Who is a genuinely good US president (or speaker) not called Abraham Lincoln?

One president I know little about if Grover Cleveland.

@Petar I tend to take issue with slavery generally speaking. It is like a concentration of all kinds of evil stuff. Greed, sadism, desire to control others and case of the one practised by US racism.

Edited by Risa123 on Nov 5th 2023 at 7:59:51 PM

If we’re picking US presidents based on “morally good person who did the least harm”, that’s Jimmy Carter, who I love and respect and who is probably my favourite US president. He sought peace and human rights rather than national or personal pride - one notable example is returning the Panama Canal to Panama rather than fighting over it, which Reagan lambasted him for; he made an honest and sincere attempt at mideast peace, despite unintended consequences; he was way ahead of his time in pursuing green energy, which Reagan reversed; he tried to crack down on the CIA, and he largely avoided the kind of egregious support for human rights abuses in the name of anticommunism that so characterized all other Cold War presidents. The CIA hated him, which is all the recommendation I need. And that’s without mentioning all the good things he’s done in his post-presidency.

If we’re looking at “largest positive outcomes from this person rather than someone else being president” rather than “least harm done”: I would say that FDR was a pivotally good president, despite also having done some notably bad things (such as the internment of the Japanese).

The Depression combined with the Dust Bowl was an event of unprecedented scale and desperation, and every country that experienced it struggled to deal with it. FDR stood out for his willingness to try a wide range of things and keep what worked, and to create job projects that didn’t just keep people fed, but kept them inspired and moved the country forward (the national parks work, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and so forth). He introduced a modern social safety net.

I’m Canadian and have read about Canada in the Depression. We didn’t have an FDR. We had barebones relief payments that barely kept people fed, a system for unemployed single men that amounted to insultingly pointless slave labour, and widespread political repression (at least one provincial premier was basically a fascist, and did have European fascists working for him in high political positions). Having FDR made a big positive difference for the US.

In addition to that, there’s the fact that he was actually interested in helping Europe against the Nazis in the context of most people strongly favouring isolationism, and Britain would have had things even harder if someone isolationist had been in power prior to Pearl Harbour.

Regarding Grover Cleveland: none of the presidents between the death of Lincoln and the start of the 1900s are going to be picks for good ones. By and large, they were pretty consistent in backing or acquiescing to the South’s repression of Black people and institution of Jim Crow and sharecropping systems that approached slavery, and in backing the large industrialists (the megacorps of their day) against unions, crushing unionization by force, and reinforcing the extreme wealth inequality of those days. If you want to find heroes during the Gilded Age, you’ll need to look outside the presidency, and probably outside government entirely.

Edited by Galadriel on Nov 5th 2023 at 11:52:08 AM

I will paraphase my opinions on leadership. Ahem, the price for being a good leader is the ability to become a good person. To lead, you must sin. And as such none of the presidents past Honest Abe are good people, for none of them are free of sin (though I will add that some are worse about it than others) except maybe Carter.

As for good leaders, The best would prolly be FDR for the whole New Deal thing and again, Carter. The worse would be Trump (ofc), Nixon, and that one guy that said "prosperity is just around the corner" despite reality saying otherwise

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Nov 5th 2023 at 1:45:58 AM

Eh, even Lincoln was not flawless. For example. He did not want a black both for a slave and a wife. (you can find a quote, it was in a speech). The first is commandable, the second is not. I'm not saying that because I have something against him, but let's not romanise him. Shall we ?

EDIT: Yes, I know the rules of the thread. I do not wish to start a discussing, I just dislike Romanisation of past.

Edited by Risa123 on Nov 5th 2023 at 9:50:57 AM

Probably both Roosevelts are fairly high up there.

Lyndon Johnson to some extent too, insofar as he was way better than St. Kennedy the Martyr at essentially everything though with the obvious caveat of the Vietnam War. Also he turned the democratic party into the civil rights party, which is nice, because there really wasn't one of those before.

I think Kennedy is grossly overrated as a president, really. He tripled the nuclear arsenal at obscene cost (not to imply government spending is an issue, the issue here is he dumped money into lockheed because he trusted lockheed about a non-existent missile gap), then got credit for... Not starting a war with the Soviet Union, which every other cold war president also did, and then died.

