Even the blue team’s best presidents are a mixed bag.
Even the blue team’s best presidents are a mixed bag.
T oday is, in law, George Washington’s birthday, and not “Presidents Day.” It nonetheless produces an annual profusion of rankings of the presidents. These are typically hogwash for multiple reasons, not least of which is the combination of ideological bias with the pretense of ideological neutrality.
I am constrained by no such pretense. And I confess that I know more about some presidencies and their many facets than others. But rather than do a full ranking, I decided to divide up our list of 45 presidents (counting the two-timers once apiece) along the two-party line this year. What follows is my ranking of the Democratic presidents by my overall assessment of the good and harm they did to the country — starting with the top nine out of 18. Perhaps another year, I’ll take on the red team and its Whig and Federalist antecedents.
Ranking the Democrats from the perspective of a modern conservative is a challenge. Only a few of them, such as James Madison and Grover Cleveland, could reasonably be described as conservatives. Some others, such as James K. Polk, were aggressive nationalists. Most, however, proceeded from premises we would reject, and relied upon political coalitions in which any Republican between 1854 and today would be out of place. John F. Kennedy, for example, is the closest we have had to a Democratic president untainted by support for slavery, segregation, or legal abortion. How much good or ill did these men do nonetheless?
A few historical caveats up front. First, I consider the Democrats a continuous organization since Thomas Jefferson, notwithstanding name changes (from Republican to Democrat-Republican to Democrat between the 1790s and the 1820s) and a schism in the 1820s after a brief interlude of one-party hegemony. Second, I excluded John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, and Andrew Johnson from this list. Adams was originally a Federalist and later an Anti-Mason and then a Whig; while he served under James Monroe and ran nominally within the Democrat-Republican tent, he at all times represented the opposite persuasion that ended up re-forming the opposition party. Tyler and Johnson, while once, future, and de facto Democrats, were both elected as running mates on tickets that opposed the Democrat ticket. Tyler, in particular, governed as a man without a party. If one is ranking the presidents whom the Democrats acknowledged as their own, neither man quite makes the list. In either case, both would rank very low by anyone’s criteria.
That leaves us a list of 18 chief executives. I consider, first of all, what long-term good and harm they did to the country and what good and harm they did in their own time. For each Democrat, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of their standing in a conservative history of the United States.
First: James K. Polk (1845–49)
Polk was, without a doubt, our most consequential one-term president; after Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, the list of presidents with more impact gets very short.
Pro: Polk expanded the size of the United States by more than a third, including the entire West Coast of the continental U.S. He did so at comparatively low cost in lives (in war with Mexico) and diplomatic concessions (in obtaining the Oregon Territory from Britain). That’s even aside from the extent to which his presidential campaign gave cover for his politically hobbled predecessor, John Tyler, to annex Texas. Despite a narrow electoral mandate (he won a 1.4 point plurality of the vote and owed his whole election to winning New York by 1.15 points), Polk accomplished everything he set out to do in just a single term. In both the short and the long term, he left America vastly larger and more powerful than he found it. An America without Polk’s acquisitions is nearly inconceivable to us today.
Con: There are two major criticisms of Polk. The first is the utter amorality of his presidency. A devious and underhanded man with a devious and underhanded cabinet, Polk was a slaveholder with no qualms about the institution. The Mexican War was the least-just foreign war the United States ever waged, motivated nakedly by lust for conquest of foreign sovereign territory.
The second criticism is that judging Polk only by the great benefits of his presidency in the short and long term ignores the catastrophic impact of the Polk era in the intermediate term. The Western territories added by the Mexican War triggered an immediate political crisis over whether and how slavery might be permitted or prohibited. This issue arose before the war even got rolling, via anti-slavery Pennsylvania Democratic Representative David Wilmot’s famous proviso (attached to a war appropriations bill) barring territory acquired by war from having slavery. Polk, who died of cholera at 53 (six months after leaving office), didn’t even live to see the nation almost pushed to civil war in 1850 over the admission of California as a free state. The Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850 were the first two fateful, visible steps on the path to civil war.
