MA used to be a conservative Republican state, before the dark times, before Camelot. They were one of the few states that maintained a GOP legislature clear through the depression.
Anyway look at the 20th Century Presidents. Who was a credible conservative? Which of the Republicans were actually committed to decent constitutional governance?
Coolidge, Reagan. Harding, Taft perhaps (I’m not that well versed on his term). So yes Harding if only by process of elimination is one of the best Presidents of the 20th Century and definitely better than all but 2 that followed him. He didn’t do much to leave us worse off.
The worst list in my opinion belongs to the 20th Century democrats. Wilson, FDR, Truman, (Kennedy would have been but died before he could really mess things up), LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and his current majesty, the 19th century dems James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, and the RINO Hoover who’s statist response to what would have been known as the Panic of 1929 turned it into the great depression.
For THE worst I’d have to go with FDR who created the modern socialist state and greatly prolonged the depression. Everyone ranks him as one of the “greatest”. The greastest at screwing up the country. Obviously he and his boy Truman are the most overrated, the later is especially overrated by conservatives, he was in fact an incompetent statist pig of the highest order and had bottom basement popularity for most of his Presidency.
Harding is easily the most screwed over by historians.
Grant wasn’t great or anything but I think they’re a little hard on him too. Apparently having a few corrupt cronies is the worst sin a (Republican only of course) President can have according to historians.
The answer for anything good is: Ronald Reagan
The answer for anything bad is: Democrats
I’d rank them 20th century:
Coolidge, Reagan, Bush II, Eisenhower (recall he built the interstates), Taft and then Harding. Harding wasn’t around for very long, which makes it difficult to rank him up there with Taft who was full term with similar policies.
Taft royally pissed TR by jettisoning the progressive agenda and sticking with conservative principles. Which gave us Wilson after TR ran with the Bull Moose.
On the Dim side:
FDR, Wilson, Obama, Carter. Carter really deserves to be higher then Truman, Truman cut the post WW2 deficit and his administration paid off substantial amounts of debt. Makes him a giant compared to Carter.
As for the 19th century. Obama is a dead ringer for Franklin Pierce, one of the very few single termers on either side who failed to acheive his own party’s nomination after completing a full term. Which makes Pierce and Buchanan right up with Obama and Carter as the worst single termers. Wilson got re-elected which gave him significant time to do damage to the United States.
Unfortunately, the breed of Republicans in MA changed over time. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. was a stalwart Conservative. When HCL, Jr., his grandson, was elected 12 years after Sr’s death, he was a solid liberal. Add to that the bad taste Catholics had to the MA GOP and you had a long-term disaster in the making. JFK was, of course, to the right of Lodge, Jr. when he defeated him in 1952, but the national trend of the Democrats was leftward, and so that was where he went in rapid order.
The young college liberals did a clean-out/purge of the Democrats, replacing the calcified old-timer Conservatives by the ‘70s, while the Republicans had nowhere near such a movement (which was piecemeal at best), and what accounted for the near-total collapse of the MA GOP presence in the legislature was that the young Dems were able to pick off so many open/retiring GOP seats (partly due to the increase of Catholic Dem voters, and partly due to the GOP being so statist and lacking for that active grassroots movement).
So many of those Republicans were almost ideologically carbon-copies of the Democrats, but ran as “pedigreed” types, that arrogant sense that they were the only ones who should “rule” over the Dem rabble. No wonder so many were shown the door (with Weld being an exception, a snobbish Brahmin). The MA GOP never got the remake/revitalization (or a gigantic enema) it should’ve received back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
It’s too bad that in the ‘80s, the MA GOP utterly failed to harness the national energy to reboot the party using the Reagan voters, but everything up there was so messed up. It was the Brahmin liberal RINOs who had more in common with Carter/Mondale (Weld and Slick Willard, who wasn’t even a Republican by his own admittance), while the Democrat Governor Ed King was far closer to the Conservative GOP model. It was no wonder with the bad guys in charge of the GOP that they ended up where they are today, and still remain (and then you have these types like Charlie Baker and Scott Brown who seem like they can’t get far-left enough fast enough and act as though they’re reformers). MA is ripe for change, but as long as there is no viable alternative with the GOP, those people have nowhere to go.
