I admit that I admire different Presidents for different reasons. There are several with a fair claim to the title of “greatest.” But if you had to pick just one, who would it be, and why? Define “greatest” as you will.
I suggest George Washington.
He was, Abigail Adams observed, “modest, wise and good.” Led the Continental Army for eight years during the Revolution, losing a lot but learning as he went, and winning brilliantly when the opportunities presented themselves (Trenton, Princeton, Yorktown). Would rather have retired to Mount Vernon, but risked his prestige to successfully chair the Constitutional Convention. Still denied retirement by his country, he virtually invented the Presidency, and guided the country through its first eight difficult and treacherous years, keeping us out of war with either Britain or France, despite public pressure and political ferment. Gave up power willingly time and again, when some would have made him king.
As always when this question comes up, I say Washington. For many of the same reasons that you do.
He set precendents which guided the nation well. I can think of no one at the time who could have done better as our first president, and his value to the future of his nation was inestimable.
If all presidents limited their accomplishments to what Harrison achieved in office, the country would be better off.
2nd is Van Buren.
But the more interesting question is, who were the worst presidents? There are plenty of choices in this category, but I think this is a reasonable starting point:
Well, Washington was certainly better than his predecessors. As for greatest, I’d probably pick Lincoln, although both Washington and FDR are up there.
As much as I admire Lincoln, I’d say Washington. I think the greatest feat was stepping down after his two terms. Not that two terms is sacred, it was that voluntary submission of power that made the Constitution work.
Tough call for me between Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. I’ll d/q Jefferson because his major contributions came in the concept of the nation rather than the presidency.
Given those two I’ll go with Washington for the reasons stated above. He defined the role and could have defined it as a MUCH worse position. He had a vision for the job and imposed it in such a way that even current office holders need to pay homage to that vision. That’s truly rising to the occasion.
Well, he didn’t do that for any great moral reason, but because he was old, and tired, and sick of the press and the public criticizing his actions. (He almost didn’t run for a second term, for the same reasons, but was talked into it.) Hence his famous comments to John Adams. “Well, you’re in and I’m out. Lets see who enjoys it the most.”
I would put Teddy Roosevelt first among the greats.
I give **Washington ** plenty of credit, mainly for establishing that two terms should be the limit and holding together a very young and diverse nation by force of will.
**Lincoln ** Forced the Union to stay one. He ended Slavery, which should have ended much earlier. I don’t have any reason to suspect that another Northern Republican of the time would not have done as good as a job and possibly better. Lincoln won a war where the North had every advantage and I believe took longer than required.
**FDR ** was a great president but stands guilty in my eyes of running for re-election past the 2nd term. A dangerous precedence as the world was turning to Fascist/Communist Dictators. I give him credit mostly for building the Infrastructure that brought electrical power throughout the country. His WPA and alphabet soups of agencies kept the poorest going in very dark times and improved the country at the same time.
WillMagic, I suspect you were joking. Why William Henry Harrison & Van Buren?
My Defense of **Teddy Roosevelt ** as our Greatest President, taken in light of the fact I am a Green Republican.
As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none.
He was responsible for the building of the Panama Canal, this was a vitally important achievement for both Commerce and Military.
His winning of the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the ending of Russo-Japanese War thrust America out of the hemisphere as a major world player.
Roosevelt also arbitrated sucessfully the Moroccan dispute between Germany and France.
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential achievements are impressive. In foreign affairs he led us into the arena of international power politics, thrusting aside the American tradition of isolationism, while on the domestic scene, he reversed the traditional federal policy of laissez-faire, and sought to bring order, social justice, and fair dealings to American industry and commerce. In all his policies as Chief Executive, he expanded the powers and responsibilities of the Presidential office, establishing the model of the modern Presidency which has been followed by most of his successors in the White House. He established the Department of Commerce and Labor;
He is to this day the most major Trust-Buster the country has seen. Roosevelt emerged spectacularly as a “trust buster” by forcing the dissolution of a great railroad combination in the Northwest. Other antitrust suits under the Sherman Act followed. He delay the switch from a Democracy to a Corporate Ogliarchy with trappings of democracy. I fear we are now rapidly approaching the Corporate Ogliarchy phase of American Politics.
Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined. He added enormously to the national forests in the West, reserved lands for public use, and fostered great irrigation projects.
He promoted Physical Fitness. He crusaded endlessly on matters big and small, exciting audiences with his high-pitched voice, jutting jaw, and pounding fist. “The life of strenuous endeavor” was a must for those around him, as he romped with his five younger children and led ambassadors on hikes through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. He was a founder of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
Small but major social equality achievements:
Oscar S. Straus was the first Jew appointed as a Cabinet Secretary.
In 1901 Booker T. Washington became the first black man to dine at the White House.
Intellectualy he established himself as a historian (he was President of the American Historical Association) and as a naturalist (he was considered the world’s authority on large American mammals and he led two major scientific expeditions for prominent American Museums, one in South America and one in Africa, each lasting many months). Had he not become President, he would be remembered for his contributions in both of these fields.
He had a lot to do with the NY Museum of Natural History being the truly great Museum it is.
What Exit, I commend you for your enthusiastic and detailed advocacy of T.R. I like him, too, very much, but just don’t think he’s in the same league as Washington and Lincoln. Have you read Edmund Morris’s books on T.R., “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” and “Theodore Rex”? Well worth your time!
I assume WillMagic chose William Henry Harrison because, dying after just a month in office, Harrison didn’t do much of anything. Which is, of course, some people’s vision of an ideal President…
I don’t give Lincoln too much credit for “ending slavery” especially since the EP covered only states which were currently “in rebellion.” Secondly, I believe that slavery, as an institution, was probably on its way out anyway because it was becoming economically unsound. I believe that it would have ended eventually, even without the war, and there might have been less anti-black sentiment in the US if it had died a natural death.
His crowning achievement was preserving the Union and for that he deserves credit. It’s my opinion that he took a bunch of loosely federated states and turned them into one true nation.
I also agree with you that he probably did as good a job as anyone else could have in the circumstances, except for the McClellan debacle-- he should have given him the boot long before he did. But hindsight is 20/20. He did the best he could.
I actually subtract points from Washington for being a Slave Owning Aristocrat. His genius was in being “A Great Man” not in any actual Tactical, Strategic, Intellectual or Political areas. I ask that you spend a little time in detailing what made Washington our greatest President. It is an easy answer and quite possibly no one has ever been better suited to being the first President. But does this qualify as the greatest.
As far as TR, my opinion is very colored by my beliefs. I am basically a Hawk, an Environmentalist, I believe in a strong Foreign policy and control over too much power accumulating in either Corporations or Unions. TR represents the President that mostly closely achieves my Ideal Candidate.
Lincoln liberated as many slaves as possible, as soon as possible. Hastening to free the slave states that didn’t turn traitor might have damaged thw war effort by convincing some of the most powerful people in those states to join the rebellion. Recall that Lincoln died in the final days of the war. I don’t think anyone has ever tried to argue that Lincoln wouldn’t have made the entire United States into a free country if he had lived out his second term. As it was, his successor ended slavery shortly after his death, and that was only possible as a result of Lincoln’s actions. Thus Lincoln gets the credit in my book.
I disagree with this assessment. For a certainty, slavery was already an infeasible system in 1861 from an economic standpoint. However, from a social standpoint, there was no sign of it ending. Among the wealthy, land-owning class in the South, support for slavery was almost universal. There simply wasn’t any social will to end slavery in the South. Thus, the only acceptable course of action was for the Northerners to come down in large numbers and start killing Southerners until the Southerners surrendered. What the country truly needed was a leader who had the willpower to make that happen. Luckily, such a leader stepped forward.
