related to presidents, but when they are the themes usually involve “idealization, canonization, memorialization, respect for the office—how America looks at presidents after they leave office and after they die, and how they’re reflected.”

There’s a wide range of finished work. In a course with wood from Theodore Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill, there are functional pieces, like walking sticks featuring TR quotes about nature, and there are more abstract works, like the necklace called “Beginning and End 2010.” “Teddy Roosevelt has always been portrayed as a pillar of strength,” wrote artist Athena Lo of her creation. “He was born with serious asthma, which drove him to work harder and become the strong figure that has gone down in history as a ‘Rough Rider.’ Nevertheless, he was brought down by an affliction of his lungs. The knots in the wood from which this necklace was made represents [sic] the blood clot in his lungs that caused his death. The necklace commemorates Roosevelt’s life and how one can overcome weakness to find strength.”

Once the art is finished the project goes full circle: “The objects are curated,” Broholm says, “and go back to the site for exhibition, to engage visitors in a different kind of conversation—something fruitful and different than the normal interpretive staff engagement.”

Not every president is the whirlwind of personality that TR was, but Broholm has a plan. “With Van Buren we’re going to look at American identity. In his time westward expansion was under way, the dawn of industrialization was right around the corner. We’re starting to get into a struggle about who are we? You could say, oh, he was a minor president, but his presidency is happening at such an important time that he can’t help but leave a fingerprint or a footprint.” Preparing the tree takes months; it has to be moved, cut, and dried before the course begins. “That tree had fallen two years earlier, but it kept putting up shoots. And the Park Service propagated it. They wanted to make sure they would continue on with the DNA.”

Broholm has a dream witness tree in mind: one from the White House, he says. “And we’ve heard a rumor that there may be one—obviously there’s a lot of layers of bureaucracy, but I believe it’s from Jackson’s time.”

_________

THE WHITE House is as good a place as any to find material for presidential art, since it’s been amassing one of the great collections of American presidential portraits since acquiring the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington in 1800, the one that had to be whisked out of the Executive Mansion in 1814 before British troops came and burned the place down. Adding new portraits to the collection has been a matter of course since then—with one notable exception: James Buchanan. The wily Pennsylvanian managed to worsen the already tense relationship between North and South; by the time his term was done, the country was practically sprinting toward armed conflict and disunion. He was so loathed that when the artist George Healy finished Buchanan’s official portrait for the White House collection, Congress refused to pay the bill.

So you can imagine my surprise to find that Washington, DC, features not only a Buchanan painting in the National Portrait Gallery but also a full-size James Buchanan Memorial overlooking Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcolm X Park. A statue of the impeccably dressed Buchanan sits admiring the Constitution, while a side panel hails him as “the incorruptible statesman whose walk was upon the mountain ranges of the law.” It’s a nice memorial, but a completely inexplicable one. How does a president get a memorial like this if he leaves office without a friend in the world?

The answer, it turns out, is simple: he had a niece. Harriet Lane served as first lady for the bachelor president. A bright and forceful young woman, Harriet lobbied to live with Uncle James after the deaths of her parents, and she got what she wanted. He made sure she was well educated and cultured, exposing her to politics and high society; she, in turn, served as his hostess. Though only in her twenties at the time, she was more than up to the job. Queen Victoria called her “dear Miss Lane” during Buchanan’s time as minister to Great Britain, and in the White House, she got northern and southern men who were literally preparing to fight a war against each other to come to dinner together—though she made sure to seat them far apart. The bright, charming “Democratic Queen” was perhaps the brightest spot in an otherwise dismal four years in office.

Her years in the White House were successful, but the years that followed were marked by tragedy. She married a Baltimore banker, Henry Elliott Johnston, in 1866, and they had two sons, named for her uncle and her husband. Then, in one three-year period, both James Buchanan Johnston and Henry Elliott Johnston Jr. died from rheumatic fever, and Henry Sr. succumbed to pneumonia. According to newspaper accounts of the time, Harriet Lane Johnston grieved alone, living “in retirement for some years.”

But she was far from finished. Having inherited a sizable estate, Harriet Lane Johnston became a philanthropist, paying tribute to her children by establishing a number of facilities to provide medical care for poor children at no cost. When she died in 1903, she left $100,000 to establish the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children, affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medical School. Among its many medical advances, the home, later renamed the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, discovered successful treatments for rheumatic fever. Johns Hopkins still publishes a guide to pediatric diagnosis and treatment called The Harriet Lane Handbook.

