In honor of the day, for no particular reason, here are my rankings of the best and worst of the 43 Americans to serve as the head of our nation. (Note: Barack Obama gets an “incomplete” so far. Based on his early legislative prowess, he’d rank high on the list, but it’s too early to say for sure.)
Best
1. Abraham Lincoln, 16th President, 1861-1865
Really, this one is easy: Lincoln led the war effort that successfully preserved a united republic, an effort that ended up ending the great national disgrace that was slavery. Some may argue that Lincoln didn’t free the slaves directly, using the Emancipation Proclamation as a weapon of war. That’s true enough, I suppose. But there’s no question that a loss by the Union would have prolonged the suffering and bondage of slaves in the Confederacy. Lincoln won the war, and the war ended slavery; for that alone, he is our greatest president.
2. George Washington, 1st President, 1789-1797
Washington doesn’t get the respect he deserves. Oh, sure, he’s father of our country, leader of the revolution, blah blah blah. He was a fine president, one who established our nation as a nation, not a loose collection of states. It can be argued that his actions in the Whiskey Rebellion suffused the idea of a strong federal government into the soul of the nation. If nothing else, his willingness to be President, not King, set the tone for most of our nation’s history.
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President, 1933-1945
Republicans hate Roosevelt, mostly because he was so very right. Pump money into the economy to help end the Great Depression? Right. Establish a social safety net to ensure the elderly could live out their years in basic dignity? Right. Fight against Fascism and Naziism to preserve democracy? Right. All three of these were opposed by right-thinking Republicans of the time (yes, even World War II), and Roosevelt turned out to be flatly correct across the board. Nothing breeds emnity like being proven right; Roosevelt has been proven correct by history, and how.
4. James Madison, 4th President, 1809-1817
Madison led the nation successfully through the War of 1812, holding things together despite talk of secession in New England and the difficulty of getting states to cooperate. While that war was a particularly stupid and pointless one, it did establish once and for all that America was an independent nation, one that England would not be able to reconquer. Meanwhile, Madison showed flexibilty and ingenuity on the domestic front, allowing him to serve as an able and skilled — and underappreciated — leader.
5. Ronald Reagan, 40th President, 1981-1989
Reagan is a great president; that doesn’t mean he was always right or always perfect. Indeed, there were serious ethical concerns raised by the Iran Contra affair. But he managed to revitalize America after the long malaise of the 1970s, and hastened the end of the Cold War, not least because he was willing to compromise his principles to meet with, and come to agreement with, the Soviet Union. Indeed, Reagan’s presidency would have him hated by the current right, who would hate that he dared to raise taxes (boo!) and negotiate with the Russkies (double boo!) — two decisions that he was 100% right about.
Honorable Mention: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Clinton
Worst
40. Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President, 1869-1877
Grant was a great general. But he was an abysmal president, who presided over a corrupt and inefficient administration, severely damaging the Republican Party and setting the stage for the “corrupt bargain” election of 1876, which effectively ended reconstruction.
41. Herbert Hoover, 31st President, 1929-1933
Hoover responded to the Great Depression just as the right tells us he should have — by pushing voluntary action among banks. It worked as well as one might expect. His big government actions involved raising tariffs to confiscatory levels, which touched off a trade war and further damaged the economy, and deporting half a million Mexican immigrants, which also managed not to improve the economy. He was crushed by Roosevelt in 1932, and rightly so.
42. Richard M. Nixon, 37th President, 1969-1974
The only president to resign the office, Nixon was corrupt, evil, and awful. The Imperial Presidency has its roots in his administration; his actions showed contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law, and common decency. From paying hush money to cover up a burglary of the Democratic National Committee to employing a terrorist who planned to bomb the Brookings Institution, Nixon was simply a train wreck from start to finish. He’s universally considered a terrible president and human being, and that’s not nearly enough opprobrium for him.
43. George W. Bush, 43rd President, 2001-2009
George W. Bush had the reverse Midas Touch: everything he touched turned to dross. Whether it was invading a country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction that country didn’t have, or strumming while the City of New Orleans flooded; whether it was becoming the first president since Hoover to actually see America lose jobs on his watch, or whether it was making a huge and unconstitutional power grab for the executive branch; whether it was torturing prisoners in Guantanamo or watching the stock market tank, George W. Bush was a disaster from the day he took office to the day he left. He was less purely evil than Nixon, but he made up for it by being staggeringly incompetent, and obviously unqualified for the job. He will be long remembered as one of the most pathetic figures ever to serve in the office; historians will laugh at us for re-electing him.
