The final president in this low tier is Herbert Hoover.

Calvin Coolidge’s decision not to run for a second full term left Hoover the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in his party. In the election of 1928, Hoover was the first Republican to pioneer a “southern strategy,” and attacked Democratic candidate Al Smith on his Catholicism and his position in favor of the repeal of Prohibition.

Hoover is most often remembered as the president who presided over the start of  the Great Depression, but he did not cause the Great Depression, nor did he fail to act in response to Black Tuesday. He ranks among the worst presidents today because his actions in fact led a worsening of the Depression.

Hoover did fear too much government involvement, but by all accounts, two major pieces of legislation passed in response to the stock market crash – the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Davis-Bacon Act – were largely policy failures. Attacking Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” which had immense popularity across the nation, Hoover was soundly defeated by Roosevelt in 1932.

The legacy of Andrew Johnson has run the gamut from excellent to abominable. In the early twentieth century, the Republican Party of the 1860s was seen as beholden to business. In that light, Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, was viewed as a “man of the people” and held in high esteem. A century later — by the 1960s — he was reviled as a president with southern sympathies who held back the civil rights movement.

The truth lies somewhere in between. Johnson was the only Southerner in Congress to remain loyal to the Union, and seems to have held the continuation of the Union as his highest priority in his work toward rapid North-South reconciliation after the war. To this end, he staked out a centrist path and kept his distance from the Radical Republicans. This move, however measured, inevitably placed him ideologically closer to the former Southern opposition than Northerners would have preferred.

President Johnson’s most marked failure was his lack of action in addressing the social and economic status of recently-freed slaves: it took significant effort from the Republican Congress, without much help from Johnson’s administration, to pass the Freedman’s Bureau and other laws.

This 1867 Harper's Weekly illustration, "The Georgetown Election," mocks President Johnson's (left) stance in opposition to suffrage for freed slaves.

Johnson did oversee the purchase of Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and forced the French out of Mexico (where France was attempting to establish a satellite state and exploit the nation’s resources). France’s withdrawal ended the reign of Maximillian I of Mexico, the Austrian archduke installed by France.

Even considering these foreign policy accomplishments, Johnson’s failure of domestic post-war leadership and his disregard for civil rights places him squarely in our bottom tier of presidents.

For what it’s worth, the Congress at the time agreed — there were two formal efforts to impeach President Johnson: the first, in 1867, failed to pass the House; the second, in 1868, passed the House but failed (by a single vote) to receive the required two-thirds majority in the Senate.

This week, we’re making the final edits on our Visual History of the U.S. Senate print before sending it out to be proofed. Based on feedback we’ve already received, some of the edits we are making now to the posted version include:

• Further labeling each state’s senate seats with the state’s abbreviations at the start of each horizontal bar in the body graphic
• Making relatively minor changes to the color hues associated with each political party, as well as the color hues in the ideology row (below the body graphic)
• Editing the white-on-yellow text over the yellow-hued parties in the body graphic
• Adding short descriptions of each category of major legislation
• Further editing the legend
• Fixing overlaps in text and graphics

Take a look at the Zoomify (click here) and let us know what else is unclear or could be improved. Use the contact form on our website, or make a comment below. Thanks!

Considered a “doughface,” or a Northerner with Southern sympathies, James Buchanan is widely considered the worst U.S. president. The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision was delivered by the Court in the first days of Buchanan’s presidency, and Buchanan was widely believed to have influenced the decision.

Buchanan’s administration spiraled downhill from his first day in office. Capitalizing on Buchanan’s lack of leadership on slavery and expansion, an energized Republican party seized control of Congress in the mid-term elections and blocked much of Buchanan’s weak proposals. During the Panic of 1857, he initiated the sale of Treasury revenue bonds and managed to enrage both Democrats and Republicans.

Most significantly, President Buchanan ignored the growing secessionist movement. Even after Abraham Lincoln’s controversial election, as Southern states announced their intention to secede from the Union, Buchanan nervously demurred taking action in the hopes that the crisis would resolve itself.

In its profile of James Buchanan, U.S. News & World Reports writes,

“To his dying day, he felt that history would treat him favorably for having performed his constitutional duty. He was wrong.”

