Millard Filmore: Biography of a President

Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President by Robert J. Rayback

Millard Fillmore, the U.S.A.’s 13^th president, is generally viewed by many historians as one the all-time worst. Curiously, you would never have fathomed that after reading this biography. Interestingly, the author alludes to this fact in this book’s introduction. He claims that whatever history has taught us about this man, more scrutiny is required. He then paints a very flattering portrait of the man throughout the entire book.  For someone like me who doesn’t know much about Millard Fillmore, who should I believe?  The author? Or the masses?  Whoever the masses may be.

So it’s very easy to be critical based on the author’s treatment of his subject matter. But before anyone judges, they should do their own homework and not frame their opinion based on what others have told us. What is undeniable to me, is that this is a very well-written book that held my interest throughout. I admit I was a bit skeptical since (according to Amazon) the author doesn’t have any other published works. I’ve also learned that ‘older’ books tend to hold my interest less.  Perhaps that’s an unfair generalization, but most biographies older than 50 years are a bit of a challenge for me when it comes to holding my interest (this book was written in 1959).

This book seemed to be the perfect length. Being that Millard Filmore served as president for less than one term (he succeeded Zachary Taylor after his death and was never elected again), one shouldn’t expect too lengthy of a narrative.  Conversely, this isn’t a carelessly written volume designed to fill a gap that can be digested over a weekend.  We read just enough about his youth, his early law career, his political beginnings, his ‘accidental’ presidency, and his waning years.  To be honest, I would have liked to have read a tad more about his life after the presidency, but perhaps sources for the author were rare and/or unavailable.

I’m learning that any biography of any United States president focuses heavily on slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow, or Civil Rights.  This is good since these issues should have always been a focus in our country’s somewhat flawed history. It’s always a bit sad, though, when we read how slow progress has always been.  With Millard Fillmore being President during the controversial decade of the 1850s, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the slavery topic is a very hot one in this bio.  To cut to the chase, Fillmore was like many of his counterparts: he was against slavery but didn’t want to rock the boat too hard as to alienate roughly half of the country.  The biggest topic of his presidency, The Compromise of 1850 (actually initiated by his predecessor) can be looked at in one of two ways. One spin is that it ‘delayed’ the Civil War by about 10 years, but the upshot of this is that slavery was in place for that much longer. Could the Civil War ever have been prevented?  Some might think so, but as bloody as it was, it achieved the goal (in a roundabout way) to finally end slavery.  So the fact that Fillmore was able to postpone such an event might not necessarily be viewed as a good thing in hindsight.

Perhaps the biggest strike against Fillmore was in his post-presidency days, he was a big advocate of what was known as ‘Nativism’. This essentially was a movement to restrict the rights of foreigners and recent immigrants (strangely, Catholics in particular).  Again, history isn’t pretty in many places, so one probably shouldn’t be too judgmental of such sentiments, but in hindsight, such feelings are a bit distressing.

I also enjoyed this book because it gives a good overview of why and how the Whig political party came into existence. Since Fillmore was right in the middle of this particular era, the author does his due diligence to educate his readers on the key players and their motivations for this new faction.  We then read about how the short-lived Whig party eventually morphed, to a degree, to the new Republican party that appeared around the late 1850s.  The main lesson is that having at least two political parties with different views is often inevitable, but also necessary.

There was also a very enjoyable chapter on the country’s desire to bridge the two oceans via a canal to aid in travel and trade.  History shows us that this wasn’t accomplished until the 1910s, but it was still very interesting to read the initial thoughts, plans, and obstacles of the originators of the idea.

So in conclusion, I would advise one not to wholly trust what they read in these pages about the man nor the times because of its obvious conflicts with the most accepted theories and recollections.  On that note, however, I’m interested to find the opposing view that is presented as well and as interesting as what Rayback has done here.   Based on that, I’d have to give this retrospective 5 stars out of 5 stars.

