The Greatest American President Ever

Where's Lex Luthor? And Pete Ross? Jonathon Horne?

Josiah Bartlet?

I've always been a big fan of Chester A. Arthur; he's way underrated. Everyone thought he was going to feed into machine politics, but instead, he ignored the cronies and became a great civil service reformist. Polk also deservers some respect for setting a list of goals, achieving them and then getting the hell out of office.

Oh, and Arthur brought fashion into the White House.

Polk also deservers some respect for setting a list of goals, achieving them and then getting the hell out of office.

and for his mullet ... 150 years ahead of his time.

http://www.historyplace.com/specials/calendar/docs-pix/polk.jpg

Samuel J. Tilden

Tilden counseled his followers to abide quietly by the result. His health failed after 1876 and he retired from politics, living as a recluse at his country home, Greystone, near Yonkers, New York. He died a bachelor in 1886. He confided to a friend that he had never slept with a woman in his life.

more like Samuel GAY Tilden

Oh, and as someone pointed out in my AP US History thread, what about Joshua A. Norton?!

wasn't cheney president for a few hours when bush had surgery or something back in 2001? or did i daydream that?

http://votepetrelli.com/images/home_mainImage.jpg

Give him another 5 years.

Dear God...wasn't he on a Sears billboard last week?

With my limited and knowledge I'd plump for FDR, for new deal, war leadership and accelerating the decline of the European empires. Kennedy set the tone for a decade but never had the chance to show how great or otherwise he might have been and the bay of pig was hardly pointing at greatness.

Tilden also had a considerable pornography collection.

Polk also deservers some respect for setting a list of goals, achieving them and then getting the hell out of office.

Including invading Mexico? Quite admirable.

Speaking of the Mexican War (and an early dissenter), my vote is obvious: Lincoln, for being the greatest writer and for straddling contradictions that toppled lesser men.

I've lots of admiration for John Adams as a writer and thinker, not as president.

where are Blair and Sarko? I voted FDR.

Executive Order 9066

god do I love the name

GROVER CLEVELAND

this is hard. I may end up goin for Lincoln too, altho there are several things (suspending habeas corpus, for ex) that are less than admirable.

desperate times, etc.

Reagan. for finally bringing freedom to the east.

"thank you, Ronald"

http://www.yearinparadise.com/ecmap.gif

this is hard. I may end up goin for Lincoln too, altho there are several things (suspending habeas corpus, for ex) that are less than admirable.

But he didn't! Congress did (at his request). Besides, the Constitution calls for it "in cases of rebellion or invasion."

1) Abe
2) FDR

None of the others saved the Union.

well, Washington, but that was mostly pre-prez

OH BUT HE DID SUSPEND IT ALFRED HAVE YOU HEARD OF GOOGLES LOL

Speaking of his abilities as a writer and statesman, you should check out his impassioned defense of the suspension in The Portable Lincoln.

Including invading Mexico? Quite admirable.

Uh, yeah, and giving us a shitload of land!

None of the others saved the Union.

And what a happy marriage Lincoln preserved.

http://www.kathleen-turner.com/images/photos/roses.jpg

however:

FDR + Eleanor = Greatest Americans Evah

gotta go with Washington.

Uh, yeah, and giving us a shitload of land

Imperialist.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=b0X7-9Wl9jk

^^^^^Washington

And what a happy marriage Lincoln preserved.

true -- but i still voted for abe.

would also be interesting to distinguish between good presidents and presidents who were good men....grant was a good honest person (so i've heard) but maybe the worst president, etc....

I suppose FDR was the least-awful.

grant was a good honest person (so i've heard) but maybe the worst president

A damn good writer too.

Then again, I find it impossible to believe that a man of Grant's brains and cunning (Gore Vidal wrote once that you couldn't read his memoirs without thinking that this was a man of first-rate intelligence) had no idea what crew of crooks he'd surrounded himself with.

grant was a good honest person (so i've heard) but maybe the worst president, etc....

you can say similar things about jimmy carter, too.

SAM ADAMS

it's hard not to vote for jefferson - the man was a bona-fide genius. i'm also fond of madison as a writer and thinker, but he wasn't much of a president.

but in the end it's got to be lincoln. as walter karp put it, when you consider what politics was like then and now, lincoln's election was nothing short of a "political miracle."

it's easy not to vote for jefferson. he wanted us all to live (or slave) on farms. and i say this as someone who likes both him and farms.

http://img9.imagepile.net/img9/605phoc96v1.jpg

I mean, Zach Taylor didn't know shit about stringin' cable.

SO I voted for LBJ. I ain't gonna apologise.

has to be washington

the original "keep it simple, stupid"

http://www.happyitis.biz/images/coolidge%20sticker.jpg

LBJ? That's an odd choice.

I voted Washington. Oversaw the creation of our political system while trying to stay above the politcal fray. The first and last non-partisan president.

LBJ had an amazing record domestically. in terms of knowing how to get things done, he may have been the most brilliant president of the twentieth century. shame about vietnam.

i'm glad someone shares my feelings on FDR, as well. and LBJ was good at politics but bad at policy.

