I surpirsed that Grant only garnered a few mentions.
Why, I hate FDR so much I won’t even touch a nickel!
Just kidding. I’m Canadian and our nickels have beavers on them.
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Millions of slaves and great damage to the United States don’t count as reasons, eh? Convenient.**
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You missed my point. The “great damage”??? You mean phsyical? Yeah it was caused by something called the Civil War, which wouldn’t have happened if he had let them secede.
You mean damage to the institution? Well that would be like saying that I refuse to let my wife divorce because she is doing damage to the institution of our marriage.
Slavery? That’s why I mentioned that Lincoln said he did not go to war to “free the slaves”. So you can’t turn around and say, “weren’t the slaves worthy of being freed”? Maybe, but that’s not why he went to war. He went to war to preserve the union. He said “if I could preserve the union and have the slaves still slaves, I’d do it.” So yes, slavery caused the South to rebel, but it didn’t cause him (Lincoln) to fight the rebellion in the interest of freeing them. At least, that’s what he said.
**
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Err, wait. What? The South didn’t secede because Lincoln abolished slavery. He made zero attempt to do so. They did so, in part, because they THOUGHT he would (even though he said he wouldn’t). If Lincoln had freed the slaves, and then the war happened, this argument might make sense. What could Lincoln have done to preserve the Union? Made slavery legal everywhere? **
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I didn’t say he tried to outlaw it. What could he have done to preserve the union? That’s my point. He should have let it go. If they want to be on there own, why is that a terrible thing? Other than slavery (which is not why he wanted to fight them…he was not fighting to “abolish slavery”), why is it terrible when people go their separate ways? Ever hear of “self-determination”? Why did that not apply to the South?
I don’t think slavery is that much different economically than the system that replaced it, share cropping. In slavery, blacks got no wages and subsistence level food and lodging and were treated cruelly. In share cropping blacks worked on their own, but were paid subsistence level wages barely good enough to afford the shacks they lived in. The shacks probably weren’t that much different than slave quarters…so what was the difference, other than the treatment was obviously crueller under slavery?
I think the South would have realized that they could abolish slavery and it would have died out.
It would have been replaced by apartheid? Wasn’t it anyway?
I think history will show George W. Bush as one of the worst. He gets my vote for many reasons. For presidents, I think his intelligence is among the lowest. His fiscal irresponsibility, and for his lack of leadership, both domestic and internationally or other reasons. Hell, he couldn’t lead a horse to water; let alone make him drink. I’m embarrassed to see his mug on TV, and to hear him stumble over sentences. Does anyone have on record where he actually completed three complete sentences from a unprepared speech, without messing it up with a stutter, a pause, a mispronunciation , or him losing his train of thought? Alright, how about two then? Without his daddy’s name, to this day he probably would have ended up flipping burgers for some fast-food chain. Hypocrisy comes to mind when I think of Dubya. The more I read about his life; his drunken years till he was 40; him refusing to answer questions about drug use; so many of his business dealings and records that are sealed in secrecy and not for public viewing; and for his daddy’s pull to get him in the National Guard, and even while there he was AWOL are just some more reasons. His former TX drivers license has also been pulled and was reissued, for what I think were called national security reasons. Yeah, right, and we seen what was on his Maine drivers license. Yet this man ran on a campaign that he was going to restore honor and dignity back in the White House. He’s running the country about as well as any of his previous businesses. His fiscal irresponsibility by taking hundreds of billions of dollars in annual surpluses before he was in office, to over a half a trillion in IOU’s a couple of years later is inexcusable. The last nincompoop who showed this much fiscal irresponsibility was his daddy whose last year in office had over 300 billion in debt. Dubya easily smashed that record. Republicans claim how conservative they are, particularly being fiscally conservative. Finally they got what they wanted and have a Republican Congress now; it would be a good time to start showing it.
JZ
Abraham Lincoln - he changed our governement from being a “federation” of states into a too strong national government.
Second place was Herbert Hoover for running the country into the ground, but it looks like bush is trying to overtake Hoover.
As with several other posters, Jackson gets my vote for pure evil.
