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Who’s Your Favorite Underrated President?
Since we’re all playing along with the consensual fiction that this is Presidents’ Day, a question for the assembled Ricochetti: Who’s your favorite underrated American president? Calvin Coolidge is an easy answer around these parts — Ricochet operates under the banner of Silent Cal Productions, after all — but we’ll take him as a given. My choice? Grover Cleveland, the man George Will once referred to as “the last Democratic president with proper understanding of [the presidency’s] place in our constitutional order.” Writing in the Boston Globe, the consistently great Jeff Jacoby gets at why:
He was never paralyzed by the fear of saying “no.” In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed 414 bills, more than double the total of all the presidents who preceded him. Over his eight years in the White House, Cleveland rejected an astonishing 584 bills passed by Congress. That many of those measures were popular feel-good measures, such as authorizations for specious veterans’ pensions, makes Cleveland’s fortitude all the more impressive. Only 1 percent of his vetoes were overridden — a testament to the power of ethical principle to withstand the political appetite for spending other people’s money.
Read the whole Jacoby piece for a sense of the thoroughgoing integrity that was the hallmark of Cleveland’s entire career. Then marvel at the chasm between him and the next Democrat to assume the White House, Woodrow Wilson.
OK, Ricochet, how about you?
Published in General
As a veteran of 25 years of marriage (or your average politician), I’m going to ignore your question and instead answer an unasked question….because like President Obama I hear people…even those who don’t vote.
So back to the unasked question I’m answering…
Based on our shared “consensual fiction,” do we Ricochetti suffer from a diagnosis of folie a deux? a shared delusion?
just checking…..
It warms my heart to find so many sharing my love for Harding. No matter how great the second female President is, she’s not going to match up to Florence.
Great question! Present, or future?
I was waiting to read this. :)
You should share your reasons for this fondness; I think we’d all be genuinely interested.
President Edith Wilson!
When her husband became incapacitated, she took over the presidency for a year. Knowing nothing about economics, and having no interest, she did nothing about the sharp depression of 1921-22. Harding followed her do-nothing economic policy, and together they saw the economy quickly correct itself. Hoover and FDR, a few years later, did everything they could and saw their similar depression continue for 11 years (15, if you count the war years, as you should).
Ah, yes. Cousin Edith. And her first married name was Galt.
I think Grant has been underrated. Although his administration had a lot of corruption, the corruption led to the first real development of the west through the railroads.
Personal peccadilloes aside — and they are legion — I’m inclined to agree with this. Our own Richard Epstein is also fond of pointing out the talent that Harding brought into his administration. That group included Coolidge, Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover. Of course, you have to discount for Albert Fall.
I’m glad you pointed this out. I’ve always thought that the story of the Arthur presidency is one of the most overlooked in American political history. It’s also among the most poignant, considering that he was dying of kidney disease at the time.
Garfield was one of the most fascinating men ever to hold the office. It’s a shame that his short tenure allowed that fact to go overlooked. As I’ve noted before, anyone who hasn’t really needs to read Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is a fascinating account of the events surrounding Garfield’s assassination.
I’m confused by the “even if” part. My ideal president would see it as something just short of a patriotic duty to drop dead shortly after leaving office.
I agree with this. It took a long time, but the Nixon pardon has now received the recognition it deserves as an act of statesmanship. Also, policy aside, bonus points to Ford for being one of the few genuinely normal human beings to hold the office in the modern era (that may be a professional liability, but I still find it personally endearing).
Agree with this and all the previous Ike love. One of the most fascinating things about Eisenhower is the second look he’s gotten from historians who’ve had access to more information. He thrived on being underestimated, going out of his way to undersell his abilities (go read a transcript of an Eisenhower press conference at some point — he was a master of giving the press nothing to work with). Not only is that canny, but it takes a remarkable amount of self-discipline.
He rolled back Wilson’s reforms in a scant few years and let loose the roaring twenties. In the UK, the second wave of progressives built on the achievements of the first. In the US, FDR pretty much had to start from scratch.
And Harding did it without making it seem partisan. He helped make a lot of the Wilsonian schtick unusable, and some of the worst stuff, the eugenics, the homicidal violence against dissent, the open hostility to so much of America, went away and really never came back.
He brought Catholics into the party about as much as anyone did and persuaded Coolidge not to identify as a progressive, meaning that the party was left larger and more conservative, solidifying Taft’s wresting the party from TR (on both issues). 1928 would be a big step back on both, but Harding’s side would ultimately win out.