When Libertarians Invade

what's interesting about FDR, and far more on point than any ww2 or depression stuff, is the fact that he sort of presided over the modernization of the US government, he helped create the "super-government" that we take for granted now and never really existed before. none of this is meant to be bad or good, obviously it's what you make of it. he had to see the US to it's new role as global power, modern super-state, etc.

(sorry i am simple minded non-historian!)

what did millard fillmore ever do? maybe he's the best.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act

also inspiring shitty political comics

saying fdr is responsible for the gov't "sticking its nose into everything" is about the most simpleminded (and tiresome) political meme ever.

http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietimages/Audio/0,1020,249029,00.jpg

Re-reading bits of Walter Karp's The Politics of War after watching a History Channel documentary on Pancho Villa last night, I was struck anew by what an unyielding, high-minded fuckwit he was. In his last four years he degenerated into a petty, cruel, man of disgusting sanctimoniousness.

word. where i grew up, EVERYTHING was named after woodrow wilson (because he was president of Princeton University & governor of NJ, etc.) so i had a positive impression of him till i got to college & read other, less favorable stuff about him. wilson may've been the most unbearably sanctimonious president this country ever had (at least until dubya came along).

as for LBJ: vietnam really ruined everything for the guy. not just the fact that it fucked up american foreign policy and the lives of those who fought it (and stuck us future generations with an army of boomers who won't ever shut up about the 60s), but it ended up being one of the root causes for the american economy being so fucked up in the 1970s (b/c he wouldn't raise taxes sufficiently to pay for both vietnam and the war on poverty programs thereby being one of the things that helped fuel inflation in the 70s [though OPEC also had a hand in that) & thereby paved the way for ronnie reagan (who was only too happy to unwork as much of what LBJ worked for as he could).

fuck all this, I voted for william henry harrison, realest nigga alive

his only act as President was summoning Congress to a special session that wound up taking place after his death

wilson may've been the most unbearably sanctimonious president this country ever had (at least until dubya came along).

The worst part was that Wilson was a pretty good writer, most of whose speeches he wrote himself (Vidal's Hollywood has a few trenchant scenes of WW pecking away at high-minded nonsense on his own typewriter). His list of offenses is pretty long: insisting on our right as neutrals to travel on belligerent ships (re Germany) during WWII, the Espionage Act, Palmer raids, genuine about seeking a third term so that voter endoresement signified approval of the League of Nations, scheming to get James Cox nominated so that he'd lose, terribly, to Warren Harding as punishment to the Dems for failing to stand behind the League, refusing to pardon Eugene V. Debs.

For you Lincoln folks - does it make you uncomfortable voting for a guy who was such a racist, or do you just chalk it up to the times?

Serious question.

Doesn't make me uncomfortable in the slightest. Caring about the political status of black men in 1863 wasn't synonymous with caring about their social status.

so, yeah, you are judging him by our standards.

Doesn't make me uncomfortable in the slightest. Caring about the political status of black men in 1863 wasn't synonymous with caring about their social status.

Plessy v. Ferguson comes to mind.

One of the few times Lincoln's usually infallible political instincts failed him was when he called a meeting of a group of black businessmen in order to discuss the possibility of moving every black in America to Liberia. They were, quite properly, gobsmacked.

did the term "racist" even exist in Lincoln's time...? Its a fairly recent socio-political development that making assumptions about people based on their ethnicity is not morally or scientifically defensible.

I don't know if the term existed but the outlook certainly did. Lincoln certainly made assumptions based on ethnicity - he thought that blacks were inferior and wanted to free slaves to send them back to Africa. I assume he was also worried about blacks interbreeding with whites here in the US, I think I recall that, but I may be wrong.

Now, these are just questions from a questioning mind. I in no way wish to endorse any kind of weird militia point of view. That being said, fire away.

Lincoln certainly made assumptions based on ethnicity - he thought that blacks were inferior

This needs qualification. He thought that an educated, hard-working Negro was the equal of any white man, as his great respect and long association with Frederick Douglass showed. What he really felt about miscegenation remains clouded by campaign-baiting (he didn't want to scare prospective Southerners in the 1860 race).

did the term "racist" even exist in Lincoln's time...?

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 7:02 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

does this mean slavery wasnt racist either?

x-post

the farther back in history you go, the fewer examples there are of people who were not totally racist by today's standards. I'm always kind of amazed (and gratified) when you DO find these rare people in the history books. Morality is a fluid thing - granted the thread question itself implies that we are judging the President's by today's standards, and not by some previous era's, but its helpful to keep this in mind when making harsh judgments on political leaders.

