An impactful president is one whose actions outlive his administration. By "actions" I mean more than executive orders, managing wars, or specific pieces of legislation signed. Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and other offices often exert monumental impact across generations. So too do presidential speeches and other forms of messaging that mobilize (and sometimes de-mobilize) the populace. Visions emanating from presidential rhetoric often survive in popular discourse--for better or worse--for many decades. Two academic classics from the 1980s, Jeffrey Tulis' The Rhetorical Presidency and Kathleen Hall-Jamieson's Eloquence in an Electronic Age, cemented the view that, in modern times especially, a president's skill at maneuvering a bill through Congress is less vital than his ability to go "over the heads" of Congress and develop popular support for an idea or program.
New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg has a similar framework in mind in an excellent recent piece in which she argues that Joe Biden stands a good chance of being the first "post-Reagan" president. What she means is that Reagan's message of government as the evil that can only make things worse, a nonsensical but deeply American narrative that has ruled Washington since the 1980s, may finally be ending its reign in the public mind. The overwhelming need for effective government response to the pandemic and the economy makes government action more acceptable to the masses. (Goldberg is more optimistic than I am about Mr. Biden's ability to seize the moment.).
Does a president need at least two terms to be impactful? Of course not. Mr. Trump recently became the 13th one-term president. He will go down as the worst president in the history of the United States (Andrew Johnson is the only one who even comes close in terms of sheer awfulness), but also as one of the most impactful. Here's my ranking of the 13 one-termers, from least to most impactful:
#13 Franklin Pierce (1853-1857): By the 1850s the anti-slavery abolition movement was in full gear and it should have been clear that decades worth of putting off the crisis via congressional gag rules or lame compromises would no longer cut it. Imagine being an abolitionist and hearing these words in Mr. Pierce's inaugural address: "I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different states of this Confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution. I believe that it stands like any other admitted right, and that the states where it exists are entitled to efficient remedies to enforce the constitutional provisions." Like today's climate change deniers, Pierce exhibited a mix of denialism and subservience to powerful interests that made his administration nothing more than an enabler of the most wretched overseers of the slave states.
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| Franklin K. Pierce |
#12 James Buchanan (1857-1861): After Lincoln's election in November of 1860, southern states began seceding from the union on Buchanan's watch. Though personally opposed to slavery, until his last day in office he continued to place more blame for the nation's crisis on northern anti-slavery agitators than on the institution of slavery itself. Like his predecessor President Pierce, Buchanan boxed himself into a constitutional "originalist" position that made it impossible for him to do anything meaningful to address the crisis.
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| James Buchanan |
#11: Martin Van Buren (1837-1841): Van Buren had the misfortune of following President Andrew Jackson, who was at the time the most popular politician in the land even though he had been censured by the Congress. (Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee reportedly said that "Van Buren is as opposite to General Jackson as dung is to a diamond."). To make matters worse, Van Buren inherited an economic crisis of a type that the US federal government was ill-equipped to handle until the expansion of federal powers in the 1930s. The murder of abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, IL in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob produced an ineffective response from the administration. Van Buren was denied a second term in part because he was the victim of the one earliest political attack ads: Pennsylvania Congressman Charles Ogle's "Gold Spoon Oration" created an image of the President as living a lavish lifestyle in the Peoples' White House. The speech was released in pamphlet form and for its time was the most effective anti-incumbent diatribe the young nation had ever seen.
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| Martin Van Buren |
#10 Herbert Hoover (1929-1933): Hoover was a decent man (he probably would not be allowed into the contemporary Republican Party) so committed to the 19th century view of the federal government and presidency that he left himself powerless to address the Great Depression. Hoover's problem was not incompetence as much as ideology: he could not imagine a "big government" role to address human suffering. When he sent federal troops to disperse the "Bonus Marchers" (World War I veterans camped out in DC to demand their war pensions), he became a personal symbol of the government's heartless response to the depression.
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| Herbert Hoover |
#9 Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893): Harrison lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, but became president as a result of securing enough votes in the Electoral College. By the 1880s it was clear that corporate power controlled government at all levels. Harrison's inaugural address teased the populace with language suggesting he might do something about it: "If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their operations." Harrison did support the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but the law was too vague to address corporate abuses rigorously, and Harrison found himself essentially irrelevant.
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| Benjamin Harrison |
#8 John Quincy Adams (1825-1829): Because his election was the result of a "corrupt bargain" that gave him the office over the more populist Andrew Jackson, Adams possessed little political capital and had difficulty moving any major measures through Congress. Like Jimmy Carter more than a century later, Adams became more widely respected for his post-presidential accomplishments. The only former president ever to get elected to Congress post-presidency, Adams served 17 years in the House of Representatives. He was a powerful voice of conscience against slavery, and was able to bring an end to the "gag rule" that limited discussion of the matter on the House floor. Adams heroically represented slaves before the Supreme Court in the famous Amistad case, securing an improbable victory for the abolitionist cause at a time when victories were too few and far between.
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| John Quincy Adams |
#7 Jimmy Carter (1977-1981): Elected after the Watergate crisis, Carter had a mandate for reform that he could not quite deliver on. The fact that Ted Kennedy challenged him for the Democratic nomination in 1980 was symbolic of Carter's inability to reformulate the New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society vision that still resonated with the Democratic base and independents. Only Teddy's bumbling incompetence as a candidate enabled Carter to be re-nominated and ultimately blown out in the general election by Ronald Reagan. Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech in July of 1979 was much lambasted on all sides at the time, but I think it has been vindicated as one of the few times a president has told the the American people the unvarnished Truth about what ails them. With the possible exception of J.Q. Adams, he is the most effective ex-president in history, inspiring millions of people globally as an activist, humanitarian, and author.
