A Presidents Day Hangover—The Often Hungover Franklin Pierce

 

                                        Franklin Pierce has been called the most handsome President.  After that the accolades taper of dramatically

Monday was the Presidents Day Federal Holiday.  You might have hoped to have escaped the ordeal for another year.   No such luck.  Today we are taking one of the lesser lights of the White House for a spin.  Franklin Pierce usually shows up in the lowest third of best to worst Chief Executives lists but usually misses the absolute bottom tier out of a combination of obscurity—and likely pity.

Franklin who, you might ask.  Why the 14th President of the United States, that’s who.  The noble son of New Hampshire who was certainly the handsomest man ever elected to that office.

Although born in a log cabin in 1804, Pierce came from reputable Yankee stock.  His father was a Revolutionary War hero and two time Democratic-Republican governor of the Granite State.

Nathaniel Hawthorne posed for this portrait in 1852, the year in which Pierce's election assured him of the sinecure. 

 

He was educated at Philips Exeter Academy and then attended Bowdoin College in Maine where he became the lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In fact one of Pierce’s most notable accomplishments as President was keeping Hawthorne employed in plumb political appointments thus saving his family from virtual starvation.

 

After graduation, Pierce studied law in Massachusetts the returned to Concord, New Hampshire to start practicing in 1824.  Gregarious and charming, Pierce won friends and clients and was soon highly successful as a lawyer and rising in Democratic politics.  He served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1828 to ’33 while his father was Governor and served as Speaker for the last two years.  Then he was elected to the U.S. Congress and at 27 years old was the youngest serving Representative.

During this time he married the beautiful but shy and frail daughter of the former President of Bowdoin College.  He was devoted to the former Jane Appleton.  Highly religious, she abhorred her husband’s political career—and his heavy drinking.  She became an outspoken teetotaler.  Despite their differences, they made a striking couple and had three children together.  Their first son, named for his father, died in infancy and their second survived only four years before falling victim to a typhoid epidemic.  Jane regarded these tragedies as punishment for her husband’s political career.

In 1836 the New Hampshire General Court elected Pierce to the U.S. Senate.  He served as a Democrat without much distinction until he gave into his wife’s pleas and resigned in 1842.  He returned to a lucrative private law practice in Concord and then was appointed Federal Attorney from 1845-47.

                                        Pierce still cut a dashing figure when he posed in his Mexican War Brigadier uniform in 1852.

With the outbreak of the Mexican War, generally unpopular in New England, Pierce enlisted as a Colonel of Volunteers.  Once in Mexico, he was promoted through political clout with the Polk Administration as Brigadier of 1st Brigade, 3rd Division and joined Winfield Scott’s army in time for the Battle of Contreras where he was seriously wounded in the leg in a fall from his horse.  The next day while leading his troops in the Battle of Churubusco he fainted from pain and had to be carried off the field.  After recovery, he resumed command for the rest of the campaign and returned to Concord a middling war hero.

In 1852 the Democrats meeting in Baltimore were deadlocked between four candidates for President—Stephen A. Douglas, William L. Marcy, James Buchanan, and Lewis Cass each with significant regional support.  The party was split on the expansion of slavery but tied to place itself above “agitation” on the issue.  The platform called for support of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. None of the candidates could win a majority.  On the 35th ballot Pierce’s name was put up as a possible compromise—a Northern man with Southern sympathies and a record as a war hero.  He finally the won nomination on the 49th ballot, probably the most obscure man ever to win a major party nomination.

If the Democrats were in disarray that year, the Whigs were busy dying after the disastrous accidental presidency of John Tyler.  Their great men—Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—refused to get out of each other’s way.  Instead the party nominated war hero Winfield Scott.  But Scott was a pompous campaigner and as an anti-slavery Virginian lost the support of the South.  

In the General Election Old Fuss and Feathers was humiliated at the hand of his former subordinate.  Pierce won the Electoral votes 27 of the 31 states, including Scott’s home state of Virginia.

He was, at 48 years old, then the youngest man ever elected to the office.

A Democratic Party poster for the 1852 campaign with Vice Presidential nominee Rufus King of Alabama who would die just a month after the Inauguration.

But tragedy struck before his inauguration.  On his way to Washington the train carrying the President Elect and his family derailed.  His wife was injured and his last surviving son, 11 year old Benjamin was decapitated before his eyes.  The tragedy unhinged both Pierce and his wife, who blamed the death on her husband’s career.

