U.S. Presidents - Early Twentieth Century Edition

no idea. shameful, but really, no clue.

Warmongers and moneylenders, the lot of them.

History has not been particularly kind to Wilson.

Ditto, except that Hoover was W., the Prequel.

This is best, right?

did TR create the FDA? all the sinclair lewis stuff happened under him, right? see, this is how badly i know the period...

what's really interesting to me in a meta way is that it's hard to even map these guys onto a contemporary ideology as we know it. we really do live in FDR's world.

Only studed Wilson > at school. He certainly struck me as the best of the four (Europeans may have a different take on his intervention into WWI than Americans). Before him - Teddy R's the giant figure but I don't know enough about him, McKinley or Taft really.

If you're looking for reasons to hate Wilson, he began drug prohibition, strongly suppressed dissent during the War, and was, putting it simply, a gigantic racist.

i don't even know what the parties stood for in this period. republicans were "the city" + owners and managers, democrats were "the country" + workers? sort of?

xp All good reasons to hate the man.

yeah especially "gigantic racist" which covers a lot of ugly stuff

these guys were all absolutely awful. the only one i have any good words for at all, weirdly enough, is harding.

republicans were a lotttt of things in this period

xp wait what Teddy Roosevelt did plenty of good stuff.

And Wilson for all his many faults introduced a number of very progressive economic policies (FTC, progressive income tax, anti-trust legislation). Harding was far far worse than either of these guys.

goole -

big picture w/r/t elections were still split north/south, republicans = north, democrats = south

Roosevelt.

and party wasn't really as tied to ideology

roosevelt/taft/wilson - 'progressives'
harding/coolidge/hoover - not so dissimilar from today's republicans policy-wise

Hoover was actually a very skilled bureaucrat - he oversaw a kind of Marshall Plan like program during and after WWI and helped feed millions of people. Had he never run for President, he would be far better remembered today as a terribly decent humanitarian. However...

I have no time for Harding or Coolidge and McKinley gets a mixed review from me. Taft was a decent guy, perhaps too decent - hence the single term probably as he got to far ahead of his constituency.

TR is a giant figure and I think, despite, some major misgivings about him, he was a mostly positive force for the US. I have to vote for him.

Wilson was not only a racist and occasionally a fool, but the Espionage and Sedition acts deeply disturb me. His conduct of the war was good and his early domestic priorities; Federal Trade Commission, Federal Reserve, antitrust legislation and income tax were all important. More than anything, though, there's a certain rigid, professor's pride to him that irks me. It's why he irked the Republicans so much and it's why he failed to see or admit that he wasn't fit to remain in office for part of the last year of his presidency.

these guys were all absolutely awful. the only one i have any good words for at all, weirdly enough, is harding.

When I think of the worst American presidents, I don't generally think of the Progressive era
(which basically ended w/ your man, Harding.

Hoover was actually a very skilled bureaucrat - he oversaw a kind of Marshall Plan like program during and after WWI and helped feed millions of people. Had he never run for President, he would be far better remembered today as a terribly decent humanitarian. However...

That's why I can't vote in this--I just don't know nearly enough, which is when you fall back on caricatures, in Hoover's case the one I've internalized from the Democratic side.

Harding gets a few points because the moral laxity of his administration peeled off the worst qualities of Wilson's. He pardoned Eugene Debs, for instance, after Wilson, in one of the most shameful acts of his presidency, specifically denied him clemency.

Roosevelt did a lot less legislatively than he gets credit for. He's certainly the most vivid figure.

Hoover was actually a very skilled bureaucrat - he oversaw a kind of Marshall Plan like program during and after WWI and helped feed millions of people. Had he never run for President, he would be far better remembered today as a terribly decent humanitarian.

otm. Which is why Truman called on him for help in the late forties.

I may vote for Wilson with the same repugnance I showed for LBJ in the last round.

Woodrow Wilson - Classic or Dud?

btw it isn't that Wilson was a "gigantic racist," which is reductive -- all these guys were in some sense or another -- it's that Wilson actively pursued Jim Crow policies in his own administration and then got haughty about it when pressed by black leaders.

