2-21-17
What Makes a President Great? Clipping? Sipping? Slashing?
Breaking Newstags: presidents, Obama legacy, ranking presidents
Related Link HNN: Ranking Presidents
So Presidents’ Day has come and gone, along with the whining over C-Span’s latest ranking of American presidents, which predictably put Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on top (yawn); demoted the beleaguered Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson; and positioned Barack Obama, in his post-presidential debut, at No. 12.
Such lists are a fun parlor game, if one that tends to provoke weary sighs from scholars, including some of the 91 who participated in the poll. “It’s not a thing that lends itself easily to quantification,” said one of them, David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University (and author of books about Richard Nixon and Calvin Coolidge). “But still we play along.”
Our attachment to these rankings, Mr. Greenberg said, reflects something real. “The president is a singularly important symbolic figure in our national culture,” he said. “Because the head of government is also head of state, the president just becomes this vehicle for emotional attachment that might otherwise go to a king.”
Fair enough. But are “public persuasion,” “crisis leadership,” “moral authority,” and pursuit of “equal justice for all,” to name some of the criteria C-Span used, really the only things that count? Now that the Presidents’ Day pieties are over, let’s look at some alternate ranking systems that take account of the things that really matter.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel