Happy Presidents' Day

[calimac]

James Buchanan: still the worst.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, if your criterion of "worst" is simple incompetence, maybe. Going by actual harm done would imply different rankings. I think my own choice for that would be Wilson.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Failed to prevent World War II despite his best efforts, yep, that's a pretty heavy charge against Wilson.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure of these polls.
Some folks had "Silent" Calvin Cooledge up there along with Raygunz as good presidents. Both were failures as I see it.
Then again I believe that excepting the Vietnam war, L.B.J. was one of the best we ever had.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I'm curious.
Wilson's "14 Points" could have negated the reason for Hitler's rise to power.
Not just him, but ANY Fascist regime.
But none of the allies were willing to listen, and so, raped the axis for everything they could get.
Was he supposed to have held a gun to their heads and said "OR ELSE!"
Noting that everything she learned about U.S. foreign policy she learned from Henry Kuttner.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not in historians' polls.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated to that! Wilson was the single biggest supporter of the Progressive agenda in American politics, which I regard as an all but unmitigated evil. His foreign policy was only a small part of this. Though I must say his hubris in redrawing the map of Europe played a big part in setting up the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.

What's wrong with Progressivism? Support for government by scientific experts over government by the people; popular election of senators; national income tax; the legal imposition of "scientific" racial categories, including immigration restrictions based on ethnic quotas; the related eugenics movement; the prohibition of alcohol and other drugs; a massive upsurge in cartelization of the economy, often disguised as "anti-monopoly" measures or "government regulation" (big businesses were aware of the advantages of regulatory capture before there was much regulation to capture); specifically, the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission, under whose regime the specious claim that spectrum was "public property" (as opposed to the perfectly workable alternative of rules for homesteading) justified the denial that the First Amendment applied to broadcast as well as speech and print. It was the editor of the progressive New Republic who justified entry into the Great War by writing that the country needed the "tonic of a serious moral adventure," turning war into a character-building exercise—and government policy during the Great War included brutally enforced conscription, a huge measure of centrally planned economy, censorship, and the repression of dissidents such as the IWW by authoritarian methods.

In short, when I said "actual harm done" I meant it. I did not refer only to the long-term failure of his foreign policy, which I would have classed as simple incompetence.

Of course, I realize that you aren't going to share my evaluation of most of these, given the radical difference in our political positions. But perhaps you will grant that, for someone who regards Progressivism as an ideology as negatively as I do, it makes sense to see Wilson as its single greatest exemplar in the White House, and therefore to judge him equally negatively.

You're Right

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I doubt you and I could agree on anything.
Except that we can't agree on anything.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Progressives, like everybody else, have occasionally said stupid things, and some progressive reforms (notably the ballot initiative, which gave us the unmitigatedly evil Prop 13) have decayed over the years and should probably be done away with, but they did good work in their time, and overall the Progressive movement was one of the great positives of US history. If you want to know why we never had a socialist revolution, thank the Progressives (both of the TR-Wilsonian period and of FDR's), who lanced those boils before they could erupt by granting reasonable reform when it was still timely.

I notice you don't denounce such wholly virtuous Progressive achievements as the FDA. Is that because it was a TR-era event, and TR Progressives are good where Wilson ones are evil?

You also load down your denuncations with a lot of causes which were not Progressive at all, though some progressives (not all!) supported them: immigration restrictions, Prohibition, WW1, and the Palmer suppressions.

Lastly: the popular election of senators? That was a Progressive cause, and it's the one I've studied in most detail - wrote a research paper in college about it, in fact. I know exactly why that was enacted, what abuses it aimed to reform, the extent of those abuses, and the extent to which the change succeeded in ending them. You might be able to bamboozle on some other subjects, but you can't fool me into considering that one as anything other than a major net positive.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Wilson's biggest problem was that he supported what we would now call teabagger racism, sexism and control of your personal life (Prohibition, etc). And he didn't step down when ill. Otherwise, he was okay. To be sure, he was no Teddy Roosevelt (my favorite 20th c president).

Going by "actual harm", the choices are Coolidge, Reagan or W.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Wilson was indeed shockingly racist, even for the time. We think of him as from New Jersey, but by origin he was a Southerner - born in Virginia and raised in S. Carolina and Georgia until he left for college - and was the only U.S. President to have been a citizen of the Confederacy for its entire existence. That doesn't make racism a Progressive cause.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

No, it's because I couldn't list everything. I'm in favoring of abolishing the FDA, too. Libertarian, remember? I think poorly of the first Roosevelt, but I don't think he was as comprehensively malevolent as Wilson.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Then you are a damn malevolent fool who wishes to endanger the public health and safety. I'm sorry, I cannot put it any less strongly than that. Do not tell me that private enterprise will enforce this. We tried that already; that's why we have an FDA in the first place.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm going to quote you a few bits from the Wikipedia article on eugenics:

Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers.

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying.

The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.

[T]he U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.

The Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation.

The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

In the USA, eugenic supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council. . . . In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I didn't particularly propose to argue for libertarian positions with you; that wasn't the point of my comment, and I would not expect to convince you, certainly not in the space of a brief exchange of comments on lj. I was simply noting my position.

Do you have a choice you favor for the president who did the greatest active harm, as opposed to simply being inept?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Some positions are merely worth noting. You advocate making the food I eat and the drugs I take positively unsafe. I will not let that pass without the strongest possible denunciation.

Greatest active harm? Biased by the degree we're suffering from it today, but probably:
1. W.
2. Nixon.
3. Reagan.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

First, I would suggest using a source of some reliability. I do not care toc heck the accuracy of all of this, but I notice it munges together eugenics and racism, progressive and anti-progressive movements (Virginia, for instance, was not a hotbed of progressive legislation) most sloppily. Nor, as far as it goes, does it note that progressives dropped eugenics when it became clear what harm it would cause. I would not blame the eugenicists of the nineteen-oughts and teens for anything more than extreme short-sightedness, any more than I would blame those who held up communism as an ideal before the late 1930s.