It’s President’s Day! Perhaps America’s least distinguished holiday, but an excellent time for lists. Specifically lists of presidents. The cohorts are more important than the ordinal rankings here.
This is the ultimate semi-arbitrary ranking of American presidents
The all-time greats
These are the guys who steered the country through times of crisis and let it endure and improve. George Washington established the tradition of republican governance and peaceful transfers of power. Lincoln prevented the country from literally collapsing. And Roosevelt preserved democracy at a troubled time through his decisive rescue of the economy, and then led the country to victory in the Second World War.
1. George Washington
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The good ones
These presidents created major elements of the American welfare state, forged its foreign policy tradition, and turned the state from an enemy into an ally in the fight for racial justice.
4. Ulysses Grant
5. John Adams
6. Harry Truman
7. Dwight Eisenhower
8. George H.W. Bush
9. Lyndon Johnson
10. Barack Obama
They did fine
These are your run of the mill presidents. Some of them are very well-regarded because of an economic boom, while others are held in low regard due to poor economic performance. Some are obscure and some are famous. But all basically left the country in the same fundamental shape that they found it.
11. Theodore Roosevelt
12. Bill Clinton
13. Warren Harding
14. William McKinley
15. Thomas Jefferson
16. James Monroe
17. John Quincy Adams
18. James Madison
19. William Howard Taft
20. Zachary Taylor
21. Gerald Ford
22. Jimmy Carter
23. Calvin Coolidge
24. Chester A. Arthur
25. Benjamin Harrison
26. Grover Cleveland
27. Rutherford B. Hayes
28. Martin Van Buren
29. John F. Kennedy
30. John Tyler
Very consequential, not always in good ways
These are guys who in terms of pure “greatness” should clearly rank above the earlier cohort of presidents. Big things happened under their watch, and if I liked the big things that they did I would consider them great presidents.
31. Ronald Reagan
32. Woodrow Wilson
33. Andrew Jackson
34. James K. Polk
Incomplete
These guys died really soon after taking office. Harrison has at least been granted the dignity of famously dying really quickly. Garfield’s six-month span in office before being assassinated is simply forgotten. Getting shot and killed by a patronage-hungry office-seeker actually helped inspire an important civil service reform in the next administration, but it’s hard to give a guy credit for getting shot.
35. William Henry Harrison
36. James A. Garfield
Laid the groundwork for civil war
From 1850 to 1860 the country was governed by a series of three presidents whose big idea was to forestall civil war by appeasing the South and buttressing the institution of slavery. It was immoral and it didn’t work.
37. Millard Fillmore
38. Franklin Pierce
39. James Buchanan
True, epic disasters
In different ways, these three presidents all managed to totally wreck the economy. Nixon’s inflation wasn’t as bad as the other two, but he gets extra demerits for also shredding the constitution.
40. George W. Bush
41. Herbert Hoover
42. Richard Nixon
The worst
Jamelle Bouie has a good piece on this, but basically Johnson’s deep-seated commitment to white supremacy ended up giving back a huge share of what had been accomplished during the Civil War.
43. Andrew Johnson
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