Second: James Monroe (1817–25)
On the roster of politically successful presidents, it is hard for anyone — even Washington — to top Monroe, the only president who served in the Continental Army under Washington. The collapse of the Federalist Party during his presidency led to our only interval as a one-party nation, dubbed the “Era of Good Feelings.”
Pro: In the short run, Monroe was the perfect president. He presided over peace and prosperity, allowing the nation to recover and grow following the War of 1812 and the 1816 “Year Without a Summer.” He presided over the Missouri Compromise, which effectively sidelined regional division over slavery for a quarter century. For the longer term, he also acquired Florida and laid down the Monroe Doctrine. He established the nation of Liberia (capital: Monrovia). While colonizing freed black Americans back to Africa was never something most black Americans wanted, offering the opportunity to those who did was a worthy attempt, and it extended American influence to Africa.
Con: Monroe’s sins were those of omission. No other American president stood in a stronger position to do something about slavery, which seemed on a trajectory for decline during the Founding Era but took off dramatically in the first quarter of the 19th century. As a Virginian with no real political opposition, Monroe could have spent his political capital limiting the expansion of the peculiar institution and its political influence. He instead helped kick the can down the road while the cancer grew.
Third: Thomas Jefferson (1801–09)
Jefferson’s gravestone, by his own choice, lists three accomplishments (the Declaration of Independence, the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding of the University of Virginia), and does not even mention that he was president or anything he did in the job. His first term was one of the most spectacularly successful presidential terms in our history, but his second was a disaster that left a sour aftertaste.
Pro: Jefferson, accepting the first-ever peaceful transfer of power as a result of a national election, set a model of magnanimity with his declaration: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” While he rolled back major elements of the Federalist platform and spent years battling its judges, he also accepted a lot of the Hamiltonian financial system he had long denounced and left the nation on a sound fiscal footing.
Jefferson doubled the size of the country without firing a shot with the Louisiana Purchase. He called for a federal ban on the slave trade at the first instant the Constitution permitted it, and it passed with his support and signature.
Con: The biggest blot on Jefferson’s record is the Embargo Act of 1807, in which he misguidedly attempted to chart a neutral course in the Napoleonic Wars by simultaneously cutting off trade with England and France. It was the worst economic policy decision by any president and swiftly crashed the economy by self-inflicted wounds.
Fourth: Harry Truman (1945–53)
Truman gets a good deal of retrospective respect from today’s Republicans. He deserves some of that, but people have also forgotten what a ruthless partisan and left-wing populist he was, all the way down to calling Tom Dewey a fascist in the closing weeks of the 1948 election.
Pro: Truman did a huge amount, much of it good and some still controversial, to finish the Second World War, shape the postwar order, and bring America into the Cold War. He dropped the atomic bomb, desegregated the Army, and rallied us into resistance to Soviet Communism and Red Chinese aggression in Berlin and Korea. He oversaw the transition of Japan and Germany into placid American allies. He transcended his background as a product of corrupt machine politics in Missouri. In 1947–48, under Republican control, “the 80th Congress was full of consequential activity, passing over 900 pieces of legislation including the Marshall Plan, the Taft-Hartley Act, the National Security Act (a huge restructuring of the whole military and national security state that created the Air Force and the CIA), the Presidential Succession Act, the creation of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and the 22nd Amendment.” Truman opposed some of those steps loudly, but he worked with Republicans on others.
Con: Like Jefferson, Truman’s presidency looked much worse to those who lived through its end than it does in retrospect, and like Jefferson, he was responsible for a good deal of that. His economic policies were misguided statism and trade-union liberalism. He tried to nationalize the steel mills during a strike and had to be stopped by the Supreme Court. His judicial nominees were hacks and cronies from the Senate. It’s beyond my scope here as well to get into the many still-roiling debates over what Truman might have done better to deter Stalin, prevent or better manage the Korean War, or resist the fall of China to Mao.
