I think too many people are blaming Jefferson Davis for the Civil War. Which is somewhat unfair, as he was regarded as a moderate during the secession crisis and hoped for a peaceful resolution between the CSA and the USA. He basically was thrust into the middle of a crisis that he hadn’t made and tried to lead as best as he could.
John Calhoun, on the other hand, deserves a big share of the blame. He was one of the leading figures of the generation before the war who went around telling everyone that the South needed slavery, slavery was a wonderful institution for everyone involved, the Southern states should never compromise, and screw the Union if it didn’t give you what you wanted. By the time he died in 1850, he had essentially lit the fuse and ensured that there would be a war.
And in retrospect, even the most die-hard rebels have to concede things didn’t go as well as hoped. The war that Calhoun helped provoke ended up destroying the very society he claimed to be serving.
I don’t think he was evil either. I think he really believed his ideas would work (ideology over fact). However, the results were less than stellar. Trickle down failed to consider the greed of the “big shots”. Dumping on the other hand has no such excuse. Cozying up with “Future Dominionists Of America” was just foolish. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Anyway, I left the Republican Party during the Reagan years. Somteimes the handwriting really is on the wall.
Orval Faubus. He put those nine young African-American students through sheer hell in order to win re-election as governor of Arkansas. There is a special place in hell for people that devoid of morals.
I guess it is impossible to know what was in his mind. I tend to think he was a lot more shrewd than often given credit for. Note his change on the abortion issue. And also how, while he sang the tune of the religious right, he never really did try to do anything to deliver for them. As I said before, I think he played the religious right like a harp from hell.
Don’t know if these guys are the worst Americans ever, but if John Wilkes Booth hadn’t killed Lincoln, and if Andrew Johnson hadn’t taken power after Lincoln’s death, reconstruction might have been a lot smoother, and a lot of the civil rights problems that affect America to this day might never have been, or at least wouldn’t have been as severe.
I don’t know what the “official” numbers are, so instead here are some personal observations from that time (purely anecdotal).
I noticed during that time, a large jump in the muber of people who were homeless. Many had held jobs, the jobs had just “gone away” - lay offs, plant closures, the result of corporate raids etc. It was no longer the wino or the bum, it was working people and their families. It was people who could work and wanted to work, but had no where to go.
For everyone who gets rich (the winner) there are more people who lose.
With hindsight, who was really being played? His show of interest fake or otherwise, may have given them more attention than they might have otherwise had. It also gave them a “foot in the door” in the party.
For me, easy to narrow down to two people, but difficult to know on whose head to place the laurel wreath. Rather than spinning a coin, I’ll go for Hillary Clinton ahead of Michael Moore, on the grounds that merely being obnoxious, hypocritical and a mediocre film-maker is not sufficient to earn this grand title. On the other hand, being a deceitful, selfishly ambitious, scheming, self-promotional, whiny shrew takes Hillary past the shambling Moore to the winning post and the promise of a photo opportunity in the parade ring.
Have you read The Devil in the White City? It’s an excellent account (though could use more photographs of Holmes and an architectural rendering of his murder mansion. (Leonardo DiCaprio bought the film rights to it, incidentally.)
I don’t blame him for the war itself (by the late 1850s that was pretty much unavoidable), but for the extension of it. I can’t even fault the general philosophy behind the early campaigns (“If we win some victories, the North will decide 'this isn’t worth fighting over and let us go”) but when it became very clear that the North was going to fight an all-out war and that the South (at first could posssibly lose and later) would certainly be defeated, he should have sued for great peace terms (which before July 1863 he would have gotten- he probably even could have kept his slaves for at least another generation at that point. Instead he drug it out until the South was completely devastated, not a house on either side of Mason-Dixon was without its dead and the two regions hated each other worse than ever.
Its hard to take this thread very seriously. Hillary Clinton? Ronald Reagan?? Of all the American’s in our entire history, guys who murdered hundreds or thousands, backed us into Civil war or perpetrated genocide against the Native American population, perpetuated Slavery or attempted to keep Black from voting in the South by force and intimidation…you guys picked THEM??? Seriously?
Personally I feel the Mickey Mouse was by far the worst American…
It doesn’t, even though they owned them de jure but not de facto as the portion you failed to quote made plain. However, and by the same token, how does a few Cherokee owning slaves — setting aside the enumerated mitigations — excuse nearly wiping out a whole race of human beings and herding the survivors to barren rockland two thousand miles from home, while confiscating everything that they were forced to leave behind?
I didn’t come with the “reply” button, my apologies. Still nothing in that paragraph says that the slaves were in fact not slaves. I work outside with a shovel that does not mean I do not own my shovel. Nor does allowing the children to remain free change the fact that their parents were slaved.
I never said it did nor did anyone else in this thread. The quote you replied to differentiated between Cherokee that owned slaves and those that didn’t. Whether those that did own slaves deserve sympathy for being forcibly relocated is a matter for another thread.
She’s perhaps not the top of the list, and most Dopers have probably never even heard of her. But I present for consideration Judy Martz, former governor of Montana. There are many politicians for whom education is a very low priority. I can understand that. I’ll never vote for such a politician, mind, but I can at least understand the position. Ms. Martz, however, is the one politician I’ve ever heard of who was actively against education, a position I find not only reprehensible but unfathomable.
Meanwhile, roger_thornhill, it seems to me that “deceitful, selfishly ambitious, scheming, and self-promotional” are all prerequisites for any politician of any party. I’m not convinced that “whiny shrew” properly describes Senator Clinton, but even if it does, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that makes her the worst American in history.