44. James Buchanan, 15th President, 1857-1861
As bad as Bush and Nixon and Hoover were, there’s no question that the worst president in American history was the feckless, overmatched, passive Pennsylvanian, who sat on his hands as the nation fell apart. Oh, sure, he held that southern secession was illegal, but he also held that there was nothing the north could do, and so he did absolutely nothing, setting the stage for the bloodiest disaster in American history.
Dishonorable Mention: Andrew Johnson, Warren G. Harding, Millard Fillmore, Jimmy Carter, William Henry Harrison
Some ethical problems? That’s all you’ve got to say about Reagan? Wow no wonder we disagree on BSG.
US presidents are all war criminals whose job it is to promote ensure the survival of capitalism. You can rank them from evil to less evil, and you can argue who is good at what they do. But by celebrating the role you’re picking sides against the vast majority of people on this planet.
Okay, I guess it can be argued for FDR to be high on the list, but…I’ll admit it, it’s hard to like him after what he did to Japanese-Americans.
I guess I’m horrified by the fact that I would’ve been in alot of trouble if I was alive in the forties.
“US presidents are all war criminals whose job it is to promote ensure the survival of capitalism. You can rank them from evil to less evil, and you can argue who is good at what they do. But by celebrating the role you’re picking sides against the vast majority of people on this planet.”
Or instead of capitalism you could leave everyone poor! That’s an exciting prospect.
You forget to mention that FDR turned the western seaboard into a detention camp…oh I mean a relocation center for Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans and seized all their property(which was the real purpose of the internment plan).
Too bad that didn’t at least merit an asterick.
And ditto to those who think that Reagan had more than just ethical problems and certainly more than just Contragate.
I’m surprised Andrew Jackson doesn’t get a Dishonorable Mention.
Reagan is one of the best and Carter one of the worst? As Maia says, they are all the happy tools of capitalist imperialism, but still.
Jeff, are you young enough that you don’t actually remember the reign of Reagan, that his support of the Guatemalan genocide counts as nothing, and that the only thing wrong with the Contra’s war in Nicaragua is that there were a few ethical problems with the fact that it was illegal?
Reagan’s death count is on par with Clinton’s, way above Carter’s. I think that is my main metric for presidents, how large of a mass murder did they cause?
Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleansing of American Indians should, I’d argue, disqualify him for an “honorable mention.”
I also second what Charles S. said about Reagan, and what Radfem and Charles B. said regarding FDR.
You gave ANDREW JACKSON an honorable mention? That’s just barely better than giving Hitler an honorable mention on a list of best Kanzlern. Arguably, Jackson’s genocide was more successful, if less systematic and industrialized.
Then there’s Reagan. I would have put him on the worst list. He didn’t have anything to do with the breakup of the Soviet Union: it was doomed before he got there. Well, ok, he may have pushed it to decay a little faster by restarting Kennedy’s arms race and spending both the US and the Soviet Union into a budget crisis, but all we’ve got to show for it now is a bunch of decaying nuclear weapons and a big debt. He presided over one of the worst recessions to occur until the Bush II recession. All he was really good at was promoting jingoism and stroking American exceptionalism. Made people in the US feel good, but not so great for the economy or the world in general. Also he helped set the stage for al Qaeda by aiding the most radical of the Afghani opposition to the Soviet invasion. Without his influence, Afghanistan might have returned to what it was before the invasion, minus a good deal of infrastructure. And he funded Pol Pot. Lovely man all around.
Lincoln? Eh. He was a racist but it would be a bit much to expect a mainstream politician of his day to be anything but. He did end slavery, even if he was practically forced into it (the emancipation proclaimation didn’t come until late in the war and it didn’t end slavery in the “loyalist” states.) I don’t personally consider keeping the country united to be a great acheivement. The world might be a better place if the US was a smaller country with a semi-hostile neighbor to keep it entertained and out of the rest of the world’s hair. (Not but that it’d be inconvient for me: one of my parents is from the north, one from the south…so you could add “wouldn’t have to read Dianne ranting” to advantages of a divided country if you want.)
I guess I’m horrified by the fact that I would’ve been in alot of trouble if I was alive in the forties.
Not that this makes FDR’s actions any better, but the rounding up of Japanese-Americans and putting them in concentration camps (Roosevelt’s phrase, not mine) only occured for those living on the west coast. It was possible to move away from the problem. (As the family of a friend of my parents apparently did.)
