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Polk was one of the most successful presidents in our history, accomplishing most if not all of his goals. He acquired the Oregon Territory along with CA and NM making us a continental power; he lowered tariffs, and the Independent Treasury Act was passed which we still have today - solving an issue which dated back to the Washington Administration. On top of that, the US started to use postage stamps; before then, all mail was COD; if the mail carrier could not find the recipient, the post office did not make money, by paying up front, the Post Office was put on a sound footing at the time.
Naturally, I am glad non of the "Virginia Junta" are on the list of the worst presidents. Tyler is not part of that list of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. (Tyler went on to be elected to the Confederate House of Representatives after his presidency.)
Polk was one of the most successful presidents in our history...
Even Nixon went to China, a landmark achievement in geopolitics.
That is, excluding the current administration, almost every single President accomplished a few noteworthy things, often as much by time and circumstance as anything else — simply being there when it was time to motorboat. I don't think cherry-picking these highlights for what are almost universally regarded as poor chief executives/administrations accomplishes much.
I mean, Buchanan? Really? Polk? You have to assess the total package, and these two fall into the very bottom no matter how nice they made the front lawn look.
I won't go out on a limb just yet. Ask me in 100 years. It has been a wild ride recently.
But the duo of LBJ and Nixon is probably the most interesting in hindsight in my last 70 years or so. Add in Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew. LBJ was an amazing, larger than life, astute charcter on one hand and a rude Texas bumpkin on the other. He was secretive and a tough arm twister but not as much of a public bully. Both he and Humphrey knew how to work the Congress. Johnson was somewhat amazing in view of more recent presidents. He pursued so many major domestic programs while waging a war in Vietnam and fending off the anti-war movement and sending astronauts to orbit the moon (leading to a landing in 1969) while the Russians were sending turtles into lunar orbit. The war was his eventual undoing...the light at the end of the tunnel was getting further away. His foreign policy attention was focused on SE Asia and he was blessed with a fairly forgetable Soviet leader (Kosygin) and developing friction between China and the USSR.
Nixon had serious flaws in his personality from the start, even under Eisenhower. He was under the impression that he was the rightful heir to Ike, lost the 1960 election and then went on to lose the Governor election in California in 1962. His comment to the press after his loss ("You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference") revealed his gift for paranoia, as if we didn't already know. He didn't even run in 1964 but supported Goldwater, probably to shore up his far-right credentials. Winning in 1968, against Humphrey, he started out with some reforms and administrative changes. Vietnam was still the albatross that it was under LBJ but Nixon was tired of the war and tried to get beyond it. He widened the war into Laos and Cambodia that enraged people at home. Right or wrong, he will be remembered for the Kent State shootings by the Ohio National Guard and following campus demonstrations. Then in 1971 the Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Elsberg to the NY Times and Nixon couldn't stop publication. That added to the paranoia and by then he was keeping an enemies list and becoming more vindictive. He was really focused on foreign policy (with Kissinger) and the trip to China was maybe the high water mark. Meddling in Chile and the killing of President Allende and the installation of Pinochet was probably the worst. Eventually things fell apart in 1972 with the Watergate burglary and investigation and Spiro Agnew's 1973 resignation and plea of "no contest" to felony charges. With Agnews departure, Gerald Ford was appointed VP and he eventually replaced Nixon after the 1974 resignation in the face of certain impeachment. Watergate eclipses almost everything that Nixon did or tried to do and Vietnam weighs very heavy on LBJ's legacy.
I think there is a category of presidents who were both effective AND failures.
Johnson pushed through the civil rights legislation that Kennedy had given lip service to but didn't mean to really do much about; the Great Society whatever you think about it was certainly a legislative achievement; but he crated his presidency over Vietnam.
Nixon achieved much that's not talked about today including the end of the draft, extricating us from Vietnam, and a whole range of domestic actions that would make today's Republicans' heads explode; but he threw it all away trying to get an advantage over a totally unelectable candidate (McGovern).
Wilson was highly regarded, set up the Federal Reserve, but let the US be dragged into WW1 and then blew it on the peace treaty by refusing to compromise.
So comparing these presidents - effective in some areas, but with a fatal flaw - to someone like Harding who was just a nonentity, is really a case of comparing apples to oranges. Is Nixon "worse" than Harding? Or the other way round?
"Dealing" with the slavery issue at any point was going to result in secession and, therefore, likely civil war. It's easy to look back and call the mid-19th century guys "bad presidents" because they didn't end slavery, but they all knew it would end the union. I don't think it's any more fair to blame Pierce for not ending slavery than it is Jefferson.
Dealing with slavery didn't mean civil war. Why is it never considered that slavery could have been ended in the US followed by peaceful diplomatically negotiated successions. I doubt with this approach more than a handful of states would have not sought to rejoin the US by 1880. The end of slavery should have been a condition for reentry. It would have only taken a handful of British ships off the coast of SC for the South to realize the benefits of being in the US far outweighed the benefits of slavery.