I know. I was trying to make it clear that that was shorthand for that stuff without writing a lecture about it.

i've probably read more about this era than any other in u.s. history (the last 30 years aside), so i'll elaborate:

mckinley -- contrary to popular belief, he wasn't a puppet of wall street or mark hanna, but a very skilled politician. and, unfortunately, a very skilled warmonger. karl rove loves this guy. need i say more?
roosevelt -- some presidents have bad qualities that have blinded us to their good ones; with TR, it's the reverse. his amusing personality (who could deny he's more fun to read about than almost any other president?) all too often distracts us from the fact that he was basically our first national figure to be an all-out, unapologetic, no-kidding imperialist. he wasn't much of a 'progressive,' either -- his usual tactic was to rant about the awfulness of big business and then turning around and complaining about the "muckrakers" and "fool La Follette type of radicals" who were exposing that awfulness. still, he'll win this poll and probably deserves to.
taft -- curiously, actually busted more trusts than TR ever did. otherwise, probably a more impressive chief justice than president.
wilson -- if not the worst president, certainly the most destructive. any president would have had to pass a few progressive bills in this period; not many would have the fortitude to drag the united states into the bloodiest war in world history up to that time over a trifle. and yeah, he wasn't just a 'racist,' he resegregated the federal government, which had been desegregated since the civil war.
harding -- leaving aside the obvious corruption, he doesn't look too bad in this company. not only pardoned debs, but even invited him to the white house. my backhanded support for him is more due to annoyance with the lazy "harding, buchanan and grant were the worst presidents" routine trotted out by the kind of historians who laud wilson and truman.
coolidge -- a disaster, and certainly more to blame than hoover for the depression. incidentally, he was reagan's favorite president.
hoover -- oddly enough, hoover probably gets a little too much blame for the depression -- contrary to popular belief, he did try to do something about the depression, and FDR's first attempts to fix it (the NRA, etc.) weren't much more successful than his. not a bad man, just a decent one who failed to step up to the plate when faced with an unprecedented disaster.

'taft was the TRUE trust-buster' is for some reason the thing I remember best about AP us history

dunno enough about most of this list to make an informed opinion, sadly, but TR is a really strange guy who did some good stuff and bucked his party (and decided to explore the Amazon after he left office WTF) so um him

x-posts

mckinley oversaw the curiously long liberation of the philippines, which as i understand it was kind of like a pre-echo of vietnam.

I was going to remark on the McKinley revisionism that Kevin Phillips and Karl Rove have started, but I learned it first from Walter Karp and Gore Vidal.

btw guys, it bears repeating: Vidal's novels are essential reading, especially Empier and Hollywood: historically accurate and amusing as hell.

this poll would be easier if it were wkiw

haven't gotten to those yet but I really enjoyed Burr. laugh at loud funny

xp

laugh OUT loud

sheesh

otherwise I second most of J.D.'s judgments, with one caveat to his Roosevelt blurb: he was a menace and a jingo whenever he was out of office (badgering McKinley into war in 1898, badgering Wilson into war in 1917) but pretty sane once he realized the presidency required a certain measure of PR savvy; and Roosevelt was nothing if not PR savvy.

btw my masters lit thesis is on Grant, Roosevelt, and manifestations of manhood in the late nineteenth century American novel.

ot many would have the fortitude to drag the united states into the bloodiest war in world history up to that time over a trifle.

Not a trifle for Europeans, I'm saying.

Depending on your politics, Taft was an effective chief justice: he presided over the most conservative court of the 20th century, and even then he was an able administrator (he got'em the grotesque building in which the Court resides today) rather than a great legal mind. Four of the old men that made FDR's first two terms hell were in Taft's court, btw.

Just had a quick look at Wilson's racism. Kind of shocking that I didn't learn about this when we covered him in school.

http://www.suite101.com/content/woodrow-wilson-and-white-supremacy-a126787

I don't think I knew much about it until reading that Loewen book mentioned in the article.

Not a trifle for Europeans, I'm saying.

to clarify: not saying that ww1 was a 'trifle,' but that the reasons the united states got embroiled -- a complex series of events having to do with americans' supposed 'right to travel' on arms-carrying ships -- amounted to a trifle when compared to the unbelievable cost of entering the war.

fuck wilson imo

i have no idea beyond that tbh

Growing up I knew nothing about Wilson other than his progressive achievements and his "reluctance" to enter WWI.

Been a long time since I studied WWI so I googled some "what if" scenarios to see what historians thought would have happened if the US hadn't intervened and found this post - that last line's a doozie.

