This Is An Easy One
Ta-Nehisi Coates points us to this President’s Day question, and also gives us the right answer. I’ve discussed this before, but Grant is extremely underrated.
Teaching the Presidency this semester, I spent some time with my students going over this handy sortable list of presidential rankings by historians. Grant’s reputation is improving. But it’s hard to get a better example of the pernicious influence of the Dunning School than the fact that in the first Schlesinger poll in 1948, Grant ranked 28th out of 29 — below Buchanan, below Pierce — with Andrew Goddamned Johnson, the man who tried to govern as a Confederate after the Civil War despite not being elected, ranking 19th.
…Good point in comments about LBJ; I suppose it depends on the audience, but my sense (generally confirmed by the polls) is that LBJ is getting more of his due from historians. Incidentally, in the informal poll of my students, LBJ was only mentioned a couple times out of 15. JFK ranked 4th, behind Lincoln, FDR, and Washington.
Another question: why the hell does Cleveland rank so high in every poll?
Only President to be elected twice nonconsecutively? Most entertaining personal life of any President (not counting postmortem revelations)? Democrat amid a sea of Ohio Republicans? Almost uniquely for important late-nineteenth century politicians, not infamous for either corruption or godmongering (or both)?
Other than that, I’ve got nothing. Can’t think of an actual accomplishment associated with him.
Except for presiding over the Panic of 1893 and using federal troops to crush the Pullman Strike.
Historians of the late 19th century probably like the union crushing?
I’ll give you crushing the Pullman strike as an “accomplishment”. The Panic was of course huge, but I don’t know that he precipitated it, nor how influential or interesting his response was.
Closest thing to an anti-imperialist President at the time?
That’s true. Cleveland did oppose the annexation of Hawaii. A solid point in his favor.
He also attempted to reverse the coup and restore the Hawaiian monarchy as much as he could without sending in troops.
As bad as Pullman’s reaction to the Pullman Strike was, it was standard operating procedure at the time. Cleveland’s response was less brutal than it could have been.
To clarify, by “high” we mean second quartile, with most polls putting him toward the bottom of that.
You’d better check my work, but from what I can see, there aren’t many two-term presidents who aren’t upper half (namely Grant, Nixon, and GW Bush). If you’re a one-term president, you don’t have a whole lot of time to do stuff, which tends to hurt your rating. And bunches of one-term presidents tend to float the two-termers into the upper half.
People mistaking him for Grover Cleveland Alexander, the HOF pitcher?
(at least, in 3rd grade when I asked my school librarian if we had any books on the pitcher, she gave me a book about the president. I suppose it could go the other way?)
I would have gone with LBJ, not Grant. But, I don’t know as much about Grant, and now that I’ve seen the linked sortable list, I realize that LBJ is fairly well rated. I would say LBJ is seriously underrated in popular imagination, but I guess that historians give him (most of) his due.
LBJ is problematic. Doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his support and expansion of the New Deal or for Civil Rights (in part because a lot of his credit for the latter gets assigned to JFK) – but was a SOB, was corrupt both financially and in terms of ideologically corrupt dealmaking, was bad on Civil Rights in order to gain power, even if he was later great on them. And then there’s Vietnam, and the shattering effect it had on the American left.
Of course, as I suggested above, a lot of LBJ’s problem is JFK. History hasn’t been kind to JFK and will be still less kind, but for a whole generation he was a beautiful martyred icon, remembered through rose-tinted glasses. It was easy and natural to give him the credit for LBJ’s accomplishments on Civil Rights and to blame LBJ for sticking with JFK’s quagmire in Southeast Asia, complete with former JFK aides insisting that JFK would have pulled out, etcetera.
Here’s hoping Robert Caro finishes his series
For those of us who lived through the late 60′s, JFK’s assassination also carries with it the sense of loss of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And even later on to a lesser degree the assassination of John Lennon. There was an entire nucleus of liberal leadership removed from existence, and with those deaths a sense of loss of direction for the country with the subsequent election of nNixon and the success, still ongoing of his southern strategy.
It wasn’t just the loss of JFK, but the loss of a different future we will never know.
I can see that, but (from a later perspective) the RFK of 68 seems like much more of a liberal figure than JFK ever was (or than RFK was when JFK was alive, of course). Infinitely more so for MLK, of choose.
…the RFK of 68 seems like much more of a liberal figure than JFK ever was… That’s true, but drafted kids weren’t dieing by the thousands in ‘Nam when JFK was alive. RFK as always liberal on poverty, hunger, race, and education (he was a hardass on labor), but in ’68 ‘Nam was the defining issue.
You and I had the counterfactual discussion years ago on another blog: What if Sirhan had missed.
I think Matthew Yglesias had the best explanation for why JFK’s ratings among the public are still so high and LBJ’s so low.
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2009/03/06/192032/the_kids_love_lincoln/
Of course, JFK’s untimely death in 1963 was an important part of why this happened, since it let Baby Boomers imagine that if he had lived he would have somehow pushed through all LBJ’s popular accomplishments without getting bogged down in Vietnam. However, for those of us who have no personal memories of JFK, there’s no reason to think that a man who ran to the right of Nixon on foreign policy and damn near blew up the world would have shown any more sagaciousness in Southeast Asia than Johnson.
Heh. This sounds like the popular take. In regards to Civil Rights, LBJ himself is responsible for Kennedy’s over-rating…as he, out of political necessity, sold the 64cra as a Kennedy tribute. But Academia, in my estimation, has shifted to view Kennedy the way Malcolm X did (two-faced enabler).
This lead to an overestimation of LBJ. LBJ again contributed to this by hiding documents revealing the real extent of his segregationist ways. Then Caro exposed him.