Once in Washington Jane withdrew from her husband and official duties as hostess.  Pierce spent most of the first year in office alone in a darkened room drinking himself insensible.  When his Vice President, former Alabama Senator Rufus King died just thirty days after inauguration, Pierce’s Party fearing for his sanity and ability to serve his term fretted that he had no clear successor.

                                                    Jane Pierce doted on her surviving son Benjamin before his gruesome death in the train derailment.

Pierce eventually recovered enough to perform his duties, although he continued to drink heavily.  He steadfastly supported the Kansas Nebraska Act, including the hated provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act and generally pursued a policy of conciliation with the South while decrying the “agitation” of Northern abolitionists.  His closest adviser and political supporter was his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis.  

 

As President Pierce relied heavily on his Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.  The two men corresponded privately during the Civil War in letters some historians say bordered on treason.  Luckily for Pierce they were not discovered until after his death.

His policies led to a decade of virtual civil war in Bloody Kansas between slave state settlers and their Missouri Border Ruffian allies, and Northern Free Soil settlers supported by abolitionists.  At every juncture where there was sectional conflict, Pierce sided with the South on the justification that it was necessary to preserve the Union.

By the end of his four year presidency his Party was splintered sectionaly.  No one wanted a second Pierce term.  The party finally settled on his Secretary of State James Buchanan, another Doughface Democrat—a Northerner with Southern principles.

Pierce retired to New Hampshire to try and win back the affection of his alienated wife.  They traveled abroad.  When they returned home, Pierce began speaking publicly against “abolitionist agitation.”  He was briefly considered for re-nomination in 1860 but declined and the Democrats split among three sectional candidates.

During the war he was an outspoken opponent and critic of the Lincoln Administration and the President’s war aims.  When Secretary of State William Seward accused him of being a member of the seditious secret Knights of the Golden Circle—a militant Copperhead group flirting with allying themselves with the Confederacy in armed rebellion in Ohio and border states.  Pierce demanded he present proof in what became an embarrassing scandal for both men.

At the end of the war when Jefferson Davis’s  papers were captured, very friendly letters from Pierce to the Confederate President were found—so friendly many thought they verged on treason.

Pierce’s wife Jane had died in 1863.  And now his reputation was in tatters.  He was drinking more than ever.  On October 8, 1869 he died in Concord of cirrhosis of the liver.

With no close heirs save a nephew, he divided his estate with generous gifts to several friends, including a provision for the children of old pal Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Maxine Kumin and Two Sides of a Coin—National Poetry Month 2022

 

Maxine Kumin--a poet in her prime at her desk.

Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur on June 6, 1925 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents but attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant.  They had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton’s suicide in 1974.  Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University and from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities.

The author of several esteemed collections of poetry, she was honored to be named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982.  From 1976 until her death in February 2014, she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where they bred Arabian and quarter horses.

A happy Kumin on her Warner, New Hampshire farm.

Critics have compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop because of her meticulous observations and with Robert Frost because she frequently devoted her attention to the rhythms of life in rural New England. She has also been grouped with confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell. But unlike the confessionalists, Kumin eschewed high rhetoric and adopted a plain spoken style. Throughout her career, she struck a balance between her sense of life’s transience and her fascination with the dense physical presence of the world around her.

Diane Wakoski wrote in Contemporary Women Poets:

The one thing that is clear throughout [Kumin’s] substantial body of work is that she believes survival is possible, if only through the proper use of the imagination to retrieve those things which are loved well enough.

My first selection of here work may surprise some folks but delight vegans.  After all, I am a notorious omnivore who vegan friends have denounced as social justice and environmental hypocrite and an active saboteur of the planet.  I would be shunned and shamed at a California brown rice and tofu Unitarian potluck.  But my discovery of Accolade of the Animals absolutely charmed and delighted me.

Life-long vegetarian George Bernard Shaw not long before his death from injuries in a fall at age 103.

Accolade of the Animals

 

All those he never ate

appeared to Bernard Shaw

single file in his funeral

procession as he lay abed

with a cracked infected bone

from falling off his bicycle.

 

They stretched from Hampton Court

downstream to Piccadilly

against George Bernard's pillow

paying homage to the flesh

of man unfleshed by carnage.

 

Just shy of a hundred years

of pullets, laying hens

no longer laying, ducks, turkeys,

pigs and piglets, old milk cows,

anemic vealers, grain-fed steer,

the annual Easter lambkin,

the All Hallows’ mutton,

ring-necked pheasant, deer,

bags of hare unsnared,

rosy trout and turgid carp

tail-walking like a sketch by Tenniel.

