Historical Rankings Of President Essay

In political studies, historical rankings of Presidents of the United States are surveys conducted in order to construct rankings of the success of individuals who have served as President of the United States. Ranking systems are usually based on surveys of academichistorians and political scientists or popular opinion. The rankings focus on the presidential achievements, leadership qualities, failures, and faults. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington are consistently ranked at the top of the lists. Often ranked just below those Presidents are Thomas Jeffersonand Theodore Roosevelt. The remaining places in the top ten are often rounded out by Harry S. Truman, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, James K. Polk, and Andrew Jackson. Recent presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton tend to be rated among the greatest in world opinion polls, but do not always rank as highly among presidential scholars and historians. The bottom ten often includes Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Richard M. Nixon, Zachary Taylor and John Tyler. Because William Henry Harrison (30 days) and James A. Garfield (200 days, incapacitated after 119 …show more content…
Zelizer argues that traditional presidential rankings explain little concerning actual presidential history, and that they are "weak mechanisms for evaluating what has taken place in the White House."[6] Conservative political commentator Ivan Eland wrote a book titled Recarving Rushmore (2008; updated 2014) in which he wrote that historians' criteria are poor in their capacity to reflect presidents' actual services to the country; in the book, Eland chose to rate 40 US presidents on the basis of whether their policies promoted prosperity, liberty, and non-interventionism, as well as modest executive roles for themselves; his final rankings varied significantly from those of most