However, one might also note that FDR encouraged anti-Japanese (and by extension, pan-anti-Asian) prejudice as a means of getting people excited about fighting WWII. So he was somewhat complicit in the numerous acts of vigilanteism against Asian-Americans and atrocities committed by American soliders in Asia at the time.
While we’re on the subject of presidents with high body counts, where’s Truman? The only person to ever use nuclear weapons in a war (probably unecessarily) doesn’t rate a dishonorable mention?
I’d take Carter off the dishonorable-mention list: he was the last decent, honest man to complete a term as president, and he inherited all kinds of crap from the previous two administrations. I’ll admit that he didn’t do a great job, but he gets blamed for a lot of things that weren’t really his fault. And he left office saying he was going to go off quietly and work to make the world a better place — and then actually did.
I have nothing to say about Reagan because the mere mention of his name reduces me to incoherent, apoplectic rage. All right, one thing: he made greed and hating poor brown people respectable again.
I really think you are reaching on some of these, Jeff, although you may be suffering from a disease I’m familiar with: Shrub made almost anyone look good.
I agree with the objections to Reagan, Jackson, FDR, and think Carter is underrated. And I wouldn’t give Madison too much credit for the War of 1812, which probably could have been averted through non-violent means. But what I really don’t get is how Andrew Johnson doesn’t rank more highly on the “worst presidents” list. While it’s oversimplistic to blame 150 years of racial inequality on one person, Jackson did more than anyone else to ensure that newly freed slaves didn’t receive full political rights and compensation for generations of unpaid labor. Basically, he helped restore the white planter class to power–the same people responsible for the Civil War in the first place. His actions and inactions during his presidency led to the exploitive system of land-lease contracts and Southern rule by the KKK. He was also an embarrassment as President, being semi-illiterate and heckling audiences with obscenities during his speeches. Hard to see how he’s not on the worst presidents list.
Not all of them could (or wanted to leave property including businesses or other family members) and this is where a huge concentration of people of Japanese ethnicity were located. I’m from the region so I’ve met people who were in camps or parents were.
What Amp said about Jackson. Jackson willfully ignored a SCOTUS decision (Worchestor vs Georgia, I believe) involving the Cherokees in Georgia who were facing expulsion because White Americans wanted the rich soil for cash crops where slave labor was used. This ultimately led to the “Trail of Tears”.
Sarah said:
While it’s oversimplistic to blame 150 years of racial inequality on one person, Jackson did more than anyone else to ensure that newly freed slaves didn’t receive full political rights and compensation for generations of unpaid labor. Basically, he helped restore the white planter class to power–the same people responsible for the Civil War in the first place. His actions and inactions during his presidency led to the exploitive system of land-lease contracts and Southern rule by the KKK
Andrew Jackson was President from March 4, 1829 to March 4, 1837. He had nothing to do with anything you’re talking about.
Dianne said:
Then there’s Reagan. I would have put him on the worst list. He didn’t have anything to do with the breakup of the Soviet Union: it was doomed before he got there. Well, ok, he may have pushed it to decay a little faster by restarting Kennedy’s arms race and spending both the US and the Soviet Union into a budget crisis, but all we’ve got to show for it now is a bunch of decaying nuclear weapons and a big debt.
The Soviet Union might have collapsed otherwise, or it might not. We’ll never know. I personally don’t think that it would have survived, but what Reagan did was to push it in such a fashion that it didn’t have a chance to get into other mischief and end up taking out half the planet in it’s death throes. That’s non-trivial.
Ack, I meant Andrew Johnson.
If you go one sentence back, it’s pretty clear she meant Johnson because she said Johnson and then made the slip people make all the time. And Johnson was pretty damn awful. Of all the dishonorable mentions, he’s the one I’d most want to get on the worst list.
What’s that old movie where Johnson is the noble victim of the Radical Republicans? My high school history teacher was a big fan of Johnson, and we watched that in class as if it was gospel, not as a lesson in how people tend to view history through the lens of their own times. This was the same man who told us slavery “wasn’t that bad because the slave owners never beat their slaves so badly they couldn’t work the next day.” This was in the early 1990s.
There’s so much competition for the worst! Still, Dubya is talented that way.
