20th: Moseley. (Unobjectionable, although I’m sure there would be quite a few votes for Churchill and Thatcher. And Balfour is arguably responsible for many of the ills afflicting the world today. And some of us will never forgive Wilson for the Darkest Day in English History - February 15th 1971.)
19th: Jack The Ripper. (A common criminal was the worst person of the entire nineteenth century? I don’t think so. Castleregah? Engels? Darwin?)
18th: Cumberland. (Agree completely with this one - some would vote for Paine, though.)
17th: Oates. (Hmm. A hero to many. Cromwell? James II?).
16th: Lord Rich of Leighs. (Can’t really vote for Henry VIII - far too charismatic. Mary Tudor wasn’t really wicked, just the wrong religion at the wrong time. Walsingham, perhaps?)
15th: Thomas Arundel. (My history teacher would have voted for Morton, but he did get the economy back on its feet. Richard III is the obvious candidate, but he’s very popular these days.)
14th: Hugh Despenser. (Yup.)
13th: King John. (Double-yup.)
12th: Thomas Becket. (Now, this is the controversial one. Apart from his being canonized, he has very strong competition from King Stephen.)
11th: Eadric Streona. (I’m afraid my knowledge of this era isn’t good enough for me to comment).
Your thoughts? Who would be on an equivalent American/Canadian/Australian/other country’s list? Is this a waste of time?
Why not Duke William? His conquest of the rightful King of England led to unceasing foreign entanglements and wars, at an uncountable cost to Britain of lives and money, merely to keep parts of France.
Interesting list, what’s interesting is that many of the figures on that list would be considered heroic even by a sizeable number of people.
An American list by centuries wouldn’t be as intersesting as we’re not talking about a very long time period.
But, from the 17th century (first establishment of major and surviving colonies) on:
17th - Sir William Berkeley, Governor of the Virginia Colony (runner’s up award to Sir Edmund Andros)
18th - Benedict Arnold
19th - Robert E. Lee (sadly I can’t list the entire Confederacy)
20th - Franklin D. Roosevelt
As an outsider I have to ask why? Wasn’t part of his problem with the nobles that he had to raise money for Richard who spent what? a month in England during his whole reign, if you could all it that.
One could argue that he created the serial killer mystique that may drive many of today’s killers, and/or contributed to the state of sensational tabloid journalism that now exists.
Of course, don’t you know that before FDR the US was filled with inventive, resolute, resourceful. enterprising people and was a place where, to paraphrase Anatole France (I think) rich and poor alike had the freedom to be without work and to line up at soup kitchens for a meal?
Aw people, let it lie. Or kiss this thread goodbye. MHyde is just attempting to steal this thread in a total hijack trainwreck. No matter how masterful a baiter he might be, please, don’t bite. Please.
The list of Rooseveltian crimes isn’t something a layman like myself could possibly compile, they are so long and so excessive I don’t have the resources, time, nor ability to catalog them all. But the big ones are easy enough to list, and most of these are matters of historical record to such a degree that I don’t feel the need to provide a cite:
-Imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese. They had by and large committed no crimes (and were certainly not convicted of any) and were no threat to the United States. Roughly 60% of those imprisoned were American citizens.
-When the SCOTUS saw fit to go against Emperor Roosevelt he responded by introducing a bill to pack the United States Supreme Court in order to fill it with “yes men” who wouldn’t get in his way.
-Made the promise, in 1940, that he would keep America out of the European war. Which is interesting considering he was actively engaging in policies that could do nothing but guarantee United States involvement in the war.
I disagree with Robert E Lee, he was one of the last people to seceed. He did it only because he didn’t want to fight his friends and family. I would have to say
1600’s Berkeley
1700’s Benedict Arnold
1800’s William Wirz, the warden of Andersonville Prison
1900’s McCarthy
Heavens, are some people still that upset about “That Man in the White House”? I agree on the appalling nature of the Japanese detention camps, but I’m not sure they was much worse than the systematic harassment and persecution of German-Americans in WWI. And it should be borne in mind that most Americans were in favor of such measures. It doesn’t seem appropriate to label somebody the “worst American” just for being the one to implement policies that most of his fellow Americans agreed with.