But Caro places Johnson’s shift in 1957, crediting him with passing Ike’s cra. The NAACP however, saw LBJ as intentionally killing it by watering it down. Caro is wrong here and the NAACP is right, as the former misses the fact that LBJ used all his might to stop an Ike-Nixon scheme to end the filibuster…which of course would’ve made civil rights legislation a gimme.
So things are still evolving. AFAK, no one but me has explicitly pointed out that LBJ’s famous quote was not prophetic. Dems did not lose the south for a generation. They lost it in. That’s quite a difference. And LBJ did all he could to keep the Segregationist within his party. He went has far as smearing King as a communist, using Goldwater’s pro-civil rights views against him in 64, and tried to stop Fannie Lou Hamer from speaking at the DNC. While there is no label for this particular southern strategy, he by and large succeeded.
Y’know, up until the last wildly ahistorical, distorted paragraph (Goldwater’s pro-civil rights views? It is to laugh) everything in that comment was at least something worth arguing about.
If there’s one man who supported Martin Luther King, it was Barry Goldwater! Don’t you remember the civil rights marchers lobbying for Barry!
George Romney was so fired up by Goldwater’s Civil Rights agenda he couldn’t even wait until the ’64 convention was over to get out there and start campaigning!
I clarified, in case you really think this is what I was saying.
I referring to LBJ using Goldwaters anti-cra vote against him in the north, while simultaneously highlighting his previous support for civil rights (he voted for the 57cra, for instance) while campaigning in the South.
I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on record here as saying Goldwater’s opposition to the 64cra was not principled in any way. He opposed Brown v Board, and that doesn’t even pass the libertarian smell test.
This is quite possibly the most deluded thing I’ve ever read on the internet.
LBJ, who signed the Civil Rights Act, did everything he could to maintain segregation, while Barry Goldwater, who voted against and ran against the CRA had pro-civil rights views.
Whatever.
Don’t you see, it’s not how you voted, it’s whether Robert Byrd was a member of your political party.
That’s why Pat Buchanan is much more progressive on civil rights than Keith Ellison.
That would be deluded. Glad I didn’t say that.
Maybe this sentence…
could’ve theoretically been interpreted that way.
Its a typo. There should be an “s” after “Segregationist”.
Actually, it’s the entirety of your comment which is to be interpreted that way.
I find it hard to believe you really believe this. I think you can’t address my argument so you intentionally strawmanned it.
Stop being a hack.
If you’re not willing to stand by your argument, you shouldn’t make it.
Upon 2nd thought, you may have been referring to my description of LBJ’s behaviour in 1957.
In that case, yes, LBJ did everything he could to maintain segregation.
Informed people may disagree, but if you think this is a deluded position then you are not informed enough to be commenting on the subject.
…because passing a civil rights bill instead of killing it, which was well within his power, is such a powerful demonstration of Johnson doing everything he could to maintain segregation.
That’s a reasonable argument. Indeed, this is the mainstream white liberal interpretation. So, allow me to address it.
First of all, one needs to know that the House passed essentially the 64cra in 1957. Then it gets into LBJ hands. The votes are there to pass it. But there are not enough votes to override a filibuster. So the Ike admin puts forth a scheme to get rid of the filibuster. LBJ stops it, then uses the very filibuster he just fought to maintain as an excuse to water down the cra to the point that segregationists won’t filibuster it.
I can provide an academic source for the filibuster maneuver, but for now here is how the civil rights movement itself viewed things:
http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis57.htm
The votes are there to pass it if LBJ says they are; the votes are there to kill if that’s what he decides he wants.
It wasn’t.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
I just provided you with a credible source saying “The draft bill has broad bipartisan support from Republicans and Northern & Western Democrats”.
This bill did not pass. A “crumb” bill that was “worse than nothing” (as evidenced by the fact that “fewer Blacks vote in the 1960 election than had voted in 1956″) did.
According to the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, LBJ maintained segregation.
It sounds like you’re saying that, in 1957, LBJ worked to maintain segregation; aren’t you agreeing with Manju?
No, Kadin. I’m saying that, if LBJ was trying to maintain segregation, he would have killed the bill, not passed it.
If he wanted to end segregation, he would’ve gotten rid of the filibuster or use his mighty power to get the votes for cloture.
But he didn’t. If your trying to tell us that maintaining the filibuster is a legitimate position, then you’re treading in “States Rights” territory.
In a better world, you would be ashamed of yourself. Here’s LBJ himself on the matter:
Dems did not lose the south for a generation. They lost it in. That’s quite a difference.
Indeed. One makes sense, the other doesn’t.
“they lost it in” means that the region remained a democratic stronghold on every level except Presidential for 30 years.
So, LBJ’s prediction did not come true.
To say “there is no reason to think” Kennedy would have changed course on Vietnam is wrong.
Kennedy had already signed NSAM 263 withdrawing the first 1,000 of 16,000 troups in Vietnam. Other documents, including planning documents from the spring of 1963, show that this was the first step in a planned complete withdrawal.
…and while you are free to think he would not have followed through, it is incorrect to say that there is no reason to think otherwise.
As Kennedy showed during the Cuban Missle crisis, when for awhile he was the only person in the room against more aggressive action against Cuba, Kennedy, more than Johnson, worried less about what the Generals though when he said no.
The main reason that I would rate LBJ very high is his success on major Civil Rights legislation: both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In my view, these two pieces of legislation are probably the two federal actions that most increased integration and black uplift since abolition. Given the difficulty in achieving these legislative victories and the fact that racial discrimination is among the most intractable and horrible aspects of American history, the importance of LBJ’s success is hard to state.
