Objectively Ranking the Presidents

What do we mean by presidential "greatness?"

(Please forgive the belatedness of this President’s Day post—I plead the excuse that I’ve been sick for the past week and unable to do much of anything, certainly any writing.)

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Every few years, the folks at Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey conduct a poll of academics who study the presidency and presidential politics, asking respondents to rate the “greatness” of all of America’s presidents. Their latest survey is now out, and there have been various news stories about it highlighting who’s notably up (Obama, Grant, Carter, Kennedy) and who’s notably down (Jackson, Coolidge, Polk, Wilson, Reagan).

The exercise is obviously silly on one level. Who cares about rating the “greatness” of William Henry Harrison, who was president for only a month? Who cares whether James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson or Donald Trump was the “worst” president, or whether George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or FDR was the “greatest?” Who cares, honestly, about rank-ordering presidents at all—particularly when it will inevitably tell us more about current fashion than about the presidencies themselves? But people do love ranking things for some reason, so I decided to waste a little time thinking about how to make this silly poll better. I decided that the big problem is lack of clarity about what constitutes “greatness.” What do we mean by that word?

If we start with what the word, well, actually means, then what we’re talking about is magnitude. Was John D. Rockefeller a “great” businessman? Obviously—he built an enormous, massively profitable and long-lasting business out of nothing. Was Genghis Khan a great conqueror? Obviously—he conquered most of Asia. You can get into ambiguous cases, of course. Was Thomas Alva Edison a great inventor, or just a great businessman who capitalized on other people’s inventiveness? Is Tom Cruise a great actor, or just a great movie star? Even in these cases, though, it’s clear that the person in question was great at something; we’re just debating what that something really is or what context to put it in.

So what makes a “great” president? The question begs a teleology, an implied answer to the question “what’s a president for?” And it seems to me that, as we look at how the rankings of presidents have changed over time, that implied answer is what’s been changing behind the scenes.

Consider a president like James Polk. He’s ranked a bit below the middle of the pack in the current poll: the 25th greatest president out of 45 (they do rank Biden, but they sensibly only count Grover Cleveland as one president, even though he had two presidencies), with an average greatness rating of 49.83 out of 100. (For comparison, Lincoln, rated the top president of all time, gets a greatness rating of 93.87 while Trump, rated the worst, gets a greatness rating of 10.92.) Polk ran for president on a platform of territorial expansion: into Oregon at Britain’s expense, via the annexation of Texas, and via war with Mexico (which would inevitably follow annexation). Domestically, he opposed the kinds of internal improvements favored by his Whig opponent Henry Clay (because he thought they were the proper responsibility of the states), advocated the restoration of an independent treasury system (rather than relying on private banks or chartering a national bank), and favored lowering the tariff (the better to sell America’s agricultural commodities, rather than relying on protectionism to build up American manufacturing). He promised to serve only one term, and accomplished all of his stated goals in that term. His objectives were certainly not uncontroversial and so required considerable skill to accomplish, and those accomplishments were not insignificant—between them, the settlements with Britain and Mexico added more territory to the United States than the Louisiana Purchase. Why isn’t that the record of a great president?

A mild way of answering that would be to say that his presidency has been recontextualized within the larger sweep of American history with different emphases than before. Sectionalism and slavery were already the central issues in Polk’s day, but success in antebellum politics meant managing those issues rather than resolving them, because the differences between North and South were growing greater, not smaller. Polk was far from being above these debates—he was a slave-owner himself, who continued to purchase enslaved people while in the White House as well as to sell slaves, breaking up families to do so. But a pure creature of Southern interests would not have fared as well nationally as Polk did. Polk was able to navigate between free-soilers and advocates for the expansion of slavery, as well as between protectionists and free-traders, which is a testament to his political skill. And the fact that he was able not only to manage the sectional divide but accomplish a massive expansion of America’s continental empire in the bargain attests to great skill indeed.

From a post-Civil War perspective, though, that skill looks it was mostly used to kick the most important can down the road. If you want to imagine a counterfactual world where slavery was slowly strangled to death, and the Civil War thereby avoided, then Polk is arguably the man who made that counterfactual world impossible. (This is particularly true if you think that Henry Clay, Polk’s 1844 opponent, was the man who could have made this counterfactual world a reality.)

I’m very skeptical of this counterfactual world, though. Clay was instrumental in both the Compromise of 1820 and the Missouri Compromise of 1850, both exercises in successful can-kicking. Was there a similar compromise that involved not annexing Texas? I doubt it. The strongest advocates of expansion southward wanted all of Mexico (and Cuba too), and Clay himself waffled on annexation during the campaign because he saw how his opposition was hurting his chances. And can-kicking was never going to work in the end anyway. Lincoln (who vociferously opposed the Mexican War) was right: the country could not endure half slave and half free. But there was no way the Slave Power was ever going to accept a political outcome that put their social system on the path to extinction.

If you look at America’s pre-Civil War history through that lens, then “success” at holding the union together and growing its power was actually a kind of failure, since it only delayed the inevitable day of reckoning while making that reckoning more terrible. And once you start looking at things that way, not only Polk must be downgraded, but also Jackson, Jefferson and indeed the framers of the constitution itself. That’s not an absurd perspective by any means—but is it compatible with evaluating presidents on the basis of their “greatness?” Perhaps—but only if we come to think of greatness as less about leading the country successfully and growing its wealth and power, and more about striving mightily to lead the country the right way, whether successfully or not.

