Every now and again a magazine incites a group of historians to pick the best and worst presidents. And there, at the bottom of their scale, I typically find James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson; Warren Harding, and/or Ulysses Grant, none of whom deserve the dishonor, in my opinion. For Pierce and Buchanan, their high crime was to not solve the slavery /succession problem — as if this was a problem that any PhD historian would have been able to solve in a weekend. It was not so simple; the slavery question bedeviled the founding fathers, tormented Daniel Webster and Henry Clay; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrestled with it. None could solve it, and we accept that they served the country well, promoting prosperity and relative levels of good feeling. Now, in the 1850s, Pierce and Buchanan inherit this monster, the slave issue, and we blame them for not resolving it when the nation was at the boiling point and Kansas was burning. They did the best they could in impossible circumstance, buying us time. Pierce also bought us southern Arizona and helped open Japan.
Similarly, with Johnson: our historians’ complaint is that he didn’t manage reconstruction well — as if any one of them could have done better. You can’t blame a person for failing in a hopeless situation. Be happy they filled their terms, avoided war with our neighbors, and left the country richer and more populous than they found it.
Moving on to Grant and Harding, their crime was to be president at a time of scandal. But the very essence of this condemnation is that it presents the scandal, a non-issue in the large sweep of America, as if it were the only issue. Both Harding and Grant drank in the white house, and played cards while members of their cabinets stole money. These are major scandals to blue noses, but not so relevant to normal people. Most presidents drank, and many had corrupt associates. Both presidencies were periods of prosperity, employment, and growth. Both presidents paid down the national debt. Harding paid down $2,000,000 of debt, a good chunk of the debt from WWI. Grant paid down a similarly large chunk of the debts of the civil war. Both oversaw times of peace, and both signed peace treaties: Harding from WWI, Grant from the civil war and the Indian wars. Both left office with the nation far more prosperous than when they came in. No, these are not bad presidents except in the eyes of puritans who require purity in everyone but them, and care little for the needs of the average American.
The worst president, in my opinion, was John Adams, and I would say he set a standard for bad that’s not likely to be beat. How bad was Adams? He oversaw the worst single law ever in American history, the Sedition act. This act, a partner to the Alien act (almost as bad), was pushed though by Adams a mere 8 years after passage of the bill of rights. The act made it illegal to criticize the government in any way. In this, it made a mockery of free expression. Adams put someone in jail for calling him “his rotundancy” — that is, for calling him fat. The supreme court had to step in and undo this unbelievably horrible law, but this was only one of several horrible acts of president Adams.
Another horrible act of president Adams is his decision to pick a war with France, our ally from the revolution. Adams himself had signed the treaty of Paris guaranteeing that we would never go to war with France. So why did Adams do it? He was a puritan, literally. He didn’t like French immorality and hated French Catholicism. He was insulted that French officials had overthrown their king (not that we had done otherwise) that they wore fancy clothes, and that they wanted bribes. He leaked their request for bribes to the press (the XYZ affair) and presented this as the reason for war. So Adams, pure Adams, got us to war with our oldest ally, a war we could not win, and didn’t.
But Adams didn’t stop there. Having decided to go to war, he also decided to stop paying on US debt to the French. He was too pure to pay debt to a nation that overthrew its king and set up a more-egalitarian state than we had. One where slavery was abolished.
Adams, of course, did nothing to address slavery, though he berated others about it. And it’s not like Adams didn’t pay out bribes, just not to the despised Catholics. At the beginning of Adams’s single term a group of Moslems, the Barbary pirates, captured some American ships. Adams agreed to pay bribe after bribe to the Barbary Pirates for return of these US ships. But the more we paid, the more ships the Barbary pirates captured. So Adams, the idiot, just bribed them more. By the end of Adams’s term, 1/4 of the US budget went to pay these pirates. When Jefferson became president, he ended the war with France by the simple solution of buying Louisiana and he sent the US Marines to deal with the pirates of North Africa. Adams could have done these things but didn’t; Jefferson did, and is ranked barely above Adams as a result. So why is it that no historian calls out Adams as an awful president? I think it’s because Adams wrote beautifully about all the right sentiments, including to his wife. Historians like writers of high sentiment. According to 170 scholars, the top ten presidents, not counting those on Mount Rushmore are FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Obama, and LBJ, all of them fairly recent.
The bottom ten presidents. And there’s Trump at the very bottom, with the usual suspects. Harrison was only president for a month.
And that brings us to the new poll. It puts William Henry Harrison among the worst. Harrison took office, became sick almost immediately, and died 31 days later of Typhoid. The white house water supply was just down river from the sewage outlet, something you find in Detroit as well. He did nothing to deserve dishonor except drinking the water. he ran a great presidential campaign, BTW. His campaign song, Tippecanoe and Tyler too is wonderful listening, even today.
And that brings us to the historian’s worst of the worst. The current president, Donald J. Trump. This is remarkable since it’s only a year into Trumps term, and since he’s done a variety of potentially good things: He ended a few trade deals and regulations that most people agree were bad, and made some that most people agree are good. A result is that the stock market is up, employment is up, people are back at work, and historians are unhappy. What they want is another FDR, someone who’ll tell us: “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” whatever that means; who overspends liberally and oversees 9 years of the Great Depression. By historian polls, FDR is the second or third best president ever.
Robert Buxbaum. April 25, 2018. Semi-irrelevant: here’s a humorous song about Harrison. Two other bad presidents: James Madison and Zachary Taylor. Madison started a war against Britain without preparing, and Taylor crafted the horrible compromise of 1850.
