Grant
Still Carter.
Two different issues. Not remotely comparable.
On Hayes, in response to the above: Reconstruction appears to have run its course by 1877 because popular historians portrayed it that way for decades as an appeasement to the South. The truth isn’t even close. If Hayes “favored civil rights for blacks”, he had a very strange way of showing it. The Hayes administration paved the way for Jim Crow. If we fault the Antebellum mediocrities for the Civil War (which it appears we have), then we must lay many if not most of the worst social problems of this nation at the feet of Rutherford B Hayes.
I’m listening to my betters and voting for Madison. We need to spread the generations around a bit.
That’s the way I see it. The title of the thread is “The President Elimination Game”, not “The Presidency Elimination Game”. Otherwise my first vote would have been for FDR – wipe twelve years of Great Depression and World War II misery and tragedy from the pages of U.S. history in one fell swoop! So I’ve been voting for the scandal-ridden and the sub-mediocre in these early rounds.
However, just as people have various reasons for casting ballots in actual elections but never have to explain their choices, each voter in this game is obviously employing his/her own combination of strategies and criteria. Curtis LeMay could have just posted his own rankings, but he chose to seek the SDMB’s opinions, knowing they might clash with his. I, for one, think the resulting thread has been more interesting than a simple “here’s what I think – agree or disagree?” discussion would have been.
I’m still amazed that you think the south would have been more racially sensitive if only federal troops had occupied an entire region for…how much longer exactly? The war had ended 13 years prior so what…5 more years? 10? Into the twentieth century? It was time to be a complete country again, and unfortunately the south was going to be the south, it still is really, no matter who the president was. Do you think Tilden would have done this any differently? Of course not, Reconstruction was over and everyone knew it. Nobody seriously thought that more years of unpopular occupation of an increasingly frustrated region would have changed their tune on race relations.
And of course Hayes favored civil rights for blacks, and putting it into doubtful quotation marks will never change that. He wrote extensively about that and other progressive social issues. I have a multi volume set of books on my shelf where he goes into detail about how best to achieve the monumental social goal of racial equality in education. To borrow a cliche, he was really one of the most “ahead of his time” presidents we’ve ever had.
If you think he made some critical missteps in a very tricky situation that’s fine, but you really seem to be criminally miscasting him as a person. The only criticism you seem to be able to muster is a giant leap in blaming him for a century of southern racism, something he had no interest in maintaining and every inclination to fight against.
Well, as I wrote before, and which you have chosen not to address, the south has been enjoined from making their own voting laws for 44 years now. If you really think an utter laissez-faire policy was in order in 1877, then I can’t help you. Hayes’ actions went beyond ending the occupation. Replacing the occupation with a less onerous form of constitutional enforcement may have been defensible, but he did not take that tack. Essentially, Hayes sold the nacent civil society of the war-ravaged former confederacy down the river.
Also, you write above about what Hayes “favored” in terms of civil rights. Might you give some examples of what he did to accomplish these lofty aims? Further, you have also praised Hayes for his handling of the railroad strike of 1877. Hayes handled that strike by calling out federal troops, resulting in over 70 railroad workers dead. Is Hayes laudable for using military force against organized labor while refusing to use it (or any other means) to secure civil rights?
Sure, the man had his good points, but we’ve already eliminated Nixon, and his accomplishments utterly dwarf Hayes’. Get Rutherford B. Hayes out of here.
Rutherford Hayes becomes the fifth president within two decades of the Civil War to be voted out.