Claiming Reagan was a “great” president, albeit not “always right or always perfect” is extraordinary. Others have pointed out that the grave crimes of Iran-Contra raise more than “ethical concerns.” What about the treason of delaying the release of the hostages in Tehran? The dismantling of the welfare state and the naked appeals to racism? The attacks on women’s rights? The blatant homophobia and ignoring the spread of HIV? Supporting terrorism in Central America, Angola, Mozambique, apartheid South Africa, and so many other places? The war against organized labor? Far-right judges who continue to erode basic rights? The attack on environmental standards and dismantling of alternative-energy programs that might have helped with global warming? All Dubya’s sins were prefigured by St. Ronnie.
Reagan didn’t “revitalize” America. High interest rates caused a recession that led to Reagan’s initial victory but ultimately reduced inflation. And then Reagan presided over a huge transfer of wealth to the rich.
Reagan a great president? Reagan is one of the most dreadful we’ve had.
Andrew Jackson, Johnson, both were horrid in their own ways. But I agree that “feel good” Reagan was one of the worst. Supported and financed governments in Central America which raped, tortured and killed men and women, some of whom were found in mass graves.
I’m going to second, fourth or fifth what everyone else has said about Reagan. He is the cause of a lot of problems that W finished up. And, well, everything Yusifu says.
Were you a young ‘un in the 80’s?
I agree that Reagan probably shouldn’t qualify as “great” — in particular, Paul Volcker at the Fed (a Democrat appointed by Carter) deserves a large measure of the credit usually given to Reagan for ending stagflation, even though the Fed is supposed to make decisions independently of the president. And Carter is always cheated of the credit he deserves for ending price controls in the transportation industry, thus bringing airline travel within the reach of middle-class Americans and increasing interstate commerce.
Reagan did was to push it in such a fashion that it didn’t have a chance to get into other mischief and end up taking out half the planet in it’s death throes.
What act or acts of Reagan’s ensured that the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully? Not a sarcastic question: I’ve just never heard anyone make that claim before and am wondering what the evidence is.
I’m inclined to give Gorbachev more credit for the relatively peaceful and orderly collapse of the Soviet Union than Reagan personally. He was the one that chose to allow soviets that wanted out to leave peacefully*, led reforms that helped people in the ex-soviets ease into their new system, and, ultimately, did not start any fights, even when Reagan was basically begging him to. (Remember the “with enough shovels” comment? I’m half convinced that only Reagan’s alzheimer’s saved us from nuclear war, but maybe I’m too cynical.)
*Though if Lincoln was a great president for doing just the opposite-insisting that the US stay one country, does that mean that people who respect Lincoln should think of Gorbachev as a horrible leader, worse than Stalin, who at least kept the country united?
Though if Lincoln was a great president for doing just the opposite-insisting that the US stay one country, does that mean that people who respect Lincoln should think of Gorbachev as a horrible leader, worse than Stalin, who at least kept the country united?
1) The Confederacy essentially wanted its independence in order to continue holding a minority group in slavery. I don’t think the various nations that split off the USSR had that purpose, and of course they predated the USSR, whereas the United States has always had a dual, federalist nature of colony/state government coexisting with an imperial/federal government.
2) The South wouldn’t have lasted as an independent nation anyway; they were at an “articles of confederation” level of development as a country and were unlikely to get better. The trouble is that once you introduce the “you can’t tell me what to do sentiment” and aim it at the North, it’s just going to transfer over to the new boss. If Lincoln can’t tell Georgia what to do, why should Jeff Davis? If the state governors hadn’t been such protectionist asses about sending their militias to help fight the Union before Sherman was on their doorsteps, the war would have taken longer and *maybe* even could have tipped the other way. In contrast, the countries that split off from the USSR didn’t try to become one opposing group; they went back to their pre-USSR status as several independent countries.
Honestly, my vote for best president goes to James K. Polk. He has to get high marks for his effectiveness. He’s probably one of the few presidents to ever keep their campaign promises.
In contrast, the countries that split off from the USSR didn’t try to become one opposing group; they went back to their pre-USSR status as several independent countries.
Many of the first US states had been independent countries before joining the US. Admittedly, I’m not sure if any of the southern states ever were and certainly the CSA was a new concept. (But if new countries or political groups are bad…) So would it have been ok if Vermont (free state, former country) wanted to split off? How about Texas (slave state, former country)?
Incidentally, if it’s not already clear, I do think that Lincoln did a good thing by ending slavery. But saving the union per se was probably morally neutral at best.