By the same token, I think Tailgunner Joe is also disqualified from the list; true, he was an unscrupulous, self-serving, partisan hack, but he didn’t invent anti-Communist paranoia, and he had a lot of popular support. The nasty trickery and excesses that finally caused him to lose that support were comparatively small potatoes, IMHO.
Nixon, however, seems like a real contender for the 20th-century spot. His secret spying on political opponents and attempts to claim quasi-imperial power to conceal and protect his actions were not generally popular, and the exposure of them seriously discredited his office.
For the 19th-century title, it seems as though we ought to be able to do better than a military prison warden. Surely there was some major public figure who had a seriously negative impact on the nation as a whole? Probably the Civil War will be involved somehow, though if we had to pick a Confederacy leader for the position I’d be inclined to put Jefferson Davis well in advance of Robert E. Lee.
I disagree with Benedict Arnold. Several years ago he was listed as “America’s most overrated traitor” in American Heritage. They pointed out that the victories he secured for America on the battlefield were far more imporatant than his unsuccesful plot to surrender West Point.
I will say James Wilson, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. Not only did it acknowledge the legality of slavery within the Constitution itself, but it also created the political split between slave and free states which ultimately led to the Civil War.
Actually, after careful consideration I realized that Robert E. Lee was especially deserving of mention.
Jefferson Davis was little more than a figurehead, a political hack, he didn’t start the secession movement, nor was his contributions to the CSA what I would consider the equivalent of Lee’s. If anything, some of Jefferson’s inept military actions just brought about a quicker end to the war.
Robert E. Lee I came to as being the worst for a few reasons:
-His military actions did much to prolong the American Civil War and cause greater harm to his country, both the North and South.
-He had a deliberate and prolonged internal debate about the Civil War, and ultimately he came to the conclusion that State comes before country. That goes against everything this country should stand for, and for that he cannot be forgiven.
I can, off the top of my head, think of three Americans I think I might hold for consideration as worse than Lee in the 19th century.
John C. Calhoun - He advocated the position of nullification, that any State could declare null and void any Federal law it viewed as unconstitutional. He can be seen as instrumental in the Nullification Crisis, which almost resulted in the military invasion of South Carolina.
-He defended slavery as a “positive good” as opposed to a “necessary evil” (which many Southerners felt it was) his view was extreme even amongst slave owners.
In a lot of ways Calhoun may have more to do with the Civil War than any other man.
Andrew Jackson - Various reasons. Destruction of the Bank of the United States was horrific economic policy. Ignoring the SCOTUS was bad constitutionally. Dislocating the Cherokee was cruel, illegal, and morally repugnant.
Aaron Burr - He killed Hamilton, which I’m not too happy about. Aside from that, he entertained some sort of insane plot that was tantamount to an attempt to set up his own private country in the West, and which could have led to a civil war.
Personally, I think the debate over worst Americans deserves its own thread.
For the Brits, I think the damage that Cromwell did was far more significant than Oates. Jack the Ripper was an interesting choice- surely someone in that century did something that was worse or at least more significant to the nation as a whole than murdering four people.
Cite?
Davis among other things insisted that the war continue for a year and a half after it was unwinnable (a date pinpointable to July 4, 1863). He could almost certainly have ended the war through diplomacy on far greater terms than the south got in the end, but he arrogantly refused to consider any peace terms that involved reunification or the emancipation of the slaves.
It was Davis who gave the order than any black captured in Federal uniform be executed on the spot, a literal “take no prisoners” order. This led directly to the horrors of Andersonville. (Prior to this order there had been fairly liberal prisoner exchanges twixt USA & CSA, but afterwards there were very few, causing massive overcrowding in the southern prisons.)
Davis was such an arrogant spoiled brat bastard that he took body slaves to Westpoint with him as a youth and actually did the CSA major damage by not giving more power to General N.B. Forrest, one of the most brilliant military minds the nation has every produced, strictly due to Forrest’s low birth and lack of formal education or family connections.