Nonetheless, focusing solely on Civil Rights actually undervalues LBJ’s domestic accomplishments. His signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 transformed and improved America; legislation during his term began the programs Medicare and Medicaid as they are today; and his Presidency also saw the true beginning of a variety of other anti-poverty programs, ranging from food stamps (now SNAP) to Head Start.
It’s really hard to appreciate the extent of LBJ’s contribution to the Liberal agenda and his transformation of America without accounting for those things. Now, his foreign policy was disastrous, and his domestic policy wasn’t perfect. But, few if any Presidents since him have so completely reshaped American government or culture, mostly for the better.
It’s very strange that Reagan’s reputation has improved over time.
He’s also the only one on the list to have multiple blue (first quartile) and orange (third quartile) scores. No other president has multiple rankings in quartiles that are a step removed from each other.
What did we suddenly “learn” in 1999-2000 that could explain such a dramatic shift in opinion about him?
well if we include a few years after 2000, we learned that he could have been worse
I’ve long said, only half jokingly, that the whole purpose for Republicans behind nominating and electing Bush the younger was to help rehabilitate Reagan. No one could have seriously thought Bush was suitable to be President, but he sure made Reagan look good in comparison. And you can bet that the next Republican President, even if it’s Romney, will in the end make Shrub look like a genius and a wonk in comparison.
I’d subscribe to this theory, except:
I’m sorry, but any professional who was not a professional hack would ever rate W as 6th best at any time in his presidency. You don’t have to rate his performance on 9/11-9/12 as pathetic and disgraceful to recognize that his response was in no way transfiguring. (I’m happy to give him props for saying Islam was a religion of peace and taking off his shoes to go into the mosque. But that hardly dominates the aftermath!)
The real Bush Derangement Syndrome was the absolutely over the top propaganda spewed about him during his presidency. I know that presidential worship is par for the course among many segments of the public and commentariat, but come on. Bush? Really?
Reagan’s reputation benefits from a cottage industry that energetically promotes his image and an American political public that seems determined never to remember the reality.
Good point. National Airport was renamed for Reagan in 1997, which lines up pretty well with the beginning of the shift in his rankings.
Reagan has been the beneficiary, in his time but especially since, of the most awesome marketing campaign. Actual events of his Presidency and actual policies have no impact on peoples’ recollections of him: we’re just told over and over that he was wonderful. It is in its way perfectly appropriate to his own post-fact, post-modern approach to being President. It’s not surprising that Americans think he’s wonderful: they’ve been told he was so often. Historians are a bit more surprising.
There’s also that pernicious disease affecting all public discourse in America: artificial Balance. It’s necessary to praise some Republican President, and the options in the remotely modern era (ie excluding Lincoln) are thin. George Dubya and Nixon are obviously out; George HW and Ford are seen as fairly bland nonentities, and their own party doesn’t like them and wouldn’t accept praise for them as being an appropriate sop in the name of Balance; Coolidge was a stiff and Harding and Hoover were disasters (although don’t try saying that to the disciples of Amity Shlaes); Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist and eventually not a Republican. That leaves Eisenhower and Reagan. I’d rather they idolized Ike (infrastructure! warned of the military-industrial complex! 90% tax bracket! Little Rock!), but given how the Republican party never identified with him it’s not surprising they’ve gone with Ronnie.
There was, however, a quite concerted effort to rehabilitate Nixon’s image. Obviously, he could never be a hero, but they tried to pull him out of the muck.
And sure enough, you can see a shift in his rankings over time, too, from red to orange.
It’s reasonable to reevaluate Nixon as a below average but not horrifically bad President. If you don’t place a lot of weight on the paranoid delusional tendencies of a President and you’re enough of a cynic to believe that all Presidents do some truly horrible and unjustifiable things, then Nixon’s main faults w.r.t. Watergate and his enemies lists were that he got caught and that what he was caught doing was juvenile, petty, and so clearly unrelated to national security that he didn’t have room to wriggle out of the mess. I don’t agree with such a line of reasoning, but it’s not crazy.
There’s no excuse at all for anyone ever rating Reagan as a good President.
I don’t think reevaluating Nixon based on minimizing his bad points is valid. Watergate and the continuation of Vietnam are as bad as people say.
I think of him like Johnson – his good points are very good, and his bad points are very bad. In 1976, nobody cared about his going to China or signing the EPA bill.
Saying “most Presidents do things that bad” isn’t minimizing how bad Watergate is. It’s acknowledging that being so incompetent as to nearly blow the world up during the Cuban Missile crisis, escalating Vietnam, pardoning Nixon, granting the kleptocratic dictator of Iran asylum, Iran/Contra, declaring that atheists can’t be citizens, lying the country into war so you could blow up Iraq for shits and giggles, torture advocacy, and refusing to prosecute torture because you have to “look forward” are all pretty fucking horrible things for Presidents to do, and it’s far from obvious that Watergate stands out, even on subversion of democracy grounds. Watergate was just particularly inept and impossible to spin, and Nixon was a paranoid and unlikable person who couldn’t ride it out.
I hope you realize that including “pardoning Nixon” in a list of Presidential misdeeds and foulups meant to contextualize and so devalue the misdeeds and foulups of Nixon is more than a little ironic.
Kennedy’s handling of the Soviet missiles, pushing back against the rest of his administration: much better than Watergate and escalating Vietnam (which Nixon did).
Escalating Vietnam: Nixon himself did this.
Pardoning Nixon: not even remotely as bad as the crimes for which he needed to be pardoned.
Granting the Shah asylum: not even remotely as bad as either Nixon’s Vietnam escalation or Watergate.