Fifth: Grover Cleveland (1885–89, 1893–97)
Cleveland was the last truly conservative Democrat, who ought to be celebrated for that, although his party got away from him by 1896.
Pro: Cleveland’s ramrod integrity and tight-fistedness with the public purse is his most positive legacy. Much of his 1892 platform reads more like a conservative manifesto than that of any Democrat before or, certainly, since. He stood for small government, sound money, free trade, and federalism. If “do no harm” is the first principle of a good presidency, Cleveland respected it more than most inhabitants of the office.
Con: Like almost any Democrat of the long era from 1852 to 1944, Cleveland depended upon the support of the Solid South, and his appointments and policies reflected the lingering influence of ex-Confederates and the rise of Jim Crow. He was also powerless to handle the economic depression that covered his entire second term.
Sixth: John F. Kennedy (1961–63)
JFK is the pace car. Because his presidency was cut short before he could finish most of the things he started, he did less good and less harm than most other Democrats. (Among the five presidents who died before completing a single term, there were two Whigs and two Republicans but only one Democrat.) Kennedy is massively overrated in most presidential rankings, but when you strip away the myth, there’s still more to like than not.
Pro: Kennedy was no conservative across the board, but he was the most moderate Democrat after Cleveland, taking positions on many issues considered quite conservative today, some of which aligned him with conservatives in his time. His ideology was politically closer to that of George W. Bush than to most modern progressives, including the rest of his disreputable family. He reflected the brief window between the end of the pro–Jim Crow Democrats and the beginning of the pro-Roe Democrats. He described abortion as “repugnant” and put Byron White, one of the two dissenters in Roe, on the Supreme Court.
Kennedy supported black civil rights and the space program. An ardent Cold Warrior, he stood down Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis and stood with Berlin when the wall went up. He cut marginal tax rates and spoke up for school prayer and an individual right to bear arms.
Con: JFK’s staunch anti-communism didn’t prevent some egregious foreign policy errors, the two biggest of which were mishandling the Bay of Pigs invasion (a misstep that helped convince Khrushchev and Castro to escalate, leading the world to the brink of nuclear war) and signing off on the coup that ousted and killed Ngô Ðinh Diêm in South Vietnam. The Diêm assassination, shortly before Kennedy’s own, marked a fateful turning point after which it became impossible to resist communist enslavement of South Vietnam primarily by a proxy war waged by the South Vietnamese. That left us with two tragic options: pour American soldiers directly into the war or abandon our allies to be overrun and tyrannized. Eventually, we did both.
Kennedy’s scandalous personal life, his administration’s dirty tricks against Richard Nixon, and the lingering ill effects of the Camelot myth all testify against his veneration.
Seventh: Bill Clinton (1993–2001)
Conservatives weren’t wrong to mistrust and despise Bill Clinton when he was in office. At a pivotal moment when American public opinion was behind his declaration that “the era of big government is over,” Clinton worked to stem the rightward march. But we are also not wrong today to be nostalgic for Bill Clinton’s America.
Pro: Clinton’s tenure was largely one of peace and overwhelmingly one of prosperity, in which the budget was balanced and the economy boomed. He pushed the Democrats off many of their most self-destructive shibboleths, at least for a time, and cut one deal after another with Newt Gingrich and Republicans. The list of legislation signed by Clinton between 1995 and 1998 contains more conservative lawmaking than any other period of the past 40 years. Clinton may not have desired that, but he also signed most of it rather than dig his heels in to resist it, from law enforcement to immigration to marriage and welfare reform. Even the ethical morass of the Clinton years gave us one benefit by building bipartisan consensus to end the unconstitutional monstrosity of the independent-counsel law. The failure of Hillarycare also delayed the federal invasion of the health insurance market by over a decade, although Clinton enacted more modest incursions. Clinton deserves some credit for helping bring peace to Northern Ireland.