I think it’s pretty tough to say that FDR was a bad President based on what he did to the Japanese-Americans in WWII. FDR had to make a lot of decisions during that war. Some of them are bound to have been bad. What he did in that case turns out to have been unnecessary, and it was certainly unjust and based in part on racial predjudice. But there was a war on, a war that was deciding if a rather large chunk of the planet was to be ruled by fascist or democratic governments. As in any war, you can’t wait until you have all the information before you make a decision. And you have a lot of decisions to make and can only spend a certain amount of time on each one. Did FDR blow this one? These days it looks like he did. Does that one instance mean that he’s not a great President? I would say no.
Dianne, states in the South that were originally independent countries would include Virginia (which at the time included what is now West Virginia), North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Maryland is usually considered a Southern state but was not in the CSA, mostly because it borders Washington, D.C. and the Union Army pretty much made sure it wasn’t going anywhere.
But seriously, how did Reagan deprive the USSR of the chance to blow up half the world? He nearly frightened them into starting a nuclear war at least once.
Given that:
>There is a direct line connecting our current economic demise with the Reaganomic policies of tax cuts for the rich and the offloading of enormous parts of our industrial infrastructure to cheap labor regions like India and China, and
>That the worst president ever (hint: not Buchanan!) assumed office by dint of a vote from a Reagan Supreme Court appointee, and
>That the groups that have had us all supposedly cowering in such terror that we’re willing to abandon the Constitution on an indefinite basis were given a huge boost by the Reagan administration, and
>That Reagan launched significant assaults on the ability of the federal government to protect our environment, and undid some of the nascent efforts of Carter to instill a more energy-efficient mindset in America, and
>That Reagan’s deficit-ridden budgets were instrumental in overturning the fiscal restraint demonstrated by Carter, and the subsequent debt hobbled Clinton’s ability to embark on major new progressive spending initiatives (i.e. a national health care program), and
>(All the things Yusifu said), and
>That the overwhelming thrust of the Reagan adminstration was not merely a deviation from the progressive agenda, but a repudiation of it …
… I find it utterly mind-boggling that an avowed progressive would be so befuddled as to include Reagan’s name on his list of “great” presidents. He was one of our worst presidents, and undeniably inferior in every important respect to the unjustly-maligned Carter.
And just while we’re at it – because no-one’s mentioned it yet – Teddy Roosevelt? I’m sure he’s particularly evil even for a US president, although off the top of my head I can’t remember why (Phillipines?).
But, as say, I find this whole list offensive. I didn’t know anything about Polk so looked him on Wikipedia and it talks about his commitment to land expansion and ‘manifest destiny’. Or theft and genocide as it’s also known.
I’m curious about what methodology everyone is using for ranking a president, since of course everyone here isn’t in agreement. What criteria makes for a good president in the first place? How do you determine what a president could have done, did do, and should have done? So on and so forth.
Maia:
I can understand why you may find the list offensive. Your right to call what Polk did theft and genocide. The reason why I, and so many other historians, would think of him as one of the better Presidents is because of his effectiveness. I honestly can not think of a President who has accomplished everything they set out to do, except for Polk. Of course that doesn’t say anything about his morality, whether any of things he did was right, and so on.
*BTW, Polk is a President that few remember despite his accomplishments.
Yusifu:
The dismantling of the welfare state
The United States isn’t supposed to be a welfare state. It’s supposed to be a country where the government depends on the people, not the other way around. A welfare state is a bad thing. Many of the criticisms here about Reagan are quite valid (e.g., foreign policy towards Central and South America). I’d say that putting the brakes on the concept that Americans have a right to expect the government to take care of them may well push the sum of the balance at least into positive territory.
There are people out there pushing to have Reagan’s picture put on the $10 bill. I’m not one. Whether you call him a great President would be a function of how you use the term. Consider Newsweek’s “Person of the Year” recognition. In I think 1939 they named Adolf Hitler. In answer to objections they said that it wasn’t an issue of good or bad, but how much he affected history. If the measure is what you like or don’t like about what he did, then I wouldn’t necessarily jump on the bandwagon myself. But if the measure is how effective he was in getting his policies enacted, he was at least a very good President.
Dianne:
What act or acts of Reagan’s ensured that the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully?
He ran the bill for keeping up with the U.S. so high that the Soviets couldn’t sustain both their empire (and that’s what the Soviet Union was, a European and Asian empire in the actual sense of the word) and their military anymore. I do agree that Gorbachev deserves a lot of credit as well; you have to wonder what Putin would have done in that situation. But that’s poker; Ronnie evaluated his opponent, estimated what he’d do and didn’t give him much wiggle room. Compare that with President Bush II’s comment that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and decided he was a good man. Reagan made the right call at the right time.