 

What a cortege it was:

the smell of hay in his nose,

the pungencies of the barn,

the courtyard cobbles slicked

with wet. How we omnivores

suffer by comparison

in the jail of our desires

salivating at the smell of char

who will not live on fruits

and greens and grains alone

so long a life, so sprightly, so cocksure.

 

—Maxine Kumin

 

On the other hand, Kumin was no self-righteous scold.  She even admitted to a tinge of bloodlust herself though she wryly recognized her guilt.  This one is matter of fact and rooted in commonplace real life.

                                        A woodchuck and the means of his execution. 

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.

The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange

was featured as merciful, quick at the bone

and the case we had against them was airtight,

both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,

but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

 

Next morning they turned up again, no worse

for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes

and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.

They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course

and then took over the vegetable patch

nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

 

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling

to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.

I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace

puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,

now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face.

He died down in the everbearing roses.

 

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.  She

flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth

still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.

Another baby next. One-two-three

the murderer inside me rose up hard,

the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

 

There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps

me cocked and ready day after day after day.

All night I hunt his humped-up form.  I dream

I sight along the barrel in my sleep.

If only they’d all consented to die unseen

gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

 

—Maxine Kumin

Sam Walter Foss— National Poetry Month 2020

Sam Walter Foss--a regionalis poet of the common man.

Why are the streets in Boston—even main thoroughfares—so damn crooked?  Sam Walter Foss could tell you.   Foss was a New Hampshire born, Brown University educated librarian who wrote a fresh poem every day for publication in the newspapers.  His poetry, in the rustic-voice-of-the-common-man style was popular with the public and a couple of his verses became oft-quoted staples of poetry anthologies.  But Foss is officially designated a minor poet, a not-very-successful regionalist along the lines of the despised-by-the-cultural-guardians Hoosier Edgar Guest.   But Foss was deft and highly skilled at what he did.

Foss was born on June 19, 1858 in the family home on a rural road near Candia, New Hampshire.  He lost his mother when he was only four years old.  Otherwise his experience was much like other farm children of the era—taking an increasing load of the farm chores year by year as he grew and attending a local school in the winter when his hands were not needed at home.  But he was a good and promising student.  The farm was prosperous enough for his father to be able to send him to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  He was so highly regarded there as a student that upon his graduation in 1882 his name was inscribed on the University’s ceremonial mace.

After graduation Foss worked as a journalist, editor, and writer, somewhat itinerant professions that took him to various corners of New England.  He married the lovely daughter of a Methodist minister with whom he would have a daughter and a son and settled down as the librarian of the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts. 

Wiffs from the Wild Meadows, 1892, the second of seven volumes of Foss's collected poetry.

He supplemented his income by writing a daily poem in the local paper, surely not terribly remunerative.  But the poems were so highly thought of that they were picked up and reprinted in papers around New England and beyond.  There were enough of them—and enough demand for them, that he was able to publish seven volumes of collected verse before his death.

Foss’s poems were no mere trifles—they tended to run to several metered and rhymed verses each.  They were often humorous, observational, wry but sympathetic comments on human foibles, with gentle moral lessons that did not clobber the reader over the head.  He celebrated the common man, but wished him better and wiser.  He spoke for tolerance and reason in matters of religion and had a perhaps naïve faith in progress—if that common man could shake the comfortable doldrums of the safely familiar.

Foss died at the relatively young age of 52 on February 26, 1911 in Boston and was buried at North Burial Ground in Providence near his beloved alma mater, Brown.

An old post card of the House by the Side of the Road, Foss's boyhood New Hampshire farm home which became a tourist attraction after the poem named for it became famous.

His most famous poem, The House by the Side of the Road was inspired by his boyhood New Hampshire home.

Foss’s other widely remembered poem, The Coming American, was a paean to hope and faith in his favorite common man, challenging him to a greatness and nobility that he doesn’t even suspect that he has.  The opening quatrain from the poem were once inscribed on a granite wall at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to inspire the cadets and officers, but they were removed in 2003 after the Academy began to admit women because Foss’s old fashion use of the word men to represent humanity was now thought exclusionary.  

Bring me men to match my mountains,

Bring me men to match my plains,

Men with empires in their purpose,

And new eras in their brains.

But those lines found other homes. The words are engraved and displayed at Disney’s Epcot in Orlando, Florida, and on the Jesse M. Unruh State Office Building in Sacramento, California. They are also inscribed on the Rocky Mountain Cup trophy, which is contested annually between Major League Soccer teams Real Salt Lake and Colorado Rapids. 