FWIW, I'd might've excluded him as well if not for the title. The earlier presents were also sinners as well (from Washington being a slaver his successors not abolishing it when Europe did. There's a reason it took a civil war to abolish it here)

lost potential makes for easy fodder for Rose Colored Glasses it seems.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Nov 5th 2023 at 2:06:06 AM

That part I said about Lincoln does very well demonstrate on problem with the topic. Or any other situation where we are discussing people from the past. Even with "good ones" ValuesDissonance is very much in effect which at best going to result in FairForItsDay.

As for your opinion on leadership. I think it is insightful. Even if we had a leader with (close to) flawless moral record, which I should note is unlikely. It is not likely to survive the leadership tenure. A leader maybe forced to make distasteful compromises and even when their intention is pure they may also make mistakes with devastating consequences.

Edited by Risa123 on Nov 5th 2023 at 11:17:51 AM

Some general thoughts on the topic:

• I do think Fair for Its Day is a valid defense, though it does need to be fact-checked.

• One thing in particular is that a person can be good in one area but bad in another. For example, George Washington had many genuinely admirable traits in my opinion but his views on matters like race and slavery were not among them.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Nov 5th 2023 at 3:18:42 AM

Kennedy is very thoroughly overrated, he doesn’t deserve accolades just for narrowly refraining from destroying the world. He also sexually abused his staff, in that it was just a basic expectation that women working in the White House would provide sexual favours to him and to congresspeople he wanted to please.

LBJ is a mixture of some very important good things (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, economically progressive domestic policy) and very big bad things (lying about the Gulf of Tonkin to throw the US full-tilt into Vietnam, and mass killings of Vietnamese).

Theodore Roosevelt is NOT one of the good ones, he was hugely imperialist, introduced the official government doctrine that the US could invade anywhere in the Americas that he thought was misgoverned (and acted on that in occupying numerous Latin American countries), ushering in a string of abuses that continued until FDR (and resumed in related forms in the Cold War). The trustbusting and national park system don’t outweigh that, to me.

George Washington was crucial in the existence of America as a democracy. Many new republics have failed to be/stay democratic because of their president either becoming a dictator (e.g. Napoleon I in the French First Republic, Napoleon III in the French Second Republic, many Latin American and African leaders upon independence), or just being re-elected for their whole life which prevent the establishment of a tradition of peaceful transitions of power (again, fairly common in newly-independent African countries). This is especially the case when the first president is a military general involved in the independence struggle. The fact that Washington did not do so, and left office after two terms, is in my opinion key to why that didn’t happen in the US; and his prestige meant that the two-term-max precedent lasted for the next 150 years.

Edited by Galadriel on Nov 5th 2023 at 4:57:28 AM

I actually think the maintenance of the Monroe doctrine (He didn't introduce this policy by the way, it was official policy for over 80 years by the time he was acting on it. His predecessor used it to annex hawaii, and Hayes used it to grant huge portions of territory claimed by Argentina to Paraguay) by Theodore Roosevelt was a good idea, if just for establishing the relevance of the US internationally in a way it previously had not been established as, and for the comparatively less severe imperialism it offered to those it hit.

When the alternatives at the time were the British and French empires, I think generally the US's (comparatively) soft control over weaker territories was the better option than the much more direct control that Britain and France exerted over anyone they were able to take a shot at. South America recovered fairly quickly from him, (up until the cold war), whereas much of Africa and India still haven't recovered.

It was a period when someone would have done it eventually, and it's probably better that it was Roosevelt's gunboat diplomacy that generally left local institutions mostly intact instead of the British and French empire's "draw some arbitrary lines and assume you'll be there forever"

Kennedy also delayed signing on emancipation legislation, which he doesn't seem to have been too keen on. If he wasn't so charismatic and hadn't been assassinated, history may well have remembered him differently.

In the first place, the alternatives were not the British and French empires, the alternative was independence. In the second place, the Roosevelt Corollary was an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine (from “we will fight to keep European powers from acting in the Americas, this is our territory” to “we will invade any nation in the Americas if we want to”), not a maintenance of it. And thirdly, American imperialism in the Americas was not a ‘kinder and gentler’ variant.

