Ten Worst Presidents: Introduction
Is George W. Bush's presidency shaping up to be one of the worst in U.S. history? You hear the question being asked more and more these days. And more and more, you hear the same answer. With Iraq a shambles and trust in the administration declining, it is probably not surprising that 54 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Gallup survey said that history would judge Bush a below-average or poor president, more than twice the number who gave such a rating to any of the five preceding occupants of the White House, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Public opinion is a notoriously fickle beast, of course, which is why historians, political scientists, and other custodians of the long view usually prefer to reserve judgment until they can speak of their subjects in the past tense. But clearly there is something about Bush II—or possibly the overheated climate of contemporary national politics—that has inspired many historians to abandon their usual caution. Meena Bose, a Hofstra University political scientist who has written about presidential ratings, says that the scholars' rush to rank the current president comes out of an acute awareness of the long-term consequences of his policies. "Since it's hard to see how Iraq will work out for the better," Bose says, " it's hard not to pass judgments."
Whatever his reasons, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz created a minor sensation last year when he published a resounding verdict in Rolling Stone magazine: "Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents." Wilentz's bill of particulars was not surprising: the quagmire in Iraq, "monster" deficits, the inadequate response to the Katrina disaster, and assorted arguable abuses of presidential power. But that he would so fully abandon the historian's distrust of "presentism" was a bit of a surprise. Bush partisans had a ready explanation for that assessment: liberal bias. But while Wilentz makes no secret of his liberalism, he referred to pointed out that his was not a lonely voice in the history crowd. He cited an informal survey of 415 historians in 2004 in which 81 percent of the respondents stated that the Bush administration would go down as a failure.Later, a cluster of article in the Washington Post asked whether Bush would rank among the worst presidents, and four out of five of the participating historians made a case that he would.
I fear that we are getting too far into the Bush presidency, which takes us off trackSo was there something more than partisan bias at work here? Bush loyalists don't think so. Giving voice to what many of them believe, one dissident among the History News Network respondents opined that the results would reveal more about the liberal-left bias of today's professoriat than they would about Bush's performance in relation to that of other occupants of the White House. And even one of the instigators of the survey, historian Robert McElvaine of Millsapps College, conceded that it was too early to make meaningful comparisons.
Bush's own view of how history will treat him comes across in his frequent allusions to Harry Truman, another famously unpopular sitting president whose reputation rose sharply as scholarsand the public began to appreciate his role in laying the foundations for America's success in the Cold War.As Bose points out, however, it is Bush's perceived failure to build similarly effective foundations for the long-term war on terror that has made so many scholars so uncharacteristically quick to judge. And if Iraq turns out to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East 10 years from now, there will be a lot of scholars eating crow.
Attempts to rate the Bush presidency are at best premature, but they do raise valuable questions about presidential ratings in general and failed presidencies in particular. Is there, to begin with, a scholarly consensus on who America's worst chief executives are? If there were a negative Mount Rushmore, which presidents would have their faces carved into it? What qualities seem to distinguish poor presidencies? And finally, and is there any failing that seems to weigh more heavily than others? And last but not least do rankings really help us understand presidential leadership and individual presidencies, or do they, in the words of Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein, "divert attention from the full range of presidential experience"?
Are they simply parlor games that say more about the biases, partisan or otherwise, of the people who do the rating?
As it turns out, those questions have been asked ever since scholars got into the business of ranking presidents. Fred Greenstein, chairman of the Program in Leadership Studies at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, charges that ratings "divert attention from the full range of presidential experience."The ambiguities and mixed performances of our past chief executives are far more instructive, he argues, than what you get when you reduce a president to a place on a ladder. Having written an outstanding book on the Dwight D. Eisenhower (The Hidden-Hand Presidency), which provided a significant upward revision of that president's ability and accomplishments, Greenstein has good reason to question the mutability of judgements, even those of scholars. Yet as critical asis of presidential rankings, his own study of the qualities that constitute presidential leadership (The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton) has been picked up and used by designers of many of the major polls. Perhaps not altogether innocently, Greenstein has contributed to the game.
Credit, or blame, for the first scholarly ranking of the presidents usually goes to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who conducted a poll for Life magazine in 1948. He asked 55 specialists in American history to rate the presidents as great, near great, average, below average, or failure. Abraham Lincoln topped the list, followed by George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Claiming the cellar of that list were Warren G. Harding and, in ascending order, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, John Tyler, Benjamin Harrison, and Herbert Hoover.
