We Will Survive

I don’t want to get into it, since I fear for my life, and the lives of my family. My mantra: stay in the present. The past is history, the future is a mystery, that’s why they call it the present. We’ve witnessed a statistically unlikely event, maybe we are in for two.

As a former middle-school history teacher, I know we’ve been here before, and our democracy has survived. Yes, I know this is the 21^st century, not the 19^th.

Just as you shouldn’t credit or blame a president for “their” economy—it’s mostly outside their control—you also mostly can’t blame them for the state of the country. We, the people, got together to form a more perfect union: the first country on earth without a national ethnicity or religion.

Among our truly ghastly presidents:

• Millard Fillmore, who proved presidential succession may be a bad idea (a lesson we may someday relearn).
• James Buchanan, who fiddled while the Union burned.
• Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, who, between them, drove America into the ground. In aviation, it’s called controlled flight into terrain.
• Rutherfraud B. Hayes, (oh wait, did I say that out loud? Rutherford) who won the White House by selling his soul to the devil. He promised, and delivered, a premature end to Reconstruction and sentenced African-Americans to a century of quasi-slavery at the hands of undeterred bigots, and their narrative that they hadn’t really lost the Civil War.
• History has yet to render its judgment on a  couple of recent mediocre presidents. But they are not really  in a class with Fillmore, Coolidge/Hoover and Hayes. Mediocre does not mean ghastly, and their terms were relatively easy to survive (although their damage lives on).

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

Pierce was worse than Fillmore, and Buchanan was worse that Pierce. Buchanan did nothing in December 1860 when the southern states started seceding, including not removing weapons from the federal armories in the South. He is the second-worst President in history (I rank him as worse than Andrew Johnson).

Reconstruction was going to end in 1877 one way or another. If Hayes hadn't made the deal, the electoral votes would have gone to Tilden, who would have been beholden to southern Democrats and ended Reconstruction on his own. Hayes actually did what he could faced with a Democratic Congress in the second half of his term, vetoing bills designed to repeal the Enforcement Acts passed during Reconstruction. Hayes was far from being great, but he was just as far from being one of the stinkers we had from 1849-1861.

[Robert E. Malchman]

P.S. Regarding presidential successors (and "failu-ors"): John Tyler already showed that the VP-next business could produce garbage; we didn't have to wait for Fillmore, and let alone Andrew Johnson.

But that said, Chester Arthur -- the bobo of Spoils-System King Roscoe Conklin -- actually tried to do the right thing once he got in office and signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which killed the Spoils System, at least until Project 2025 in enacted. (Arthur was a mixed bag, too; he vetoed the first Chinese Exclusion Act, but inexplicably signed the second one that merely reduced the sunset provision.)

Then you get to Theodore Roosevelt, who is one of the greats, and skip past Calvin Coolidge (who at least had an administration less corrupt than Harding's) to Harry Truman, who is on that very good/great bubble. LBJ was a mixed bag, too, as great on civil rights as he was poor on Vietnam. And finally Ford, who was adequate and not a crook like his landslide-elected predecessor.