As I recall, the corruption also didn’t touch Grant himself. That’s not to excuse his responsibility to be aware of it, but I think it’s a meaningful distinction.
Grant also doesn’t get enough recognition for how great he was on civil rights. He crushed the Klan, went out of his way to empower blacks, and completely turned the tide on the treatment of Indians (although he also bears some responsibility for the reservation system, so demerits there).
I’ve always thought one of the biggest mistakes in American history was the deal that put Rutherford Hayes in office as Grant’s successor, which ended the occupation of the South and set blacks up for nearly a century of misery. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it still never sat right with me.
By the way, the two presidents I find most vexing — because both of them had admirable qualities and serious drawbacks in almost equal measure — were Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. And before I’m savaged, please note that most of my admiration for TR is on the personal, not the political, level.
Troy S: “[And Grant] completely turned the tide on the treatment of Indians (although he also bears some responsibility for the reservation system, so demerits there)”
Matty Van: I agree with you on Grant up to that point. In terms of Grant’s sentiment and sympathies, you are certainly right. But in terms of actual policy, he appointed his trusted Indian-hating generals Sherman and Sheridan to solve the “problem” of Indian obstruction to government-built westerrn railroads. And those railroads… one of the most destructive – possibly THE most destructive – examples of government intervention in the free market in America’s history.
EDIT: Btw, agree with you completely about Jackson and TR. Jackson, fortunately, had Matty V… uh, Martin Van Buren to reign him in on his bad points and encourage him on his good. TR, great person though he was as an individual, had nobody like that. He is one of the pillars now of the progressive government which threatens to sink the once great system established by the Constitution.
Even as a descendant of Andrew Jackson, I would have to agree because of his unruly populist nature, the fact that he managed to reinvent the patronage system and primarily because he vetoed the reauthorization of Alexander Hamilton’s concept of the Second Bank of the United States.
Warren G Harding. He walked into office with an economy in a deep recession. It was every bit as bad as the recessions that FDR and Obama started their terms with. Harding cut the size of the Federal Government by 50% in 2 years. The rest of the decade became known as the Roaring 20s. FDR and Obama both increased the size of government. The result? The economy didn’t recover from FDR’s economic policies until WWII ended, when the size of government was again reduced. Obama’s recovery? Well still waiting.
Of those already mentioned: Coolidge, Ike, George H. W. Bush.
Not mentioned (I don’t think): George W. Bush.
I agree and I would add Woodrow Wilson to that as well, though I don’t think he has any positive qaulities. There aren’t too many positives to Andrew Jackson either.
Most over rated: JFK.
Well said.
Yes, that’s totally fair and I should have been more precise. Grant’s achievement was creating a new standard of humane treatment for the Indians, but he did that mostly through rhetoric — no small thing, that — while policy never got there.
I’ve always thought that JFK benefitted from having in perpetuity what Barack Obama had temporarily. That is to say, he’s something of a blank canvas for people to project their beliefs on (notice how often both liberals and conservatives try to claim him).
Now, granted, he had nearly three years in office, so it’s not as if we don’t have some idea of what he was actually about. The record, however, is still thin enough to maintain the ambiguity — and the substance tends to get swallowed by the mythology anyway. His premature death only compounds that trend. I suspect we won’t get to any meaningful reappraisals of Kennedy until the generation that lived through his tenure has passed away. The analysis is simply too tainted by romance.
That book was the primary source for my belief that Garfield would have been a good president. Also one of the best popular books on American history. Right up there with Unbroken.
It will also make you appreciate modern medicine. Garfield would have survived the assassination attempt today and would have avoided some rather barbaric medical procedures.
Yeah, I agree. Good points.
There is one president who is both overrated (by society) and underrated (by conservatives): JFK. His legacy consisted primarily of cutting taxes, in the process introducing to the mainstream the idea that too high tax rates hurt productivity, and being a thorn in Fidel Castro’s backside. Maybe if he had lived he’d have squandered that legacy, but as it stands his record is to the right of the one his opponent eventually produced.
And I’ll go ahead and say it: Teddy Roosevelt is an underrated President. Most of the things that annoy conservatives about him happened after he left office. While President he supported lowering tariffs, was truly neutral in the business vs. labor question, and even his trust busting could be justified as a recognition that being pro-market sometimes means being anti-business.
My father in law was a hard money Republican from Iowa, and Truman was the one Democrat he ever voted for.
Very true . . .
Do you not think his running in 1912 was about his failure of character? How about his bigotry about Catholics?