The Fallacy of President's Day

Hey all! I’m really excited to post my first guest blog post - my dad! He’s an avid history buff, especially on American History, and he has some thoughts about today’s Federal Holiday.

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The Fallacy of President’s Day

by Mark Elliott

I have been an avid critic of “President’s Day” ever since it was created a number of years ago. Someone had the bright idea that, for some reason, it made sense to do away with observances of Washington’s and Lincoln’s February birthdays and, instead, honor all former Chief Executives with “President’s Day”. This despite the fact that, with the exception of Washington and Lincoln themselves, relatively few other men ever elected to this position are worthy of having a day dedicated to them.

In fact, in my opinion, only seven other former Presidents would qualify. An additional five other former Chief Executives could be added to a list of “honorable mention”. The other thirty-one? They ranged from mediocre to downright scoundrels. To suggest that any of them deserve a “Day” is preposterous.

Here’s my list, in chronological order, of the nine Presidents who would truly qualify for a day in their honor, including brief commentaries supporting my opinions. Following that is a list of the five other former Presidents, also in chronological order, who come close to deserving the honor, but for one reason or another are excluded from the top echelon.

The Deserving Nine

George Washington

He was the first of twelve presidents who owned slaves (count ‘em: 12), and in the 21st century, there is rightfully a blight on the legacies of all great men who profited from slavery. However, Washington’s importance to history is so immense that, while not being overlooked, his slave holdings must be seen in the light of the eighteenth-century norms that prevailed in Virginia and other southern states.

His administration kept the original thirteen states from coming unglued, which had been a distinct possibility. With the duties of the President stated vaguely in the Constitution, Washington established numerous precedents for the office that insured democratic rule in the fledgling country. The most important of these was his insistence on not being considered a king, and his peaceful transfer of power after eight years.

Thomas Jefferson

The same can be said of Jefferson as with Washington when it comes to slavery. In fact, Jefferson’s intimacy with several of his female slaves was, in many ways, much more despicable. But, also like Washington, the importance of his presidency to history is too great. He stabilized the economy of the young nation and negotiated the greatest real estate deal in history up until that time, which doubled the size of the United States. He flexed the young country’s first overseas muscle by defeating piracy on the Barbary Coast. He had quite possibly the greatest intellectual mind of any President ever.

James Monroe

It’s a tough call to consider yet another slave-owning President as worthy of “President’s Day”, but Monroe accomplished much during his time in office, which historians have labeled the “Era of Good Feelings” due to the relatively peaceful harmony that prevailed during his eight years in office.

He resolved long-standing disputes with the British stemming from the War of 1812. He acquired Florida from Spain and established the Monroe Doctrine, which basically declared that all of the Americas (North and South) were off-limits for further European involvement at a time when many Latin American countries were fighting for their own independence. The doctrine was largely abided by. (Later administrations, however, would see nothing wrong with U.S. involvement in Latin America.)

Abraham Lincoln

So much has been written about the greatness of Lincoln that—using a passage from the Gettysburg Address—it is “far above (my) poor power to add or subtract.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Trust buster. Regulator of businesses that had run amok with unfettered capitalism. Food and Drug overseer. Panama Canal creator. Conservationist par excellence. Nobel laureate for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Builder of the modern U.S. Navy. His list of accomplishments is unmatched (he’s also my fifth cousin, four times removed).

Franklin Roosevelt

A wealthy man, no one would have faulted him for retiring from public service after being stricken with polio at age 39. Finding ways to overcome his handicap, he pressed on, winning the Presidency at the worst time in the country’s history since the Civil War.

He demonstrated energy and tenacity in fighting the Great Depression that must have been the envy of able-bodied men. His Administration met the economic devastation that gripped the county with major federal programs that reformed the financial and communications industries, created jobs, protected farmers, and spurred numerous and much-needed civil engineering projects.

For the benefit of the elderly for decades to come, he created the Social Security Administration. Oh, and then there was the small matter of successfully leading the US and its allies through the greatest war in the history of mankind.

Harry Truman

No President ever took office in such dire times and with such little preparation. It is a knock on FDR that he did not keep his Vice President informed on important matters, especially on the Manhattan Project and the existence of the atomic bomb. (In FDR’s defense, no President in history to that time had ever confided in a significant way with his VP).

Truman handled the situation well. He had to make possibly the weightiest decision anyone at any time has ever been faced with: whether to deploy the atomic bomb on a civilian population. I believe it has been shown that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed fewer people than would have been the case with a ground invasion of Japan. (I have often wondered why the second bomb on Nagasaki was necessary.) Truman showed strength in correctly dismissing General McArthur for insubordination after WWII. The biggest misstep in his presidency, and something that almost disqualifies him from this list, is that he allowed us to become bogged down in the euphemistically named “police action” in Korea.