Iran/Contra: not nearly as bad as Nixon’s escalation in Vietnam.
Bush’s dissing of atheists: not even on the same planet as Nixon’s escalation in Vietnam, or Watergate.
Iraq War: not even the Iraq War is as bad as Nixon’s escalation/continuation of Vietnam.
Torture program: vastly more people were tortured because of Richard Nixon than George W. Bush. See Vietnam.
Refusing to prosecute torture: see above. Mote vs. plank.
I don’t know why you’re arguing as if Watergate was the worst of Nixon’s sins.
I suppose it’s possible that other Presidents have used state power for nakedly electoral purposes in quite the despicable way Nixon did, in the modern era, but I’ve never heard of such, even years later. And Nixon came about this close to trying to take over the state in a coup – was urged to by members of his administration. If his AG hadn’t resigned, he might have done so. That’s pretty special.
Nixon — and I was there in real time, and despised him as much as I’ve ever despised a politician — accommodated himself to a Democratic congress and presided over a virtually top-to-bottom adoption of the progressive agenda. And, he really really sucked in a lot of ways. Since the latter applies to every President, I think we have to give him due credit for the former.
Also, since in our modern hi-speed era a President with a huge majority in both houses can only “do” one issue over an 18-month period, and then badly, let’s give the Trickster props for productivity.
LOL@ the claim that Obama only “did” one issue in his first 18 months.
As opposed to passing the most extensive progressive legislative agenda in any two-year period since either LBJ or FDR, depending on how you count.
Many of these polls include non-professional historians. I wonder what the difference is between the ranking of Reagan from academic and non-academic historians? I suspect it is fairly dramatic.
I despise Reagan, but he’s probably getting a lot of credit for the end of the Cold War. Now, personally, I would give most of the credit for our winning the Cold War to Truman and Eisenhower, but I’m not shocked that people associate it with Reagan given that it happened on his watch. Also, to be honest, he did handle it better than one might expect from his public pronouncements.
But why would he get more credit in 2004 than in 1992?
The immediate judgment based on memoirs of participants and contemporary news reports can differ from the later judgment based on historical research. For one thing, more evidence becomes available. I don’t think we’re at the point where the full archives of the Reagan years are open yet, but certainly more stuff is available to researchers than there was in 1992.
And these records vindicate Reagan how?
I’m pretty sure the academic consensus among American historians of the Soviet Union is that Gorbachev destroyed it through quick liberalization. A process that wasn’t allowed to begin earlier due to the Reagan administration’s belligerency.
The popular belief pushed by conservatives is that Reagan ‘spent the Soviet Union into the ground’. Show me the evidence that the Soviet Union’s prosperous economy was stifled by a sudden shift to military spending.
Exactly. I would expect the contemporaneous accounts from participants and the media to be more favorable to Reagan than the judgement of academics looking back at the historical record, not less.
Absolutely. An honest look back at the historical record does no favors at all to Reagan’s legacy.
The Reagan of myth is an entirely dishonest propaganda creation.
Right. I can’t think of a single example of something Reagan did right, for which he isn’t given enough credit.
Especially since the conservatives (aided by the media) always lie about Carter, who started the military build-up Reagan continued and expanded. I’m not convinced the military build-up “spend the USSR into the ground”, but it wasn’t only Reagan’s.
I don’t agree with this, though. I’m of the impression that the consensus is that Gorbachev’s liberalization was a plausible effort to save the system, but was too little too late. Also, note that Gorbachev was known to be a reformer and was chosen well into the belligerent Reagan’s term, suggesting that his belligerence was either a contributing factor to the Soviets’ decision to pick a conciliatory leader, or at least neutral, as opposed to an impediment.
American academics are probably much more favorable to Gorbachev than Russians, but not to the extent that US media and politicians are.
I don’t know the decision-making process of the Soviet Politburo in the mid-’80s, but they were probably trying to pick someone that wouldn’t die in a year.
This article by Fred Kaplan on Slate from shortly after Reagan died is fairly useful on the matter of Reagan and the Cold War.
of course it didnt actually happen on his watch, by the way – thats another bit of gloss
I disagree. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were two different events.
What did we suddenly “learn” in 1999-2000 that could explain such a dramatic shift in opinion about him?
Essentially, there was a concerted push by the right wing to make Reagan into the conservative answer to FDR: a figure who was almost universally beloved but at the same time represented a partisan political ideal. The loathsome Grover Norquist was one of the prime movers in this attempt. It could only succeed once there were enough people around who were too young to remember much about the Reagan presidency in person, but had to go with what they heard from others (and those others were generally not professional historians).
It was dramatic and relatively quick but not as sudden as that one year period.
In response to Glenn Greenwald’s ridiculous claim last December that the week of Reagan’s funeral was the turning point of Reagan’s legacy I wrote this:
Of course any one or two graf summary is going to be at least somewhat oversimplified, but I believe this at least gets to the heart of it.
The surveys seem to breakdown as the Wall Street Journal, The Times and CSPAN come in to play. The Siena surveys generally rate Reagan fairly consistently.
So, I’m going with survey composition as much as anything
I’ve got one more potential answer: we learned that Reagan really had transformed the Republican party’s agenda and established its base. Reagan really made the Southern Strategy work, and he solidified the tax revolt that remains in place to this day.
Now, a lot of Republicans are actually delusional about Reagan’s record (he raised taxes at times), but Reagan’s policy agenda and rhetoric (unfortunately) became the core of the modern Republican party’s agenda. Reagan also convinced a lot of people that his tax cutting cured the economy (not true, but they believe it).
