Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic The Presidents of the United States ranked by historians

Just for a change, I have no snarky points to make It's been fascinating reading this thread, though. You all are good. I've learned a lot.

But one thing did pique my curiosity. Ann said:

And I'm dying to know why that's so surprising I never thought that much about him one way or the other, other than being vaguely familiar with his name.

PJ

I don't really know myself why I was so surprised. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Van Buren doesn't sound like an Anglo-Saxon name. I guess I believed that Barack Obama was the first American President ever who did not have an Anglo-Saxon name. Was Van Buren of Dutch descent?

Then again, I guess that when you think about it, Roosevelt doesn't sound all that Anglo-Saxon either.

Ann

Good guess, Ann. Martin Van Buren was the only president who didn't speak English as a first language even though he was born in New York. He was indeed of Dutch ancestry and spoke Dutch.

He was Jackson's vice president and was one of the main founders of the Democratic Party.

As a bit of trivia, Van Buren was the first president who was born a citizen of the United States whereas all the previous presidents were born English citizens.

He was also president during the incident with the Amistad, a famous ship where slaves rebelled and were captured by the US Navy. If I remember correctly, the incident was made into a Hollywood movie.

I can believe that name. But how did a man named Chester A. Arthur get elected?!

Add me to the list of people who question the relatively high rating of Andrew Jackson. Just a few weeks ago, I had my GATE students read primary sources from supporters and opponents regarding five areas of conflict during Jackson's administration (Jacksonian Democracy, the Spoils System, The Second Bank of the U.S., the Nullification Crisis, and Indian Removal). Then they read excerpts from Jackson's first Inaugural Address. Their test essay prompt was: "In your opinion, did Jackson live up to the goals he set for himself in his Inaugural Address?" Out of about 100 students, none of them concluded that he had. Most of them villified him as a murderer for his treatment of Native Americans. Jackson kicked people out of civil service jobs and put his friends in those positions, vetoed Congressional actions, defied the Supreme Court, and ignored states rights. There's a reason his opponents called him King Jackson.

Truman dropped the atomic bomb on innocent Japanese civilians, JFK nearly lead us to World War 3, Jefferson unconstitutionally purchased the Louisiana Territory, Teddy Roosevelt slaughtered innocent animals...it seems that people at the top of the list have a lot to answer for.

By the way, all of this ignores the people I call the Real First 10 Presidents . Just because the Articles of Confederation failed doesn't mean that there weren't patriotic Americans providing political service to our country.

Groobie wrote:

While I don't think Truman was a great president, we have to put this particular action in historical context. The Japanese Empire had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and was still fighting in that region. They had attacked America without a formal declaration of war in 1941. They had also attacked other nations around themselves and brought them into subjugation - often quite brutally. In 1937, the Japanese soldiers who overran the Chinese city of Nanking exploded in a month-long expression of brutality now called the Rape of Nanking, and it was pretty much just like the term sounds. In December of 1941 they bombed Manila despite the Allied declaration that it was an open city (meaning that the Allies would not fight the Japanese within the city limits). The Japanese captured nearly a hundred civilian engineers and skilled laborers when the took the Wake Island and forced them to build military structures, a violation of international law, and when Wake was about to be retaken, the Japanese commander had the men beheaded.

Allied intelligence had uncovered Japanese plans to fight the Allied invaders with everything they had. There were about seven thousand aircraft in Kyoto ready to drop bombs or shoot cannon and machine guns and dive into enemy ships in 'divine wind' attacks. Civilian men and women in every city had drill presses and band saws and other industrial tools in their homes where they made smaller parts for the Japanese war effort. School children were drilling with bamboo spears to impale the invaders. The casualty estimates for the planned November 1945 invasion ran from 250,000 dead and wounded to a million.

The day before the Emperor announced over Japanese radio that the war was over, a cabal of fanatic young officers tried to kidnap the Emperor and destroy the recordings he'd made of his announcement to force him to continue the war. And it nearly happened.

The Japanese took over 60,000 prisoners on Bataan Island in the Philippines in early 1942. Barely a tenth of them survived the war in prison camps. Germany treated Allied prisoners of war strictly but for the most part humanely. Japan did not, and American citizens knew it. Whether under Roosevelt or Truman, the American citizens would not have accepted a peace with Japan which did not include a Japanese surrender.

By this time, there were no non-combatants in Japan. Medical workers carried weapons and blew themselves up in suicide attacks as often as any other soldier did. The general populace was being told that the Americans would kill everyone when they came, from the oldest to the youngest babe. All were urged to kill as many invaders as they could before they died. An invasion of Japan would likely have resulted in the destruction of the Japanese people, because there were no "innocent Japanese civilians" by July 1945.

And if the war had continued much longer, the Soviet Union would have declared war on Japan and moved to take the northern islands away from them. They did, in fact, declare war, but it was only days before the surrender and General MacArthur dissuaded the Russians from grabbing much actual Japanese territory after the surrender, before the political situation stabilized. They did, however, take Korea back and accept the surrender of several hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, very few of whom ever saw home again.

It can be argued from an alternate history perspective that Truman saved Japan from German-style dismemberment after the war by ending the conflict when he did. Fewer civilians died from the atomic bombs than from the B-29 firebombing campaign. And no Americans lost their lives during the atomic attacks (unless you count the majority of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, sunk by a Japanese submarine after delivering the parts for the Nagasaki bomb to the island of Tinian).

Condemning Truman for dropping the atom bombs without considering the historical context isn't fair to him or to the many Americans who died to free the nations of the Pacific from Japanese imperialism. In retrospect, I believe it was the right thing to do. If nothing else, the event convinced the rest of the world that actually using these weapons was a bad idea in the long run.

End note: Groobie, I agree that Andrew Jackson wasn't what we'd call a great president. And thank you for reminding us of those anonymous men who served the United States before the Constitution was ratified. So many people forget about the Articles today.