Rank Politics

Monday is Presidents’ Day, a national holiday which most Americans will celebrate by wondering why the mail never came.

The history of the holiday itself is one of steady expansion.

First, it was a president’s day, singular, devoted to celebrating George Washington’s birthday. The inspiration for the holiday is obvious. As Alexis Coe put it, you never forget your first, and with George Washington there has been plenty of reasons to celebrate a man who inspired myth-making from Parson Weems to my personal favorite, Brad Neely. Local celebrations expanded to national ones, and in 1885, the nation made it official by fixing Washington’s Birthday as a federal holiday.

But then, about a century later, Washington’s Birthday became Presidents’ Day. The change here came in 1968, when a new law took several federal holidays that had been sort of careening around the calendar and fixed them to more manageable Mondays. (Be sure to thank LBJ for all your three-day weekends, everyone.) And because the new date for honoring the president tended to fall in February somewhere between Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s, people just assumed it was meant to honor both of them.

Technically, that’s what the US government would have you believe to this day, but in practice most Americans assume the holiday is one meant to honor all presidents.

Yes, even the mediocre ones.

Now, there are a lot of bizarre trappings that go with Presidents Day, many of them forced upon us by businesses who will look for any excuse to have sales.

For some reason, it’s long been a day for “white sales” of mattresses and linens, which I suppose would make sense if Washington had chopped down a cherry-wood credenza or Lincoln had been assassinated with a pillow. In recent years, car companies have made it their thing as well. (And not just Lincoln Motors.)

More seriously, the holiday is often used as an excuse to release some sort of “ranking” of the presidents, purportedly by presidential historians and other scholars. While these are fine conversation starters if you’re desperate enough, I’d advise you to take them with a Mt. Rushmore-sized grain of salt.

First and foremost, the pool of judges for these things can vary wildly. I remember getting emailed one from an organization which will remain nameless, who invited me to pass the survey link on to any other scholars I knew, or perhaps any random person at all. Another one seemed to be sent out to actual historians, but even then I know a whole lot of scholars (myself included) who tend to think these ranking exercises are a little useless and never bother to respond. So even those are skewed a bit wildly by a set of respondents who probably aren’t typical of the profession.

With that in mind, I see there’s a new one out and the New York Times has taken a quick break from its nonstop coverage of All Things Harvard to discuss it, so we might as well do that too. (I should say at the outset that I’d never heard of the organization running this, but it seems to have contacted political scientists through the APSA, so it seems legit?)

Here’s the write-up from Peter Baker, who definitely appreciates a good horserace approach to politics:

President Biden has not had a lot of fun perusing polls lately. He has a lower approval rating than every president going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower at this stage of their tenures, and he trails former President Donald J. Trump in a fall rematch. But Mr. Biden can take solace from one survey in which he is way out in front of Mr. Trump.

A new poll of historians coming out on Presidents’ Day weekend ranks Mr. Biden as the 14th-best president in American history, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and Ulysses S. Grant.

Um, let me pause here to remind everyone that despite Peter Baker’s flat characterization of this as a “poll of historians” this is actually a poll of POLITICAL SCIENTISTS.

That should have been sort of clear from the fact that the organizers are both political scientists and the clear text of the very first paragraph of the press release about how “respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.”

Anyway.

While that may not get Mr. Biden a spot on Mount Rushmore, it certainly puts him well ahead of Mr. Trump, who places dead last as the worst president ever.

Indeed, Mr. Biden may owe his place in the top third in part to Mr. Trump. Although he has claims to a historical legacy by managing the end of the Covid pandemic; rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and leading an international coalition against Russian aggression, Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Mr. Trump from the Oval Office.

I will say — again, despite this being a poll of POLITICAL SCIENTISTS — that most historians would generally agree with the top three (invariably Washington, Lincoln and FDR) and the one who now has a stranglehold on dead last (Trump, of course).

After that, though … does any of this really matter? The one time I answered one of these surveys, once I got about ten deep it all became a bit of a blur. We know the ones who are really great and we know the ones who are really awful, but does anyone truly care about the massive muddle in the middle?

Does it matter if Grover Cleveland edges out Gerald Ford for 25th? Meh.

Am I going to cite Warren G. Harding’s 51.23 Presidential Greatness Rating in an undergrad lecture? Not if I want to make it out of that room alive, I’m not.

So take these for what they’re worth, which in my opinion isn’t an awful lot.

As I said, they’re conversation starters at best, so when you show up to your neighborhood’s big annual Presidents’ Day Picnic today, feel free to get into an argument with your friends about how Millard Fillmore got the shaft. (Or about how he looks like a dead ringer for Alec Baldwin.)

Feel free to fight amongst yourselves in the comments, or to ask me any presidential history questions.

But one thing I beg you to remember — there’s no mail today.