If we consider the rankings as reflecting a President’s success at achieving their policy goals and at having long-term effect on America, then Reagan looks good. Also, if you’re obsessed with lower taxes as your major domestic policy goal (as almost half the elected officials in Washington currently are), then Reagan also looks good. And, he looks better now than he did at leaving his Presidency because (1) his effect has proven to be more long-term than one might have thought and (2) it’s easier to remember the image of Reagan as a laissez faire, total tax-cutter, and ignore his policy capitulations during his actual Presidency.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Johnson governed as a Confederate. Whatever awful and completely fair things one can say about Johnson, he was not a Confederate or a Confederate sympathizer. He was a monstrous racist and hated Black people, certainly, but he also hated the Confederacy. He did govern essentially how you would expect a pre-war southern Democrat would have under those circumstances, and was generally awful.
As far as Grant, I feel as though he was underrated for a long time, but that at this point he is on the verge of being overrated. The Dunning School was obviously racist and wrong, and Grant deserves credit for being basically the only president between Lincoln and Truman who made any attempt at all at racial justice. But Reconstruction was probably doomed from the start, and nothing Grant did very much to make it a success. You mention in your earlier post that Waite was a terrible chief justice on racial issues, but so were all of Grant’s appointees. Reconstruction was already in the process of being dismantled by the time he was leaving office.
With the demise of the Dunning School (whose zombie, of course, continues to haunt popular remembrance of Reconstruction), there seems to be a tendency to view Reconstruction as a great lost opportunity, where if only this one thing had been done slightly differently, we would have had racial justice a century early. This seems like nonsense to me. The reason there was no real opposition to the Compromise of 1877, which occurred while Grant was *still president* is because the vast majority of White Americans in 1877 had simply decided that they had no interest in insuring the civil rights of African Americans. Northern Whites kind of half-heartedly tried it, decided it was too much work, and were perfectly content to let white Southerners retake control of the south in the name of reconciliation.
I doubt that anything good was going to come out of Reconstruction at any point, and certainly by Grant’s inauguration it was basically too late.
That’s not to say Grant hasn’t been underrated in the past – his corruption was real, but certainly exaggerated, his heart was in the right place, and he was, of course, a great general who made massively important contributions to the country in that capacity. But the idea that he was a great, or even a particularly good, president seems hard to sustain, especially on the basis of a record on civil rights that left no lasting legacy whatever.
Nonsense! He could have made more speeches and used his bully pulpit! That would have gotten the 1870s versions of Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh right in line.
The reason there was no real opposition to the Compromise of 1877, which occurred while Grant was *still president* is because the vast majority of White Americans in 1877 had simply decided that they had no interest in insuring the civil rights of African Americans. Northern Whites kind of half-heartedly tried it, decided it was too much work, and were perfectly content to let white Southerners retake control of the south in the name of reconciliation.
The problem with this argument is that by 1877, the Supreme Court had already pretty much gutted Reconstruction and handed the KKK a license to do whatever they wanted. Cruikshank v. U.S. was one of the worst Supreme Court decisions that few people have ever heard of. Nathan Newman describes the death of Reconstruction in more detail here.
Most white Americans may not have cared much about Reconstruction one way or the other, but the legitimately elected governments of 1866-1876 were willing to stand up for the rights of the freedmen. It was overthrown in what amounted to a sequence of Southern military coups, supported by a vile Supreme Court. (The role of corrupt judiciaries in the loss of democracy is an underrated subject of study. Weimar Germany’s fall can also be blamed to a substantial extent on right-wing courts, which allowed Nazis to literally get away with murder throughout much of the Republic’s history. This includes the Beer Hall Putsch, which by all rights should have seen Hitler swing from the end of a rope or spend the rest of his life in a prison cell.)
Had Reconstruction held on just a decade longer, had the freedmen been granted land in the West as Thaddeus Stevens wished, had they been armed as defenders of the Union and given military training, the so-called redeemers would have missed their chance. A hundred years of lynchings, rapes, tortures, and murders could have been averted.
Although another issue that is totally missing from any of these discussions of Grant is the slight problem of the genocide against Native Americans. If we are going to slam Jackson (rightfully) for Indian Removal, we need to remember that it was under Grant that the crushing of indigenous populations on the Great Plains and in the West ramped up. Giving land to freedmen in the West meant taking land from the people already there.
Although I also recognize both that Grant was somewhat less egregious on these issues than some other presidents and that the president was not able to dictate these policies entirely. But then the same can be said for anything and any president.
Well said. And this is exactly why IMHO one of Obama’s biggest failures has been his lack of urgency in judicial nominations.
And not just judicial, but executive branch as well.
I find his lack of action in this area baffling.
The problem was that freely elected governments could only be maintained in the southern states through the use of military force, and by 1877 the north was completely sick of it and certainly were never going to “hold on for just a decade longer.” Maybe if you had moved to more radical policies sooner, during the Johnson years, something would have been possible, but I am doubtful.
It’s very easy to say “But for…”, but the basic fact is that the country was still really racist in the 1870s, and although many northerners had some mild concern for the rights of the freed slaves, that concern was increasingly outweighed by a desire for “reconciliation,” which they saw could not be achieved without letting the Southern Whites continue to oppress the former slaves.