Uncle James had died at home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1868, after publishing a rather touchy memoir that blamed everyone else for his administration’s difficulties. His grave at Lancaster’s Woodward Hill Cemetery was tasteful but not too prominent, so Harriet’s will called for two large public monuments in his honor. Knowing these requests would be unpopular, she left $100,000 for the pieces—enough to avoid any need for public funds—and she set a strict deadline of fifteen years for officials to either go forward with the memorials or give the money back.

The first project won approval pretty easily; the James Buchanan Monument Fund built a stone pyramid thirty-eight feet high on the southern Pennsylvania land where Old Buck was born. The monument in Washington was a very different story. Remember, at the time, only George Washington had a monument in DC. There was nothing for Jefferson, nothing for Lincoln, and Congress was supposed to approve a Buchanan memorial? Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts fumed, “This joint resolution proposes at this moment, in the midst of this war, to erect a statue to the only President upon whom rests the shadow of disloyalty in the great office to which he was elected.” In the end, though, lawmakers decided free money was free money; they authorized the memorial, and President Wilson signed the legislation six days before Harriet’s deadline. The memorial opened to the public in 1930, and President Herbert Hoover noted that even though Buchanan was “engrossed in public and private business, he found time to rear and educate an orphaned niece in a manner that would have done credit to any father. It is due to Miss Lane’s devoted appreciation of his kindness that this statue has been erected.”

Only one other individual has been willing to give Old Buck’s presidency the benefit of the doubt besides Harriet Lane: the acclaimed novelist and native Pennsylvanian John Updike, who wrote a “play intended to be read” called Buchanan Dying. It is a tough read, mostly depicting the bedridden former president’s life flashing before his eyes. Updike’s Buchanan thinks of himself as a man who sought to act slowly and deliberately, so as to head off the hotheads in both North and South and buy the Union more time. No one buys this; Edwin Stanton, who was briefly Buchanan’s attorney general before serving in Lincoln’s cabinet, shows up to tell Buchanan, “Time does not preserve, it destroys. Men preserve!” Former president James K. Polk, in whose cabinet Buchanan served, says Buchanan tried too hard to get everyone to like him. “Any honest man has opponents,” he warns. “Opposition demonstrates a steadfast direction.” Buchanan’s severe father is the harshest, telling his son that the country will throw a huge party when he passes on: “Die, Buchanan, and give us an excuse for a clambake!”

Buchanan Dying is less a commentary on Buchanan than on the year in which it was published: 1974, the final act of Watergate. “In these years of high indignation over unbridled and corrupting Presidential power,” Updike wrote, “we can give more sympathy to Buchanan’s cautious and literal constitutionalism than has been shown him in history books.”

Buchanan doesn’t show up in many history books these days, and when he does it isn’t because of his politics but because of his sexuality: he is, after all, regularly touted as the first gay president, because he never married and lived in Washington with another bachelor politician, Alabama’s William Rufus King. Political watchers called the inseparable duo “the Siamese twins.” Buchanan griped to friends when King went overseas to work as minister to France; “I am now ‘solitary and alone,’” he wrote in one such letter, “having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.”

A few politicians snickered at Buchanan and King—one, Aaron Brown, said that Buchanan acted like King was “his wife.” Andrew Jackson called the duo “Aunt Nancy and Miss Fancy”; in fact, mocking Buchanan and King was about the only thing on which Old Hickory and his hated rival Henry Clay agreed. The Great Compromiser mocked Buchanan on the Senate floor, raising the pitch of his voice when addressing the Pennsylvanian to, as Clay put it, “suit the delicate ear of the Senator.”

It sounds pretty straightforward, but sometimes clear evidence isn’t always so clear. Michael Birkner teaches history at Gettysburg College. He’s edited two books on Buchanan and says there’s no evidence that Old Buck and King were anything other than emotionally close. Take, for example, the comment about King being Buchanan’s “wife.” Aaron Brown was a political crony of James K. Polk, who, at the time Brown made the comment, was trying to outmaneuver William Rufus King to end up on the Democratic ticket in the 1844 election. Andrew Jackson had deeply distrusted Buchanan because of some behind-the-scenes scheming during Old Hickory’s first presidential campaign. Birkner says of the “Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy” comment, “That’s not evidence—that’s a quip. And Buchanan was the kind of guy who it was easy to make quips about. He was foppish, he loved small talk with the ladies.”

