Ever notice that some Presidents have slipped beneath the radar.
I mean everyone has heard of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. However, you mention Fillmore, and you most likely would get "Never heard of him."
I think it depends on a president's accomplishments. As far as Fillmore, he is the most forgotten president because he had no significant accomplishments, asserted no political identity, and made no inspiring speeches. His administration was a historical footnote. Supposedly, a White House attendant called him "a secondhand president" to his face.
Fillmore banned alcohol and tobacco from the White House. He conceded to congressional pressure to support the expansion of slavery, thus exacerbating the events that led to the Civil War.
His administration was so unremarkable that that some historians, in desperation, have convinced themselves of fabricated stories about him. In 1917 H.L. Mencken, in a satirical column for the "New York Evening Mail" on the origin of the modern bathtub, wrote that Fillmore "gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States." 9 years later, Mencken admitted the joke, calling it "a piece of spoofing to relieve the strain of war," but by then the piece had already corrupted a naïve academic community. As recently as 1981, a biographer credited Fillmore with installing the first tub in the executive mansion, even though the existence of a White House tub was previously mentioned in 1840, when Congressman Charles Ogle attacked the sophisticated Van Buren for being "the first president" to indulge in "the pleasures of the warm and tepid bath" alongside other "proper accompaniments of a palace life."
The Whig's mediocrity has been honored by several tongue-in-cheek barroom fan clubs such as the Millard Fillmore Society, which "is dedicated to the principle that Millard Fillmore was the most incompetent nonentity ever to hold the position of president," according to Rosanne Klass, who applied for membership in the 1970s. "When I expressed my interest, I was told I had just disqualified myself."Cmvmk
After paying a visit to Fillmore's birthplace in Cayuga County, New York, journalist Phil Arkow founded the Society for the Preservation and Enhancement of the Recognition of Millard Fillmore, Last of the Whigs (SPERMFLOW). In 1972, the Millard Fillmore Birthday Party Society (MFBPS) considered endowing a college scholarship in Fillmore's name, to be given to students with C averages. It was a grand idea which, fittingly, never came to fruition.
