It’s Small Consolation, But…
To play a little “glass half full” on Independence Day weekend, this can remind you that if you think today’s liberal elites are bad, liberal elites sixty years ago were so thoroughly saturated with white supremacist Southern revisionism about Reconstruction that they viewed Andrew Goddamned Johnson as a much better president than Ulysses Grant.
scott, i spent 5 minutes searching around and couldn’t fine an answer: what makes you so sure that the 1948 poll was entirely of a “liberal elite?”
i have no idea one way or another, but on the face of it, i would assume that if schlesinger tracked down 55 other historians, they weren’t all liberals….
Fair point, although 1)I think that poll fairly represents the consensus of Schlesinger-type liberals, and 2)given the gap the preference for Johnson over Grant had to be cross-ideological.
scott, i’ll certainly buy that (hell, i would have bought that it was all liberals, i just couldn’t find any evidence), given that one of jfk’s profiles in courage was the decisive vote not to convict andrew johnson….
History, for whatever reason, seems to attract a more conservative crowd than other humanities and/or social sciences. Back when this poll was taken, a large proportion of historians were white Southerners.
It took a lot of work to finally discredit the racist “Dunning School” of post-Civil War history.
Some comments on presidential ratings:
(1) “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder,” really does seem the operative principle. This is especially so with ratings of British prime ministers where it seems that no abuse of power is as bad as failing to hold on to it. Suez isn’t the worse thing the British Empire has on its conscience, but the fact that it feel apart so quickly has really damaged Anthony Eden’s reputation. By contrast, appeasement was the major foreign policy for half a dozen years, ardently supported not only by the government, but also by major institutions such as the monarchy, and the press. Appeasement still has its defenders, who can after all point out that Britain didn’t face the worst of it (no, just the rest of Europe). Another aspect of British historiography is the bias of biography. A well admired premier like Gladstone or Churchill may attract some inconoclasm. If Charles II has a more attractive reputation than most of his royal successors, there is a place for Ronald Hutton to write a book that dents that reputation. If Anne Boleyn or Thomas More are popularly considered victims of injustice, then we have Richard Marius or a recent new book to put the case for their executioner. By contast, if you are simply a medicore figure (as opposed to a brief debacle like Douglas Home) the only person likely to spend seven years researching your life is someone who is likely to be fairly sympathetic to you. Which means that our sources for such people are likely to be filtered through such a perspective. This appears to be more a feature of British historiography than of American: there doesn’t seem to be much of a market for laudatory books about Benjamin Harrison or William Howard Taft.
(2) As a consequence of the blunder/crime distinction, the policies of Pierce, Buchanan and Johnson could still find defenders in the fifties and sixties. Partly this is because there were more conservative Southern historians at the time, but also because in a democracy any criminal policy is likely to have a large number of defenders. One could describe their policies as a compromise, and there is much in American culture to valorize compromise, regardless of its content. By contrast, venality itself is not likely to be popular, which hurts Grant and Harding. Grant’s reputation also suffered not simply because of the Dunning school of Reconstruction, but because he became the epitome of all that was wrong with the Gilded Age. This was hardly fair: Arthur was more mediocre, Cleveland more devoted to economic orthodoxy, Hayes more the exemplar of Republican demagogery, winning the Ohio governorship on a combination of anti-Catholicism and denouncing inflationists as Communists. But it wasn’t totally unfair: both Grant’s vice-presidents were compromised by Credit Mobilier. And his very selection of nominee reprsented a first step in the replacement of anti-slavery ideology with the Union cause. Grant did more to represent Republican orthodoxy than Republican prinicple.
(3) Is Harding unduly screwed by presidential rankings? I don’t think so. Corruption by one’s cronies isn’t the worst thing in the world. And yes he did pardon Eugene Debs and support an anti-lynching bill. And yes the foreign and economic policies weren’t as stupid as they appeared in retrospect. But let’s not go nuts. There was after all a Great Depression, and there was after all a war. That Harding’s policies were more complex does not mean that they worked. In many ways the twenties were a low point in the history of American racism: the Ku Klux Klan as a mass movement, both North and South, the new immigration law, the rise of an even more simpled minded Evangerlicalism, the 1928 presidential election campaign, the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, it just goes on. Enforcing an ill thought out Prohibition law, while imbibing in private isn’t the worst kind of hypocrisy, but it’s not admirable or attractive. And at a time when democracy really needs inspired leadership, Harding is so not the man. (Also, Harding and Coolidge’s foreign and immigration policies mean that Commentary will never really have that much interest in rehabilitating him.)
(4) Theodore Roosevelt as #2 in the Sienna poll? Really? I mean I know Jefferson has taken a hit, but that’s better than Lincoln, or even Saint Washington. I think Roosevelt is more admired for the image of vigrous activity as opposed to actual achievement. The coal mediation represents more the idea of having civil relations with labor, as opposed to collective bargaining legislation. The Anti-trust cases represent more the idea of inconveniencing business as opposed to actually limiting its power. (Even Taft did more to enforce anti-trust laws.) Having a civil conservation with an African-American, in a city where they actually are a majority, is less impressive when you consider that Roosevelt did less for African Americans than his five Republican predecessors. And American action in Cuba and the Philippines is hardly an improvement over Iraq and Afghanistan.
(5) Most underrated American president? McKinley in my opinion. He broke a 20 year political stalemate, and was only the third president to win two popular majorities. Only six have done so, and unlike Eisenhower and Reagan he was able to carry Congress both times. He helped establish an American power and strengthened the power of the presidency. I’m not saying I would have voted for him, but like Polk he had remarkable political success.
(6) Most overrated American president? Well as long as anyone likes Nixon or Reagan I would say those two. And I clearly don’t like Theodore Roosevelt. But given that Washington is suffused with a presumption of infallibility, I really think we need to reconsider his reputation. I’m not saying that Napoleon or Bismarck were better leaders, but they didn’t have the luxury of living in countries where the political class would freely and unanimously endorse their own self-regard. Washington’s superior success owed much to the fact that a fifth of the population was enslaved, most of the monarchists had fled to Canada, and that in an overwhelmingly rural country Washington’s reputation easily trumped primitive political organization and debate. His reputation also encourages the fatuous chauvinist belief that it was superior virtue (either his or America’s as a whole) that led to the American Revolution’s success.
I don’t understand the “Background” category. I understand what it means, and largely agree with the rankings, but what is it for? Does it figure into the scoring? If so, why? I can see some value in comparing the “background” ratings to see how they correspond, if at all, with performance, but why should they be factored into evaluating the performance itself?