I believe that if we had not entered WWI, there wouldn't have been a WW2. Germany wouldn't have been smashed into pieces during WW1, it wouldn't have been hit nearly as hard as it was by the depression, etc. and the climate neccessary for hitler to rise to power wouldn't have existed.

Furthermore, I think we were on the wrong side of WW2. But that's another thread.

McKinley was also presented as a starfish "manipulated" into the Spanish-American war.

haha tell me that's just some internet crank

xps

Yeah it's not a history professor, you'll be pleased to know.

I'd be interested in hearing more 'had we not entered wwi what if's

but not from that dude

Growing up I knew nothing about Wilson other than his progressive achievements and his "reluctance" to enter WWI.

Not even Federal Reserve and income tax, Alfred?

those are part of the achievements.

Alex Cockburn's choice is Harding, why I have no idea (least harmful in some sense)

Really, most of what we think of as the excess of the twenties happened under Coolidge's (non) watch.

Furthermore, I think we were on the wrong side of WW2.

Yeah, I guess we should have bombed Pearl Harbor ourselves.

No, he means we should have built the camps and killed the Jews ourselves.

I do like his technique of dropping an incredibly extreme, wtf opinion with an offhand "But that's another thread." Nice move.

Well, Alfred, our experience in concentration camps and continent-wide genocidal mayhem was, perhaps, superior.

"Furthermore, I think we were on the wrong side of WW2. But that's another thread."

I want to read this hilarious thread!

This is really difficult. Wilson is basically a more problematic LBJ: Gets credit for a lot of really good bills passing through Congress, but there's some stuff you can't overlook. Teddy Roosevelt is a dude who probably has scored extra history points for being as charismatic as he was, but he was pretty good, and even then he is a guy who wrote some stuff about eugenics. Taft sounds like the safest option, like a morbidly obese Dwight Eisenhower or something.

Historians view the 1912 election as some kind of pivot point in our history: Progressivism vs the status quo (and, to be fair, we rarely had candidates as qualified as Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs); but, really, the outcry for legislation was such that any president elected would have had a free hand. Wilson gets and deserves credit for being the first president ever elected who understood how Congress worked (first guy since Jefferson to deliver a SOTU live), acting like a prime minister instead of a president; but those are the kinds of virtues historians admire, n'est-ce pas?

Yeah it is one of those right place right time kinda things, but that inevitably factors into the elaborate shell game of President ranking. Like, FDR's first 100 Days and WWII give him a ton of leeway for the weaker parts of his term, but like, if he had ended up being VP in 1920 and then became President in like 1924 or 1928, there's no guarantee he doesn't end up as Hoover with polio. I'd like to think FDR would have done awesome no matter what hand he was dealt, but then Hoover seemed totally competent until the economy exploded. Hell, George W Bush might have been a mediocre-to-bad president if it weren't for 9/11, which gave him a much bigger stage to be a much bigger failure on.

"might have been a mediocre to bad president"

Hoover was actually a very skilled bureaucrat - he oversaw a kind of Marshall Plan like program during and after WWI and helped feed millions of people. Had he never run for President, he would be far better remembered today as a terribly decent humanitarian. However...

He has two asteroids named in honor of his humanitarian work: America and Hooveria. The discoverer of the last one wished he could have named an entire major planet after him.

Been a long time since I studied WWI so I googled some "what if" scenarios to see what historians thought would have happened if the US hadn't intervened and found this post - that last line's a doozie.

Been a long time since I studied WWI so I googled some "what if" scenarios to see what historians thought would have happened if the US hadn't intervened and found this post - that last line's a doozie.

The rec.arts.what-if/alternativehistory.com nonfiction alternative history crowd has a pretty good sized right-wing contingent, or it did when I was paying attention to it. Is that where you got this?

No, I don't know how that doubled quote happened.

http://www.old-picture.com/american-legacy/000/pictures/Coolidge-Indians-Calvin-With.jpg

All I can contribute to this thread is the fact McKinley had a great folk song written about him, "White House Blues"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

you secret lurkers will all vote for Taft.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Dear 2 Warren G Harding voters: I hope u like living in yr Teapot Dome of CORRUPTION

alfred was right re: taft!!

is a late nineteenth century poll (johnson to cleveland) next?

Guys: Taft /= Eisenhower. Sorry.

How did Coolidge get a vote yet Hoover didn't?