Since they haven’t come up, I’d like to mention McKinley and T.R. The really got American adventurism (if that’s a word) into high gear, what with the Spanish-American war, the Philipines, Cuba, Hawaii, and so on.
When it comes to having the most deleterious overall effects on the country and on the world, I think history will show Dubya to be the worst (to date). I know he’s got serious competition when one looks at individual areas, but George II is an all-rounder.
Thinking back over some of the dimmer stars in American history (borrowing heavily from my recollection of Richard Shenkman’s entertaining book, Presidential Ambition), I’ve compiled a list of some of their most notorious shortcomings.
Ulysses S. Grant: Widespread allegations of corporate influence and corruption. His Vice President awarded himself lucrative government contracts.
Warren G. Harding: Posthumously derided for permitting the criminal leasing of public lands to private companies, particularly oil reserve lands in the so-called “Teapot Dome” scandal.
Franklin Pierce: Widely rumored to be an alcoholic.
Ronald Reagan: Permitted the people involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal to subvert the direction of Congress.
Richard Nixon: Nearly impeached for manipulating an intelligence agency.
Yeah, I’d say the jury is still out on who is the worst ever…
I can think of no more fitting testament to the soundness of the American political system than to note that nearly every American who has ever served as President has received votes disparaging him as the all-time worst.
Or to note that the list of the all-time best would read precisely the same.
While Reagan, Bush II, Clinton, Lincoln, FDR, even Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Hoover, may have their fans and apologists, ammo, I really hope no one copmes in here to speak up for Jackson, Harding, or Grant.
I mean, some people were just bastards.
My list:
The trinity I named above at one two and three, obviously.
LBJ- For comitting us to vietnam under false pretenses (I’d draw contemporary comparisons, but I agree that its too soon to judge the recent guys ;)).
Hoover- Dropped the ball, big time.
Nixon- Some have been as corrupt, but tricky Dick gets a prize for being so corrupt that he was run out of office.
and I’m no fan of Reagan either, but he probably did more permanant good than harm in the long run, and it’s too soon to tell the long term effects of his legacy.
As for FDR, well, I am quasi-socialist, but look at it this way: The 1930’s were, in many nations, a time of political experimentaltion. I see FDR’s programs as an innoculation against true socialism/communism or facism. He gave us cowpox, so we could avoid smallpox.
I meant damage to the United States. Yes, a lot of damage was caused by the war, but you seem to be asserting that the North would have been undamaged by the loss of the South, as the two were largely complementary parts of the country. (I think the opposite was true as well.) There still would’ve been damage had a peaceful secession occurred.
The fact that it wasn’t his stated reason doesn’t mean it can’t be factored into a cost-benefit analysis, which is really what we’re doing here. You say yourself (coming up in just a moment) that Lincoln could not have preserved the Union as it was. Are you arguing that the existence of the United States wasn’t worth the trouble?
Like I said, this labors under the assumption that secession wouldn’t have harmed the North. If the South is allowed to act in its own self-interest, the North has to have the same prerogative. And likewise, despite your comment that slavery can’t factor into the picture anymore, Southern blacks would have had nothing that even faintly resembled self-determination. The
‘self-determination’ you’re talking about applied only to some segments of the population.
You’re correct about the terrible nature of the sharecropping system, although I’d include “slaveowners could separate families by selling the members apart at will, and often did so” as part of the ‘obviously crueller’ treatment. The fact that they didn’t own human beings on paper does count for something.
At some point. Is the slaveowners’ right to get rid of slavery on their own time and of their own free will more important to you than the right of the slaves to, um, not be slaves?
Yes, it was. Everybody who’s said so has added that conditions there in the present would surely be worse for blacks in the South now had the Confederacy been allowed to go on its merry way. Conditions would have been worse from 1860 through the present. Progress has been made toward equality since then; I think it would have been slowed or prevented from ever happening under a Confederate apartheid. Is there a reason you didn’t address this point? A lot of people made it.