October List

October List – by Jeffery Deaver

A book like none other I’ve read.  This story starts at the end and ends at the beginning. This is a book that tells the story in reverse order. Ridiculous, you say?  Well, not really. If you think about it, it’s not completely foreign to tell some stories “out of order”. We’ve all seen movies that start with a prologue, and then the next scene says something like “Four Years Earlier” and we see what leads up to where we were when we saw the first scene.  We also have movies like “Pulp Fiction” that seem to be told completely out of sequence, yet, since it’s such a well-done movie, it still resonate strongly for many people.

To be fair, this really isn’t that great of a story. The appeal, though, is how it’s told. This type of experiment isn’t for everyone. I can see where a lot of people would be turned off, and it can require a tad more concentration when the whole story is going backwards.  Deaver, smartly, knows his limitations. He purposely made this tale significantly shorter than an average book for him, because he knows that too much detail in a case like this will simply baffle most of the readers.  There’s only so much ‘backwards’ one can take before screaming at the ride operator to stop the spinning so we can get off before we become sick.

Also, in case you’re wondering something like “How do you enjoy a story when you already know the ending as soon as you start the book?”  Well, see, that’s the beauty here.  You know the ‘what’, but you don’t know the ‘why’ or the ‘how’. This is where Deaver’s skills come into play.  His best niche is his ability to twist his stories (several times in some books) so that nothing is ever what it seems when you get to the last few chapters. He does a good job near the end of this book (which is actually ‘the beginning’) to tidy up the loose ends so you can make sense of what happened at the beginning of the book (which is actually ‘the end’).

Still, though, I’m betting most readers, like myself, went back and read the end/beginning after we read the beginning/end just to make sure we got everything.  This book is definitely an interesting and unique twist. I’m not sure if I could handle many more like this, though. Once is good. I’m now ready to go back to a normal sequential story.

Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House

Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House by Prof. Holman Hamilton

Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone and they’re telling you about a 30-minute television show that they just watched. How long should it take the person to summarize the show? 30 seconds? 1 minute? 5 minutes?  What if they described every single line of dialogue?  In addition to that, they described every piece of clothing that each character wore, along with a detailed analysis of all the camera angles. Then, they gave you a detailed biography of every single person that worked on the production of the show. I would challenge you that it would take this person several hours to describe this 30-minute show.  The real question then becomes, “If they took 8-10 hours to describe a 30-minute show, how soon would you become bored out of your skull?”

This is how I felt while reading this dreary, overlong biography.  The author simply doesn’t know how to summarize, tell a good story, nor just shut his mouth. I can’t believe the excruciating detail that he finds necessary to slog his reader through. This is actually a two-volume set. I read the first one and had similar reservations. The first one, however, was twice as short and about four times as interesting.  Even that book was weighted down, so the author goes from mediocre to awful.  Had he combined these two books and cut about 75% of the material, I probably would have endured better.

When one looks at the life of Zachary Taylor, the twelfth U.S. president does seem to have a more colorful life as a military general as opposed to a politician.  Taylor joins the ever-growing list of presidents who mainly became president because of their record in battle.  When reading both of these volumes, the question that begs to be asked is, why is the man’s 16-month presidency (he died in office) detailed in a much longer book than the first one that details his many military escapades?  I really do think the author was forced to write this book. Maybe he signed a bad contract or something.  He finds it necessary to quote Taylor’s entire inaugural address as well as devote an entire chapter to a party at the executive mansion where he feels obligated to describe every guest’s features as well as the outfits they wore. 

The one significant event that happened during Taylor’s presidency was the ongoing debate of The Compromise of 1850. From what I understand, the author is a bit of an astute expert on the Compromise – he wrote an entire book on it – but, sadly, that doesn’t mean he does a good job translating it into a somewhat bearable narrative.  By the time I arrived at the last 100 pages or so of this book, I confess that I basically just skimmed through the remainder.  This was an unbearable read.  In fact, I’ve probably read about 40 biographies of U.S. Presidents and other key stately figures, and most I’ve enjoyed (4 to 5-star reviews on Amazon), yet this one was by far the worst I’ve ever read.  Since the author was a professor (this is a 75-year-old book), I can only imagine how unbearable it was to have to sit through one of his lectures at the university where he taught.

From what I know about Zachary Taylor, he deserves a better account of his life than this.