Plus there was the moral leadership. Remember “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”? Tell me that didn’t inspire people on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of that wall.
Dianne:
Also he helped set the stage for al Qaeda by aiding the most radical of the Afghani opposition to the Soviet invasion.
Actually, that situation reminds me a lot of what happened in Gulf War II. We did a great thing very effectively in both cases – in one case, we helped the Afghans defeat armed invasion and in the other we got rid of a vicious dictator that was oppressing 60 million people and was threatening a lot more.
But in each case we completely mucked our next move. The mistakes in our actions in post-invasion to pre-surge Iraq are well known, so I won’t review them here. In Afghanistan we could have moved in with aid and helped them rebuild, and could have done it through local leaders who were not associated with the Islamist extremists. But instead we walked away – we used them as proxies but didn’t take an interest in them directly. That left the field open to them and we ended up with the Taliban and history as we know it. As was noted in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, we did a great job in getting rid of the Soviets but then we blew the endgame. Nobody in either the executive branch or the Congress (they have to take their share of the blame) was interested.
Maia:
I’m sure he’s particularly evil even for a US president, although off the top of my head I can’t remember why (Phillipines?).
Gee, Maia, you’re sure he’s particularly evil but you don’t know why? That’s absurd. Do some research on the man before you condemn him.
Here’s a plus for the man that I can come up with off the top of my head; he was the first environmentalist/conservationist President. The National Park System started under his watch, including setting aside Yellowstone National Park, the biggest one in the system IIRC. Without him the American West in particular would probably have been stripmined, polluted and exploited much worse than it was. He was also an accomplished author (bibliography).
Actually, it was funny to see Garrison Kellior gush about how Pres. Obama is our first true author-President. Teddy Roosevelt wrote 38 books and numerous essays, etc. Pretty odd mistake for an author to make. I sent Kellior an e-mail pointing this out, but he never replied.
Sarah, chingona: I too was taught in school that Andrew Johnson was basically an ineffective President that was unable to do anything about the actions of Congress after the Civil War. Now, ineffective = bad in my book. But are you saying that he actively promoted what happened? That would be news to me. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying that it’s inconsistent with what I was taught.
I will beat a hasty retreat if an actual historian tells me I’m wrong, but what I recall is that the Radical Republicans were very supportive of more rights for blacks, and Johnson was an out-and-out white supremacist even by the standards of the day. He did everything he could to thwart attempts to protect black civil rights. I see him as a significant (though certainly far from the only) force in the failure of Reconstruction. His alcoholism and ignorance prevented him from being more efficient in ending Reconstruction earlier. It took a few more presidents to finish the job. So it’s not just that he was ineffective. It was the whole package.
RonF: The United States was supposed to be a quasi-aristocratic, slave-owning patriarchy. That doesn’t mean we should attempt to retain it as such. Invoking the framers’ intent gets us nowhere.
The fact that the framers didn’t imagine a welfare state–which would have been an extraordinary anachronism in the late eighteenth century–proves nothing. It certainly doesn’t excuse Reagan for attempting to dismantle our half-hearted attempt at achieving a reasonable standard of living for all our citizens. The welfare state is a good thing. Social justice is a good thing. It also, since the New Deal, has led to greater economic growth than more laissez-faire policies. I no more want to live in a social regime imagined by the framers than I would a medical regime they could understand.
RonF – As I said I condemn all presidents of the United States. That they had that role is enough. But I was right about Teddy Roosevelt and the Phillipines.
RonF, I’ve studied Reconstruction extensively at a college level. (I’m not saying this to brag, just to establish some level of knowledge beyond high school.) The problem with Johnson wasn’t that he wasn’t able to do anything about Congress–quite the opposite. The so-called “Radical Republicans” in Congress were trying to push through legislation which would have helped compensate ex-slaves, but Johnson vetoed pretty much all of it.* Granted, a lot of post-war policy was very complicated. There were no clear answers as to the legal ramifications for ex-Confederate states or individuals. Dividing the former Confederacy into five military districts clearly wasn’t much of a long-term solution. But Johnson’s policies and vetoes helped restore ex-Confederates to power.
