In honor or Presidents’ Day, C-SPAN released the results of a survey given to 64 presidential historians, asking them to rank all the presidents in ten categories ranging from Pursued Equal Justice for All, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, etc. The results of those ten categories were then compiled to generate a list of all the presidents in order of overall effectiveness.
Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, not surprisingly, topped the list (the two are the perennial front runners in any presidential survey), and Thomas Jefferson was number seven. These are the only three presidents who have monuments erected in their honor on the National Mall, and also three out of the four presidents immortalized on Mt. Rushmore. Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson are so engrained in American mythology, it is rather expected they’d appear near the top of most everyone’s list of the top American Presidents.
What’s interesting is that, rounding out the top ten are seven presidents, all of whom served during the 20th century. They are (in order of rank): F. D. Roosevelt, T. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Wilson, and Reagan.
Why do historians look more favorably on relatively recent presidents? Are presidents simply generally better now than they used to be? An alternative explanation is that the role of the president has changed immensely over time. One trend is that successive presidents bring more power to the office, and later Commanders-in-Chief are hesitant to relinquish it. Thus, it is difficult to compare presidents on a uniform rubric simply because they each, in their own time, had a different conception of the office.
Presidential historians, when they think of the ideal president, have their own biases, and are then drawn more towards the modern presidents, who better exemplify the current notions of what a Commander-in-Chief should be.
The ten subcategories are also fun to look at! (Poor James Buchanan comes in last in seven out of the ten.)