Slavery could not have been ended peacefully. "Slavery" changed over time in how it was viewed. When it was first established in VA, it wasn't too far back that slavery existed in England under Edward VI (Vagrancy Act 1547). Even Washington was uncomfortable with it and struggled how to free his and the dower slaves so families would not be broken up. Not once in his writings will anyone find that he through slaves inferior as humans. In VA, that started to change after the Revolution (how slavery was viewed by Fauquier, Jefferson and Washington is an interesting study) so that by the 1840's it was justified as not only good for the enslaved, but also had Biblical justification. Once that happened, the die was cast. For southerners, there was no "moral" argument to get rid of it (only the Roman Catholic Church opposed slavery in the south), rather the religious argument was to keep it; economically, the value of humans and buying and selling them was immense. Slavery was engrained in the South, by religion, by history, by economics. It was so engrained that with the exception of VA, it was reintroduced with peonage and other laws. Mechanization did not get rid of it since during reconstruction, for minor violations, African Americans would be rounded up and the local government would then rent them to factories.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon is an excellent read.
To think Buchanan could have stopped this march to war is to expect of him something approaching a miracle.
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Originally Posted by mensaguy
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I was just thinking of this and off the top of my head Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan come to mind. A complete failure to deal with the slavery issue among others that resulted in Civil War. Only worsened by the fact that Henry Clay died just prior to Pierce taking office. Perhaps the Civil War was inevitable and Clay had just been delaying it, but these two didn’t help.
I would add Taylor and Fillmore to that "worst" list, so four back-to-back.
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Originally Posted by Japanfan1986
Really you could make the argument for a lot of presidential 1-2 presidents around the mid to late 19th Century. Starting after Polk all the way to Cleveland you have a slew of presidents all regularly ranked by scholars among the worse US President with Abraham Lincoln being the ONLY glaring good standout.
The book Grant by Ron Chernow persuaded me that Grant should be ranked higher. He really walked the walk as far as trying to lift up people of color and Jews. He was fighting an uphill battle, not helped by the expansion of the role of government left over from the Civil War. This created a lot of opportunities for the corruption that plagued his administration since there was no machinery yet for expunging that blot. It took Garfield's assassination around five years after he left office to start the war on corruption. For my review on the book Grant by Ron Chernow see link, What book are you reading?
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Originally Posted by Japanfan1986
Outside of this period the only other standout for worst back to back presidents is the Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover era. So you could make the argument for either Harding/Coolidge or Coolidge/Hoover.
Coolidge is not one of the worst. I would make a strong argument for the Harding-FDR back to back presidencies and the Taft-Wilson-Harding presidencies being up there in the Hall of Shame.
Add to that the Hawley Smoot Tariff Act and the Federal Reserve tightening the money supply by a third, and you have a prescription for disaster. Now, the Fed operates without any oversight, but if Hoover had nixed the idiotic tax increases, who knows what the board of governors might have done.
It was the equivalent of the government trying to fight a medium-sized brush fire with 100 gallons of gasoline.
The pleasant myth is that FDR took the oath of office, gave his little speech how, "All we have to fear is fear itself," and the recovery began. In truth, the unemployment rate in 1938 wasn't much better than the unemployment rate in 1933 when he became president. Unfortunately, the people who salvaged the American economy was Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. FDR was a far better president in war than he was in peace.
In my previous post on this thread, I rank the Hoover-FDR combination as among the worst. Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill and did not take any action to address the international impact of the failure of Austria's Creditanstalt (sp) which greased the slide. See The Collapse of the Creditanstalt Bank. The market had actually almost recovered from the crash in late April 1930, in the so-called "sucker's rally." Sorry, Hoover owns the Depression. And about FDR, the less said the better. He was a bad man as well as a bad President. As far as his vaunted war leadership, he was being pushed by Churchill in good directions and Stalin in not-so-good ones. He orated well but basically was an empty suit. Just ask Eleanor and Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
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Originally Posted by MinivanDriver
On to Gerald Ford. I'm not sure how one can ascribe bad leadership qualities to him. He inherited a miserable situation with a tanking economy, runaway inflation, and the collapsing situation in Vietnam. He was dealt a terrible hand and had precious little time to play it. Yet there was a decent expansion of the GDP and unemployment dropped considerably. In retrospect, if Ford had garnered 12,000 more votes in Ohio and 1,800 more votes in Oregon, I think our history would be far different today.
Ford also took the fall for necessary step of pardoning Nixon. If Nixon hadn't had some assurance of a pardon, he would have fought to the end. We didn't know if conviction after impeachment was appealable. With over 12% inflation and rocketing unemployment, we didn't have the luxury of finding out. I was a liberal Democrat, and about the only member of my high school class to support the pardon. That, in hindsight, doomed his reelection, despite a more than passable tenure as President under some of the worst circumstances in history.
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