That may be precisely what we increasingly do. Consider two other presidents undergoing reevaluation: Grant and Wilson. Grant’s reputation has risen dramatically as Reconstruction has gone from being seen as a corrupt disaster (the South-flattering mid-century view) to a noble failure (the view I was taught in high school) to a vital cause that should never have been abandoned (which I believe is how it is taught now). Wilson’s reputation, meanwhile, has suffered from a surfeit of blows. Once he was remembered as FDR’s key progressive forerunner, the author of progressive reform domestically and liberal internationalism abroad, whose wise domestic and foreign policies were sadly undone after his presidency by plutocrats and isolationists. Now he is increasingly remembered as the man who brought segregation to the seat of the federal government, ruthlessly suppressed civil liberties, misled the country into a world war to bail out foreign empires, and whose legacy lay in tatters after his departure from office substantially because of his arrogance and high-handedness.

I see considerable merit in both reevaluations—but both can also go too far. Grant deserves great praise for his war against the Klu Klux Klan, and more generally for championing an egalitarian ethos that was far ahead of its time (he was also sympathetic to women’s suffrage, for example). But it’s still true that Grant wasn’t able to make Reconstruction a success. For that matter, Grant also favored a more peaceful (though still assimilationist) policy toward America’s indigenous peoples—but nonetheless, the Indian Wars that devastated the Plains Indians began on his watch. How great can Grant have been if what we increasingly applaud him for as president can well be seen as noble failures rather than successes?

Similarly, the bill of indictment against Wilson is a vital corrective to the outrageous whitewash that formerly obtained. I personally think Wilson was a very bad model to follow, less because of where he led (though I disagree with a lot of that too) than how he led. But Wilson did dramatically change the role of the federal government in the economy, and of America in the world, in ways that prefigured even broader and more lasting changes under the next Democratic administration. Surely, that’s a measure of greatness.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying that “fighting the good fight” isn’t a meaningful factor in measuring greatness. Part of what a president is for is exercising moral leadership, both building structures for a better society and restraining the people’s own worst impulses rather than indulging them—because being a great country is partly about being an admirable one as well as one endowed with wealth and power. But that can’t be the central factor in considering greatness, because it isn’t the central reason why we have a president.

No presidency has been more dramatically devalued by academic opinion in recent years than that of Andrew Jackson, and that trend exemplifies precisely what I’m talking about. Jackson emphatically had a lasting and significant effect on the trajectory of the country and left an enormous political legacy; moreover, it’s hard to imagine another man taking his place in history. He was certainly not always successful, nor was he a man noted for his foresight, to say the least. He deserves all the opprobrium he receives for his role in the Trail of Tears. Temperamentally, I think he was the opposite of what a leader should be. But between the passing of the founding generation and the Civil War, American democracy was Jacksonian democracy. Placing him in the middle rank of presidents ordered by “greatness” is absurd. You may not agree with the course he set the nation on—indeed, you may think that course was evil—but you can’t deny that he shaped history enduringly. If that’s not greatness, I don’t really know what the word means.

And, of course, even as Jackson has fallen in academic esteem—and not only among liberal academics—he’s found new fans on the populist right. The MAGA enthusiasm for Andrew Jackson specifically is about repudiating the notion of the presidency as a “bully pulpit” from which to preach to the nation, and thinking of it, instead, as the custodian of the national honor. It is explicitly a choice for greatness over goodness. That’s reason enough to recognize that the two words don’t mean the same thing, and can sometimes be opposed. Since they can be opposed, it may be necessary to make the case, at least some of the time, that it is better to strive to be good than to strive to be great. But it also means that we should be wary of a natural tendency on most of our parts to think they should go together, and therefore to underrate the achievements of those we think are wrong, and underrate the failures of those we think are right.

In that regard, I found an interesting little factoid in the poll. The poll asked respondents to self-identify as liberal, conservative or moderate. I took a look at which presidents were rated more highly by moderates than by the average views of liberal and conservative respondents put together. Moderates in general were more generous in their assessments, but not uniformly so. Guess which three presidents showed the biggest disparity, with moderates rating them relatively more highly than either liberals or conservatives? Andrew Jackson, James Polk—and William McKinley. McKinley, a protectionist backed by Wall Street rather than a free-trader who scourged the banks, was the opposite of a Jacksonian in a host of ways; it was his populist opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who carried forward Jacksonian ideals and attitudes into the 20th century. But McKinley was yet another president of great practical consequence, establishing Republican dominance and the terms of political debate well beyond his lifetime. And he is also remembered today far more for building up and expressing American power—and launching it across the Pacific with the acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines—than for articulating and pursuing a distinctive vision of a good society that still inspires us.

These three presidents weren’t moderates by any means, nor were their policies ones that contemporary moderates would be likely to draw inspiration from. But perhaps, being moderates, these respondents had somewhat weaker ideological filters, allowing them to be a bit more objective in assessing these leaders’ successes, and the degree to which they left their stamp on America, and on the world. If we want successful leaders ourselves, and not merely failures whom we agree with, we would do well to examine them over the rims of our own shaded lenses a bit more than we do.