The economic situation after the war was very complex and it’s hard to make generalizations about it. I’d recommend Eric Foner’s “A Short History of Reconstruction” to anyone wanting to know more. During the war, Grant and other Union generals sometimes granted slaves the right to land which they had worked for generations, with slavemasters absent. That wasn’t necessarily the norm; there werea variety of arrangements. Most Blacks hoped to form self-sufficient agricultural communities–and some did just that for a time. Others were not so fortunate. Radical Republicans, including Blacks as well as some Northern whites, hoped to provide the Freedmen’s Bureau with further powers to truly “re-construct” the South. This is where the expression ” 40 acres and a mule” comes in. Johnson obstructed these legislative efforts, which was why he was almost impeached. His policies, including his leniency towards the seceded states, allowed political and economic power to re-congregate in the hands of Southern whites in general and elite Southern whites in particular. (Interestingly, Johnson perceived himself as representing the interests of poor Southern whites, the class to which he belonged. For him that aim was incompatible with providing Blacks with any sort of power.)
Like I said before, it’s too simplistic to blame Johnson alone for more than a century of racial inequality. There were an awful lot of people who were responsible for that, through complicity as well as actions. But Johnson did prevent policies which could have helped rectify the long-term economic effects of centuries of slavery. He did that actively, with his presidential powers. It’s with good reason that Eric Foner, the foremost historian on this topic, refers to Reconstruction as “America’s Unfinished Revolution.”
*The very term “Radical Republicans” is the result of white Southern re-interpretation of history. The “radicals” were trying to secure political rights and economic compensation for freedmen. They brought us the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.
Dianne, states in the South that were originally independent countries would include Virginia (which at the time included what is now West Virginia), North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
I grant Dianne that Texas was an independent country for a brief time between independence from Mexico and joining the U.S., and ditto the “Vermont Republic,” but RonF, when were any of the original 13 colonies independent countries? They pretty much had to go straight from being a British colony to being part of the U.S. Admittedly the Articles of Confederation were weak, but their full title was “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.”
I think TR gets too much credit for being an “environmentalist.” He wanted to set aside wild lands so that white men could prove their virility by shooting large animals. His ultra-militaristic mindset had a few good side-effects, but he’s hardly someone I like to see held up (as he often is) as a model for reasonable conservationism. I don’t think we’ve had a president who could really be described as an “environmentalist.”
RonF: The United States was supposed to be a quasi-aristocratic, slave-owning patriarchy.
No it wasn’t. It was supposed to be a republic, and that’s what we got. Slavery was only grudgingly kept to create the Union and right from the beginning the smart people knew it wouldn’t last. “Quasi-artistocratic” begs a definition, so that’s a bit hard to respond to. Patriarchy? Well, that’s how it started, but I wouldn’t call it a core value.
That doesn’t mean we should attempt to retain it as such. Invoking the framers’ intent gets us nowhere.
Invoking the framers’ intent gives us an understanding of why our governments are structured the way they are and what the intent of doing so was (reading The Federalist Papers is a good start). That in turn makes sure that we understand what we are changing, and what the consequences, both intended and unintended, might be. So, yes; that doesn’t mean we should automatically retain our forms of government and civic structure exactly as the framers intended. But it does mean that we should understand that we are changing, evaluate what we are changing, and come up with good, open and explicit explanations and reasons why.
That’s one of my objections to the stimulus bill. We were told that this would be an open Administration. We were told that bills would be published and that people would have time to consider them beforehand. But what we got in our new Administration’s first legislative initiative was an 1100 page bill that our new President rushed through the Congress absolutely as fast as he could before the people voting on it could even read it that was larded up with the pet projects of a handful of insiders. That’s not change – that’s business as usual with a vengance. There was no need for that kind of speed for half the stuff that was in that bill, but Pelosi and Reid knew that there were things in there that would never pass if they had to stand on their own. The philosophy there was well stated by Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Again – not business as usual? Bullshit. It’s Chicago politics writ large.
For those who care to read the stimulus legislation, it is of course freely available. But it’s so much easier to complain about lack of transparency.
PG, the colonies publicly declared their independence on July 4th, 1775. Since they won, their existence as independent entities counts from that date, not from the end of the Revolutionary War, and that’s how it’s been celebrated ever since. The Articles of Confederation weren’t ratified until 1781. They were negotiated among completely sovereign states. Until it was signed and ratified those states were independent countries. Wiki states it well:
It’s also arguable that as the Constitution moved forward in the ratification process, at some point the Articles of Confederation became moot and at least the last state to ratify the Constitution did so as an independent country because the Confederation was dissolved.