George Washington (None, 1789-1797)
John Adams (Federalist, 1797-1801)
Thomas Jefferson (Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809)
James Madison (Democratic-Republican, 1809-1817)
James Monroe (Democratic-Republican, 1817-1825)
John Quincy Adams (Democratic-Republican, 1825-1829)
Martin Van Buren (Democrat, 1837-1841)
John Tyler (Whig, 1841-1845)
James Polk (Democrat, 1845-1849)
Zachary Taylor (Whig, 1849-1850)
Abraham Lincoln (Republican, 1861-1865)
Ulysses Grant (Republican, 1869-1877)
Chester Arthur (Republican, 1881-1885)
Grover Cleveland (Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897)
Benjamin Harrison (Republican, 1889-1893)
William McKinley (Republican, 1897-1901)
Theodore Roosevelt (Republican, 1901-1909)
William Howard Taft (Republican, 1909-1913)
Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1921)
Calvin Coolidge (Republican, 1923-1929)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat, 1933-1945)
Henry Truman (Democrat, 1945-1953)
Dwight Eisenhower (Republican, 1953-1961)
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Democrat, 1961-1963)
Lyndon Baines Johnson (Democrat, 1963-1969)
Gerald Ford (Republican, 1974-1977)
James Earl Carter (Democrat, 1977-1981)
George Herbert Walker Bush (Republican, 1989-1993)
William Jefferson Clinton (Democrat, 1993-2001)
Eliminated Presidents:
- James Buchanan (Democrat, 1857-1861)
- Franklin Pierce (Democrat, 1853-1857)
- Andrew Johnson (National Union, 1865-1869)
- Warren Harding (Republican, 1921-1923)
- Milliard Filmore (Whig, 1850-1853)
- Richard Milhous Nixon (Republican, 1969-1974)
- Herbert Hoover (Republican, 1929-1933)
- Ronald Reagan (Republican, 1981-1989)
- Andrew Jackson (Democrat, 1829-1837)
- Rutherford Hayes (Republican, 1877-1881)
Madison. I personally think that including presidents’ accomplishments outside of office clouds the picture too much.
Calvin Coolidge
Jimmy Carter. Fine man, best of intentions, but not a success as president.
What did Carter do that was as bad as getting the White House burned down?
Double-digit inflation.
Double-digit unemployment.
21% prime interest rate.
Utter disrespect internationally.
That, and 1) Madison’s boys got 'em back at New Orleans, as well as 2) you’ll notice the Brits didn’t try to pull that shit again.
Finally, though I do hate the appeal to authority, the fact is that Madison hasn’t fared too poorly in surveys of professional historians. YMMV.
Ok, my Polk vote seemed more contoversial than Reagan. Hmm, then I’ll join the Grant bandwagon.
Grant
Still Madison.
Both his and Jefferson’s best days were pre-Presidency. We’re voting on these guys (or not) based upon what happened during their time in the White House, I thought; otherwise Hoover would still be in the running for his admirable work against hunger in post-WWI Europe, or Jackson for his military accomplishments.
I’ve never been able to respect or understand Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Olympics. I respect him as a person, and he was the kind of man we needed as a figurehead after Nixon left. He was a honest and humble man who genuinely cared for his country and stood up for what he believed in. But he just didn’t have what it took to be a great president.
Carter.
How much of that can be attributed to Carter? As I recall, OPEC had a thousand times more to do with it than Carter.
I don’t buy that. The Panama Canal treaty and Carter’s emphasis on human rights made more friends than enemies.
Pull WHAT shit again? Get the US to declare war against it?
The third, of course, was Carter’s response to the first, which he was handed because neither Nixon nor Ford had the stones to jack up interest rates.
Are you going to vote Lincoln for starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans?
Let me get this straight: are you folks actually arguing that Jimmy Carter was an effective president?
Hey, I LIKE the guy! He did his best. It didn’t work out. Our embassies got used for target practice, and OPEC jerked us around like a monkey on a chain. That, and his performance threw the White House to Ronald Reagan, and you saw how much I liked that. Come ON, people!
Impressment and such. Also, the War of 1812 made the Monroe Doctrine tenable, and everything I’ve read does indicate that the crown was quite convinced that the US was inviolable after Ghent and New Orleans.
Hey, I’m not going to cry if y’all bounce James Madison, but I don’t think history makes the guy out to be a bottom-quartile president. If you want to vote him out, fine by me. Like you said, going to war with the world’s most powerful nation is never a great idea–even if they are distracted by Napoleon at the time.
What would you have had Carter do regarding the Iranian embassy crisis? What could Carter have done to prevent OPEC from is rapid price increases during his term? Bad things happened doesn’t necessarily mean bad things could have been avoided.