But who's it gonna be? After all several traditionally highly regarded presidents have yet to make an appearance.
Maybe it will be the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln.
Maybe it will be the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan
The man who won World War I, Woodrow Wilson
The man who won World War II, Franklin Roosevelt
The father of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson
The man who set american foreign policy for a century, James Monroe
The man who ushered in the Nuclear Age, Harry Truman.
A soft spoken man with a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt.
The father of the bill of rights James Madison.
The father of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson
The man who set american foreign policy for a century, James Monroe
The man who ushered in the Nuclear Age, Harry Truman.
A soft spoken man with a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt.
The father of the bill of rights James Madison.
Consider, with only 3 spots left, 2/3 of those guys, as respected as they are, and as famous as they are wont even make the cut to top 10........and that assumes I dont throw in a dark horse no one sees coming.
So whos Great, and who's so so? a final definitive answer is coming your way.......just as soon as I waste enough space to knock the picture of Number 3 down far enough to not give it away without scrolling.
And here we GO, the countdown is on with NUMBER 3:
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| Theodore Roosevelt. 26th President. |
Teddy is the third person on the list to become President after his predecessor was assassinated. He's also one of the easiest presidents to justify on this list....in fact I could do it in one word "Trustbuster"
Basically you remember the whole "too big to fail" crap from the great recession? well according to Teddy that meant you were too big to exist, he made his presidency trying to prevent corporations from taking over an entire market or industry/preventing competition by controlling the market for a good.
On top of that, he literally helped clean up america. Pure Food and Drug Act, signed that. Federal Meat Inspection Act, signed that too. Was honorary president of the American School Hygiene Association while still actually president and held the first Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.
He also created the National Park system, and appointed the first Jew to a cabinet position Oscar Straus, Secretary of Commerce and Labor.
Oh and did we mention the Nobel Peace Prize he won for ending the Russo Japanese war?
So actually the question should be, "Why isnt teddy roosevelt higher?"
Well it turns out their are two reasons......the first is actually the Panama Canal.
Look no one can deny the Canal has been a HUGE benefit for US trade and Naval services for a century now, and its much better and faster than having to go all the way around the tip of South America.
The problem lies in HOW he got it. See he tried to buy the land from Columbia, they refused. So TR sent the US navy down there, and encourage rebels in the Panamanian province of Columbia to rise up....while also telling the Colombians not to interfere or else. After his successful revolution was staged and Panama created, TR bought the land from them instead. Thats some pretty underhanded shit when you think about it, and one of the earliest examples of the US belief that they can dictate decisions for other counties and they better go along with it or suffer the consequences.
The other issue holding TR at third, is that most great presidents face either a domestic crisis, or a foreign menace, and he faced neither, in the grand sceme of things, his administration was pretty quite, wedged in between Civil and World war.
Basically you remember the whole "too big to fail" crap from the great recession? well according to Teddy that meant you were too big to exist, he made his presidency trying to prevent corporations from taking over an entire market or industry/preventing competition by controlling the market for a good.
On top of that, he literally helped clean up america. Pure Food and Drug Act, signed that. Federal Meat Inspection Act, signed that too. Was honorary president of the American School Hygiene Association while still actually president and held the first Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.
He also created the National Park system, and appointed the first Jew to a cabinet position Oscar Straus, Secretary of Commerce and Labor.
Oh and did we mention the Nobel Peace Prize he won for ending the Russo Japanese war?
So actually the question should be, "Why isnt teddy roosevelt higher?"
Well it turns out their are two reasons......the first is actually the Panama Canal.
Look no one can deny the Canal has been a HUGE benefit for US trade and Naval services for a century now, and its much better and faster than having to go all the way around the tip of South America.
The problem lies in HOW he got it. See he tried to buy the land from Columbia, they refused. So TR sent the US navy down there, and encourage rebels in the Panamanian province of Columbia to rise up....while also telling the Colombians not to interfere or else. After his successful revolution was staged and Panama created, TR bought the land from them instead. Thats some pretty underhanded shit when you think about it, and one of the earliest examples of the US belief that they can dictate decisions for other counties and they better go along with it or suffer the consequences.