(Or as a later-day President once said: “These kind of people are not people you can negotiate with, or reason with, or appease. In the face of such adversaries there is only one course of action: We will continue to take the fight to the enemy, and we will fight until this enemy is defeated.”)
It may be case that economic concerns would eventually have forced the South to accept the end of slavery. But how long do you suppose that would take? Twenty years? Fifty years? One hundred years? For every year that the end of slavery was delayed, millions of people would suffer the worst abuses ever imagined in the history of the human race. Furthermore, as long as slavery survived, the backwards and stagnant South would continue to hold back the rest of the country, socially, politically and economically.
Nope, Lincoln is was the best because he refused to let that happen. Others may try to put forth Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, but it’s a difference of magnitude. The Southerners were far worse human beings than the Nazis or the Soviets, and their crimes against humanity were far greater.
Lincoln, just because he saved the Union, overcoming not only military but political obstacles – at the time there were significant factions in Northern politics who didn’t think the war was worth fighting. If he had failed, there would have been two separate English-speaking republics in North America, sharing a long border and a history of bad blood. More conflicts would have been inevitable, and bloody. (See Harry Turtledove’s “Timeline-191” series – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline-191.)
IMHO Lincoln was the worst president of all time, and it isn’t really close.
Let’s see…
He started a war that killed 500,000 american citizens (scaled for population that would be something like 4,000,000 now.) 500,000! Five hundred fucking thousand people died because of his actions. He could easily have just let the south secede. He invented the whole concept of the “union” out of whole cloth. Prior to 1860, state sovereignty was considered paramount, and
He imprisoned 15,000 Northern journalists for publishing views that displeased him. 15,000!!! Just think about that number for a second. This effectively silenced all other dissent out there.
He micromanaged a total war in the South. Sherman’s march through Georgia was a tragedy of epic proportions, with Union soldiers expressly ordered to take the war to civilians. It has been noted that if the South had won the war they would have been entirely justified in hanging Lincoln for crimes against humanity.
And why? Why did he do all this? Was it in the noble purpose of freeing the slaves? No. In his famous letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln showed that the slavery issue was of zero consequence to him:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. "
And in a debate with Douglas:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. " http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_on_slavery
And the Emancipation Proclamation was a total sham. Many of you will remember from your social studies classes that the Proclamation didn’t free the slaves in the slave states that supported the union! He didn’t free them in Union-controlled New Orleans, either! He freed them only in areas where he had no jurisdiction. The emancipation proclamation was a meaningless document.
So why, then, if not slavery? Why kill 500,000 citizens? Why imprison 15,000 journalists (do you all realize how ridiculous this is?) Well, as with many other things, the reasons are economic in nature. For most of his career Lincoln was a Whig in the tradition of Henry Clay. He advocated the American System of internal improvement subsidies, high tariffs, and corporate welfare. He was a protectionist. Naturally the American System was grossly unfavorable to the South, and when he became President these tariffs were put in place and the south felt they had no choice but to secede, to leave the union as they felt it was their right to do.
Lincoln’s war changed what was at that point a voluntary union into a union held together at the point of a gun. He was, without a doubt, the First American Dictator.
And this is your favorite president?
BTW I was most certainly not joking about Harrison being my favorite president. Van Buren was good because he actually managed to prevent a whopping depression in the 30’s.
What made the 30 day President so good?
As Lincoln is not my horse in this debate, I will let others attempt to defend him. I think he is actually overrated, but I don’t think anywhere nearly as badly of him as you do.
Imagine if you will, a scale, measuring the effect that a President has:
Very Positive--------Positive------------No Effect---------Negative-------Very Negative--------Extremely Negative-------------Mind-bogglingly negative
In my opinion, every president has fallen somewhere between No Effect and Mind-bogglingly negative. Note that I am strictly talking about their actions in office - Jefferson/Washington were most certainly net postives for their whole lives, but not necessarily in the Presidency.