After the fall of Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond and practically the entire Southeastern seaboard, it was Jefferson who wanted the carnage to continue, almost like Hitler wishing a scorched earth upon Germany. Davis literally wanted to see Johnson and Lee’s armies resort to geurilla tactics, destroy anything the Yankees could use, go back on their surrender terms, etc., rather than give up. Luckily the troops and the generals were too damned tired and whipped to listen to him. When all was unquestionably lost, did Davis go to face the music like Red Eagle after Horsehoe Bend/Lee at Appomattox/Göring after the Fall of Berlin, or at least have the guts of Goebbels and Hitler and King Saul to fall on his own sword? Nope- he “ran like a scalded monkey” (though the story of him wearing a dress is apocryphal).
Jefferson Davis was an absolutely despicable individual who was far from a figurehead in the estimation of most historians and I’d like a justification of your categorization of him as such. Lee on the other hand, while certainly on the “wrong side” as we today see it (though remember that the CSA were not the only slaveowning states), lived within living memory to a time when the states, especially Virginia, had been very souvereign. He lived in a land where the most revered man, mythologized in his own lifetime, in the nascent field of American History was George Washinton (or, as Lee’s wife called him, Grandpa*). and in which the reason Washington was revered was for taking up arms in an unwinnable struggle against a central government whose interests were alien to those of the represented (essentially a bid for self-determinism). Add to this that Lee himself was not a slaveowner** and that his character was praised by northern generals. (Lee had southern troops shot for looting northern farms, while northern generals had a “burn what you can’t steal” order for the southern campaigns.)
There’s simply no comparison twixt Lee and Davis.
*Lee’s wife was the daughter of Washington’s adopted son/step-grandson.
**Lee inherited eight slaves from his mother and freed them all as soon as he had the financial liberty to do so. He loathed slavery. (His father-in-law freed more than 100 slaves in his will, just as George Washington had done with those he owned.)
PS- The commandant of Andersonville was Heinrich Wirz, a Swiss born officer whose guilt and evil remains heavily debatable. It’s true that tens of thousands died of disease and malnutrition and exposure in his camp, but it’s also true that he was given tens of thousands more prisoners than the camp could possibly accomodate humanely and nowhere near enough food or medicine for them. A total nightmare was unavoidable by him (and he did evidence some signs of great humanity).
The commandants of Elmyra and other northern prisons could be held to much greater scorn. They had the resources the south lacked to treat prisoners humanely but the prisoners were still treated hellaciously.
I never said Davis was a good guy, or that he wasn’t despicable.
I primarily pointed out that Davis doesn’t qualify because his actions were actually ruinous to the Confederacy, and without some of the military leadership he had, I think the Confederacy would have collapsed some time earlier simply due to his inefficient allocation of military resources. He had no unified military commander, or any unified military strategy to deal with the Northern threat to speak of, furthermore he adopted a strategy that sought to defend all parts of the Confederacy equally.
I have a feeling that isn’t how Robert E. Lee would have allocated the resources of the South if he had been named head of all confederate armies way back in 1861. He would have recogonized what his ancestor Washington as well as most of the other colonial military leaders recognized that it was wise to abandon a city in the face of superior military pressure. Retreat to the countryside, get more support, pick at the enemy’s line of supply, and when possible force their armies into decisive battles in which you can gain tactical superiority and impose demoralizing defeats.
Sans Robert E. Lee the war may have been over before 1863 simply because union victories in place of confederate ones in many of Lees early battles would have caused a collapse of the confederate government.
Davis was ruling over a government that believed highly in states rights. He was constantly ignored by state governors, some of whom acted with practicaly independence. He also had to deal with a judiciary that was quick to restrain him.
Somewhat ironically, it was the northern President that was most able to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. I was wrong to call Davis a figure head, but he also did not have the power that Lincoln did within his own government, and that, to me, limited how important he could be seen as in the ACW as a whole.
Robert E. Lee may have been a better person than Jefferson Davis, but Robert E. Lee hurt our country more. And plus, Robert E. Lee put aside his moral convictions to commit treason. While Davis was a bonafide kool-aid drinker.