The other issue holding TR at third, is that most great presidents face either a domestic crisis, or a foreign menace, and he faced neither, in the grand sceme of things, his administration was pretty quite, wedged in between Civil and World war.
Number 2:
Which is not to say Roosevelt didnt have his negatives. He did. However most of them were actually totally legal, just bad ideas (for example his court packing scheme, which was done completely legally....just not very intelligently). There were two major exceptions to that though, and they cost him the Number 1 spot.
With Executive Order 6102 FDR forced Americans to sell their gold to the US government at a set price, for the betterment of the national economy. Now granted that we got out of the Depression not long after, we might be able to debate the effectiveness of the order, but its still pretty blatantly unconstitutional.
As was the infamous Executive Order 9066. If you happen to be of Japanese decent, I wouldnt mention that number near your grandparents. See that was the Order used to justify the rounding up of ALL persons of Japanese decent in the US, including america citizens, taking their property and putting them in forced relocation camps based solely on their national origin. There are very few actions by any president I can think of that were that against the idea of America, and the couple I can think of were technically legal, which I find hard to believe Order 9066 was.
So yea, really with that one act, FDR took himself right out of the top spot and gave it too.......
NUMBER 1:
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| Franklin Roosevelt. 32nd president. |
To be honest, their is also most no point in going over FDR's greatest strong points, most people already know them, he got us out of the depression, with the new deal, set the basis, if not the core idea for all government aid programs from his administration forward, and helped the allies win World War 2.
But he's got a few lesser known accomplishments as well. He partly undid his Cousins mistake and renegotiated a treaty with Panama to no longer make it a US protectorate, he did the same thing in Haiti and Cuba, and signed the Montevideo Convention, which basically said the US would stop assuming it had unilateral power over all decisions made in the Western Hemisphere and would recognize the sovereignty of other western hemisphere nations. He also issued Executive Order 8802 which prohibited discrimination based on race in the defense industry, a forerunner to the Civil Rights act and Title VII signed by LBJ. Oh and he appointed Francis Perkins as Secretary of Labor, making her the first female Secretary.
But he's got a few lesser known accomplishments as well. He partly undid his Cousins mistake and renegotiated a treaty with Panama to no longer make it a US protectorate, he did the same thing in Haiti and Cuba, and signed the Montevideo Convention, which basically said the US would stop assuming it had unilateral power over all decisions made in the Western Hemisphere and would recognize the sovereignty of other western hemisphere nations. He also issued Executive Order 8802 which prohibited discrimination based on race in the defense industry, a forerunner to the Civil Rights act and Title VII signed by LBJ. Oh and he appointed Francis Perkins as Secretary of Labor, making her the first female Secretary.
Which is not to say Roosevelt didnt have his negatives. He did. However most of them were actually totally legal, just bad ideas (for example his court packing scheme, which was done completely legally....just not very intelligently). There were two major exceptions to that though, and they cost him the Number 1 spot.
With Executive Order 6102 FDR forced Americans to sell their gold to the US government at a set price, for the betterment of the national economy. Now granted that we got out of the Depression not long after, we might be able to debate the effectiveness of the order, but its still pretty blatantly unconstitutional.
As was the infamous Executive Order 9066. If you happen to be of Japanese decent, I wouldnt mention that number near your grandparents. See that was the Order used to justify the rounding up of ALL persons of Japanese decent in the US, including america citizens, taking their property and putting them in forced relocation camps based solely on their national origin. There are very few actions by any president I can think of that were that against the idea of America, and the couple I can think of were technically legal, which I find hard to believe Order 9066 was.
So yea, really with that one act, FDR took himself right out of the top spot and gave it too.......
NUMBER 1:
| Josiah Bartlett. |
I'm Kidding........
