This is brought up from another thread.
The Siena Scholars Poll put together their 2018 results, and they rank Trump ahead of Andrew Johnson and Buchanan, but behind Harding and Pierce.
One other commenter noted that they rank Trump the dumbest, the crookedest and with the worst appointees.
I guess that could be, but I just don’t know enough about all those 19th century presidents to offer an opinion. Who the hell knows about all the nominees of Franklin Pierce except scholars who specialize in the Presidency? Perhaps not even them. Maybe it would have to be scholars who specialize specifically in Franklin Pierce.
Frankly, I have some problems with these scholars not knowing as much as they should. The first thing that catches my eye in this table is their rating of the Presidents by intellect. This is something I have studied in some depth, although I am just an amateur historian. The most obvious glaring error is their ranking of John F Kennedy at #11 and James A Garfield as #20.
Kennedy was a very witty man who could think well on his feet, and was above average in intelligence compared to the general population, but was probably below average in Presidential intelligence, very likely near the bottom. We have a very good grasp on his IQ and George W. Bush’s, for example. Although Kennedy could be eloquent as well as witty in public, while Bush had a poor presentation style that made him appear to be perpetually befuddled, Dubya actually had a significantly higher IQ than JFK.
Garfield, on the other hand, may have had the most powerful intellect of any man ever to hold the office. He was certainly in the same league as Jefferson, the Adamses, Madison, Wilson or anyone else. The most famous story about him is that he knew both Latin and ancient Greek, and could write them simultaneously, holding one pen in each hand. That story is probably apocryphal. Although Garfield was ambidextrous and did know both ancient languages, there’s no evidence that he ever really performed that feat. But it wasn’t a parlor trick that revealed his intelligence. He was just freakishly brilliant at everything he tried, and succeeded in an astounding number of unrelated fields, even though he was born into dire poverty and had no father that he could remember.
As far as Trump’s intelligence goes, I don’t know how they determined that he was the dumbest. I don’t know how to compare him to James Buchanan or Tippecanoe, for example, so he may not deserve last place, but he’s no genius. He was a C+ to B student at Fordham, and earned no honors at Wharton, where one of his teachers called him “the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” He never attended grad school, so there’s nothing to offset his mediocre undergrad record. As for high school, I think you can assume there is a good reason why he had Cohen write letters threatening legal action against any institution revealing his grades and SAT scores. Coincidentally enough, The Donald and I were both at Fordham in 1966, he in the spring, I in the fall of that year. Same university; same calendar year. I will be happy to share and compare our 1966 report cards, but you can bet with 100% certainly that he would never take up that challenge for any amount under any circumstances!
What a crock. Who gives the scores for each category? A bunch of liberal profs? Gee, I wonder who they’re going to praise? Ranking Obama over Trump for handling the economy? Giving any scores at all to WH Harrison? He died a month after his inauguration and was sick the whole time! They pull these out all the time just to give praise to their heroes. It’s all subjective.
So is your comment….
“A bunch of good-brain-having guys?!? No, they ungood!” Whose opinions do you want? Some dentists’?
That said, if you click and look, it is exactly as subjective as you say, they don’t claim otherwise. And some of these categories…”willingness to take risks”? Does a high rating mean lots of risk-taking? Just the right amount of risk-taking? That the risks they took mostly paid off, possibly through sheer luck?
There are so many ways to determine intelligence. I’ve never been a big believer that grades in school mean much, as some brilliant people I knew weren’t good students, and some that were not were excellent students. Depression, anxiety and other issues can impact classroom performance, as can how interested you are or how much you try. I was very bad at standardized testing, but would ace an essay test over the same material.
Poor Garfield. Ohio’s one shot at having a really good President. Comurdered by a madman and his own doctor – PBS did a really good doc on that.
Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard is a great bio about Garfield. The man was absolutely fascinating.
A more balanced view of Garfield in in his Wikipedia entry.
Kennedy has been greatly overrated…
As a good example, Eisenhower’s standing has gone up drastically since he left office. In 1960 the Academia/Intelligentsia bloc pretty much regarded him as the village idiot (which says a lot about them – Operation Overlord anyone?).
After the Presidents of the next 20 years he was looking pretty good and seemed to fit in more with the two who preceded him than the ones who followed (though JFK obviously has to be given an Incomplete). The Trogolodyte wing of the GOP certainly thought so. I can remember my old man raving about “Me Too” Republicans and Ike was high on his list.
Hey, I had him right the first time when I was 8 or so and started thinking about such stuff.
Eisenhower is probably the last Republican President that had any bit of common sense, and would be considered a liberal by today’s Republican party. Could you imagine these quotes by Ike from a Republican candidate TODAY?
“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citzenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
“In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with the peoples money or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative, and dont be afraid to use the word. And so today, Republicans come forward with programs in which there are such words as balanced budgets, and cutting expenditures, and all the kind of thing that means this economy must be conservative, it must be solvent. But they also come forward and say we are concerned with every Americans health, with a decent house for him, we are concerned that he will have a chance for health, and his children for education. We are going to see that he has power available to him. We are going to see that everything takes place that will enrich his life and let him as an individual, hard-working American citizen, have full opportunity to do for his children and his family what any decent American should want to do.”
This is a man who led the most valiant invasion to save humanity in modern human history, and his words and stature speak for itself. If Republicans today had his values, I would have no issue with it. But in today’s day and age? He would be considered a centrist Democrat.
The same could be said in the opposite direction of Kennedy 2-3 decades after his time in the White House, as well as numerous others on either side.
Back in those days, there was a certain amount of common sense and end goals of success for the country shared between both parties. In the interest of differentiation via playing to the extremes, the two sides have strayed farther from the center & adopted a more “our way is the only way” approach over time, with the only goal today being to collect the absolute bare minimum number of votes to achieve electoral victory.
We are currently in desperate need of fewer politicians and more statesmen.
I think which side had strayed farther from logic is quite obvious to me. I can guarantee even the most extreme back then wouldn’t have agreed on a platform of gigantic corporate tax cuts that can simply be used for acquisitions or increase stock value – either option with the sole purpose of making the executives compensation go higher.
And I can image how ‘both sides’ would have played out with a Neo Nazi rally in the 50s. Ike may have went down to Charlottesville and taken care of them himself. He would be rolling in his grave aware of what the party has become with Nazi apologists today.
“If Republicans today had his values,”:
I’d still be a Republican.
I have always fallen into the camp, that no presidency should tried to be ranked until at least 20 years after the end of the presidential term. It takes that long to have a true understanding of the impact of the president.
That makes sense. It is quite irresponsible to try to rank presidents before we can judge the outcome of their actions.