Dwight Eisenhower

With him, three successive Presidents make the list. Eisenhower’s greatness was that he was the right person at the right time. After the Taft Administration ended in 1913, American politics for forty years had swerved from the lead up to war and then war itself (WWI), to scandal (Teapot Dome), to bootlegging, to the idle presidencies of Coolidge and Hoover, to depression, and to more wars (WWII and Korea).

America was exhausted. Ike the war hero was certainly the most popular figure in America at the time and seen as someone who could best guide the nation out of post-war weariness and into a period of prosperity. The fact that both major political parties courted him was a sign of his non-partisanship. Aside from the rising pressure of the Cold War, he was largely successful in the task assigned to him.

As the decade rolled on, a significant Civil Rights movement was forming. In an unprecedented move, Eisenhower sent federal troops into Arkansas to ensure integration at Little Rock’s Central High School. There was certainly much, much more to be done in terms of Civil Rights, but in the 1950s the heavily Democratic and racist South was politically too powerful to allow this. Significant action in this regard would take another six years after Ike’s presidency was over.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

How fortunate for the nation to have four consecutive Presidents on this list. JFK learned a bitter lesson the hard way early on with the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, which was a plot he inherited from the Eisenhower Administration for the invasion of Cuba with anti-Castro Cuban forces.

The USSR’s Khruschev underestimated him at their first meeting and decided he could send missiles into Cuba with no retaliation from the U.S. When the missiles were detected on Soviet ships approaching Cuba, Pentagon Generals called for an all-out war, with nuclear options on the table. Based on his experience with the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stood up against the Generals, called for a naval blockade of Cuba, and insisted on diplomatic negotiations. The USSR eventually pulled their missiles back. The U.S. did the same with missiles pointed at the USSR from Turkey, and the crisis passed.

It will never be known how many lives were spared by Kennedy’s stance. In another role, JFK’s challenge to NASA to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade was Exhibit A of his lofty ideas and his power of persuasion. He was sympathetic to the emerging Civil Rights movement but, as a New England liberal, was largely unable to make legislative headway on the issue with Southern Democrats.

He did, however, set the table for his successor, a politically savvy Texan, to achieve significant Civil Rights advancements. His popularity around the world was immense, and with it followed the popularity of the United States. Heads of state and/or high-ranking officials from ninety-one countries attended his funeral.

Seven years after his death, I was a member of the Peace Corps that Kennedy established. I was stationed in Peru, and would often enter humble, adobe-walled homes where there would invariably be two photos on the wall: One of Jesus Christ, and one of John F. Kennedy.

The Honorable Mentions

James Polk

After naming three slaveholding Presidents to the top list, it would have been too much to have added a fourth, especially since Polk secretly purchased enslaved children while in the White House. Also, the fact that he was considered a protégé of the evil human that was Andrew Jackson would almost be enough to keep him off even the Honorable Mention list.

That he is on this list is due to two major accomplishments achieved during his Administration. One was the re-establishment of an independent Treasury. The other, and much more importantly, in my opinion, was the acquiring of Oregon through negotiations with the British, and of Texas, New Mexico, and California through war with Mexico.

It can and has been argued whether his initiating the war with Mexico in order to take vast territories away from our neighbors was morally correct. A young Congressional Representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, and many other Whigs, did not think so. However, their stance on this issue spelled the end of the Whig Party, as the war was widely popular with the general public.

My personal feeling is that, in this case, the means justified the ends. “Manifest Destiny”, as it was called at the time, saw the United States become a continental country that extended to the Pacific Ocean. In due time, this was a major factor in the U.S. becoming a world power.

Ulysses Grant

For many years, historians have considered his administration a failure, and it is a fact that he selected unqualified men for key roles in his administration and did not exercise sufficient control over their scandalous behavior. But Grant strongly believed in Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War and took major steps in upholding its shaky existence. He literally destroyed the Ku Klux Klan of the 1870s to the extent that they would not raise their ugly heads again for another fifty years.

There’s no telling how Reconstruction would have continued to aid African-Americans, and Southern society in general, had Grant’s successors not gutted the program after he left office and allowed White supremacists to rule the region for decades.

Lyndon Johnson

No other President ever left office with such an admirable achievement coupled with such a glaring failure. By arm twisting his fellow Southern Democrats, LBJ was able to ram through Congress Civil Rights legislation that advanced the cause of freedom for American Blacks as had nothing else since the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed shortly after the Civil War.

It should be noted that this legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, would not have been necessary had the country simply followed the dictates of the 14th Amendment, which granted equal civil and legal rights for African-Americans, and the 15th Amendment, which established that the right to vote (for a man) cannot be denied or abridged on account of race, color or condition of previous servitude.