Even the letter about “wooing” gentlemen is less revealing than it might seem. Here’s what comes after the sentence about striking out with “several gentlemen”: “I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.” If anything, Buchanan sounds simply lonely. It wasn’t unusual for politicians to room together in those days; heck, it’s not unusual today. DC housing doesn’t come cheap. It should be noted that Harriet Lane and a relative of King’s may have destroyed some of their letters when Buchanan became president, but we can’t know whether those letters, if they existed, were about personal secrets or political secrets. Or any secrets at all.

WHATEVER THE nature of his relationship with William King, our culture has come to see in James Buchanan what it’s looking to see. It’s not the only time society has projected its own questions, concerns, and fears onto presidents and presidential candidates. When Warren Harding ran for president in 1920, he faced accusations that he had African American ancestry from a great-grandparent. The accusations came from a man called William Estabrook Chancellor, a college instructor and supporter of the outgoing Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. Chancellor, like Wilson, was no fan of the more tolerant racial views of Harding and the Republicans, so he invented a scandal that played on cultural fears of race-mixing. His evidence was nonsense, but the rumor has lingered for decades—and as long as race remains a thorny topic in the United States, it will probably continue to linger.

Not many people have lingered at Warren Harding’s beautiful, striking tomb in Marion, Ohio. In office he’d hoped to be the country’s best-loved president, and immediately after his death in 1923 it looked like he might be. As many as three million people came out to see his funeral train roll from San Francisco to Washington and then back to Ohio. Virtually every major living political figure joined the Harding Memorial Association, which set funding goals in the millions and drew up plans for a large, open-air tomb with classical columns encircling the Hardings.

But the love didn’t last, especially as the public started learning what had been going on in the administration. Some of Harding’s highest-ranking officials had been embezzling public money and taking bribes. Harding himself wasn’t in on the looting, but a best-selling memoir in 1927 said that was because he was too busy carrying on an affair in the White House coat closet. Fund-raising lagged; since the Memorial Association couldn’t point to Harding’s accomplishments to raise money, it stuck to extremely vague slogans, like “Human Being Always” and “He Loved to Serve.” The prominent politicians who had lined up to help build a Harding tomb started keeping their distance; even Harding’s successors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, put off the formal dedication so as not to be too closely associated with their former boss. The country had washed its hands of Warren Harding; Life magazine called the tomb a “lonely Ohio shrine” in 1944, barely twenty years after his death, and added, “Not many people go there now.”

(I wasn’t alone when I visited the Harding tomb. It was late May—prom season—and a young couple had chosen to pose for their prom pictures in front of the grave of the twenty-ninth president of the United States.)

The man who had hoped to be the best-loved president seemed to have lost all his friends. All but one, that is; Harding was a dog lover—when he ran the local newspaper in Marion, he had written a loving obituary to one of his furry friends—and his White House dog, Laddie Boy, had become the White House’s first celebrity pet. Harding gave the Airedale terrier his own chair in the Cabinet Room and brought him out to greet official delegations. Newspapers published letters in the dog’s voice; in one, Laddie Boy “writes” to a famous stage dog called Tiger and tellingly warns him about how “many a dog is more or less spoiled by his environment and associations.”

The news coverage of the dog continued after Harding’s death. “There was one member of the White House household today who could not quite comprehend the air of sadness which hung over the executive mansion,” wrote the St. Petersburg Times on August 4, 1923. “Laddie Boy knows that his master and mistress made frequent journeys away from home and he always watches for their return. Of late he has been casting an expectant eye and cocking a watchful ear at the motor cars which roll up on the White House drive. . . . For, in his dog sense way, he figures ‘an automobile took them away, so an automobile must bring them back.’”

21. Warren Harding’s Airedale terrier, Laddie Boy, was the White House’s first celebrity pet.

This apparently broke the heart of a woman called Edna Bell Seward, who wrote a poem about the national conundrum of explaining to Warren Harding’s dog that the president was not going to come back to the White House. Set to music by her husband, the piece was called “Laddie Boy, He’s Gone.”

Laddie Boy ended up as a work of art, too: newsboys donated more than nineteen thousand pennies, which were melted down and turned into a sculpture of the dog. It ended up in the Smithsonian’s collection because the person for whom it was intended, Mrs. Harding, had died by the time it was finished.

Harry Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” In Harding’s case he was right.