Will follows money. Mechanization would have eventually impoverished those who clung to slavery as the means for farming. The new, more effecient farms would have captured the cotton market because they could make the product more quickly and cheaply than those relying on manual labor.
Slavery was expensive. You can pay a man a wage that’s a lot less than it costs to feed, house, clothe and give him medical treatment. While slaveholders could afford this under the “old system” the new mechanization and competition would have rendered it all but impossible for any but the most wealthy-- and even rich folks don’t like to lose money.
Remember, too, that slave-owners in the south were a* minority.* Most southerners went to war to preserve a concept of states’ rights, not to specifically defend slavery. As I understand it, there was quite a bit of abolitionist sentiment in the south, though it wasn’t as open as it was in the north.
Social pressures would have eventually freed the slaves. Things that were once “fashionable” are completely abhorrent today-- morality is always shifting. It’s not a status symbol to own something that everyone else despises.
Again, I disagree. I think we see the results in the lingering racial hatred here in the US. Part of that hate, I believe began in the aftermath of the war-- anger was directed at blacks as being the cause of all of the suffering, and we’re still feeling its effects today. If you compare racial relations in the US with those in countries where slavery “naturally” came to an end, you see a big difference. AFAIK, England never had problems with lynchings and the sort of wholesale racist evil that characterized the Jim Crow era.
In all that I’ve ever read of Lincoln, I never got the impression that he* wanted* the war. Quite the opposite, actually-- I’ve read that he was extremely reluctant and heartbroken over it. He did what he felt he must, and I do give him full praise and credit for preserving the union and making this country what it is today, but I really don’t think the war was a result of Lincoln’s “willpower” to end slavery. His will was to preserve the union, plain and simple. He’s quoted frequently as saying if he could have done it without freeing a single slave, he would have.
Slavery was horrible, but you really must be ignorant of history if you think that slavery in the southern US was the “worst abuses ever imagined in the history of the human race.” Slavery existed long before cotton plantations were ever concieved, and slaves were often treated far worse.
In the US, at least, slaves were expensive and thus treated with a modicrum of care, because the owner didn’t want to lose the work the slave could produce. In Roman times (and others), slaves were very cheap, and thus disposable.
While there were hideous atrocities committed against the slaves in the south, you have to remember that they were a valuable commodity. While a slaveholder might not flinch from making them miserable, he sure as hell wanted to get his money’s worth in their labor. He would not want to injure a slave so badly that he could not work.
Not all slaveowners were abusive, either. Some of them prided themselves on making sure “their people” were content and not ill-treated. I have read diaries of slave-owners who criticize others for treating their slaves badly. Also, some slaves opted to stay on with the people who had owned them after the war was over to work for wages-- they wouldn’t have stayed with people who were cruel.
And you don’t think the enormous cost of the war and thousands of lost lives “held us back?” During Reconstruction the south wasn’t particularly profitable. I can’t imagine that a devestating war, along with destroyed cities, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and the resulting racial tensions were that beneficial to the economy.
The south wasn’t as backwards and stagnant as you believe. As I pointed out, there were already trends toward mechanization and slaveholders were in the minority.
Even at its worst, slavery was not the wholesale slaughter of the Nazi death camps. Yes, untold millions died as the result of slavery, but it was generally through callous disregard and not the desire to exterminate an entire race.
I don’t believe you have an accurate picture of slavery as a world-wide and very ancient practice. Yes, the south had their share of atrocities, but there were far greater ones in the past-- millions of people butchered, kidnapped, exploited and totured over thousands of years by those who had conqured their countries, only to do the same to their enemies when their turn came.
What about the genocide of the Native Americans? What about the millions who starved during Mao’s Great Leap Forward? What about the thousands of people who are still in slavery today?
That is not historically true. Nor is “state sovereignty” constitutionally or morally defensible. The U.S. is a nation and was even before we broke away from Britain.