Buchanan’s presidency serves as an example of the dangers of ignoring growing public discontent and frustration with the federal government. The Civil War, which broke out just a few months after Buchanan left office, would end up destroying a generation of young American men (and women), and dividing the nation for decades — if not centuries — to come.

William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding each received one-star ratings on A Visual History of the American Presidency. Harrison, really, deserves an incomplete — he only served thirty-two days in office.

The other three men who fall into our one-star category are slightly more interesting. President Franklin Pierce, for example, filled his cabinet with political rivals,  and to this day remains the only administration not to see any change in the cabinet during his tenure. He suffered from a seeming lack of willpower, however, when it came to the expansion of slavery.

Pierce stated in his inauguration that his administration “will not be deterred by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” Pierce continually temporized, refusing to cool the passions aroused by the Compromise of 1850 or the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Posts on Buchanan — the president everyone loves to hate — and Harding will follow shortly.

What do William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding have in common? They each earned a one-star rating on our Visual History of the American Presidency. It’s not just us — a number of scholars consistently rank these men in the bottom tier of the nation’s presidents.

Judging poor presidents is difficult. Arguably, no president has acted with purpose and malice to weaken the nation. If — as my last post discusses — a good president is known for rising above his era and leading with optimism and confidence, then a bad president is one who shrinks from the responsibility of leadership. Overarching issues of the time are ignored in deference to political expediency; important decisions are bungled. We also considered those whose tenures were cut short by death, like William Henry Harrison, to have been similarly inconsequential.

What most often separates the one-star from the two-star presidents is context. We viewed progress as a net positive, and inertia (or regression) as a net negative: those who favored continuation of the status quo find themselves at the bottom of our rankings. The presidents in this lowest tier ignored or mishandled an overwhelming issue at the point in time during which it needed the most action and resolution.

As for the rest of the presidents – those who find themselves in the middle tier, with either three or four stars – they are the presidents who were somewhat perfect for their era. They did not necessarily stand out; did not necessarily bring transformational change, but also did not ignore or avoid pressing matters.  In some cases, they simply continued policies of their predecessors, and in others were not faced with era-defining issues. They may not have provided outstanding leadership, but they led the nation on a steady course.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting the presidents by ranking, along with short explanations as to why they find themselves there.  None of our determinations will likely be earth-shattering, but there are some who may be controversial. I invite comments & questions as the blogging continues!

Click to view full size.

This c1860 political cartoon depicts James Buchanan as “Dismal Jemmy,” unsuccessfully navigating the tightrope between pro- and anti-slavery factions.

For early reviewers, one of the most controversial sections of A Visual History of the American Presidency was its ranking section. We were often asked: What makes a good president, and how does a good president differ from a great president?

A presidency is impossible to separate from its context. Good people were elected into poor situations, and sometimes failed in their capacity as leaders of the nation. Other presidents rose above the office, changing the political landscape and dominating their era. Hoover was over-matched by the Great Depression, while Theodore Roosevelt changed the way the presidency was viewed and the way America interacted with the world.

We referred often to the considered judgments of others; in our final assessment, we judged good and great presidents on the following criteria.

Good presidents successfully navigated political tensions and stayed true to the principles, morals, and ambitions of the executive office. They provided leadership through periods of intense change in America, due to internal tension, such as westward expansion; or external necessity, like war.

The presidents in the highest tier — the great presidents — surpassed the criteria of successful leadership. These few individuals changed the presidency through both action and philosophy. They brought strong and active leadership and a new vision to the office, and they irrevocably changed the foundations of the presidential office. The presidents here were not visionaries as much as they were transformers, shepherding the United States into new eras of governance with a sure hand and steadfast faith in the nation’s ability to progress.

Describing a good president is relatively easy, though, when faced with the cruel determination of naming the nation’s worst presidents. What makes a bad president? We’ll post our thoughts on that next.

About twenty years ago, I had an idea to make a poster with a history of every senator who’s ever served in the U.S. Congress. I thought it would be neat to be able to trace the occupants of each seat in each state over time. I worked for a political redistricting firm at the time, and began to research the project, but I got busy and set it aside.

I picked up the idea again this past year for Timeplots, and now we are almost done with an expanded and more ambitious version of that original vision. And we had twenty more years of U.S. history to trace!

Check it out at http://timeplots.com/senate, and leave your comments below– we’re always interested in feedback. Thanks!