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Top 10 Worst US Presidents
Did George W. Bush’s presidency really shape up to be one of the worst in U.S. history? You hear the question being asked more and more these days, especially with him now being out of office. With The War in Iraq and the War on Terror being a total disaster, it is probably not surprising that 54 percent of respondents in a USA Today/Gallup survey would nominate Bush a below-average or poor president.
Public opinion is a notoriously biased, of course, which is why historians and other custodians of the long view prefer not to judge until they can speak of their subjects years after the President left office. At least the can compare the President in question to the President of the contemporary age. But clearly something about Bush Jr. has inspired many historians to abandon their conventional usages. Meena Bose, a Hofstra University political scientist who has widely criticized US Presidents, says that the scholars’ rush to rank the 43rd president comes out of an acute awareness of the long-term consequences of his policies.
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz created a rivet in 2006 when he published an article in Rolling Stone magazine: “Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents.” Bush allies explained this assessment as part of the liberal bias. Was it a liberal bias? I’ll let you be the judge of this.
Attempts to rate the Bush presidency are not that substantiated, but they do raise valuable questions. Is there, to begin with, a scholarly consensus on who America’s worst chief executives are? If there were a negative Mount Rushmore, which presidents would have their faces carved into it? What qualifies a President to be added to the poor presidencies list? And finally, do rankings really help us understand presidential leadership and individual presidencies, or do they, like Fred Greenstein once said, “divert attention from the full range of presidential experience”?
Credit, or blame, for the first scholarly ranking of the presidents usually goes to Harvard historianArthur Schlesinger Sr. But I created my own list of top 10 worst U.S. Presidents. And here is the listand reasoning behind it all. You are welcome to contest this list and create your own list if you may. I have a couple of other ways to go about in writing this article. Top 10 drunkest Presidents, Top 10 most forgotten U.S. Presidents, Top 10 sickest U.S. Presidents, and who can forget Top 10 greenest U.S. Presidents. I hope you get the picture! For now we focus on the 10 worst U.S. Presidents.
Mix Top Ten
10. Herbert Hoover
Hoover is hard proof that trained engineers are capable of making things run not just more inefficiently, but nightmarishly as well. His lazy approach to the Great Depression is routinely referred to when running down his significant list of disappointments, but even revisionists can probably agree that he utterly to failed to institute the reforms they think, or wish, he reportedly wanted to make. Like today’s vulture capitalists, Hoover believed that a government directly assisting its disenfranchised, which during his time was a much more vigorous labor base than our own, was tantamount to enabling addiction. For this impoverished economic philosophy, he was hammered by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 election, and ideologically shamed during Roosevelt’s next three terms.
The Forgotten Scandal
When veterans of World War I gathered in the capitol to demand pay bonuses they were promised after many were left jobless from the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to go in and break up the protesters. Unfortunately for Hoover, the general in charge of Army troops, Douglas MacArthur, was under the impression that he was breaking up a socialist gathering, and was especially harsh in the methods he used to disperse the veterans. Already unpopular for his handling of the Depression, the brutal crushing of veterans earned him no love from the public, and he would find himself voted out at the end of his first term.
9. John Tyler
Tyler’s Presidency was short, but controversial in U.S. History books. Opponents typically called him the “Acting President” or “His Accidency”. Tyler shocked Congressional Whigs by vetoing virtually everything inside Whig agenda, twice vetoing Clay’s legislation for a national banking act following the Panic of 1837 and leaving the government deadlocked for weeks. Tyler was officially expelled from the Whig Party in 1841, a few months after ascending into office as President, and became the second President without a party; the only one after George Washington. In 1843, after he vetoed a tariff bill, the House of Representatives considered the first impeachment resolution against a president in American history. A committee headed by former president John Quincy Adams concluded that Tyler had misused the veto, but the impeachment resolution did not go through.
The Forgotten Legacy
The Tyler presidency is generally held in low esteem by historians. Edward P. Crapol began his biography John Tyler, the Accidental President (2006) by noting: “Other biographers and historians have argued that John Tyler was a hapless and inept chief executive whose presidency was seriously flawed.” In The Republican Vision of John Tyler (2003), Dan Monroe observed that the Tyler presidency “is generally ranked as one of the least successful”. Robert Seager II wrote in And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (1963) that Tyler “was neither a great President nor a great intellectual,” adding that despite a few achievements, “his administration has been and must be counted an unsuccessful one by any modern measure of accomplishment”. A survey of 65 historians, conducted by C-SPAN in 2009, ranked Tyler as 35th of 42 men to hold the office.
Some have argued that Tyler’s accomplishments and political resolve warrant a more favorable treatment. Tyler’s assumption of complete presidential powers “set a hugely important precedent”, according to a biographical sketch by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. The article also noted that “Tyler could claim an ambitious, successful foreign policy presidency, due largely to the efforts of Secretary of State Webster.” Monroe credits Tyler with “achievements like the Webster–Ashburton treaty which heralded the prospect of improved relations with Great Britain, and the annexation of Texas, which added millions of acres to the national domain.” Crapol argued that Tyler “was a stronger and more effective President than generally remembered,” while Seager wrote, “I find him to be a courageous, principled man, a fair and honest fighter for his beliefs. He was a President without a party.” The book Recarving Rushmore (2009), which rated Presidents in terms of peace, prosperity, and liberty, ranked John Tyler as the best President of all time. At three years, 11 months, Tyler served the longest tenure of any President who was never elected to the office.
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