Presidential rankings from HHN

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Presidential Rankings

Predictably, last year's presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of Barak Obama brought forth a new set of historical rankings of United States presidents.

Hummel summarizes three books that deals with the presidency and lists his least worst and worst presidents.

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Liberty & Power: Group Blog

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Presidential Rankings

Predictably, last year's presidential election and the subsequent inauguration of Barak Obama brought forth a new set of historical rankings of United States presidents. The London Times presented their rankings in October, whereas C-Span offered theirs on February 15. These rankings are always based on surveys of prominent historians, political scientists, and other scholars, and as the Wikipedia entry on the subject reveals, the variation since the first Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., poll of 1948 is fairly minimal. Conventional historians and political scientists suffer from a nationalist bias that makes them appreciate a strong executive who lastingly contributes to the growth of central authority. They thus have a particular weakness for wartime presidents. Unless the commander-in-chief turns out to be utterly inept, war allows him to show off forceful, dynamic leadership, which is what impresses these authorities.

Fortunately, libertarians have begun to challenge the Statist bias of presidential ranking. One of the first works to do so was a Mises Institute collection (to which I contributed a chapter), published back in 2001 and edited by John V. Denson: Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom. More recently the Cato Institute has published Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (2008), and the Independent Institute has published Ivan Eland's Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (2008). Only Eland's book actually ranks all the presidents, although the Denson volume contains a wonderful article by economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway offering a tentative ranking based on the growth of government.

I have been privately circulating for some time my own rankings, so I thought this might be an appropriate occasion to update and unveil them to the general public. They differ significantly in some respects from Eland's. I cut off obviously before Barak Obama and don't count William Henry Harrison, who was in office only a month. The one ranking I've actually elaborated on in print is my choice of Martin Van Buren as the least bad president. The article appears both in the Independent Review and the Denson collection (which kept my preferred title, "Martin Van Buren: The American Gladstone"). And of course, my book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, implicitly explains why I rank Abraham Lincoln the worst.

Except for the first ten in both the "Least Bad" and the "Most Horrible" categories, my judgments are all subject to some revision. Further study or arguments might persuade me to shift them around slightly. One of the most important criteria in my rankings is the body count. I have the idiosyncratic belief that presidents merit high marks for keeping the country out of war rather than dragging it into one. Overall my rankings are based on explicitly libertarian criteria. Those who rolled or held back government intervention get points, those who increased government power lose them.


Least Bad U.S. Presidents (starting at best):

1. Martin Van Buren
2. Grover Cleveland
3. Calvin Coolidge
4. Warren G. Harding
5. Thomas Jefferson

Most Horrible U.S. Presidents (starting at worst):

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Woodrow Wilson
3. Harry Truman
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt
5. Lyndon Johnson
6. George W. Bush
7. Theodore Roosevelt
8. George H. W. Bush
9. Herbert Hoover
10. John Adams
11. William McKinley
12. James Madison
13. James Knox Polk
14. John F. Kennedy
15. George Washington
16. Millard Fillmore
17. John Quincy Adams
18. William Howard Taft
19. John Tyler
20. Jimmy Carter
21. Franklin Pierce