My biggest surprise in reading the posts so far was any mention of Lincoln. Although personally he favored abolition, he saw as his primary duty the salvation of the union, whether no slaves were freed, some slaves were freed, or all slaves were freed. If the south had been allowed to leave peacefully, who can say the nation would have lasted or we would have broken up into a number of regional republics? What Lincoln did was put down a rebellion of criminals- he has nothing to apologize for. Without him, there is no United States.
About Andrew Jackson- surely the Trail of Tears was one of the low points of American history. But we are mistaken if we judge 19th century leaders by 21st century standards. Now we see it as genocide, but it was not seen as such at the time. Still, one wonders why he still graces the $20 bill.
Ronald Reagan currently tops my list, but George W. Bush is rapidly gaining ground. What Reagan started was the immature thinking that there was a free lunch and that we can mindlessly loot our grandchildren’s treasury. The fact that the national debt more than doubled in his tenure (in other words, Reagan’s deficits totalled more than Washington thru Carter combined!) earns him a place in the Hall of Shame. Add to that his subordinates’ felonious activity in the Iran-Contra and he outdoes Harding in the sleaze factor.
George W. Bush may top Reagan on my list, even if stopped at one term. John Zahn hit many nails squarely on the head. Add to that he put Dick Cheney a heartbeat away from the presidency. Add to that the profiteering that firms friendly with Bush and Cheney will engage in the reconstruction of Iraq. The only question in my mind is will history regard the worst two as 1 GWB- 2 Reagan or 1 Reagan-2 GWB.
Good God, isn’t anyone in this thread going to mention Andrew Johnson, the most openly racist individual ever to occupy the White House? The man who opposed allowing African Americans to vote, in an annual message to Congress, because they “have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people”, with “a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism”? The man who vetoed every civil rights bill to cross his desk, who opposed using the Army to fight the Ku Klux Klan, who sabotaged every attempt to grant land to former slaves? The guy was pure human slime.
Sorry, but you’ll have to show me more about Franklin Pierce other than his alcoholism before I include him in the pantheon. Alcoholism, by itself, doesn’t make anyonce a bad anything except a bad drinker. Absent any evidence to the effect that Pierce’s alcoholism played any part in his ability as President and he’s not even in the ballpark.
Hardly. The '70s energy crisis began in 1973, four years and two administrations before Carter.
You know, to take a different approach to this question, holding the country together is really the most basic requirement for any President. I’d say Lincoln was upholding the duty of his office, and if he hadn’t, he might be the Worst President Ever automatically - who could be worse than the guy who let the country break up?
I never thought I’d find myself rising to defend William Henry Harrison, but exactly what could he have done wrong in his month in office?
Well, he didn’t wear a coat during his inaugaral address… Probably entirely too much coughing and wheezing too.
Great. Who’s on you dimes? FDR is on ours.
Well, we can say that the South was basically an apartheid until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Which means that, as things really were, it only beat out Rhodesia by about 15 years, and South Africa by 25. Arguably, had blacks in the alternate-universe CSA of 1965 overthrown the oppressive system themselves, they might even have a better position today than they do.
It’s also possible that had the South eliminated slavery itself, that shift wouldn’t have been seen as external, and thus a point of resentment. After all, Reconstruction is what created the KKK as a response. Heck, for all we know the South might have just given the ex-slaves land out west, just to avoid an integrated society. For all that the just-released slaves would have no land or property in then-existing Southern states they would be leaving behind, this might have worked out alot better for them than 100 years of co-existing with Southern whites in which they were second-class citizens.
It’s all wacky speculation. Ultimately the only thing we do know would be different had the War Between the States never been fought is that the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war would not have died (at least not because of the war.) Fighting that war was something Lincoln could have elected simply not to do. It was as much his choice to topple the CSA as it was Bush’s to topple Saddam, and both show blatant disregard of principles of national soverignty.
Exactly my opinion. Since it isn’t specified (I don’t think) in the Constitution how states can secede, didn’t Lincoln need to see if he could find a peaceful solution and possibly allow the South to go its own way? Once states decide to join together, does that mean they are together for all eternity?
Maybe the US wouldn’t have been as strong, maybe it wouldn’t have been as great, but so what? Might isn’t supposed to make right and the ends aren’t supposed to justify the means.