Sure – now the full text is available, now that it’s law. I’m talking about the process from when it was first proposed to when it was actually voted into law. Hell, there were numerous complaints from Congress that the lobbyists had the bill before they did. A few days is just not enough time to properly evaluate and debate 1100+ pages of legislation, the biggest spending bill Congress has ever passed. This was not a transparent process.
RonF,
If we’re using Wikipedia as sound historical authority, I refer to you to the entry on the 2nd Continental Congress:
“Congress finally approved the resolution of independence on July 2, 1776.”
The Declaration of Independence refers to the United States of America. It was not simply a document to declare the independence of each colony; it presented the colonies as, well, united. If the Declaration were merely a document that each colony *happened* to use to declare its own independence from Britain, it would be nonsensical to consider July 4 as our nation’s birthday.
RonF,
If you’d actually bothered to click the link, you would have seen that the bill has been available *throughout* the process. The date on the post was from January.
As an Asian-American who grew up on the west coast, I am certainly not deaf to the concerns about Japanese internment during World War II, as well as anti-Asian provocations in general. I think that, until relatively recently, it’s been treated as more of a footnote than it should have (particularly by a certain type of white liberal; ignorant racists, I don’t care much about) precisely it only involved Asians. But FDR is still my favorite all-time president. I realize that US Presidents have committed war crimes, but we’re grading on a scale here.
About Reagan: to be fair, neither Lebanon nor his Contra war were any different from the long line of dirty wars of the postwar period right up until the CIA reforms of the 70’s. Presidents that I consider to be among the best ever (FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, etc.) were complicit in all of them.
But the idea that Reagan should get credit for raising taxes, precisely after he lowered them to such an extent as to create the modern state of American debt, is stretching it. Maybe, the most that can be said was that he wasn’t completely in the pocket of radical right wing interests.
It also depends on what you mean by “great” president. If we’re judging by personality, Carter should rate as one of the best. If we’re rating on policy, Reagan shouldn’t be on there. If we’re talking about historical influence, I think a strong argument for Reagan could be made – which could be what Jeff was getting at, even as he (and I) disagree with the Gipper’s policies.
The vote was limited to land-owning white men. That’s such a well worn phrase that I feel silly even having to repeat it. I’d say that that’s pretty quasi-aristocratic, as well as patriarchal. We’re not talking about social customs or informal practices that are hard to pin down; these were written, enshrined law, that upheld the very manner the country should be run, and the nature of the relationship between government and citizen. It was like that then, and it’s not like that now, because the world has changed. The evolution of the welfare state is no different.
Also, as an aside to no one in particular, from now on I’m going to be a stickler on the definition of the word “republic”. A certain type of right winger love to state that the US is “not a democracy”, regardless of the accuracy of that statement. Well, all a “republic” means is a country without a monarchy. The US is a republic – just like most modern dictatorships are. It describes nothing, holds no useful information. You could say “representative republic”, but that’s an awkward phrase no one uses. At some point, you can’t run from the dreaded “d” word.
RonF: You’re engaging in a bizarre exercise in nominalism. Republics can be aristocratic, slave-owning and patriarchal. Look at ancient Athens. The Federalist Papers are not a blueprint of the True Meaning of Our Institutions. They were written as part of an ongoing political debate. We can take part in it. There’s no need to fetishize our predecessors as somehow uniquely meaningful.
The point you seem to be making is that because the framers didn’t imagine the welfare state, somehow it’s illegitimate. They didn’t envision sexual equality. They didn’t imagine racial equality. They would have thought my (homosexual) family life monstrous. So what?
“Why our government” has its current structure isn’t because it reflects the will of the framers. It’s the result of a set of complex historical conjunctures, some aspects of which are admirable and some of which are repugnant. Worshipping at the shrine of Ronald Reagan–even if his vision of the government is closer, in some respects, to the framers’ vision than mine is–gets us nowhere, and it certainly doesn’t give any real insight into why the government functions the way it does at present.
I don’t see the relevance of the stimulus bill. Were you as critical of the PATRIOT Act? It didn’t get much debate either.
I’m confused. What has the ‘will of the framers’ got to do with the fairest, or freeist, or most efficient way to structure and run a country? Why is ‘what they thought then’ relevant to ‘how we ought to do things now’?
I ask this as an outsider. Is there some great American principle here that I’m missing?
RonF:
That’s how government operates period. When a group has the power and the consensus to do what they want, they won’t let the opportunity go to waste. It just so happens that a crisis gives politicians such an opportunity. That’s when politicians have the most power.