Surprising, perhaps, is how closely later scholarly polls would track with Schlesinger's list of the worst, including Schlesinger's own 1962 reprise of the exercise and his son Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, 1996 pollThe hardy perennials among the worst are the pre-Civil War crew of Pierce, Buchanan, Taylor, Fillmore, and Tyler. (William Harrison could have been included, but Schlesinger omitted him, along with the much later Garfield, because of a precipitously short term of office, a courtesy that few other subsequent polls granted those short-timers.) More volatile are the rankings of Grant and a president who did not even earn a place on the first 10-worst list: Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second-term vice-president and successor, would earn a place of unenviable distinction on most subsequent lists. As time rolled on, of course, there would be new contenders for the bottom spots, including Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.
What broad lesson could be drawn from this first scholarly poll of the presidents? Interpreting the results, Schlesinger concluded that what weighed most heavily in determining the best presidents was whether they "took the side of progressivism and reform, as understood in their day." Though Schlesinger did not say so, the quality that characterized most of the failed presidencies, reflected in the choice of so many ineffectual pre-Civil War presidents and Hoover, was passivity or inaction in the face of great historical challenges (or, in the cases of Grant and Harding, in the face of corruptionand ineptitude inside their own administrations). The high value placed on executive energy could be said to reflect a liberal bias, but it also reveals the influence of a less strictly partisan ideal of the presidency as a strong, activist branch of government. That ideal goes back to the arguments of Alexander Hamilton in his contributions to the Federalist, and it has has been embodied in presidencies as different as those of Andew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, though in none more vigorously than FDR's. "If there is a common denominator in presidential assessments," argues Princeton's Greenstein, "it is a bias toward activism, unless the activism is viewed as misplaced, as in the instances of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam and Nixon and Watergate."
To test whether that or any other generalizations about presidential performances, particularly failed performances, hold up, U.S. News averaged the results of five major and relatively recent presidential polls to make its own gallery of the BOX OUTSpecifically, this survey of surveys ranks the 10 worst presidents based on the average of the choices for the 1 0 worst in those five polls. We awarded 10 points for the lowest position on any poll and one point less for each successively higher spot on a poll, up through the tenth worst.)We did not include the current occupant of the White House, and in any case he does not make the 10-worst list on any of the surveys in which he was included. Furthermore, because large polls—and averages of the findings of such polls—tend to cancel out quirky and idiosyncratic judgements that often reveal more about the ambiguities and mixed achievements of a presidency, we have also surveyed a much smaller pool of specialists to learn how and why their choices differ from the usual suspects.
A brief word about the polls themselves. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s 1996 poll surveyed 32 specialists, mostly historians and political scientists but also two politicians. It used the same five categories that his father's did, and, with few exceptions, the respondents were liberal to left in their politics. The 1996 Riding-McGiver survey, conducted by attorney William Ridings and magazine editor Stuart McGiver, polled 719 historians and political scientists as well as selected politicians, activists, and journalists, asking them to rank the presidents in five broad categories of performance and also to list their picks for the 10 best and 10 worst presidents. The 1999 C-Span poll called on approximately 90 historians and presidential experts, asking them to rate the presidents according to 10 criteria adding up to overall performance. (C-Span also ran a viewer poll at the same time.) The 2002 Sienna Research Institute polled more than 200 academic specialists, asking them to consider 20 categories including overall performance. The 2005 Wall Street Journal poll, conducted with the conservative Federalist Society, sought a balance of identifiable liberals and conservatives among the some 130 scholars it approached. Eighty-five scholars responded, rating the president on a five-point scale, the mean scores being adjusted to give equal weight to liberal- and conservative-leaning respondents.
10 worst presidents—actually 11, because of a tie at ninth place. Here is the U.S. News list of the least successful presidencies: as well as a few runners-up. From the bottom up James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, John Tyler, Ulysses Grant, William Harrison, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon (in a dead heat for the #9 spot), and Zachary Taylor. The three runners-up, who qualify by dint of receiving at least one point for a bottom-10 spot, are Jimmy Carter, Calvin Coolidge, and, tied for 13th, James Garfield and Chester Arthur.
What immediate lessons can we learn from this ranking? The first is that it tracks very closely with the results of Schlesinger, Sr.'s 1948 poll, with some pointed exceptions. The second is that there is remarkable consistency in the choices across all the more recent polls, particularly for the three worst presidents, even on those polls that would be considered most politically or ideologically shaded: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s to the left, the Wall Street Journal's at least somewhat closer to the right. To be sure, there are some differences in the rankings, even interesting ones. Why, for instance, does Grant, who has climbed out of the bottom-three class of the 1948 Schlesinger poll, continue to climb fairly steadily even across the relatively short chronological span represented by these polls? Does this change reflect the close and largely favorable scholarly attention given to Grant during the last dozen or so years, or does it hint at a subtle shift rightward among historians? (If the latter, the Wall Street Journal poll, which ranks Grant 12th from the bottom, perhaps best captures that shift.)
Beyond generalities, what is it, then, about these particular presidents that earned them their dubious place in history, starting with Buchanan, the 15th president of the Union and Abraham Lincoln's immediate predecessor?