The problem was that the Jim Crow laws that flourished in the South for nearly a hundred years were a veritable thumbing of the nose to the U.S. Constitution until LBJ came along. His actions caused a major political realignment in the country where racist Southern Democrats and Dixiecrats, and not a few Northern Democrats as well, jumped to the Republican Party (It should also be noted that efforts to overturn Civil Rights legislation continue alive and well within today’s GOP).

What keeps LBJ off the list of ex-Presidents worthy of a “Day” was his responsibility for the unspeakable tragedy that was the Vietnam War. Unlike Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Johnson let his Generals not only drag him into that unwinnable conflict but also keep him in it until the end of his term, after which it continued for another five years under Nixon and into the Ford presidency.

Despite Kennedy’s sending of “advisors” to Saigon, had he lived, there almost assuredly would not have been a Vietnam War.

A note about Ronald Reagan: He does not qualify for this Honorable Mention List because of numerous bad policy stances which I feel necessary to point out.

He famously claimed that government was the problem, not the solution. He believed in “trickle-down” economics. He cut taxes, benefiting his wealthy donors, while at the same spending heavily, especially on increases for the military, whose budget already dwarfed that of multiple other countries combined. This tripled the country’s federal debt.

His National Security Council created a secret scheme involving the illegal sale of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Iran and then diverting a portion of the proceeds to militants in Nicaragua who were fighting against the Sandinista regime that had ruled there at the time for six years. The Reagan Administration supported the rebels in the dubious belief that they were fighting the spread of communism.

While he is often credited with “the fall of the Soviet Union”, the fact is that the USSR, with an economy the size of Italy’s, was already crumbling under its own weight from years of trying to keep up militarily with the U.S. dating back as far as the Truman Administration. A saving grace for Reagan, and the reason for including this note here about his presidency, was a one-liner he delivered in Berlin in 1987 in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It is arguably one of the greatest political statements ever uttered: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Bill Clinton

After twelve years of Reagan-Bush, Clinton was able to erase the massive deficits they had run up and presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history.

He ushered in the NAFTA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, an accord that was one of the earliest catalysts of market globalization. It met with a high degree of support on one hand and a high degree of criticism on the other. Critics argued that it would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S., and while it did create short term losses in certain manufacturing jobs, unemployment dropped from a 7.1% average over the eleven years prior to NAFTA to a 5.1% average in the thirteen years following the signing of the agreement. GDP increased 48% from 1993 to 2005. U.S industrial products rose 49% over the same period. Meanwhile, consumer prices during the same period fell.

In the area of universal health care, the Clinton Administration deserves an “A for effort”, but conservative Congressional Republicans, who enjoyed full health care coverage themselves, were able to block the bill. First Lady Hillary Clinton spearheaded the effort, a position that right-wingers used to smear her for the next thirty years and counting.

As for the Supreme Court, Clinton appointed one of the most iconic Justices of all time: Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

On the negative side, Clinton promoted, along with Joe Biden in the Senate, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Years later, it was apparent that this Act proved to have a racial aspect to it, as Blacks were proportionally more likely than Whites to receive longer sentences for similar crimes. The Act also encouraged judges to apply maximum sentencing guidelines, which often led to draconian jail times for minor crimes. Clinton later apologized for the creation of the Act.

Finally, the largest knock on Clinton was his affair with a White House intern that he denied for months until physical evidence proved he was lying. While this was not an impeachable offense, as many anti-Clinton members of Congress wanted to believe, it certainly was behavior unbefitting a leader of our country.

Barack Obama

He is the only former President on this list who could one day be elevated to the top. It is too soon after his time in office to see how history will judge him. Most of his decisions were decisively positive for our country. Entering office in the midst of an economic collapse, he proposed unprecedented federal spending to revive the economy. This plan worked, albeit slowly, causing Republicans, who were primarily responsible for the poor economic situation, to routinely criticize the slowness of the recovery.

Also, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as international terrorism, were raging when he took office. He pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq and tracked down and killed the world’s foremost terrorist leader. (Unfortunately, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan would continue for another five years after he left office.)

From major legislative achievements to historic court victories, Obama expanded opportunities and equality for all Americans, including especially those from the LGBT community. Gay marriage became legal nationally. After years of Democratic failure to establish universal health care, Obama, at last, got through Congress the Affordable Care Act, which has helped millions of Americans who suffered from a lack of health insurance. The Act was not perfect, as many compromises were made by Republicans who fiercely attacked the program, but it set the table for future improvements whenever, or if ever, GOP lawmakers decide it is the right thing to do.

The dignity and eloquence of Obama captivated the world, but at home, it engendered anger and hatred among a large number of right-wing racists. This was important, because it showed, if there was ever any doubt, that racism remains a significant force in our country. This force, along with the thirty-year smear campaign of Hillary Clinton, was successfully exploited by Obama’s successor.