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| If you remember Jimmy Carter jumping the fence at LaGuardia Airport, you are officially old |
#6 William Howard Taft (1909-1913): Some might argue that the federal income tax, for better or worse, has been the most impactful public policy accomplishment in the history of the nation. If so, then much credit for it must go to the portly President Taft. He campaigned in support of an income tax, and lobbied heavily (no pun intended) for the 16th amendment that established it. Less well known, but impactful in its own right, was Taft's creation of the Children's Bureau in the Department of Commerce, and bringing in social reformer Julia Lathrop to run it. Lathrop became the first woman to run a federal bureau, a major stride at a time when women still did not even have the right to vote in federal elections.
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| William Howard Taft has been body shamed by generations of pundits, often taking away from some meaningful strides made during his administration |
#5 Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881): Hayes lost the popular vote and won in the Electoral College only after the most shameful political maneuvering ever to have occurred in the United States up to that time. To get Florida's electoral votes, Hayes had to agree to end military reconstruction in the south. His actions, taken for reasons of sheer political expediency, gave us the Jim Crowe South and condemned African-Americans to political, economic, and social oppression for generations to come. Hayes did appoint John Marshall Harlan ("The Great Dissenter") to the Supreme Court, and Harlan's lone vote against white supremacy in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case remains inspirational. But the white supremacy Harlan argued against was in large part the result of Hayes' caving in on reconstruction. Yes, cowardice and political ambition in the presidency can have great impact. Hayes will forever be the poster child for how that works.
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| Rutherford B. Hayes |
#4 George H.W. Bush (1989-1993): President Bush #41 signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the most far reaching and impactful anti-discrimination law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was not as enlightened in foreign policy: his invasions of Panama and the Persian Gulf represented executive abuses of the all-volunteer military that opponents of ending the draft in the 1970s worried about. Think about all the wars America has been in since the Bush years. How many of them would have happened--or gone on as long as they have--it we had a military draft? Bush #41 was also mocked for declaring a "New World Order" (unwittingly using Hitlerite language) after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, but his post-Cold War vision (American exceptionalism + international law as a nice suggestion to follow only when convenient to do so) has been upheld by every succeeding administration. Don't be surprised if President Biden's foreign policy boldly endorses Bushism. Yikes.
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| George H.W. Bush responded to the breakdown of the Soviet Union by touting American exceptionalism--a major mistake according to this blog post |
# 3: John Adams (1797-1801): Adams did two things that forever changed the United States for the worse. First, he appointed John Marshall to the US Supreme Court. Marshall established the principle of Judicial Review (in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison case), which is found nowhere in the Constitution and which gives the Court the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. It is usually forgotten that the Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries opposed judicial review, in part because activists (like the great Fighting Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin) saw clearly that hack judges would use it to reverse popular progressive initiatives. Adams also gave us the "Alien and Sedition Acts," blatant attacks on freedom of speech and the press which established the precedent that the Bill of Rights was nothing more than a "good idea" that the feds could undermine whenever necessary. The Adams Administration reinforced the view of all true patriots in the nation who feared that the revolution had been betrayed. Even Thomas Jefferson stopped communicating with Adams.
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| John Adams |
#2 Donald Trump (2017-2021): Even though he lost the popular vote, Trump was able to remake the Supreme Court with three appointments (if you think I exaggerated the negatives of judicial review in my riff on John Adams, wait until you see what the current Roberts Court does with that power in the next few years.). Trump also completely remade the Republican Party; it's now pretty much a vice-signaling troll farm that without blinking an eye can place a person who harassed school shooting victims on the EDUCATION Committee. It's still too early to tell what will be the ultimate impact of Trump's January 6th insurrection, but it looks like Washington, D.C. will be a Baghdad-like Green Zone in the immediate future and the insurrection may fuel fascist recruitment drives for years. That's impact.
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| The majority of House and Senate Republicans don't think that inciting an insurrection against the United States government is impeachable. If that's not impeachable, what is? |
#1 James K. Polk (1845-1849): Under President Polk, the United States acquired more than 500,000 square miles in the southwest, while Mexico was reduced to about half of its former size. Much of the land seizure was the result of the Mexican-American War, a battle whose origins and need were hotly contested by then freshman Congressman Abe Lincoln. I consider Polk's actions more impactful than any other one-termer because he acted on the "Manifest Destiny" narrative, the idea that America has some kind of God-given right to expand wherever she wants and "civilize" native populations. Manifest Destiny changed the character of the United States government: the founders were enlightenment era thinkers wary of calling on an almighty power to rationalize secular actions. Manifest Destiny was a rejection of enlightenment thinking; it introduced spiritual arrogance ("God is on our side") as a legitimate form of evidence and argument in the public sphere. Even the young Bob Dylan railed against that kind of propaganda.
Manifest Destiny as an ideological weapon rightly reviles us when we see it practiced by other cultures. If civilian and military leaders believe they are acting according to the dictates of Providence, then they not surprisingly will find it easy to manufacture a case for war. Just as important, Polk's method of advocacy for the war started a trend we still see today: rather than figure out the predictable consequences of the war policy and use that knowledge to temper our actions, we instead will "figure it out later." That kind of irresponsibility has cost us at least $6.4 trillion since 9/11 and a tragic number of lives. We've out-Polked Polk.
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| James K. Polk's advocacy for and conduct of the Mexican-American War established a way of conducting American foreign policy that remains with us to this very day |
You don't agree with my ranking of the impact of the one-termers? Great, come up with your own ranking!