Con: The first two years of Clinton’s presidency would rank worse had he accomplished his aims. In its time, Clinton foreign policy was a mixed bag (there remains a fair debate about the wisdom of the Kosovo War and sound reasons to see long-term troubles stored up by the Oslo process), but he was ineffectual in dealing with Iraq, and Clinton’s approach to jihadism looked a lot worse after September 11 — he was spending a full day a week in marriage counseling for a year when he was doing nothing to shut down al-Qaeda, and it was Clinton’s administration that set up the whole structure of failure that made it next to impossible to share information between intelligence and law enforcement, leaving us blind in piecing together what our government already knew.
Clinton’s moral legacy is also toxic. His capacity for rallying his partisan tribe to stave off impeachment for felonies he committed in office laid so much of the groundwork for the Trump era, and it took until Trump’s presidency for the #MeToo movement to undo the ways in which Clinton gave cultural cover to sexually predatory men.
Eighth: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–45)
If Mount Rushmore depicted the most important presidents, FDR would join Washington, Lincoln, and Polk on the mountain. After more than twelve years in office, guiding the country through not one but two epochal crises, he fundamentally reshaped what the presidency is and how it rules. He outlasted all his foes: the greatest locus of resistance to Roosevelt was on the Supreme Court, but by the time of his death, he had appointed eight of the justices, and the final Republican appointee (Owen Roberts) resigned in frustration soon after.
Pro: FDR took over a nation flat on its back in the Depression and left behind a globe-bestriding superpower that had vanquished Nazi Germany, was soon to complete the defeat of Imperial Japan, and effectively ruled the Pacific and half of Europe. Those big-picture successes can’t be just brushed aside. Neither can the role of FDR’s inspirational leadership in getting the country through the Depression and the war. FDR played a key role in keeping Britain afloat in the year when it stood alone against the Nazi war machine. His war leadership, while far from flawless, was more often right than wrong when the stakes were highest. These are big things.
If the dark side of Clinton’s sops to Gingrich was preventing America from going further to the right, the upside of FDR’s big-government experiments was that it sucked all of the oxygen away from the more radical politics that destroyed so many democratic and republican states in his era.
Con: Where to even begin? Roosevelt was the closest we ever had to a king, to the point where the Constitution had to be amended after his death to prevent a repetition of his refusal to let go of the office. He put Henry Wallace a diseased heartbeat away from the presidency. His Court-packing plan was rightly denounced as tyrannical, and succeeded in intimidating the Court into mutilating the Constitution. All manner of features of the imperial presidency and the judicial and congressional bulldozing of our constitutional design can be laid at FDR’s feet, as well as the foundations for a federal entitlement state that threatens to bankrupt us. Japanese internment was one of the great abuses of that limitless power. The expansion of federal powers also meant the New Deal’s complicity in Jim Crow. Books could be written, and have been written, about the fascistic and communistic aspects of the New Deal octopus, the FDR administration’s shortcomings in dealing with the Holocaust, and the sins of Yalta. There is much to weigh in FDR’s favor, but the scale arm against him is heavily laden.
Ninth: James Madison (1809–17)
If FDR was a success whose bad ideas left a toxic legacy, Madison was a leader with admirable principles who struggled to implement them. The Father of the Constitution deserves his high place in American history — but not for his presidency.
Pro: Madison’s presidency was dominated by the War of 1812. The war’s long-term effects were mostly positive. It established to the Great Powers of Europe that the Revolution was no fluke, the United States could not easily be rolled up even by an army of Wellington’s hardened Peninsular veterans, we could defend even our newly acquired Louisiana acquisitions, and we were a force to be reckoned with at sea. It also added the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Mississippi (then “West Florida”) to our territory and largely ended the issue of impressment of American sailors.
Madison can be admired for largely standing on his constitutional principles, but in establishing the Second Bank of the United States, he also prudently bowed to the practical reality that his side had lost the argument over a federal role in stabilizing the national currency.
Con: The War of 1812 was an unnecessary war that Madison largely blundered into. It was badly mismanaged on land, resulting not only in the burning of our capital but also in inspiring anti-American nationalism in Canada. No other American president has ever suffered such national humiliations at the hands of a foreign army on our soil.
In Part II, the list goes downhill in a hurry after Madison.