The Calf-Path might not be as well remembered as those verses, but is a prime example of his sense of place, wry observation, and a surprising gentle lesson, 

The Calf-Path

I.

One day, through the primeval wood,

A calf walked home, as good calves should;

But made a trail all bent askew,

A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then two hundred years have fled,

And, I infer, the calf is dead.

II.

But still he left behind his trail,

And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day

By a lone dog that passed that way;

And then a wise bell-wether sheep

Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,

And drew the flock behind him, too,

As good bell-wethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,

Through those old woods a path was made;

            III.

And many men wound in and out,

And dodged, and turned, and bent about

And uttered words of righteous wrath

Because ‘twas such a crooked path.

But still they followed—do not laugh— 

The first migrations of that calf,

And through this winding wood-way stalked,

Because he wobbled when he walked.

VI.

This forest path became a lane,

That bent, and turned, and turned again;

This crooked lane became a road,

Where many a poor horse with his load

Toiled on beneath the burning sun,

And traveled some three miles in one.

And thus a century and a half

They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,

The road became a village street,

And this, before men were aware,

A city’s crowded thoroughfare;

And soon the central street was this

Of a renowned metropolis;

And men two centuries and a half

Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

V.

Each day a hundred thousand rout

Followed the zigzag calf about;

And o’er his crooked journey went

The traffic of a continent.

A hundred thousand men were led

By one calf near three centuries dead.

They followed still his crooked way,

And lost one hundred years a day;

For thus such reverence is lent

To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,

Were I ordained and called to preach;

For men are prone to go it blind

Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun

To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,

And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,

To keep the path that others do.

But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,

Who saw the first primeval calf!

Ah! many things this tale might teach—

But I am not ordained to preach.

—Sam Walter Foss

Presidents Day Hangover—The Often Hungover Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce has been called the most handsome President.  After that the accolades taper of dramatically

Yesterday, as noted was the Presidents Day  Holiday.  You might have hoped to have escaped the ordeal for another year.   No such luck.  Today we are taking one of the lesser lights of the White House for a spin.  Franklin Pierce usually shows up in the lowest third of best to worst Chief Executives lists, but usually misses the absolute bottom tier out of a combination of obscurity—and likely pity.

Franklin who, you might ask.  Why the 14th President of the United States, that’s who.  The noble son of New Hampshire who was certainly the handsomest man ever elected to that office.

Although born in a log cabin in 1804, Pierce came from reputable Yankee stock.  His father was a Revolutionary War hero and two time Democratic-Republican governor of the Granite State.

 

Pierce's greatest service to the nation may have been giving cushy patronage jobs to his equally handsome college pal Nathaniel Hawthorne which gave the aspiring author plenty of time to write.  Hawthorne posed for this portrait in 1852, the year in which Pierce's election assured him of the sinecure. 

He was educated at Philips Exeter Academy and then attended Bowdoin College in Maine where he became the lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In fact one of Pierce’s most notable accomplishments as President was keeping Hawthorne employed in plumb political appointments thus saving his family from virtual starvation.

After graduation, Pierce studied law in Massachusetts the returned to Concord, New Hampshire to start practicing in 1824.  Gregarious and charming, Pierce won friends and clients and was soon highly successful as a lawyer and rising in Democratic politics.  He served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1828 to ’33 while his father was Governor and served as Speaker for the last two years.  Then he was elected to the U.S. Congress and at 27 years old was the youngest serving Representative.

During this time he married the beautiful but shy and frail daughter of the former President of Bowdoin College.  He was devoted to the former Federal.  Highly religious, she abhorred her husband’s political career—and his heavy drinking.  She became an outspoken teetotaler.  Despite their differences, they made a striking couple and had three children together.  Their first son, named for his father, died in infancy and their second survived only four years before falling victim to a typhoid epidemic.  Jane regarded these tragedies as punishment for her husband’s political career.

In 1836 the New Hampshire General Court elected Pierce to the U.S. Senate.  He served as a Democrat without much distinction until he gave into his wife’s pleas and resigned in 1842.  He returned to a lucrative private law practice in Concord, and then was appointed Federal Attorney from 1845-47.

Pierce still cut a dashing figure when he posed in his Mexican War Brigadier uniform in 1852.

