Or, for equal time, Janet Reno.
I’m not sure what this demonstrates. As to the story in the post: examples of personal kindness, while interesting, are just curiosities compared to the major works of a man’s life.
Woodrow Wilson’s failure to respond to the 1918 Spanish Influenza, & his insistance on overcrowding flu-strickened troop ships vastly increased the US Military death toll in WW1, & created terrible homefront suffering.
As generals go, he was a very humane man. (He even imposed very severe discipline on southern troops who stole corn from northern cornfields in the Gettysburg campaign.) To declare him evil you’d have to declare pretty much any general evil: George Washington caused the deaths of thousands of British and German soldiers and paid farmers/supplyers for goods in worthless Continental script, but I doubt anybody would consider him evil.)
I have to chime in and agree with LBJ being named. He had a lonnnng list of faults, but the most glaring of them all was his foisting Medicare off on the taxpayers.
Remember? “It’ll never cost more than $9 billion a year.”
Yeah, right.
I’m keeping evil out of the discussion. But I do think the humanitarian aspects of his personality, whatever they may have been, are outweighed by the fact that he was the General of the Confederate Army. It’s like saying Tim McVeigh is a bad nomination because he had nice table manners. Since the topic is the Worst American, I think Lee’s work from 1861 to 1865 more than qualifies him as a candidate.
So she’s opposed to education? She doesn’t think people should go to school? C’mon, give me a break. Is she perhaps merely opposed to the wasteful expenditure of money that occurs in public education and the unions that thwart any efforts for reform?
Back on topic, I nominate the traitors of Klaus Fuchs, Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and all the other spies of the Cold War who turned over vital information to the Soviet Union, thus enabling it to survive and thrive and kill (either directly or indirectly) millions around the globe.
Well, that’s not really true. Grant (who came from an abolitionist family) was given a slave (William Jones) by his father-in-law, who he owned for about a year, and then set free, apparently because he was uncomfortable about owning him. It’s significant that Grant didn’t sell the slave, although he was in financial difficulties at that time, and Jones could have been sold for a good deal of money.
His father-in-law did give Grant’s wife four slaves for her personal use, but they were never owned by Mr. or Mrs. Grant.
As for Lee, it’s a little more complicated. When his father-in-law (George Washington Custis) died, Lee was an executor of his estate, and part of the estate included 63 slaves. The will said that the slaves had to be freed within five years. From the will:
So, Lee held on to the slaves for just over five years and then freed them. (The will was probated Dec. 7, 1857, Lee freed them Dec. 29, 1862).
Armand Hammer certainly deserves at least a Dishonorable Mention. His insider business deals with Stalin went a long way towards helping Stalin’s regime survive.
It’s so awkward when your in-laws keep giving you presents you don’t want, and you have to explain to them at Thanksgiving where the slaves are!
His alternative would have been to head the Union army and take up arms against his former friends and relatives, or to resign his commission and sit out the war altogether and watch while his fellow Virginians were slaughtered under a less capable commander (nobody questions his acumen as a strategist). He himself did nothing to start the war (was in fact opposed to it), as shown by the St. Paul anecdote he did assist in the mending of racial relations and Reconstruction, and again I see no more to nominate him for “worst” American than any other general of the Confederacy or most other wars. (Had the Continental Army been destroyed [as logic dictated it should have been] George Washington and his entire General Staff would have been seen as murdering traitors.)
Davis on the other hand deliberately extended the war (Lee wanted it over with), ordered the execution of black troops (Lee wanted to give blacks the option of freedom for fighting in the Confederacy) and would not allow surrender (Lee overruled him). Forrest is a better candidate because he was a (very successful) slave-trader before the war and did head the KKK afterwards (though he resigned when he saw it was little more than a terrorist organization to abuse blacks), though I’d still put him very far down the list.
Had the South won that might well have been an early plotline of Andy Griffith. (I see Don Knotts in blackface pretending to be the slave that Andy’s late-wife’s parents sent over for their grandson.)
General Thomas did.
Did he? I know Clerburne did, but I didn’t think Lee expressed those views.
I’m not, and I don’t know that anyone here is saying that General Lee was an evil man. I personally think that he was a fundamentally decent man, and in a lot of ways, a tragic figure. However, good as he may have been, he fought for an evil cause, and he fought brilliantly for it. He embraced the slave-power, he committed treason, and he violated his oath, and it was partly his skill that changed the Rebellion from a one year affair to one lasting over four years.
Well, one could argue he is rubbing Pluto’s slave status in the face of Goofy all the time…
Not me, but there have been some dicussions on this topic…
Whether or not he committed treason and violated his oath would depend on whether Virginia had the right to secede from the Union, and that’s a whole other debate (and the reason some biographers and historians believe Jefferson Davis was never brought to trial for treason).
This is actually similar to why I feel Nixon should head the list. I think Nixon was fundamentally an okay guy, certainly unfit to be President, but as a human being concerned with his country his heart was in the right place.
That doesn’t excuse his actions, particularly the “Saturday Night Massacre”. (Details here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5582013/.) By firing Archibald Cox, the lead independent investigator into the Watergate Scandal, Nixon performed an abuse of executive power unprecedented in the history of the republic. If a president were to seize power away from congress, declare martial law, and invalidate the Bill of Rights, the first step in that direction would be to fire any independent investigators. It was the closest thing to a coup this country has ever had.
Most people write this off as not being as big a deal as some of the traitorous or genocidal actions outlined in this thread. Nixon wasn’t looking to burn the constitution, after all, he just wanted to cover his butt. To me, that’s exactly what makes the SNM so evil and so horrendous. Suppose Nixon gotten away with it? He would have set a precedent that would have fundamentally weakened the system of checks and balances, providing an avenue for a future despot to seize control. Even Nixon’s own toadys couldn’t stomach it, refusing to fire Cox, resigning and getting fired themselves instead. Nixon finally found a particularly spineless today, Robert Bork, who agreed to perform this amazingly unethical act.
Which reminds me - I also nominate Robert Bork.
And to the list of Reagan’s items add “Tried to get Bork onto the Supreme Court as a reward for Bork’s role in the Saturday Night Massacre.”
Well said, Captain Amazing. I will go further and concede that Robert E. Lee did invaluable work in binding the nation back together again after the war, by urging Southerners to swear the oath of allegiance, comply with Federal law and consider themselves Americans again.
Nevertheless, Lee was the key Confederate military leader of the entire war, and did his best to assure the fracturing of the United States. Filmmaker Ken Burns said a few years back that Lee was responsible for the deaths of more loyal Americans than Hitler and Tojo combined. Burns was drummed out of an organization of descendants of Confederate soldiers for speaking the truth.
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
Davis was never brought to trial for treason because it was seen as too politically difficult at that time, and because Andrew Johnson decided to coddle the ex-Confederates with an easy amnesty.
I believe her exact quote was “This state needs education like we need a hole in the head”. Like I said, unfathomable.
obviously, Carter, history’s greatest monster