I see that C-SPAN has released its 2021 update to its presidential rankings, and it’s the first to include Donald Trump. C-SPAN’s methodology isn’t a bad one, but it’s very numeric. Participants score every president from 1-10 in several categories like Administrative Skill and Relations with Congress. Its not at all a bad way to do things. I could point out some quibbles– nobody knows enough to gage every president insightfully in all these categories. I’ve been reading books on the presidents since I was five, and I have no idea how to place, say, Rutherford Haye’s administrative skill or Martin Van Buren’s relations with Congress. I was delighted to see the presence of a number of younger (for academia) scholars– Lindsey Chervinsky and Thomas Balcerski, for instance. I also could not help but note the pains they took to include more conservative scholars. Lee Edwards (who wrote the worst book I’ve ever read, Freedom’s College), Richard Norton Smith, Alvin Felzenberg, but more than that– tiny Christian colleges are overrepresented with two different Grove City professors (Grove City is one of only two schools that does not accept students who take on federal aid. Guess what? Their student body is almost entirely white, even by the standards of western Pennsylvania.) Other Christian colleges represented in that category are Harding University, Liberty, Southern Methodist, Colorado Christian University, Taylor, and Samford, and Baylor. There’s nothing wrong with these colleges necessarily–and I went to a private Christian liberal arts school for college, although you’d probably never guess it today. My point is simply– these kinds of schools seem overrepresented in the survey, and as a result, the makeup of the participating scholars probably resembles the overall American population reasonably well, but is decidedly to the right of where the discipline of history is as a whole right now. Anyway, you can see the results here.
My own ranking this year, for whatever its worth, is:
- Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- James Monroe
- Harry Truman
- Lyndon Johnson
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Barack Obama
- John Adams
- George H. W. Bush
- Thomas Jefferson
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Ulysses S. Grant
- John F. Kennedy
- John Quincy Adams
- William McKinley
- William Howard Taft
- James Garfield
- Bill Clinton
- Ronald Reagan
- James Madison
- Grover Cleveland
- Jimmy Carter
- Rutherford B. Hayes
- Zachary Taylor
- Chester Arthur
- Herbert Hoover
- Gerald R. Ford
- Woodrow Wilson
- Benjamin Harrison
- Millard Fillmore
- Warren Harding
- Martin Van Buren
- James K. Polk
- Richard M. Nixon
- John Tyler
- Calvin Coolidge
- William Henry Harrison
- George W. Bush
- Franklin Pierce
- Andrew Johnson
- James Buchanan
- Andrew Jackson
- Donald Trump
The bigger problem is that most historians do not have enough diversity of thought to give a balanced ranking. Most History professors are far left Democrats and their political preferences bleed through in the rankings, evidenced by Barack Obama’s high ranking. The fact that you would take issue with a survey including a few conservative respondents is quite troubling.
The number of conservatives is probably why Bush is so high.
And I don’t care what anyone says, James Buchanan has to be in last. It’s not right if anyone other than him or Andrew Johnson is in last place.
Bush is actually ranked quite low (both of them). My bottom two are Wilson & Jackson, as they are the most damaging. Andrew Johnson actually had a decent foreign policy: Acquired Alaska and he got Maximillian out of Mexico.
I have just googled and have not found any attempt to judge presidents on their Labor record.
Some enterprising grad student could make a splash rating the second half of our 46 leaders.
Any guesses on worst and best?
Why is Tyler so low? He was decently high in your old rankings. Going from 17 to 36 is a big fall.
I think when I wrote my original post, I still thought of Tyler as “my territory”– I wrote my senior thesis on him, and was a couple of chance encounters away from writing my dissertation on him. But in my judgment, he lacked pragmatism, was ruthlessly ideological, and didn’t really have the erudition, vision, or people skills that make good presidents. You can’t just go it alone, as Tyler did.