As for Cruikshank, that opinion was written by Grant’s appointee Chief Justice Waite, and joined by another of his appointees, Justice Strong, along with three Lincoln appointees. Grant’s other two appointees, Bradley and Hunt, joined Clifford’s weak concurrence (and Bradley would later write the opinion in the Civil Rights Cases that invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, so he was certainly no hero on civil rights)
I guess I just have a really tough time looking at the history of Reconstruction and seeing it as a great might have been. What’s most remarkable about Reconstruction is not that it ultimately failed and the South suffered nearly a century of Jim Crow and legalized oppression of African Americans. It’s that things went as far towards equality as they did. It’s obviously impossible to prove anything, but I tend to think that if you reran the fifteen years following, say, the beginning of the 1864 Republican Convention, 1000 times, you’d see very few run throughs where things ended up any better for the freed Slaves, and many where things didn’t get nearly as far as they did. If Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated, for example, I doubt he would have acquiesced in the effective re-enslavement that was going on in 1865-6, but his solution would have been nowhere near as, well, radical, as what the Radical Republicans ended up doing. The only reason that Stevens and company were able to take control of Reconstruction in the first place was because Johnson’s refusal to take any steps at all against the Black Codes, etc., polarized opinion and causes moderate Republicans, for a brief period, to support radical solutions. By the time Grant was inaugurated, they were starting to feel uncomfortable with this, and backsliding was inevitable. If no Johnson, things don’t even get that far.
If only we could transport Thomas Friedman back to the 1870s, he could have written years of columns about how we need 6 more months to determine if reconstruction was working. The very serious people would cite Even The Liberal Thomas Friedman supports military occupation of the former confederacy.
And, if that didn’t work, at least Thomas Friedman would have been transported back to the 1870s.
He has the mustache for it.
No, Freidman’s style of mustache did not really become popular till the late 1880s or early 1890s.
If only we’d had John McCain to tell the Klan, “Stop the bullshit.”
Unfortunately, he was only 12 years old at the time.
Imagine the dusty archives full of columns based on things said to him by hansom cab drivers, and how the telegraph is flatting the world.
Well, let’s see which ones of these guys thought killing people through unnecessary war was a good idea:
James Madison
Andrew Jackson
James Polk
William McKinley
LBJ
Nixon
Reagan
Bush II
The US Presidency is such a vast pool of terrible that it’s really hard to rank.
The fault, dear Brutus….
The people get the government they deserve. Hell, in a republic, they get the government they want.
For various values of “the people,” I suppose. The vast majority of Americans were systematically excluded from the electorates that voted for Madison, Jackson, Polk, and McKinley.
Well, perhaps we shouldn’t assess Madison, Jackson, Polk, and McKinley by standards doomed to be anachronistic….
Good and hard.
And once again we see that one of the very worst American Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, is ranked in the Top 10.
…and hardly any downward movement in recent years. Very disappointing.
The problem when ranking presidents is that most of them are terrible. Wilson is not one of the worst 10 because in the end, for all the bad things he did, the good legislation he signed, which is plentiful, is much more than a lot of people did.
Yes, this. Wilson passed a lot of good legislation, especially in the 63rd Congress, which surely has to be up there as one of the most productive Congresses ever.
And while I wouldn’t defend Wilson’s record on civil rights and civil liberties, I think his foreign policy probably gets maligned more than it should by a lot of people. Wilson made a lot of mistakes in foreign policy, but I can’t persuade myself that going to war with Imperial Germany was one of them. Unlike Hitler, who always contained the seeds of his own destruction within him, Imperial Germany could easily have created a very unpleasant, but completely sustainable, domination over the European continent, which would have been bad for the US, and, really, for everybody. To say nothing of the fact it was Germany which counter-productively decided to start a war with the US on the flawed premise that unrestricted submarine warfare would be able to defeat Germany before American involvement would have an effect.
And the agreements reached at Versailles were probably, for the most part, about the best anyone could do at coming to a satisfactory conclusion to the war. Expecting Germany to pay reparations was neither unfair nor impossible, the territorial settlement was perfectly fair, and the military restrictions failed largely because the Allies gave up almost immediately on enforcing them.
Personally, Wilson was a gigantic dick, and this helped insure the failure of his foreign policy. But I’m not going to take a Revisionist perspective on World War I just because it makes Wilson look bad.
You really think Imperial German domination would have been worse than what actually happened, viz. Stalin and Hitler? Granted, you can’t blame Wilson for not foreseeing this, but I think there’s no question the 20th century would have been immeasurably better if Germany had won the First World War.
I’m not sure how I see a German victory in WWI meaning no Stalin.
The chance of a victorious Imperial Germany, possessing the finest army on the European continent, which had already demolished the Russians under the Tsars, putting up with this Bolshevik nonsense=infinitesimal.
Even if you do get Stalin, which I very much doubt, his potential for damage would be limited by the enforcement of Brest-Litovsk.
A German run eastern Europe would probably not have been as bad as a Stalin-run one. I suspect it would have been at least as bad, if in different ways, as a Khrushchev and Brezhnev run one, though.
A German victory in WWI probably takes away the most horrible crimes of the twentieth century. But what it puts in its place is gray and awful in its own way. And it leaves no guarantee that something horrific won’t happen anyway.
Ludendorff, in particular, was an awful, awful anti-Semite and far right lunatic. So was the Crown Prince, who would likely have taken increasing charge of affairs as his father got older. And the Kaiser was himself pretty close to being a right wing lunatic. In the aftermath of the war, who knows what kind of awfulness they would have gotten up to? As bad as Hitler? Maybe not, but I’m not sure we should be so confident.
An Imperial Germany dominate in Eastern Europe actually would be beneficial for the Jews regardless of the anti-Jewish bigotry of the German ruling classes.
The German nobility hated Jews in a slightly more vehement version of WASP anti-Semitism. It was not nearly as bad as the genocidal Jew-hatred of Imperial Russia or of Nazi Germany. In fact, the Jews of Eastern Europe generally liked the German and Austro-Hungarian armed forces and did what they could to help them. This is because they weren’t Russian.
