This week is Presidents’ Week, so we get Presidents’ Day Sales and Presidential rankings. The New York Times reported on a new ranking by historians that placed Joe Biden 14th and Donald Trump last. The only problem with the Times reporting is that the ranking was done by political scientists, not by historians. According to the political scientists, Biden’s major accomplishment, the one that earned him a relatively high ranking, was getting Trump out of the White House.
Respondents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey are members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. 525 experts were asked to evaluate the 45 Presidents and 154 responded.
The top ten contained some surprises. Abraham Lincoln once again ranked first, but Franklin Roosevelt moved into the second slot ahead of George Washington. Theodore Roosevelt was 4th, Thomas Jefferson was 5th, Harry Truman 6th, Barack Obama 7th, Dwight Eisenhower 8th, Lyndon Johnson 9th, and John F. Kennedy was 10th. Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Andrew Jackson saw significant drops since 2015 as their reputations were reevaluated, Wilson 9 slots to 15th, Reagan 12 slots to 16th, and Jackson 15 slots to 21.
None of the Presidents are without serious blemishes and Jefferson, Truman, Obama and Kennedy were definitely overrated. Jefferson scores high because of his earlier career and his role in writing the Declaration of Independence, but his achievements as President were minimal. John Adams, who surrendered the Presidency to Jefferson and established the principle of smooth Presidential transition after Jefferson won the Electoral College because the 3/5th Compromise gave extra votes to Southern slaveholders, should probably be rated higher than him. Harry Truman, famous for his desk sign “The Buck Stops Here,” was responsible for dropping atomic bombs on undefended civilian populations in Japan and for initiating an Executive Branch purge of suspected leftists, predating McCarthyism. Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy are better remembered for their personalities and appearance, than for their achievements. Lyndon Johnson was a much better politician than Kennedy and is responsible for landmark Civil Rights legislation. Johnson’s presidency was severely damaged by escalation of the war in Vietnam, policies inherited from his predecessor. Obama probably needed more experience as a politician before he was elected President. Despite overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate his signature health care initiative was far short of what was possible to achieve, immigration reform did not happen, Bush era high-stakes student testing policies continued, and little headway was made in addressing climate change.
There are real issues with even the highest ranked Presidents.
Abraham Lincoln is celebrated for saving the Union, leading the nation during the Civil War, and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But Lincoln refused to play any role until he was inaugurated in March 1861, even though southern states began seceding soon after he was elected in November 1860. As President, Lincoln repeatedly offered to allow the South to keep slavery if they stopped hostilities and promised to readmit states to the union with minimal penalties. He ordered confiscated land returned to plantation owners after field generals subdivided it among the formerly enslaved and his pledge to forgive Southern confederates and allow them to retain local power set the stage for the next 100 years of Jim Crow racism.
FDR is credited with navigating the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, definitely two major accomplishments. But in order to secure passage of New Deal legislation he allowed Southern segregationists to write racism into federal policy. National policies were locally administered, so Southern whites could block benefits to Blacks. Federal housing policy encoded segregated communities, housing, and schools. Farm and domestic workers, two major occupations for Blacks in the south, were initially excluded from Social Security and during World War II, FDR ordered that Japanese American citizens on the west coast be placed in internment camps and that the United States troops remain racially segregated.
Presidents’ Day was originally George Washington’s Birthday. I have very mixed feelings about the Father of the Country. Washington was a major Southern slaveholder who refused to emancipate enslaved Africans while he was alive. At the end of the Revolutionary War, he unsuccessfully demanded that Great Britain return freedom seekers who escaped to the British lines to enslavement. While President and living in Philadelphia, Washington brought slaves into a city that had ended slavery, continually rotated enslaved Africans back to Virginia so that they could not become free, and actively sought to recapture enslaved Africans who escaped from his household. As President, Washington’s major achievements were establishing the new government by delegating tasks to different individuals and constituencies, acting as a broker between competing factions headed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, certainly no mean feat, and leaving office after two terms. Washington was very much a passive President who couldn’t wait to return home to his Virginia plantation.
Maybe we need a list of the least bad Presidents.