Camelot was a fiction. But the MA GOP exists only on paper and has been so for 40 years.
Great post. Thank you. When did the MSM get in bed with the commies? They are doggedly leftist today but I do not recall that as the case in the 50’s. Perhaps I am wrong, too young to really understand.
We rely so heavily on media and elitists to formulate historical opinion that very little survives from the Country Class. I sense a vigorous movement to change this in the forseeable future. It seems to be a product of the WWW with its broad based communications easily accesible to anyone.
Is it possible for a conservative political philosophy to build a stronghold in the electorate sufficient to overcome the current progressive influences? This must include a vigorous religious revival. When Christians begin taking warfare against Islam seriously there will be some hope of reestablishing the centrality of the US as a genuinely Christian nation.
You are far too kind. Kennedy screwed the pooch big time with his incredibly cavalier full-scale entry into Vietnam, despite the precise warning given to him by Eisenhower and MacArthur. And in the end, our ally fell to the communists.
Remember a little deal called "The Bay of Pigs? " Or how about his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, which his Hollywood hooligans incredibly managed to spin into a win, but caused us to have to pull back from the borders of the Soviet Union.
We are still paying for some of the mistakes made by that lecherous, diseased bastard who thought one could run the US in two hours a day and spread STDs among movie stars for the rest of the time.
Thanks Impy. Harding wasn’t one of the best, but he’s nowhere near the worst.
Harding & Grant do really get a raw deal from historians who rank them dead last. Harding wasn't THAT bad, but given that he died before he could accomplish anything, and foolishly appointed a bunch of crooks to his cabinet, I can't rank him very high, regardless of whether had the right positions on the issues (and even if he did, I disagree with his pardon of that lunatic Eugene Debs). And Grant can be summarized simply: Brilliant general, lousy President. The funny thing is they had a DU thread a couple years back, where the DUmmies were ranking the "best" of the Gilded Age presidents (1866-1900), where basically every President from that era was center-right and there were no "progressives" to pick from. They went with Grant as their fav.
I have to disagree with Fieldmarshaldj, I DO think Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan deserve to near the bottom. Pierce was obviously not in the right mental state to be President after his only child was crushed to death in front of him, and sent most of his administration drinking himself to death. Buchanan was a worthless coward who watched the country fall apart, sat on his hands, and left to Lincoln to death with. His position that he had "no authority" to interfer with secession might have had more credibility if he hadn't used the U.S. military to stop Utah from seceding during the Mormon war three years earlier.
One thing we do have to remember is how much politics has changed in a century. Sadly, I think the political spectrum of this country is much more left-wing than it was a century ago. For example, Ike was the last president to really get control of our borders and enforce immigration laws with Mexico. At the time it wasn't controversial at all, but today he'd be labeled a right-wing minuteman reactionary and be subjected to a firestorm of attacks for being insensitive to "poor migrants". Teddy Roosevelt was "progressive" in his day, but today liberals wouldn't like his passion support for hunting or his staunch opposition to multiculturalism and belief that everyone should learn English or leave. And even the liberal icon FDR wouldn't have ever dreamed of promoting "civil unions", let alone gay marriage, which would have certainly resulted in impeachment and talks that the President had lost his mind. I think Calvin Coolidge's son, John Coolidge, once remarked in the 70s that "my father couldn't get elected today" and said that Silent Cal would be rolling in his grave if he saw how liberal America had become. And that's 30 years ago!
In any case, I'll just rank the 20th century presidents from best to worse. Note this is for overall effectiveness and accomplishments -- I'm not rating them by how much they agreed with me or how conservative they were.
Ping me if you want any details on my choices. Too much to explain here, I'd have to discuss them individually.
Ronald Reagan
Calvin Coolidge (most underrated President of all time)
Theodore Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Richard Nixon
Harry S. Truman
George H.W. Bush
Gerald Ford
Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Warren G Harding
Bill Clinton
John F Kennedy (most OVERRATED President of all time!)
Woodrow Wilson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Jimmy Carter
I think Coolidge gets far worse press than Harding. See tom Silver’s book, “Coolidge and the Historians.”