Quoth a kid in fourth grade: Oh yeah? Whaddya gonna do about it?
So Imperial Germany pulls a Napoleon and marches on Moscow. How does that end?
Or, they do put with this Bolshie stuff, and we have Stalin.
They back the Russian Whites, intervening in the Civil War that followed the Revolution. Napoleon and Hitler lacked local allies east of Poland, Imperial Germany wouldn’t.
The victorious British and allies tried that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_contribution_to_the_Allied_Intervention_in_Russia_1918–1919
Didn’t work.
Also, since the Germans themselves sponsored Lenin, I find it unlikely that they’d behave as you suggest.
Histories don’t talk about it much, because the Red Guards and Bolshevik leadership didn’t like to talk about it, but they fought the Germans off and on in Ukraine even after Brest-Litovsk.
There’s no evidence to believe that the Germans would’ve been able to take out France though. During the mutinies maybe, but that was while Russia was still in it(and re-energized by revolution) and the US was out.
As much as Americans hate to admit it, it was mainly the French that defeated the Germans in WWI.
the problem with backing the Whites is that the Whites didn’t, and wouldn’t, accept the Brest-Litovsk terms. The Germans thought about overthrowing the Bolsheviks in 1918, and decided not to because the Bolsheviks were the ones who’d signed the treaty with them.
Wengler – the French army was crucial to holding off the Germans for the first two years of the war, but after Verdun the French were mostly worn out, and had a hard time launching offensive operations. It was really the British who were most responsible for the actual defeat of the German army.
An Imperial German domination could have lasted for decades. Obviously it would have been better than what actually happened in several ways (no Holocaust, most likely). But the assumption that a victorious German regime run by Erich Ludendorff would have been mostly benign is hard for me to credit. Such a regime would have been ugly and probably anti-Semitic. It would have run rough-shod over the other states of Europe. It’s hard to say what would have come of it, but it’s hard to think it would have looked very attractive.
Hitler was horrible, but his defeat allowed Germany to expunge the various demons that mostly predated him, and allowed for the creation of a largely consensual Europe in which, for example, war between France and Germany is now unthinkable. I suspect that a victorious Wilhelm II and Ludendorff would not have created a system anywhere near as benign.
Yes, it certainly would have been unpleasant to be living in German-dominated Europe if you weren’t a German (or even if you were a left-wing German) but the ways in which it would have been better I think outway the ways it would have been worse. And the “creation of a largely consensual Europe” wasn’t really completed until the early 1990s, so I can imagine how you could get there in that time from German victory in WWI.
Looking outside Europe, German victory probably means the more rapid disintegration of the British and French colonial Empires, and that sounds like a good thing to me.
There would have been genocide in the 20th century. Maybe not *the* Holocaust, but industrialized, racialized death was coming on hard. And the Germans, even without Hitler, were leading irrational nationalists with technocratic and militaristic problem-solving habits. And the Jews, even without Hitler, were popular targets for irrational national cleansing (cf Dreyfus)
No Hitler = No Holocaust is a stupid, simplistic counterfactual.
I agree that Ludendorff was a truly evil man, and one of the 20th century’s more underestimated villains. (I’d rank him along with Wilson, Lenin, Haig, and Clemenceau as the most malign figures of the First World War.) But why do you assume that no U.S. intervention would mean an outright German victory? It seems more likely to me that without the industrial muscle of the U.S. forcing German capitulation, the war would have dragged on in the trenches for several more years. The citizenry was already getting quite tired of it, and many armies (including Germany’s) were on the verge of outright mutiny. It seems most likely that this situation would have resulted in one or more governments falling, the warmongers on all sides being discredited, and a peace of exhaustion on the basis of status quo ante bellum (more or less). In such a situation, Germany would still not have hegemony over Europe, and a dolchstosslegende would be unlikely to take hold in any nation.
Elsethread it’s argued that a strong German empire could have prevented the rise of Stalin. The merits of that argument aside, what effect does a weak, exhausted Europe with little appetite for war have on the rise of Stalin? He executed as many or more than Hitler as it was.
I’m going to have to disagree with you. An Eastern Europe dominated by Imperial Germany would have been beneficial for the Jews of Eastern Europe. The policy would have been to emancipate them.
Well, the first mistake here is thinking Germany would’ve won if the US hadn’t intervened.
If anything a more stalemated war could’ve led to a much less disastrous peace.
So nobody wants to argue that Grant isn’t the most underrated President? Pretty universal agreement on that question? OK.
Then who’s #2?
How about Herbert Hoover? Lord knows he wasn’t a good president, but is he as bad as he’s portrayed? He seems to get the lion’s share of the blame for the Great Depression, but it was clearly not his ten months in office that caused it. I would describe him as a mediocrity, perhaps a sub-par President, not one of the worst, or even on the boundary between third- and fourth-quartile.
I will argue that Grant is not particularly underrated, but I am working on my case and will publish it when ready.
I will also argue that William Howard Taft is the most underrated president in American history.
Good god, man. Taft loved golf.
But I’d grant you that is an unexpected pick…should be an interesting essay.
Taft certainly doesn’t get enough credit for actually doing a lot of the trust-busting Roosevelt talked about.
He was sadly unwilling to do much to uphold Roosevelt’s environmental legacy.
Taft’s enviro record is underrated because of the bad press TR gave him during the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy.
The thing about TR is that he was a self-promoting, full of shit asshole. So everything he says, and especially anything he said about Taft in the Autobiography, has to be taken with a grain of salt the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats.