Well, I don't think we need to make harsh judgements at all, and agree with you on that. However, I never knew, or was tought, all of the absolutely, yes, racist things that some of the founding fathers and presidents said. So it interests me, and leads to the following question: what is more useful? History as tought now, which is PC and fake, or history as reality, which might be very harmful to some people?

humansuit, lincoln's racial views are by no means as clear-cut as that. here's what he said in 1854:

"What next? Free [the slaves], and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not."

why would lincoln, speaking before an audience that doubtless consisted mostly of confirmed racists who were iffy at best on the notion of ending slavery, suggest that he might come around to the idea of making blacks his equals? keep in mind that even many abolitionists were sworn racists who treated blacks with condescension. by way of contrast, frederick douglass, who had criticized lincoln fiercely during the war, recalled that "in his company i was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color."

in 1855 he wrote this, to his closest friend joshua speed (who was in favor of slavery):

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

from the lincoln-douglas debates:

". . . there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects---certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. "

in many ways lincoln's actions make more sense if you assume he was not a racist - at least, not one by the standards of 1865.

there is no "history as reality" - its all just competing points of view and incomplete evidence. (and history is written by the victors, etc.)

x-post

or history as reality, which might be very harmful to some people?

How is reality harmful?

I guess any president who lead during times of war would be guilty of presiding over some form of genocide

'War criminal' is (and often has been) part of the job description. Lately, more indifference to genocide than actively perpetrating it (Ford in East Timor, Clinton / Rwanda, Bush41 & Clinton in Bosnia til it was nearly over, etc).

best is probably bill clinton because he didn't do anything which is what all presidents should aspire to do.

Ford came much closer to this, as Alex Cockburn likes to say. Clinton destroyed the last vestiges of idealism in the Dems, and made W possible. Fucker.

the ostensible purpose of teaching history is to enlighten us about the present - so insofar as teaching kids un-PC facts about previous administrations helps them to understand why the country is the way it is today, I'm all for it.

i dont like the idea of history as moral progress. every thing that happened before was part of incremental steps towards achieving our glorious moral clarity of today...it's sort of smug. it's using history to entrench or ground modern beliefs and practices---id like to see the opposite happen too, that is, that lincoln's perceived "racism" be seen in a context which shows the contingency of our own moral values.

i guess all that means is that who we vote for in polls like this obviously says more about us than about them.

haha yeah I wouldn't say there's been any "progress"

I think a lot of Lincoln's public statements that I've seen construed as racist are more complicated (and canny) than simply racist. like his now notorious comment on Dred Scott, "I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." that's very carefully worded.

My comments keep getting erased. Why?

god hates you

That explains all the puss and blood then.

james loewen had an interesting discussion of this in "lies my teacher told me." after a chapter discussing how racism is generally downplayed in high school history textbooks, loewen noted that anti-racism is every bit as ignored, i.e. john brown being dismissed as a lunatic, despite much evidence to the contrary.

I agree with you JD. Actually, Thomas Sowell has an interesting discussion about this in his book 'Black Rednecks.' The essence of his argument (maybe) is that there has been an unwarranted 'downgrading' of some of the early founding fathers, especially in the black community, because they owned slaves. Sowell gives a much more nuanced account of how Jefferson, etc. felt about owning slaves and what it meant to be a slave owner at that time. If the educational curriculum would stop glossing over that piece of it, I think we'd be better off.

God, please. It took me some time to write that.

LOL.

There are 17 smartasses on ILX.

Awright, who the fuck voted for Van Fuckin' Buren?

There are 18 smartasses on ILX

I thought I voted, but apparently not. Poor Chester A. Arthur.

FIVE VOTES for Carter? I suppose he gets points for being a priggish gadfly.

I never paid attention to Washington's face in that painting...he looks like he's ready to vomit.

Google pointed me towards some interesting info about it:

"Artist Gilbert Stuart concealed many of Washington's physical faults in his famous portrait in 1796 when the president was 64. Somewhat sunken cheeks were bolstered by a set of ivory dentures. It was reported that his cheeks were also filled with cotton.

Washington's brother (and guardian), Lawrence, was stricken with tuberculosis, called the White Plague. George, age 19 at the time, joined him on a visit to Barbados where he hoped the temperate climate would be beneficial. George was strongly attacked by smallpox while in Barbados, leaving him bedridden for three weeks and his face and much of his body pockmarked for life.

He was also exposed to the deadly tuberculosis bacteria. While weakened from his bout with smallpox George contracted TB in the form of acute pleurisy after they returned to Mount Vernon. He suffered for many months and Lawrence died from the disease.

Stuart intentionally omitted these blemishes from the portrait and added strokes of pinkish gloss to Washington's normally pale, sallowy complexion. He lost most of his reddish hair while serving his country and the remainder turned gray prematurely. In sitting for the famous portrait the president wore a white wig."

Better sarcastic answer: William Henry Harrison or George Bush? FITE

i'm a little surprised that neither truman nor eisenhower got ANY votes. i didn't expect either to do particularly well, but dubya gets 17 and truman & eisenhower get none at all?!? (yes, even accounting for folks voting for dubya as a hahaha-that'll-be-very-funny-joke).

all respect due to the red fox of kinderhook

is FDR the american equivalent of attlee? (and who does that make churchill? truman? or, yeesh, reagan?)

I voted for reagan

http://nypost.com/2014/10/18/what-every-president-drank/