With the outbreak of the Mexican War, generally unpopular in New England, Pierce enlisted as a Colonel of Volunteers.  Once in Mexico, he was promoted through political clout with the Polk Administration as Brigadier of 1st Brigade, 3rd Division and joined Winfield Scott’s army in time for the Battle of Contreras where he was seriously wounded in the leg in a fall from his horse.  The next day while leading his troops in the Battle of Churubusco he fainted from pain and had to be carried off the field.  After recovery, he resumed command for the rest of the campaign and returned to Concord a middling war hero.

In 1852 the Democrats meeting in Baltimore were deadlocked between four candidates for President—Stephen A. Douglas, William L. Marcy, James Buchanan and Lewis Cass each with significant regional support.  The party was split on the expansion of slavery, but tied to place itself above “agitation” on the issue.  The platform called for support of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. None of the candidates could win a majority.  On the 35th ballot Pierce’s name was put up as a possible compromise—a Northern man with Southern sympathies and a record as a war hero.  He finally the won nomination on the 49th ballot, probably the most obscure man ever to win a major party nomination.

 

A Democratic Party poster for the 1852 campaign with Vice Presidential nominee Rufus King of Alabama who would die just a month after the Inauguration.

If the Democrats were in disarray that year, the Whigs were busy dying after the disastrous accidental presidency of John Tyler.  Their great men—Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—refused to get out of each other’s way.  Instead the party nominated war hero Winfield Scott.  But Scott was a pompous campaigner and as an anti-slavery Virginian lost the support of the south.  

In the General Election Old Fuss and Feathers was humiliated at the hand of his former subordinate.  Pierce won the Electoral votes 27 of the 31 states, including Scott’s home state of Virginia.

He was, at 48 years old, then the youngest man ever elected to the office.

But tragedy struck before his inauguration.  On his way to Washington the train carrying the President Elect and his family derailed.  His wife was injured and his last surviving son, 11 year old Benjamin was decapitated before his eyes.  The tragedy unhinged both Pierce and his wife, who blamed the death on her husband’s career.

Pierce was devoted to his lovely,  shy, and deeply religous wife Jane who hated her husband's career and his sole surviving son Benjamin.

Once in Washington Jane withdrew from her husband and official duties as hostess.  Pierce spent most of the first year in office alone in a darkened room drinking himself insensible.  When his Vice President, former Alabama Senator Rufus King died just thirty days after inauguration , Pierce’s Party fearing for his sanity and ability to serve his term fretted that he had no clear successor.

Pierce eventually recovered enough to perform his duties, although he continued to drink heavily.  He steadfastly supported the Kansas Nebraska Act, including the hated provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act and generally pursued a policy of conciliation with the South while decrying the “agitation” of Northern Abolitionists.  His closest adviser and political supporter was his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis.  

As President Pierce relied heavily on his Secretary of War Jeffeson Davis of Mississippi.  The two men cooresponded privately during the Civil War in lettrers some historians say bordered on treason.  Luckily for Pierce they were not discovered until after his death.

His policies led to a decade of virtual civil war in Bloody Kansas between slave state settlers and their Missouri Border Ruffian allies, and Northern Free Soil settlers supported by Abolitionists.

At every juncture where there was sectional conflict, Pierce sided with the South on the justification that it was necessary to preserve the Union.

By the end of his four year presidency his Party was splintered sectionaly.  Noone wanted a second Pierce term.  The party finally settled on his Secretary of State James Buchanan, another Doughface Democrat—a Northerner with Southern principles.

Pierce retired to New Hampshire to try and win back the affection of his alienated wife.  They traveled abroad.  When they returned home, Pierce began speaking publicly against “abolitionist agitation.”  He was briefly considered for re-nomination in 1860 but declined and the Democrats split among three sectional candidates.

During the war he was an outspoken opponent and critic of the Lincoln Administration and the President’s war aims.  When Secretary of State William Seward accused him of being a member of the seditious secret Knights of the Golden Circle—a militant Copperhead group flirting with allying themselves with the Confederacy in armed rebellion in Ohio and border states.  Pierce demanded he present proof in what became an embarrassing scandal for both men.

At the end of the war when Jefferson Davis’s  papers were captured, very friendly letters from Pierce to the Confederate President were found—so friendly many thought they verged on treason.

Pierce’s wife Jane had died in 1863.  And now his reputation was in tatters.  He was drinking more than ever.  On October 8, 1869 he died in Concord of cirrhosis of the liver.

With no close heirs save a nephew, he divided his estate with generous gifts to several friends, including a provision for the children of old pal Nathaniel Hawthorne.