I’d like to add something about Taft’s record as chief justice. On the one hand it wasn’t very impressive. But on the other hand first amendment jurisprudence before 1921 wasn’t very imnpressive. Not only did courts not apply it to the states, but courts either supported or did nothing to strike down the Alien and Sedition Act, anti-abolitionist measures, the Comstock laws, and Wilson’s wartime legislation. Under the Taft court we do get the idea that people can’t be thrown in prison for their ideas just because conservative jurists really don’t like them.
How about Warren Harding? Presided over a period of peace and prosperity and eased up on some of Wilson’s more egregious civil liberties violations, eg letting Gene Debs out of jail and supporting anti-lynching laws. Not a good president, but not as egregiously awful as he’s often painted.
No, Harding was utterly dreadful. Also presided over the crackdown on immigration from Europe.
No, Harding was utterly dreadful. Also presided over the crackdown on immigration from Europe.
The crackdown on immigration from Europe in the 1920s was a necessary prerequisite to shared prosperity in 1950s America. Mass unskilled immigration is not compatible with a middle-class society, because it increases the reserve army of the unemployed and decreases the bargaining leverage of those who do have jobs. When possible, we should have let in those Europeans who were truly fleeing for their lives (e.g. Jews under Nazi rule), but we have no ethical obligation to admit everyone into the United States who thinks they might be better off here.
I am completely unwilling to accept the upshot of this argument. While one can certainly argue for a more regularized immigration system, the actual reasons for closing the borders were nearly 100% not about the economy and nearly 100% for racial and ideological reasons. While the AFL might have supported immigration restrictions for economic reasons, the vast majority wanted to keep the dirty dago bohunk Jew Bolsheviks out our Anglo-Saxon protestant nation. All you have to do is read what people argued at the time about this issue.
This is correct. There would have been nothing wrong if the immigration system was merely bureaucratized more but what happened was done for racist purposes.
Just as I think Hoover gets too much of the blame for the Great Depression, I think the 20s Republicans won preceded him get too little.
who preceded him.
Teapot Dome, anyone?
C’mon: in what way was Hoover ever a decent President? I’ll give you that the faults of his response to the Depression are the faults of his time (the Gold Standard, a consensus for Austerity, little or no Governmental safety net), and the Crash was built in to the economy he inherited; but what did he ever do – as President – that was worth anything?
He was a great ex-President, one of the top three or four certainly (though it’s a short list; the obvious ones are John Q Adams, Hoover, and Carter). But a good President?
How did you translate “sub-par” and “mediocre” as “decent” and “good?”
I guess I overreacted to any rehabilitation of Hoover. He may not deserve to shoulder all the blame for his series of Republican presidents and the general Austerity consensus of his day, but he did nothing as President to deserve redemption, either – and usually when I hear nice things about him it’s the Amity Shlaes of the world smearing FDR.
William Leuchtenburg’s acidic short account of Hoover does a good job of pointing out that he wouldn’t have been a good president even if the economy hadn’t collapsed on his watch. It’s much more stringent than David Greenberg’s previous book on Coolidge.
His Supreme Court appointments were pretty good for a Republican, certainly better on balance than Wilson’s…
Hughes, Roberts, and Cardozo against McReynolds, Brandeis, and Clarke?
McReynolds is obviously by far the worst of the six. Brandeis and Cardozo are pretty equivalent. Clarke was probably better than either Hughes or Roberts, but not as good as Brandeis or Cardozo. I’d give Wilson 2/3 good judges, but his bad one is by far the worst. Hoover gets 1/3 good judges, but his other two were not that terrible. I can see giving Hoover the edge, but I’m not sure it’s decisive. If Clarke had lasted for twenty-seven years and McReynolds had been gone after six, we’d certainly be saying that Wilson made good Supreme Court appointments, and it’s really not Wilson’s fault that it was the other way around (Clarke was only five years older than McReynolds, and didn’t die until 1945).
This. McReynolds was a grade-A shit, but will be forgotten (except for his outstanding achievement in that field), as will all three of Hoover’s appointees. Cardozo and especially Brandeis will be remembered.
Cardozo was a Hoover appointee.
Well, shoot.
And Hughes really was OK, very rarely joined the 4 Horsemen on crucial issues if his vote meant anything. Roberts was just very odd.
I already argued that Grant isn’t that underrated above.
Grant is an unusual President which would help explain why he would be underrated. He is the ONLY good Civil Rights president for almost a century but yet he didn’t really stop the tide of Jim Crow as much restrain it (And I will not judge presidents on the basis of good intentions.)
I remember when Yglesias was making this argument- that corruption shouldn’t be held against Grant because so many of the Presidencies of the late 19th century were corrupt. Well, the presidents of the late 19th century aren’t rated very well because of it!
As for underrated, I would say at the very least LBJ and Polk were both better president than Eisenhower though none of the three were saints.
Except of course that Grant was terrible on civil rights for Native Americans.
Also, while Polk might have been successful, starting a war with Mexico for the sole reason of naked imperial ambition to acquire land so the South could expand slavery does not suggest a good president to me.
I’m a native San Franciscan, current resident of Sonoma county, and citizen of the United States, and freely admit that I’m glad Polk stole my neck of the Mexican woods way-back-when.
Polk was in no way underrated. Raping Mexico and then throwing a dollar bill its way for the northern part of the country was not something a good President would do.
Remember Madison tried to do this with Canada and it failed.
So his failure in 1812-1814 made Madison a better president?
You have to give Madison credit for this — he was one of the last presidents to wage war by the Constitution. It was declared by Congress. When the New Englanders met in Hartford to discuss sedition, he didn’t march on them and clap them in irons. And when it was done, he took no vengeance upon them. Of course, getting the WH burned down is sort of a black mark.
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