Failure™ Magazine

The Rodney Dangerfield of Presidents

Two hundred years after his birth, Franklin Pierce still gets no respect.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Franklin Pierce.

In 2009 the United States will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of our sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln. The date is nearly five years away yet Congress has already established a 15-person national committee and appropriated millions of dollars solely for the planning of the celebration. In contrast, November 23 of this year will mark the bicentennial of the birth of President Franklin Pierce (1804-69), an anniversary that might have passed without notice if it weren’t for Jayme Simões, chairman of the comparatively modest Franklin Pierce Bicentennial Committee.

In C-SPAN’s 1999 survey of Presidential leadership, historians and C-SPAN viewers alike rated Pierce 39th-best among 41 past Presidents. Perhaps that explains why no one was particularly enthusiastic about highlighting Pierce’s life and accomplishments. Yet, Simões called on a variety of museums and institutions in Pierce’s home state of New Hampshire and managed to establish an impressive series of programs designed to get the public talking about our much-maligned fourteenth President. “The goal of the committee is to have a decent commemoration of Pierce and to foster discussion,” says Simões. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

The committee’s first obstacle is Pierce’s lack of name recognition. “About 99 percent of the American public say: ‘Who the hell is Franklin Pierce?’” admits Simões. The few that do know Pierce tend to hold him in low regard. “Those people who know anything about the history of the United States remember him as one of our worst Presidents,” says Peter A. Wallner, author of a new biography on Pierce entitled, “Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son” (Plaidswede). “He’s usually considered a weak man who because of his weakness as President brought on the crisis that became the Civil War.”

But according to both Simões and Wallner, Pierce’s reputation as an incompetent President is largely undeserved. While Pierce’s adult life started inauspiciously—he was last in his class of 17 after two years at Maine’s Bowdoin College—he proved to be a naturally gifted politician, elected to the New Hampshire state legislature at the age of 24 and Speaker of the [state] House two years later. “He had a common touch and was great with crowds. People flocked to hear him speak,” notes Wallner. Determined, hard driving, and even ruthless at times, he built up a powerful political machine in New Hampshire that won election after election for close to two decades. “Pierce was a very able and dynamic man, a terrific lawyer, and a patriot who believed he was doing the right thing. He combined all the elements that make a successful politician,” continues Wallner.

In fact, it was a clever political strategy that allowed Pierce to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852. Pierce was ten years removed from serving in public office, having spent the preceding decade fighting in the Mexican War, focusing on his law practice, and raising a family with his wife Jane. But Pierce felt that none of the potential Democratic nominees were strong enough to get the two-thirds vote needed to receive the nomination at the convention in Baltimore. “The textbooks say Pierce was a dark horse who was chosen out of the blue, but the reality was that six months before the convention his group of supporters from New Hampshire predicted exactly what would happen,” says Wallner.

What happened was that his political allies lobbied behind the scenes to make Pierce the delegates’ second choice. “Pierce, who was in New Hampshire, was telling them to go ahead and do it, but to make sure his name was never even mentioned on the convention floor until the three leading candidates had basically been knocked out. He felt the convention at that time would have grown tired and weary. When his name would be presented as an alternative everyone would say, ‘Yeah, he’s a pretty good guy,’” observes Wallner. The political savvy Pierce demonstrated is not lost on Simões, who says, “Pierce pulled off one of the greatest political coups in the history of the United States and no one even knows about it. He orchestrated his nomination to be the Democratic candidate without ever putting his foot on the floor of the convention.”

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