I think that when a banana company orchestrated a coup in Honduras because the incoming government was going to raise export taxes and the CIA was totally on board with it, the US completely forfeits the idea of being "kinder and gentler". Sure, the US didn't run foreign countries directly, but when the pattern of "if you elect leaders we don't like, we will orchestrate a military coup" became so obvious that one country straight up abolished their military completely to avoid the possibility of the US doing that in the future, I don't think that's much better.

"Cooperate with us, or we will overthrow your government and install a dictator" isn't better than "we will rule you directly", it's just a level of "it's not our fault that the dictator we picked and installed is attempting genocide, we aren't technically in total control."

Yeah, calling American plantation slavery "kinder and gentler" is maybe not the best expression.

I think that was Guatemala, and under Eisenhower during the Cold War not under TR (the CIA did not exist prior to the 1940s), but the precedent and pattern was decidedly set under TR.

EDIT: Whoops, I was partly wrong - there were also invasions of Honduras, and under Theodore Roosevelt. From Wikipedia:

Honduras, where the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925. The writer O. Henry coined the term "banana republic" in 1904 to describe Honduras.[10]

Other examples of pre-Cold War US occupations, which had everything to do with US interests and nothing to do with European powers. These ones happened after Theodore Roosevelt’s presidence, but are a direct consequence of the Roosevelt Corollary:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Nicaragua (1912-1933)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti (1915-1934)

And the Roosevelt Corollary was explicitly about US financial interests, not about European colonialism:

Theodore Roosevelt declared the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, asserting the right of the United States to intervene to stabilize the economic affairs of states in the Caribbean and Central America if they were unable to pay their international debts.

Edited by Galadriel on Nov 6th 2023 at 5:42:35 AM

The US could have easily maintained positive relations with everyone in South America without having to orchestrate coups. What was happening was a lot of people in the CIA being paranoid about Soviet influence in South America and trying to stomp it out...and the result was the US basically shredding the fuck out of a leftist movement that was actually developing mostly independently of the Soviets, because it turned out that most of South America was really suspicious of the Soviets too.

Gee, it's almost as if the CIA were keen on making right wing hegemonic orders.

Don't worry, they're on our side now. Probably.

that's what they want you to think!

It's really disturbing how much damage the Red and Lavender Scares did. The Soviets had way fewer agents than people like McCarthy were convinced they had, and the result was a combination of kicking out actually valuable and useful people for being slightly eccentric or outspoken and basically handing the Soviets a bunch of people primed to be defectors because it didn't matter if a government employee was actually a Soviet agent or not, if they were found to be gay, their lives would be totally ruined. So they might as well be agents.

*nervous laughter* Yeah, that was the joke. Except it's not funny.

That's not even close to what I said. (I don't think I ever implied US imperialism in south and central america during the first Roosevelt administration was particularly "kind and gentle" either, just that it was less directly long-term destructive.)

Anyway, the thing is, the alternative wasn't independence, not really, just the same as the alternative for India and Africa wasn't independence. At that time, the options for militarily weaker nations were "hope none of the big powers picks a fight with you (which they will if they think they can get away with it), and if they do, hope another big power comes to help you, and if they don't or fail, hope they don't destroy your institutions and allow you limited autonomy, and if they do, hope they don't wildly redraw borders for their own administrative convenience and destroy your region's economy for the next century before leaving 80 years later.

The US tended to stop at "limited autonomy" in south america during Roosevelt's administration. Notably, all the countries that existed at the height of his imperialist ambitions in the region still exist today. The same cannot be said for places in India or Africa.

Further, a lot of what you're talking about happened decades after the initial direct government strongarming and tolerated private-backed invasions during the first Roosevelt administration. I think overthrowing governments, funding rebels, actually planning coups, or refusing to help against coup plots to no particular benefit to anyone during the cold war would have happened anyway, so they're not really relevant to what Theodore Roosevelt did, they're relevant to what Dulles (of Airport Fame) did.

This is just straight up white man's burden.

wow good thing there isn't a whole special name for those kinds of economies that are based on monoculture crops like Bananas.

Yeah, if you count the height being after Roosevelt orchestrated Panama seceding from Gran Colombia.

Edited by JethroQWalrustitty on Nov 7th 2023 at 11:54:33 AM

"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." - Thucydides.

In other words, empires gonna empire, and the only ones who can do anything about that are empires themselves. In the context of South America, the US has normally been a relatively lenient empire (though the Native people of the lands now directly part of the US might have a different opinion) but only relatively.