Posted on 08/12/2005 3:25:54 PM PDT by hang 'em
Who is/was the WORST U.S. PRESIDENT EVER? Carter? Clinton? Make your choice and state your reasons.
1) FDR. Good domestic president
"...and his slaves."
The war was not about slavery, despite what they like to tell anyone in the pro-Northern history books that pollute most classrooms in the country.
I forget the number of Southerners who actually owned slaves, but I know it was a very miniscule percentage, something around 2-3%. Most people who fought in that war were fighting for their homes, their country, their way of life. The cause of the Southerner in the war was very just. I will note one thing. William Sherman, the war criminal, was a supporter of slavery, and after Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation (which had zero legal effect in loyal border states), draft riots occured in Northern cities, because all those young northern men were more than happy to fight to deny the South self-determination, but they had no desire to see slaves freed.
The peanut farmer of Plains, Georgia! He's one of those who's over educated liberals who thinks with his ass not his brain!
Congressman Billybob
I thought Smoot-Hawley had a lot to do with the depression.
Any president in the same situation would have won the war (had he trusted his generals). Moreover, a half-way decent president might have been able to avoid the Pearl Harbor fiasco and selling Eastern Europe down the river to the worst mass murderer in world history.
I agree. Either one of them.
Smoot-Hawley put the nail in the coffin for Hoover's political career. Of course, there are many on this site who believe that if we "raised tariffs" to "pertect factory jahbs" we would go back to being a blue collar, smokestack nation again. It was STUPID then and is STUPID now.
others are Harding, James Buchanan, Madison, and Nixon
WORST:
1. Carter-Destructively inept
2. Clinton-Dangerously negligent
3. Roosevelt (FD)-Inactor of American Socialism, harbored and promoted Alger Hiss while ignoring Whitaker Chambers
BEST:
1. Washington-Do I have to say it?
2. Reagan-Ended the greatest threat to America since Japan and did it without firing a shot.
3. Nixon-a bit of a liberal, but the best foreign policy mind of recent history.
Smoot-Hawley probably did not cause the initial downturn but it was instrumental in turning a garden-variety recession into a full-scale depression.
1. Clinton
2. Carter
Tie for me between Johnson and Carter.
Well trying to ram the Lecompton constitution down the throats of the Jayhawkers in Kansas sure didn't do anything to ease tensions. He wasn't responsible for the Dred Scott decision handed down two days after his inauguration (just like Roe v Wade in 1973) but he sure embraced it.
If you want to discuss states rights, how did the passage and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 not impinge on the rights of states that wished to to be free states? There were several prominent cases where during the Buchanan administration in which runaway slaves were forcibly returned back to their owners in slave states.
Harding should not be on your list. He cut taxes, brought prosperity, released Wilson's political prisoners, and had an excellent civil rights record. The corruption in his administration was minor league compared to the likes of FDR and there is no evidence he was personally involved.
Carter--then Klinton
This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In his “Cornerstone” speech, delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, at the same time that the South was in the process of seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was “fundamentally wrong.” That premise was, as Stephens defined it, “the assumption of equality of the races.” Stephens insisted that, instead, “our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth.”
"I'm going to throw in FDR."
I agree, plus the guy couldn't pull the country out of a depression over a decade without the help of a World War.
The last two Rat Presidents Bubba and Peanut Boy .
Once again, slavery was not the main cause of the war, slavery was a component issue of the sectionalism that was pervading the country at the time, but in the end, it was only an ancillary issue. The road to the War Between the States had it's first cornerstone layed during the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1832, and that had zip to do with slavery, as that was a fight regarding issues of the tariff.
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