Number 1 for real:
As if it could be anyone else really. Lincoln gets loads of credit and rightly so, for guiding the country through the civil war. And much like FDR I dont really need to drone on and on about his great achievements, everybody knows them all. Although I will say in my opinion his greatest achievement was the emancipation proclamation, a document that did nothing, and was designed as a FOREIGN policy document, masquerading as a world changing domestic policy.
See heres the thing, the proclamation was issued to keep France and England out of the civil war, as both countries were talking about supporting the South (and England was even in the process of building Ironclads for the Confederacy) but also had governments that would not support a slave power against a free power. So the Proclamation was supposed to make the US look like a free power, yet didnt actually free any slave in any territory controlled by the US (which included 4 slave states, most of a 5th, half of a 6th New Orleans, and parts of VA), only in territories in open revolt against the government.....where the proclamation wouldnt have been considered law. Yet somehow the damn thing worked and everybody bought into in.
Now Lincoln does have one big, and somewhat ironic negative, he kinda shit all over the Constitution, probably violated it more times than any other president in history, and I wouldnt be surprised if he beat all the rest of them combined. Consider even Lincolns decision to fight the war was unconstitutional since he claimed the South was still part of the country and therefore he was raising an army inside the US to fight American Citizens. Now yes, some of his violations, like suspending the writ of habeus corpus, went a bit too far, but even that wasnt widespread enough to knock him off the top of the mountain.
So there you have it, the 10 greatest presidents in history. At some point soon I hope to compile a list of the 10 worst presidents in American history, and spoiler alert, a couple of the names I listed at the start actually wind up on that list.
Also as a final side note, in the entry for JFK I said in my original ranking Kennedy wasnt in the top 10, for those who are wondering the guy he knocked out was Harry Truman, who had been number 9. I knew I wanted Arthur at 10, so it was a hard choice between Truman and Ike (who had been 8) for that spot, but I picked Ike because in part hes a bit lesser known as president, and Truman put a lot of "the pieces together" but it was Eisenhower who really used them to best effect.
Number 1 for real:
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| Abe Lincoln. 16th President. |
As if it could be anyone else really. Lincoln gets loads of credit and rightly so, for guiding the country through the civil war. And much like FDR I dont really need to drone on and on about his great achievements, everybody knows them all. Although I will say in my opinion his greatest achievement was the emancipation proclamation, a document that did nothing, and was designed as a FOREIGN policy document, masquerading as a world changing domestic policy.
See heres the thing, the proclamation was issued to keep France and England out of the civil war, as both countries were talking about supporting the South (and England was even in the process of building Ironclads for the Confederacy) but also had governments that would not support a slave power against a free power. So the Proclamation was supposed to make the US look like a free power, yet didnt actually free any slave in any territory controlled by the US (which included 4 slave states, most of a 5th, half of a 6th New Orleans, and parts of VA), only in territories in open revolt against the government.....where the proclamation wouldnt have been considered law. Yet somehow the damn thing worked and everybody bought into in.
Now Lincoln does have one big, and somewhat ironic negative, he kinda shit all over the Constitution, probably violated it more times than any other president in history, and I wouldnt be surprised if he beat all the rest of them combined. Consider even Lincolns decision to fight the war was unconstitutional since he claimed the South was still part of the country and therefore he was raising an army inside the US to fight American Citizens. Now yes, some of his violations, like suspending the writ of habeus corpus, went a bit too far, but even that wasnt widespread enough to knock him off the top of the mountain.
So there you have it, the 10 greatest presidents in history. At some point soon I hope to compile a list of the 10 worst presidents in American history, and spoiler alert, a couple of the names I listed at the start actually wind up on that list.
Also as a final side note, in the entry for JFK I said in my original ranking Kennedy wasnt in the top 10, for those who are wondering the guy he knocked out was Harry Truman, who had been number 9. I knew I wanted Arthur at 10, so it was a hard choice between Truman and Ike (who had been 8) for that spot, but I picked Ike because in part hes a bit lesser known as president, and Truman put a lot of "the pieces together" but it was Eisenhower who really used them to best effect.
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